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Cheney
The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President
By Stephen F. Hayes HarperCollins
Copyright © 2007 Stephen F. Hayes
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-06-072346-0
Chapter One
The West
On January 30, 1945, Yeoman Richard Herbert Cheney was scheduled to return home to Sumner, Nebraska, on leave. That the break coincided with his son's birthday was serendipitous, but Marge Cheney told young Dick that his father had returned for the special celebration.
Cheney had grown up in Sumner, a rural, speck-on-the-map town 200 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital. For the first few years of his marriage, he supported his new family working as a bureaucrat in a program operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But in 1944, shortly after the United States joined the fighting in World War II, Cheney joined the U.S. Navy; he was assigned first to the Great Lakes Naval Station and eventually to Naval Station San Diego in southern California. Visits back home to Nebraska were rare.
When Cheney left, his wife, Marjorie, and their two young sons, Dick and Bobby, moved into the basement of his parents' home. Young Dick asked the questions any four-year-old might ask: Where has my father been? And why was he gone? Yeoman Cheney explained to his son that he was in the U.S. Navy and pointed to the insignia on hisshoulder. The most prominent feature of the yeoman's insignia is a large birdlike figure with its wings spread as if poised to fly. This only added to the confusion.
"I was convinced," Cheney recalls, "that when he was home he was my dad, but when he went back to the Navy, they put him through some kind of process and they turned him into one of those kind of deals I saw on his shoulder." Cheney thought the Navy turned his father into a bird. "I remember carrying that thought with me for years."
Dick Cheney lived his first thirteen years in Nebraska before moving farther west to Wyoming. His was an idyllic childhood and, for someone who would later be known for his gravity, remarkably carefree.
The family history of Richard Bruce Cheney, the forty-sixth vice president of the United States, is intertwined with the westward expansion of America. On his paternal side, Cheney's ancestors had virtually spanned the country in the course of the 1800s. His great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was born in New Hampshire in 1829, and later moved with his family to Defiance, Ohio. There, he served as a captain in the Twenty-first Ohio Infantry and fought in the Civil War, becoming known as something of a Union hero; he served with distinction in many of the great battles of the war-at Stone's Ridge, the siege of Atlanta, and others.
After the war, Samuel Cheney returned to Defiance, where he ran the family lumberyard and worked part-time as a cabinetmaker. Although he had managed to survive unscathed through thirty- four battles, including some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War, Cheney's good fortune ended once he returned to Ohio. He lost part of his left hand in an accident at the sawmill and was unable to continue his trade. In the 1880s, he joined a growing number of pioneer families moving west in search of land and a new life. He settled in Amherst, Nebraska, on a homestead that would remain in the family for more than a century. He had a son, Thomas Herbert Cheney, in Ohio in 1869, and moved to Nebraska with his family when the boy was in his teens. A few years later, Thomas struck off to Sumner, Nebraska, where he would take a job as a cashier at what was the only bank in town.
Millions of pioneering Americans preceded the Cheneys in the migration west, and millions more would follow, pouring into the lands opened by the growth of the transcontinental railroad. Among them were Dick Cheney's maternal grandparents, Dave and Clarice Dickey. In the years after the turn of the century, they owned and operated the town diner in Syracuse, Nebraska, known as Dickey's Cafe. They weren't wealthy by any means, but they made enough money to survive.
This work led directly to jobs working as cooks on the Union Pacific railroad. The Dickeys lived for months at a time in a railcar as it moved up and down the tracks supplying food to the "section gangs" of 100 men who repaired old tracks and laid new ones. (Later, as a board member of Union Pacific, Cheney would discover that although they both worked and lived on the railroad, Dave Dickey was not an official Union Pacific employee because he was partially deaf and failed his physical; his wife, however, shows up on the payroll records as a cook and parttime bookkeeper.)
The Dickeys enjoyed life. Dick Cheney recalls: "That whole side of the family loved to play cards, drink a little bourbon"-here he pauses for a slight smile-"and loved a good story." In this environment, Marjorie Lorraine Dickey, Cheney's mother, developed a strong, energetic personality.
Richard Herbert Cheney's family was quite different. His father, Thomas Herbert Cheney, married young. His first wife died not long after their wedding, and several years later he married Margaret Ellen Tyler. Margaret, Richard Herbert's mother, was a devout Baptist who frowned on gambling and drinking and was determined to instill in her only child those same values.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, ten months before the attacks on Pearl Harbor would draw the United States into combat. He had an upbringing typical of most kids raised in wartime America. His father was away in the Navy, his mother ran the household, and his extended family pitched in to ease the burdens-financial and other-of life during World War II. He moved to Sumner at the age of three and lived there until his father returned from California after the war in 1946.
Once reunited, the Cheney family returned to Lincoln so that Yeoman Cheney could reclaim his job with the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The SCS was a bureau of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, created as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Its mission was to promote soil conservation and combat soil erosion, both tasks crucial to the development of farmland throughout the country, particularly in the West ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cheney by Stephen F. Hayes Copyright © 2007 by Stephen F. Hayes. Excerpted by permission.
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