Dick Cheney and I are only a year apart in age. When I think back to Nixon days, when Cheney got his start, it seems like light years ago. But for him, it’s a straight shot. from Nixon, to Ford’s Chief of Staff, to Congress for ten years, to Secretary of Defense, to the A.E.I. years thinking about the same things hewas thinking about when Nixon was around, and finally to Vice President. It’s like he drug my own past and flung it in my face thirty years later.
I have trouble imagining his life, thinking those same things for all those years in between – stuck in a rut for over half our lives ago. Gathering the skills to bring off what Nixon couldn’t bring off – the hawking of America. He never went into the Army. He never really had a life other than thinking his paranoid and grandiose thoughts all those years. He left Bush I’s administration with big plans, and simply stewed until Bush II came along and gave him a chance to have another shot at things. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he has been one of the biggest negative forces in the history of America – or if he knows that his pal, Donald Rumsfeld, from way back then in 1969 was almost as destructive as he has been. I wonder if Lynne ever looks across the table at him and thinks, "I married a very angry man – a man who finally got where he wanted to be and blew it in spades."
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