For the week of May 14 - 20, 2003

Will Cheney reclusiveness end?

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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Dick Cheney is a man suited for the superlatives he’s compiled over time.

Among all U.S. vice presidents, Cheney is the most widely experienced (serving formerly as a congressman, White House aide, Defense Secretary, vice president, corporate CEO), the wealthiest (he received a $30 million stock payoff when he resigned from Halliburton in 2000), and the unhealthiest (he has had several heart attacks and relies on a heart Pacemaker), although several presidents were sicker.

He’s also by far the most reclusive in a job requiring occupants to be constantly seen if not always heard.

Other vice presidents in my lifetime—Garner, Wallace, Truman, Barkley, Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey, Agnew, Ford, Rockefeller, Mondale, Bush, Quayle, Gore—were highly visible and accessible.

So, with al-Qaeda broken (as President Bush says), with Iraq conquered, and with stringent domestic security measures in place, will Vice President Cheney end his secretive lifestyle and return to the public stage for a Bush-Cheney campaign?

Cheney has been retreating to an "undisclosed" hiding place during the terrorism scare most of his term. The official explanation is baffling, however.

Is Dick Cheney less expendable and more vulnerable than the President of the United States, who’s out and about making speeches and glad-handing, and even landing in a jet on an aircraft carrier?

(An aside: Democratic demands for an investigation into the politics of "Top Gun" Bush’s carrier landing is as pathetic as the infantile Republican demand for investigating whether President Clinton held up Air Force One on a Los Angeles International Airport taxiway in 1993 while a celebrity hair stylist gave him a $200 trim.)

Uncharitable partisans would nod yes—that Cheney is indispensable because he does most White House thinking, composes key legislation, and pushes major personnel appointments, and without him, Bush would be lost.

Cheney usually emerges to appear only in friendly venues, then hurries off. What few questions he answers of Washington media is not in press conferences, to which even the reluctant President Bush submits, but on one-on-one television Sunday talk shows not as aggressive as White House press free-for-alls. Even on rare occasions when he appears to break tie votes in the Senate, he takes a quick powder after the tally.

In Washington circles, cynics say the explanation is that Cheney is dodging questions about Halliburton, the corporation he captained.

Halliburton is under fire for questionable accounting procedures, for multi-million dollar no-bid contracts in Iraq even before the shooting is over, and for a $2.4 million bribe Halliburton paid in Nigeria for favorable tax treatment (the bribe reportedly was paid after Cheney left Halliburton).

Most Americans probably care less about questions involving Halliburton than why Cheney is so furtive and shadowy as vice president.

Washington reporters, who seem cowered by Bush & Co., have avoided asking. Maybe the Democratic 2004 vice presidential candidate will muster courage to ask Cheney why he’s more inaccessible than even the president.

That is, assuming Cheney emerges from reclusiveness to take part in political debates in the 2004 campaign.

 

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