![]() He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. It also has the capability to shock the heart to rescue it from any potentially fatal change in rhythm. Since 1978, Cheney has suffered four heart attacks and undergone quadruple-bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, and, in June of 2001, the implantation of a cardiac defibrillator, which includes a pacemaker that monitors every heartbeat and can speed up or slow down the rhythm of his heartbeat as needed. But the public figure is nothing like the private one that I remember.” “I guess I would like to believe,” he says, “without any evidence to support it, that coming very close to death has somehow compelled him to act as though he only has so much breath and so much life, that he’s only got so much time to accomplish what he has to do. And when Naughton called in-of course, he called my office down here-I was there, and he knew he’d been had.Ī former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who oversaw work that won 10 Pulitzer Prizes, Naughton all but sighs in search of an explanation. He was already headed for Palm Springs, California. And, of course, showed up at the gate on Saturday morning to do an interview with the president and discovered when they got there that nobody knew anything about the interview, and the president wasn’t even at Camp David. ![]() He was so worried about missing the date and the time that they went up and spent the night before at the Cozy motel in Thurmont, Maryland. ![]() “He got ahold of George Tames,” the *Times’*s most famous photographer, “flew him in from Florida. And if he could be up at Camp David the next Saturday morning at eight, we’d let him into the gate, and he’d be able to do it. ![]() “So we basically made an arrangement that I would call Naughton and tell him that President Ford had decided to give one exclusive interview on what it was like to lose the presidency, and he wasn’t going to talk to anybody else. “They recruited me to get Naughton for all that he’d done to the others in the press corps,” Cheney tells me in his West Wing office, his whole bearing suddenly softening as he rubs his palms together and warms to the tale. On a morning not long ago, the vice president, whose relations with most Washington reporters are now so corrosive that he actually banned The New York Times from Air Force Two for the duration of the 2004 presidential campaign, was reminiscing about the *Times’*s Ford-era White House correspondent, James Naughton, in his day the mainstream media’s merriest prankster. It turns out that Dick Cheney remembers, too. They remember when the curled-lip expression now assumed to be a malevolent sneer was only a lopsided smile. He reigns, in the popular liberal imagination, as the Lord Voldemort of the world stage: he whose location m ust not be named, a dark, didactic, unyielding presence who shoots first and asks questions later, and who answers to no one, not even the president he supposedly serves.īut there is a dwindling corps of old Washington hands who remember when Dick Cheney was not the Dark Lord, but the bright young wizard from Wyoming who ran the Ford White House at age 34, the youngest presidential chief of staff in American history.
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