For many years, Vice President Dick Cheney held my interest. My eventual meeting with him in 2010, at his St. Michael’s, Maryland, weekend residence, fulfilled a long-held aspiration.
His off-white home, situated at the end of a grey gravel lane, simultaneously evoked images from a William and Sonoma catalogue yet appeared disjointed.
Despite their presence, the owners, Dick and Lynne Cheney, seemed to have left no personal imprint on the dwelling. The decor was both lacking in color and character (not suggesting poor taste, but rather an absence of any discernible taste). A white circular table in the entryway displayed several meticulously arranged stacks of coffee table books on interior design, such as “At Home With Books” and “At Home With Arts.”
While the surroundings were uninspired, the discussion with Cheney was captivating. When queried about whether the invasion of Iraq could be deemed a mistake in hindsight, his response was unwavering: Iraqis, he asserted, were better off being targeted by American “weapons of mass love” than by “everyone else’s weapons of mass destruction.”
Cheney regarded me with the same skepticism I held for his policies. He muttered a remark about how “communists do not reform.”
Given my role as a teacher at the progressive New School and my lineage as the great-granddaughter of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Cheney perceived me as an adversary from the Cold War. His unyielding authority, in turn, reminded me of my own authoritarian homeland.
Having been raised in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, I was intimately familiar with its dictators. Generations of them stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum, presiding over Red Square propaganda parades. I recognized Cheney’s authoritarian tendencies long before others did.
This was evident in his approach to stifling dissent.
During a 2000 press conference, shortly after his nomination as George W. Bush’s vice presidential running mate, Cheney declared that there would be no further inquiries concerning potential conflicts of interest between his impending White House role and his prior position as CEO of the energy company Halliburton.
The free press was captivated by his unapologetic assertiveness. No journalist dared to ask if Cheney had maintained contact with his former business colleagues. (He had not.) No one ventured to inquire if he would receive payments from the company. (He would.)
As a descendant of Kremlin leaders, Cheney brought to mind the strongmen who manipulated and instilled fear in Soviet citizens. Following the tragic events of 9/11, the Bush-Cheney administration’s global war on terror facilitated the implementation of several legislative acts: The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, and The National Defense Authorization Act. Furthermore, Americans’ fear post-9/11 allowed the Bush-Cheney White House to sanction torture at clandestine overseas sites and to authorize warrantless surveillance by military agencies—sweeping through the emails and phone calls of millions across the nation.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, once conveyed to me that “Cheney was a dangerous individual, not what one would anticipate in an American democracy.”
My fascination with Cheney stemmed from his ability to conduct himself in ways that, to critics of the Bush Administration such as myself, echoed the behavior of authoritarian regimes abroad.
Thus, when I finally had the opportunity to converse with Cheney that day, I anticipated him to be formidable and unyielding. What I did not expect was his seeming continued comparison of himself to Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary.
We later visited the nearby Rumsfeld estate. It presented a stark contrast—vibrant, colorful, and furnished with well-worn pieces. Its driveway was paved with cheerful yellow, small-pebbled gravel—a marker of genuine affluence, as I later learned—unlike Cheney’s gravel, which was large, grey, and characteristic of the newly wealthy.
It was Rumsfeld, then a congressman in the 1960s, who first brought the young Cheney to Washington D.C., initially as his aide, then as his deputy when Rumsfeld assumed the role of President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff. A Princeton alumnus and a seasoned figure in Washington, Don served as a fitting mentor for Dick, the relatively inexperienced University of Wyoming student. In his subsequent career, Cheney, who had failed out of Yale, inherited Rumsfeld’s former positions. He became Ford’s Chief of Staff when Rumsfeld secured the Secretary of Defense post in 1975. Cheney then followed in his footsteps—entering Congress in 1978 and becoming Secretary of Defense in 1989. By 2000, he ultimately surpassed Rumsfeld by attaining the vice presidency. However, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were conceived by them both.
Despite the significant loss of life and billions expended on these conflicts, the vice president never altered his perspectives. He never reflected on his Middle East wars and concluded, “I wish I had approached something differently.”
As one of Cheney’s associates stated, “Rather, there was a sense that they hadn’t gone far enough.”
