In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  Our senior year was like a classic fifties movie.

  Lynne Vincent and me in our high school yearbook photos. One of my best decisions ever was asking her out on our first date, January 31, 1957.

  I was class president, Lynne was homecoming queen, and as co-captain of the football team for homecoming, I got to crown her. Everything seemed possible through that fall of football games, movie dates, and going to the Canteen, a town-sponsored teen hangout where the jukebox played the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. By the early months of 1959, Lynne had figured out that she would go to Colorado College in Colorado Springs. While I knew I’d go somewhere, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the details when an independent oilman in Casper, Tom Stroock, approached my friend Tom Fake and me about applying to his alma mater, Yale. Stroock thought that based on our grades, our athletic records, and the fact that we were both class officers, we’d be accepted. He said that coming from Wyoming would also help because Yale was interested in geographical diversity. Neither the Fakes nor the Cheneys could begin to pay for four years in the Ivy League, but both Tom and I were accepted and awarded scholarships that covered full tuition, room, and board. We’d have to work as part of the arrangement, but otherwise all we had to do was get ourselves there.

  I’D NEVER SEEN YALE before I showed up in the fall of 1959 to begin my freshman year. In fact, I’d never been farther east than Chicago, and when I got off the train in New Haven, Connecticut, it felt a little like arriving in another country. At home in Wyoming, I had a great sense of wide-open spaces. You could see for miles in any direction. In New Haven everything was jammed together—people, buildings, trees. The most distant horizon was no farther than a few blocks away.

  Many of my fellow students had gone to prep school. They had had experiences very different from mine and knew things I did not. I sometimes felt they were speaking another language—and they certainly played at least one sport I found strange. Students arriving at Yale took a series of physical tests, one of which involved going through a door so small you had to stoop over. On the other side, a fellow handed me a racquet like the one he was holding and immediately began smacking a small, hard rubber ball against the wall. I had no idea what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to score. And that was my introduction to squash.

  I was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Instead of being president of my class and hanging out in the student council office, I was waiting on my classmates in the dining hall. Most of all, I missed Lynne. I spent most of my time thinking about the next time I would see her and trying to scrape together a couple of bucks so that I could afford a long-distance call to Colorado Springs.

  Lynne and me on a scooter in front of my mom and dad’s house in Casper, Wyoming in the early 1960s.

  Plenty of scholarship students, finding themselves in a totally new environment, manage to get themselves together, apply themselves to their studies, and succeed. Instead, I found some kindred souls, young men like me, who were not adjusting very well and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life. At the beginning of our second year, twelve of us roomed together in Berkeley College, which with the benefit of hindsight I understand wasn’t a great idea. We created a critical mass that led to several encounters with the dean. My parents began to get letters, one of which began, “Dick has fallen in with a group of very high-spirited young men.”

  I wasn’t entirely unaware of Yale’s intellectual attractions. One professor in particular stood out: H. Bradford Westerfield, who taught a political science course on the diplomatic history of the Cold War. It covered the foundation of NATO and the Marshall Plan, the war in Korea, the creation of post–World War II foreign policy. It was absolutely intriguing—probably more history than political science, though I didn’t understand that at the time. But even though the course was fascinating, I didn’t exert myself to get more than a C in it.

  The university tried to motivate me by shifting the terms of my scholarship and making me financially responsible for my education. Beginning with my sophomore year, I was to consider all future financial aid as a loan. When that failed to get my attention, the dean asked me to take a year off and come back only if I was willing to pay my own way. I managed to do that for one semester, during which I continued to accumulate bad grades and disciplinary notices. In the spring of 1962, Yale and I finally parted ways.

  WHEN I GOT BACK home to Wyoming in 1962, I returned to what I’d been doing off and on since high school—“working in the tools” as a union member on jobs across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. I helped build electrical transmission lines and coal-fired generating plants. I worked on bringing power to oil fields. One of my assignments was to work on Minuteman missile sites around Cheyenne’s Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, laying communications cable between silos in the middle of a Rocky Mountain winter.

  As a member of Local 322 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, I started as a groundman, or “grunt.” Later, as I got more experience, I became an “equipment operator.” At one point I gave serious thought to taking out my apprenticeship papers and working up to “journeyman lineman.” These were the men who climbed the wood or steel towers to string power line.

  The work we did was sometimes dangerous, and everyone had tales of spectacular accidents. While working on adding capacity to the Dave Johnston Power Plant outside Glenrock, I saw an equipment operator drive a truck mounted with a front-end boom close enough to a live transmission line to cause the power to arc, sending a large fireball down the line toward Casper and frying the truck. The equipment operator was frozen with fear and stayed where he was, which was a good thing. If he had tried to get out of the truck, that would have been the end of him.

  On another job we were using dynamite, and after the charges were in place and the electrical blasting cap attached, I watched the crew foreman uncoil a roll of wire from the charge back to his pickup truck. He raised the hood on his pickup, leaned across the fender, and touched the wire to the truck battery to detonate the charge. The blast blew a large rock high in the air, and it came down right on top of the pickup’s hood, driving it down onto the foreman and seriously injuring him. We were in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a rough, mountainous area in western Colorado, and it took us several hours to get him to the hospital.

  Stories like these were a reminder of what happened when you weren’t alert and careful. They illustrated why the spirit that prevailed in line work—cultivating competence and taking pride in your performance—was essential. If you were a groundman and you tied your knot right, the heavy crossarm you winched up to the lineman would make it to the top safely, and he’d be able to release it from the rope with ease, but if you fashioned the knot so securely that he had trouble releasing it, you complicated his job enormously, and if you didn’t get the knot tight enough and a crossarm or a string of insulators fell, you could kill somebody.

  The culture and lore of line work were captured in a book, Slim, that the crews I worked on passed around. Written by William Wister Haines in the early 1930s and later made into a movie starring Henry Fonda, Slim told the story of a young man who joined a line crew and learned how great it felt to do work he was good at and could take pride in, how satisfying it was to have the money he earned in his pocket. He was free to pick up and move on whenever he wanted. It was a point of pride with Slim that when he was asked for his address, he pointed to the license plate on his car.

  I was earning $3.10 an hour, which was good pay in those days, and picking up a lot of overtime at time and a half. I traveled from job to job with one large suitcase, driving a 1949 Chevy for a while. When it had to be junked, I hitched a ride or caught a bus until I managed to buy a ’58 Ford. Living accommodations were never fancy, usually a room in an old hotel or roadside motel. For ten or fifteen dollars a week, these places didn’t offer any amenities or impose any demands. I wasn’t tied down to one location or any particular job or anyone’s expectati
ons. Whenever I wanted, I could pick up and move on.

  After work, the guys on the crew would spend considerable time in one of the local bars, ideally a place that would cash our checks or carry a tab until we made our first payday. We consumed vast quantities of beer. If something stronger was called for, we’d drink shots of bourbon with beer chasers—a combination that helps explain how I managed to get arrested twice within a year for driving while under the influence.

  The first time was in Cheyenne, and I managed to brush it off. But the second time, in the summer of 1963 in Rock Springs, was a different matter. Many of my friends had just graduated from Yale. Lynne, after spending a semester in Europe, had graduated summa cum laude from Colorado College. And I was sleeping off a hangover in the Rock Springs jail.

  It had taken a lot to drive the message home, but I realized the morning I woke up in that jail that if I didn’t fundamentally change my ways, I was going to come to a bad end. As soon as I was released, I drove home to Casper. I remember spending the better part of a day on Casper Mountain, up near the top where you can see all the way to the Bighorns. It was a good place to get perspective on life and to figure out what I was going to have to do to get off the self-destructive path I was on. I talked to Lynne and my folks, and although they would have been fully justified if they’d stopped speaking to me then and there, they seemed to believe that even after all the false starts, this time I really meant it about turning my life around.

  I went back to Rock Springs, to the apartment I was sharing with Tom Ready, a journeyman lineman and crew foreman, who had been drinking with me the night I was arrested. The job we were on—building a 115,000-volt line from Rock Springs to the new Flaming Gorge Dam, on the Green River—was the third we’d worked together. Tom was an interesting guy, good enough on a horse to rodeo on the weekends. I considered him a friend but told him he would have to get a new roommate. I was moving out and camping at the job site. When he asked me why, I told him I’d decided to clean up my act and go back to school in the fall. “I’m going to make something of myself,” I said. “Who in the hell do you think you are?” he responded. “You’re no better than the rest of us.” It was the last time we spoke.

  __________

  I MOVED OUT TO the job, where my crewmate Bob Lieberance and I had the assignment of going ahead of the other crews, drilling and dynamiting holes for the wooden structures they would follow along and build. Bob had a fascinating and complicated history. The way he told it, after he’d gotten in a scrape in Tennessee in the late 1930s, he had moved to Canada, and when the war started in Europe, he’d joined the Royal Air Force and flown missions against Hitler. After Pearl Harbor he’d transferred to the U.S. Eighth Air Force and been badly wounded on one of his missions. By the time I got to know him, he was something of a loner. For most of the year he worked as a “powder monkey,” dealing with all the explosives on a site, but in the winter he would leave and hole up in the mountains.

  Bob lived out at the job site, sleeping in a camper on his four-by-four truck and stowing his gear in a big wall tent he used for cooking. He considered a stray dog he’d picked up as his best friend, and he didn’t have many others, but he and I got along. After I spent a night in my sleeping bag in the open, he told me I could set up a cot in his cook tent.

  Except for once-a-week trips to town to buy groceries, shower, and hit the laundromat, I spent the rest of the summer out on the job and far from the bars. Bob and I would work hard all day and share the cooking at night. After dinner I began reading Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II by the light of a Coleman lantern.

  In the fall, I moved to Laramie and enrolled at the University of Wyoming. UW is a school with many virtues, not least of which in my day was that, regardless of my previous academic record, they had to accept me because I had graduated from a Wyoming high school. The tuition was $96 a semester, and I moved into a $45-a-month, one-bedroom furnished apartment that fronted on an alley. I saved on expenses by getting my high school classmate Joe Meyer, who was now going to law school, to sign on as a roommate. Eventually Joe would have one of the most distinguished political careers in Wyoming history, serving as attorney general, secretary of state, and state treasurer, but while we were rooming together he was best known for being one heck of a jazz clarinet player and for dating Miss Wyoming.

  I got a part-time job reading to a retired air force colonel who had lost his sight. He was getting the credits he needed to become a counselor for the blind, and four nights a week I read his textbooks to him for $1.75 an hour, paid for by the Veterans Administration. I also spent a fair amount of time studying and got very good grades, almost all A’s—as I would do for the rest of my years in higher education.

  In late September 1963, not long after I’d started back to school, President Kennedy came to Laramie to deliver a speech at the university’s War Memorial Field House. I stood among the crowd of thousands and listened to him deliver an eloquent call to public service. He talked about the Greek definition of happiness—the full use of one’s powers along lines of excellence—and said that working for the public good could provide that kind of satisfaction. He talked about the importance of bringing what we were learning to the task of building a better nation and a better world. When he had finished I left the field house by a back door and saw his motorcade pulling away. He was riding in an open convertible and hundreds of students were running after him, wanting a last glimpse as he departed the campus. He had inspired us all, and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described. When he was killed only two months later, the mood at the university was especially somber. Everyone remembered that he had been with us so short a time before.

  DURING MY FIRST YEAR at the University of Wyoming, I spent most of my weekends in Boulder, where Lynne was working on her master’s degree at the University of Colorado. At Easter we went home to tell our parents we were going to get married, and we set a date—August 29, 1964.

  While Lynne and her mother worried about flowers and silver patterns, I went back to work building power line. One of the things I was saving for was the honeymoon Lynne and I were planning at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. But I came down with a terrible case of food poisoning and had to be hospitalized for a week. I had no health insurance, so in addition to losing seventeen pounds, I spent all the money I had been saving on medical bills. We still had a nice wedding, complete with bridesmaids and groomsmen, with my little sister, Susie, as our flower girl and Lynne’s brother, Mark, as the ringbearer.

  Our wedding party – my sister, Susan and Lynne’s brother, Mark are the young attendants in the front row.

  Leaving the church, August 29, 1964.

  But our honeymoon afterward was one night in the Holiday Inn in Laramie, Wyoming.

  Our first home was in a yellow, cinder-block apartment on the edge of campus. It was a real bargain at $53.65 a month furnished, but it lacked any kind of insulation—something of a drawback when the temperature dropped to 30 below. With an elevation over seven thousand feet, Laramie was known for its challenging winters. If you had a car, you had to install a head bolt heater and plug it in at night or else the engine block would freeze. Still, the natural setting was beautiful, with the Snowy Range and some good trout streams close by. When the fishing season opened, it was possible to get up early, drive up into the mountains and catch a few trout, and still make it back in time for morning classes.

  As graduation neared, I decided to stay on and earn a master’s degree, and it was as a graduate student that I got my first taste of politics by working as an intern in the Wyoming state legislature. Half my stipend was paid for by the National Center for Education in Politics, an organization that went back to the 1940s and a belief on the part of Judge Arthur Vanderbilt, dean of New York University School of Law, that student participation in politics should be encouraged. The other half was paid for by
the Republican Party, which was then under the enlightened leadership of Stan Hathaway, who would become one of Wyoming’s most popular and influential governors. I’d get up early in the morning and drive fifty miles over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne, where the legislature met. After working all day, I’d turn around and drive the fifty miles home at night, often through some pretty brutal weather.

  The legislative session lasted forty days, and it was a fascinating experience for me. The Republicans, usually dominant in Wyoming politics, were getting a lot of pushback from Democrats in the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle, and that made the session especially lively. The report I wrote on my internship won a Borden Award from the National Center for Education in Politics, and I received a check for one hundred dollars—an amount not to be scoffed at since that was nearly two months’ rent.

  One of my professors gave me an application for another program run by the NCEP. This one, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, placed political science graduate students in mayors’ and governors’ offices across the country. I filled out the application and pretty much forgot about it until one Sunday night in late November when Lynne and I got back from a weekend at home in Casper and I found a telegram waiting. It informed me that I had been selected for the program and was expected at an orientation in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday morning. I had to hustle, but I made it in time to the Stouffer’s Inn where the group was gathering. I met graduate students from Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, Ball State, and Penn State, all planning field assignments that would begin after the first of the year.