When Dick Cheney graduated from high school, he wrote in his girlfriend’s yearbook that “most girls are either pretty and dumb or smart and plain. You have a rare combination of both.”
Nearly half a century later, that girlfriend, now Cheney’s wife, Lynne, reveals this “extravagant compliment” in a memoir about growing up in the West, entitled “Blue Skies, No Fences.”
In the book, which will be published October 9, Lynne describes the future vice president’s yearbook inscription as “so sweetly awkward and politically incorrect that our daughters brought the house down when they read it out loud at our thirty-fifth anniversary party.”
In “Blue Skies,” the second lady traces her ancestry and recounts how her father rejected his own parents’ Mormonism. Lynne also recounts Dick’s roots before closing the book with an account of their high school courtship in Casper, Wyoming.
They got to know each other during their junior year, after Lynne showed up for chemistry class and found herself seated “next to a halfback named Dick Cheney, who was cute, quiet, and unavailable since he was going steadywith a cheerleader.”
A few months later, Dick asked Lynne to a dance, and soon they were going steady. They often spent time watching old movies because, as Dick explained to Lynne: “You see people performing at their peak, and they don’t know it.”
In the spring of 1958, Dick won the presidency of his upcoming senior class. That fall, as co-captain of the football team, he crowned Lynne with a rhinestone tiara to mark her selection as homecoming queen.
But her romance with Dick suffered an interruption in May 1959.
“After spending some time on the bus with one of his fellow council members, a pretty, dark-haired cheerleader in the class behind us, Dick came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea: we should quit going steady and, in his words, ‘play the field,'” Lynne recalled. “I did not respond positively to this suggestion.”
Lynne began dating other boys because she “wanted Dick Cheney to know that two people could play the field.” One of those boys took her to a dance that was also attended by Dick, who “asked me to dance about halfway through the evening – and not long after that, asked to take me home,” Lynne wrote.
“Playing the field, start to finish, had lasted eleven days.”
