Profile - Dick Cheney: Dick Cheney's silence following the shooting of a companion perfectly reflects his reputation for secrecy, writes Denis Staunton, Washington Correspondent
Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of 78-year-old Harry Whittington in a hunting accident last weekend has generated dozens of jokes, cartoons and bumper stickers and hours of material for America's late-night television comics.
The 20-hour delay in making the shooting public outraged the media and embarrassed White House staff but it was entirely in character for the secretive, mysterious figure who has become the most powerful vice-president in the history of the US.
Despite his central role in the Bush administration, most Americans know little about Cheney, who makes no effort to overturn his image as the sinister power behind the throne of George W Bush.
"Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually," Cheney said two years ago.
His friend and ideological soul-mate Richard Perle, a leading neo-conservative and advocate of the Iraq war, believes Cheney's poor public image is a product of his disdain for the media. "Almost everybody who winds up in a position of power and responsibility in Washington starts to care about what appears in, if not The Irish Times, the New York Times and this vice-president infuriates the media by appearing to be close to indifferent . . . He's a very likeable man with a good sense of humour and a dry wit, very loyal to friends and colleagues.
"I think the people who don't know him and are critical of him would probably like him if they knew him," he says.
Perle describes Cheney as "discreet" rather than secretive but he acknowledges that the vice-president can be taciturn and inscrutable.
"You can talk to Dick Cheney for an hour and leave the meeting not knowing just what he thinks," he says.
Cheney's hunting accident came at the end of a week that saw his former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby tell prosecutors the vice-president authorised him to leak classified material to justify the case the Bush administration made for invading Iraq.
Libby has been charged with lying to a grand jury about his role in revealing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband debunked White House claims about Saddam Hussein's quest for nuclear weapons.
Libby has admitted that the vice-president told him Plame worked for the CIA, but does not appear to have told prosecutors that Cheney ordered him to reveal her identity to journalists.
John Nichols, Washington correspondent of the Nation, who has written a critical biography of the vice-president, believes the media spotlight that has turned on Cheney this week could prove troublesome for him. "The question is whether this scandal or controversy will mutate into a broader examination of Dick Cheney. If it does, then this could be absolutely disastrous for him because his actions and his persona, his style, are really not very attractive to the American people. And the more attention he gets, the more of a burden he will be to the administration," he said.
RICHARD BRUCE CHENEY was born on January 30th, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska and moved to Casper, Wyoming, at the age of 12 when his father, a civil servant, was transferred there.
At high school in Casper, he met Lynne Anne Vincent and engaged in his first political activity, canvassing to get her elected as the school's Mustang Queen. Lynne became Wyoming's champion baton twirler with an act in which she set both ends of her baton alight, tossed it in the air, caught it and twirled it again.
As she took her bow, she would pass the flaming baton to the side of the stage where Cheney was waiting, unseen, with a jug of water to douse the flames.
After two disastrous years of poor grades at Yale, Cheney returned to Wyoming to study political science and then moved with Lynne to Madison, Wisconsin for postgraduate work. As the Vietnam war intensified and the draft expanded, Cheney deferred his call-up five times.
"I had other priorities in the 1960s than military service," he told the Washington Post in 1989.
Cheney had become involved in Republican politics as a student and in 1966 he won an internship on Capitol Hill, where he found a mentor in Donald Rumsfeld, a young Republican congressman with serious political ambitions.
When Rumsfeld got a job in Richard Nixon's White House, he took Cheney with him and both men also served under Gerald Ford, with Cheney succeeding Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff.
Nichols says the qualities that ensured Cheney's rise were already apparent in those early years, when he and Rumsfeld out-manoeuvred one White House rival after another.
"Cheney always wanted to be in the centre of what was going on and he's always been willing to work very, very hard - to come in early, to stay late and to manipulate the process in his favour. Famously, he's a great player of palace intrigues. He tends to undermine figures who have power in order to make himself more powerful," he says.
After Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Cheney won Wyoming's only seat in the House of Representatives, quietly building up one of the most conservative voting records in Congress.
An exception to Cheney's conservative record has been his support for gay rights, which most commentators attribute to the fact that his daughter Mary is openly gay. But Nichols maintains that Cheney and his wife, who have lived most of their adult lives in Washington, are conventional, metropolitan libertarians.
"I don't think they ever cared at all about the fact that their daughter was a lesbian . . . He bows to social conservatism because that's the business the party is in . . . But I don't think he has the slightest commitment to the social conservative set of values or policies," Nichols says.
As defence secretary under the first president George Bush, Cheney masterminded the outsourcing of support functions for the US armed forces, such as construction and the provision of meals. When he left office, he became the chairman and chief executive of Halliburton, a Texas company that won billions of dollars in defence contracts under his leadership.
When Cheney was asked to find a running mate for George W Bush in 2000, he spent five weeks working through possible candidates and finally chose himself. He appeared to be a safe choice, an experienced political operator with an intimate understanding of Congress and of the inner workings of the White House.
Nichols says Cheney brought to the White House an impatience with the checks and balances of the American political system, which demands that the executive branch defers to the legislative branch of government.
"He really does believe in an extremely strong executive that has the power to do essentially whatever it chooses. Now this is not pure evil or something like that. He genuinely, I think, believes that he is doing good for the country but that he does not have to work under scrutiny from the Congress or the media or the people," he said.
The role of vice-president, famously described by Franklin D Roosevelt's deputy John Nance Garner as not worth "a bucket of warm spit", has traditionally been essentially powerless and largely ceremonial. Cheney saw a larger role for himself, however, and Bush quickly came to depend on him.
"I can't offhand think of a recent president who has sought the advice of his vice-president with the consistency and the approbation of this president," says Perle.
Critics often characterise Cheney as the real president, with Bush as no more than a figurehead, but Nichols believes the truth is more subtle.
"Cheney is a full partner of the president. He literally makes policy and then consults with the president to make sure the president agrees. It's not like he treats Bush like a puppet. But that notion of a partnership is one that really needs to be understood. Because thereare vast areas of governance where President Bush knows that he's not fully competent, fully connected, fully aware. He cedes an immense amount of responsibility to Cheney in those areas to be his consigliere, his representative," he said.
This is true, above all, in the area of foreign policy, which Cheney has made his own from the start of the Bush presidency, pressing the case for war against Iraq and encouraging the CIA to adopt looser rules on the abuse of detainees. Nichols predicts Cheney will be remembered as a politician who used the vice-presidency to conduct a destructive foreign policy and trampled on the checks and balances of the US constitution.
"I am myself hopeful that before this term is out, Americans become aware of that because this model of the secretive vice-president, the secretive secondary figure within the administration is a very dangerous one for the country and I don't want to see it continue or be resurrected in another administration," he says.
The Cheney File:
Who is he? Vice-president of the US
Why is he in the news? He shot a 78-year-old man in the face
Most appealing characteristic Lack of vanity
Least appealing characteristic Secretiveness
Most likely to say Nothing
Least likely to say The war on terror is over