Politicians are not my dish of tea. I do not long for their company. Of the few I’ve met, I have admired the salesmanly quality of some among them. I directed the anti-poverty program in Little Rock in the middle 1960s, and after spending fifteen minutes with Wilbur Mills, then chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, I felt as if we had not only gone to college together (which of course we hadn’t) but had been in the same fraternity and indeed might have been roommates. I’ve several times talked over the phone with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, easily the most intellectually talented man in the U.S. Senate in my lifetime, but our conversations have been not about politics but about Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. For the rest, most of the pols I’ve met have been your normal egomaniacs, more mindful of their hairdos than their utterances, and decidedly not, as the kids say, fun persons.
But on the night of February 1, 1991, the Desert Storm offensive roughly a week old, I was in Washington to attend a quarterly meeting of the council of the National Endowment for the Arts, of which I was then a member. I received a call from a friend with whom I was to have dinner, asking whether I minded if the Cheneys, Dick and Lynne, joined us, probably not for dinner but for coffee afterwards. My friend and her husband, themselves serious intellectuals, had moved to Washington a few years before and had come to know many of the more interesting political figures in the city. She had been on the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and had told me how intelligent she thought Lynne Cheney, who was then its chairman. “Sure,” I said, “I would like to meet them.”
We met for dinner at the Four Seasons, my friend and her husband, I and a woman artist from New York, a sculptor of some fame, who was also a member of the NEA council. As we finished our main course, three or four men entered the restaurant, walkie-talkies aloft. “Ah,” said my friend, “Dick and Lynne must have arrived.” And they had, two smallish, modestly turned out people, well matched, still nuts about each other, one felt. They had just come from a movie, shown for them alone at the American Film Institute. With the bombing of Iraq underway, and Dick Cheney almost constantly on television with Colin Powell to report on the progress of the war, they could not go to the movies unprotected. I forget what movie it was they saw, but I recall asking if the American Film Institute supplied popcorn, and learned that it didn’t. A pity, we all agreed.
There was a nice flow of talk, an instantly hamish, or old shoe, feeling to the gathering. I was sitting next to Dick Cheney, and at one point a waiter brought a note from a man seated elsewhere in the restaurant who had recognized him, asking if he could buy our table a bottle of champagne. With a smile, Cheney told the waiter to thank the man but tell him that he couldn’t accept his kind offer, though he hoped he’d understand. He then turned and waved to the man, who was seated toward the back of the room. A bit later a man with an impressively full head of white hair, who turned out to be a congressman, told Cheney how proud he was of the deep competence with which he and Colin Powell were running Desert Storm. Cheney thanked him, but I sensed that he didn’t require more talk about the war, and had really gone out for the evening to get his mind off it.
And in fact the talk was dominated by Lynne Cheney questioning the sculptor and me about how things were run at the arts endowment. Her questions were smart, penetrating. Anecdotes about great goofiness at both endowments abounded. There was much laughter. Dick Cheney didn’t say much. After ninety minutes or so, the time had come to break up. We shook hands all round, and the Cheneys, met at the door of the restaurant by their security escort, departed.
“What a delightful woman,” said the sculptor. “I guess I’m not used to someone so intelligent in government.” After we had all agreed, she said, “By the way, what does her husband do?”
Twenty-second pause for astonishment and for our jaws to close. Then I said, “I believe he’s secretary of defense.”
Now there are two ways to read this story. One is as illustrating the amazing insularity, New York parochialism, and self-absorption of a successful artist. But I prefer it as a story about Dick Cheney’s self-effacement. He didn’t have to knock his wife out of the conversational box. He didn’t require the limelight. Made no bids for attention. “A measured and quietly impressive man,” I noted of him in my journal. He strikes me as the perfect vice president, not in any way the stooge, the hatchet man, or the power-hungry bozo waiting in the wings. He might, given the chance, impart substance to a hollow office.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
