NewWest.Net/Politics

Lynne Cheney’s Memoir Halts Before Turbulent ‘60s

By Brodie Farquhar, 10-27-07

Casper’s hometown girl Lynne Vincent Cheney has penned a love letter to the past in Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, which covers the pioneer histories of both families that ultimately produced the “Second Family” in the Bush-Cheney administration.

Yet because the memoir stops in 1959 with high school graduation for Lynne and Dick Cheney, there’s only tantalizing clues and some irony in their 1950’s coming-of-age story, and silence about how they were shaped by the 1960s to become the iconic conservative couple of Wyoming and ultimately national politics.

As Washington Post reporter Jennifer Frey wrote, “Lynne Cheney wants time to stand still. Not now, not in this present tense of bloodshed and bile, where she is the stalwart wife of a vice president vilified as a warmonger. She wants the past back, she wants then.”

“Then” presents images straight out of the movie American Graffitti – car clubs and football for the boys, baton twirling and an emphasis on lots of kissing and no sex for the girls.

Both Lynne Vincent and Dick Cheney were smart, hard-working and ambitious students – a good beginning for who would become a power couple in Washington, D.C. in the Republican administrations of Ford, Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2.

Yet the fathers of Lynne and Dick were federal Civil Service employees, whose federal paychecks ensured that Lynne and Dick had middle-class life styles – a far remove from the rugged lives of parents who’d endured the Great Depression, not to mention grandparents and great-grandparents who struggled to establish farms and businesses in frontier conditions.

How does that jibe with conservative contempt of federal bureaucrats or outsourcing of federal jobs? Blue Skies won’t tell you.

Nor will “Blue Skies” tell the reader how the Cheneys reacted to 1960s turmoil as Lynne and Dick attended college and started raising a family.

President Bill Clinton once observed that how people reacted to the 1960s was a pretty good indication of whether they were conservative or liberal. “That’s an interesting observation,” Lynne Cheney said a press conference Friday.

She said she deliberately focused the memoir from when she was born in 1941, to graduation in 1959, “but that turned out to be a historically interesting era. Historians often look at the end of the war to the end of the 50s as a great time of confidence and buoyancy and uplift in our national life.”

Mrs. Cheney said that was equally true for how she viewed the era as an individual, and how the nation viewed itself.

She said she’s had readers of “Blue Skies,” from Long Island and Brooklyn, come up and say: “’That was your life in Wyoming, well it was my life too.’”

The mood, the confidence, the optimism wasn’t limited to Casper, she said.

“The ‘60’s did upend everything and began a long march through many of our institutions,” she said. “Its silly to try to blame what’s unfortunate about our culture today on the 60’s, but a lot of those things started in the 60’s.”

In contrast, Cheney said, the popular culture of the ‘50s was healthier for kids. “There was no song you couldn’t sing the lyrics of to your grandmother. There was no television program you couldn’t watch with your kids. All of that changed after the 60’s,” she said.

Talking of those pre-Boom years with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Mrs. Cheney said “Drugs were not available when I was growing up. I mean, if you’d maybe scrambled around in the very worst part of Casper, where there was some nightclubs, you know, you might have come up with something. But I don’t think so. We didn’t even know about such things. It was an era when the idea of premarital sex simply wasn’t on the agenda. There were no birth control pills.”

And in an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Mrs. Cheney said “I think it’s a useful thing to go back and look at what society was like before so many of our institutions were dominated by the left.”

Asked if she could “connect the dots” between Dick Cheney’s youth and who and what he is today, Mrs. Cheney laughed at the idea of putting her husband “on the couch” for analysis.

She suggested that if you can understand fly fishing, and therefore a fly fisherman, you might gain some insight into the man she married.

“He’s never been chatty,” she said, which is kind of an odd statement about a politician – a class noted for talking. What took Mrs. Cheney a while to figure out, is that when Dick Cheney is quiet, he’s thinking, and when he speaks it is worth listening.

Asked how history would judge her husband’s role in the Bush Administration, Mrs. Cheney said the fact that there had been no followup attack since 9/11 was no accident, and was due to policies and programs set in place by the President and Vice-President.

If credit for no more attacks is due, isn’t there some measure of blame for the fact that the 9/11 attacks happened on the Bush and Cheney watch?

A bit flustered, Mrs. Cheney said “No,” that the very idea of terrorists taking over airliners with box cutters and flying them into buildings was “unimaginable.”

Lynne Cheney will be on the Casper College campus on Saturday, Oct. 27 at 11 a.m. to speak about and then sign copies of her new book Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family. She’ll take questions from the public at the the McMurry Mainstage, while the book signing will be held immediately following in the lobby of the Gertrude Krampert Theatre. There will also be a Sunday 11 a.m. book signing at Ralph’s Bookstore at Hilltop Shopping in Casper.

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