>> well, i had a somewhat spotty academic career. you might say. i am sure that has not happened to anybody here. but i was recruited to go to yale when i got out of high school and then -- well, i got kicked out twice. i ended up back in wyoming building power line and transmission line for some years and ultimately decided i needed to get an education. so i went back to school at the university of wyoming, and was seriously interested in the young lady i had gone to high school with. she was an excellent student and graduated at the top of our class. she was not too sure about where i was headed. but after a year, she agreed to marry me, and we will celebrate our 47th anniversary this year. she was a strong motivator for me to work hard and be a good student. i got my ba and masters at the university of wyoming in the 1960's and then went on to the university of wisconsin where i was working on a doctorate, and i completed the course work for a congressional fellowship, in effect an internship with a stipend. it was a relatively small group, but we were able to pick a member of congress wanted to work for. i came to washington to stay 12 months in 1968, and i stayed about 40 years. i overran my schedule. but the experience i had, a group of members of congress would come through during the orientation session, and i was very impressed with one young congressman from the north shore of chicago, a man by the name of don rumsfeld. he spoke for the group. i thought i would kind of like to work for him. i went to interview with him. he had me in his office, and he asked me what i was doing. i am explaining how i was studying the way congress voted into doing a ph.d. thesis and so forth and i was going to go back and become a professor. he listened about 10he listened, stood up, and said this is not going to work. he threw me out. he claims that is not what happened, but i took notes. i remember very well. a couple months later, he was named by president nixon, who was just starting his administration, to run the anti- poverty agency in the office of economic opportunity. and i sat down shortly after he was announced and i wrote an unsolicited 12-page memo to him, telling him how he should conduct himself in his confirmation hearings, what he should do with the agency once he took over, and what kinds of policy initiatives he should undertake and so forth. i send it through the man was then working for and did not hear anything about it for a couple of weeks. then i got a phone call asking me to come down to the agency the next day to be part of the transition group to advise rumsfeld. this was the day he was sworn in. i went down. came in. he spoke to the big group and left. he sent a secretary in and she came in and said, is there anybody in here named cheney? i held my hand up, and he took me back to his office. he looked at me and said, you, you're congressional relations. now get out of here. [applause] that is how he hired me. he did not say i liked your memo. he did not say, would you like to work for me, he said, you are congressional relations, get out of here. so i went out, got directions, it took over. >> and you were how old? >> at the time, i was 37 -- no, excuse me, i would have just turned 28. >> a question from ariel. >> i want to thank you first for this opportunity. my question has to do with your book. when writing your book of memoirs, was there in any event or moment it would have done it differently at any regrets in your early years of politics that you wish you would have done? >> things i wish i would have done in political life? >> yes. >> not really. i look back on that -- two thoughts stand out. one, i was very fortunate. i had some great opportunities that came my way. but that was, in part, because of people willing to take a chance on me. after a career like mine, it is easy to look back on it and sort of get into the mindset that somehow i earned it all by myself. that is not true. that is almost never true. if you think about it, you're able to advance on what you do in the forward progress in a career because people are willing to help. i can identify john rumsfeld, bill steiger, a congressman from wisconsin, jerry ford who was willing to hire me to work for him. i actually went down in the day he took over to be part of the transition, eventually to become chief of staff, when i was very young. my subsequent career has turned on those decisions that other people made when i was here as a young man. i did not expect to stay more than 12 months. but those are the things i think about. in terms of what i would have done with my own career, i did everything i set out to do. and it was obviously varied. had to do a bunch of things. i was glad to be there to work in the aftermath of watergate. and i was finished working for president ford, i went on to wyoming because i decided i wanted to run from congress and that was the place for me to run from. but everything here during the nixon and ford administrations laid the groundwork all the relief for my campaigns, and fortunately i won all of those and then i got to be secretary of defense and vice president. you cannot plan it. there is no place you can go to the job fair and say that is the package i want. i was extraordinarily fortunate. it has been, from my standpoint, it has been a wonderful career, and i have loved every minute of it. i am only sorry i am not young enough to do it all over again. >> thank you very much. >> let me ask about the 40 years. you're not part of his administration when he pardoned richard nixon. but you said the impact of the pardon would have been lessened if more thought would have been given to how the pardon was announced. you said it was the right decision. but in terms of public relations, what you think ford should have done or the people around him? >> rumsfeld and i came in and helped with the transition for about two weeks, i guess. then we both laughed. i went back to the private company i was working at. he went back to nato. we got called back a couple weeks, after the president had been there about a month and he decided he needed a new chief of staff. that is the job he gave rumsfeld and the name be his deputy. it was during that couple of weeks' time span between our tours that he issued the pardon for nixon. i thought it was the right thing to do from a standpoint that it was just, in a sense. nixon was resigning under fire, the only president to ever do so. he made a very, very difficult call. and president ford made the decision he did because he thought it was the right thing for the country. put watergate behind us so we can move on and deal with other things. the only problem i saw in that i talk about in the book was the president announced the pardon on a sunday morning on a nationwide television. nobody is up watching a nationwide television on sunday morning unless your, you know, a glutton for punishment and you watch "meet the press" or fox on sunday mornings. but in those days, very few people actually saw the broadcast. if you go back and look at those old tapes, you can see the sun streaming into the windows of the oval office. the leaves are in the trees. early in the timber still. it is a beautiful day and a fantastic setting. ford gave a great speech, but nobody heard it. there had not been any effort made to sort of laid the groundwork. you know, maybe, for some, some leaks to the press or maybe bring in congressional leadership and briefed them in advance. so everybody was really surprised by it when it happened. it dropped us about 30 points in the polls. we went from a 70% approval rating down to about 40%. it was a burden we carried on the way through the 1976 election. i take it contributed to our defeat. but the thing i really loved when i think about it was when president ford died, with a lot of people remembered and we're reminded of was that he had had the courage knowing full well it might well cost and the presidency to make that decision and to stick by it. and he was a remarkable man, and as i look back on it now, i think one of the things that proved that was, in fact, his decision to pardon nixon. >> westfield state university. >> thank you so much for being here. i want to go back to the beginning a little bit. you start off as an intern in washington, d.c. and work your way up to chief of staff and vice president. the feel that your internship was vital to that process, and what kind of lessons did you learn there that you cannot have learned anywhere else? >> well, i did an internship in the wyoming state senate, but they only get 40 days every other year, so it was not like it was an extent, which is, by the way, the way congress should meet. when i entered that, i was sort of nonpartisan. i was a graduate student. then i work for the government of wisconsin for a year. both of those were with republican state senator and republican governor. out of that, then i got the summons, if you welcome the opportunity to go to washington as a congressional fellow, which was a yearlong proposition and also paid. i had to feed my family. the predominant impact of those experiences -- i really thought i wanted to be a political science professor. i worked hard at that. i had done everything except the dissertation for ph.d. in wisconsin, and it is grade school with a very strong department. what i found after had been back here for awhile, based in part on those early experiences, was i decided i was much more interested in doing it and then i was teaching about it. so when it came time for me, after we lost the 1976 election, i had to go fight. what i really wanted to do was to go run for congress, put my name on the ballot. i was impressed and felt very strongly that if somebody like jerry ford, don rumsfeld, bill steiger could serve in congress -- that was honest work and those are great guys. those experiences really lead to the change in my basic life, and i never did finish the dissertation. i never did get my ph.d. i never did go back and teach. there are probably some political adversaries in wyoming who wish i had instead of running for congress, but i got caught up in the political wars. it was fascinating. it was interesting. it was something that fundamentally changed my life. that is how i met norm mineta, back in the 1980's. >> thank you. >> there is a juxtaposition in the book which is emblematic of the american political process. he began the morning of january 20, 1977 in the white house. by midafternoon, you and your family were having lunch in a mcdonald's at andrews air force base. take that metaphor and what that tells you about politics in america. >> well, it was a unique kind of experience to go through. i did not know at the time that was ever going to get the chance to go back to the white house or go back to senior levels of government. we lost the election in 1976. jimmy carter was taking over. we had run a transition. on january 20, i went up to capitol hill on the president's motorcade and restorer in president carter. then we got in the president's helicopter and flew over the city a couple times and then out to andrews air force base. the president of the helicopter and walked over and caught on air force one. it was the first time in as the time i had been working for him, the first time he had been on air force one all by himself without me. and that was a bit disconcerting. as his plane took off, a guy in a trenchcoat came out with the big aluminum suitcase that he laid open on the ground in front of us. i was there with my staff, our advanced men, military assistance, and so forth, those who work for me in my capacity as chief of staff. he said, ok, gentlemen, i need everybody's radios. throwed in the aluminum suitcase. then he closed it up and walked off and said, it has been great working with you guys. that was it. we were out of work. my family was there, so we stopped at the mcdonald's across the street from andrews air force base and had a little leisurely lunch. big macs. it was an interesting time. in part, because at that moment i was out of work. i had two young kids. lynn, my wife, was finishing up her ph.d. she got hers. >> so she finished and you did not? >> she finished and i did not. we had to decide what to do. that is when i made the basic decision that wanted to go back home to wyoming. if i was to run for office, that was the place to do it. that was home. in that spring, since school was out, we loaded up the u-haul truck and hauled home to wyoming. that fall, a few months later, the incumbent congressman announced his retirement and surprised everybody. we thought he was going to run for reelection. but he did not. that was my opening, and i jumped in and won a tough three- way primary and won the general election. less than two years after i left, i was back here as a freshman congressman from wyoming. >> there is a story about you running for reelection and one of your constituents did not know who you are. >> well, that happened on more than one occasion. i am trying to remember which -- >> they said -- >> well, my favorite story was -- had to do with a fellow down in torrington, a house painter. this is one of the guys who runs all the time anyway and never wins anything. he actually ran his dog one year. that was an insult, by the way, when he ran at the dog. but i ran into him -- i am trying to remember the exact event, but we were at a big barbecue that came along later in the campaign down in torrington, along the nebraska border. the farm groups were out that day. i had a guy come up to me at the barbecue, as i recall, and i was introduced as the dick cheney candidate for congress. he said, are you a democrat? i said, no, sir. he said, are you a lawyer? i said, no. he said, i am voting for you. that is all he wanted to know, if i was a democrat and if i was a lawyer. no offense. >> thank you for being with us. he started as chief of staff in the ford white house and later as vice president with president george w. bush. i was wondering if you could tell us the similarities and differences between those two roles both in the white house, and then how your position as chief of staff helped you to be better prepared to serve as the vice president? >> thank you. >> that is a good question. the thing, when you study political science -- when i came away from my years as a student and a scholar, we were always looking for similarities across administrations, trying to identify institutional factors that you can look and see under each congress are each presidency, what they had in common. after i was involved doing that for awhile, i changed sort of my attitude in terms of what was significant and concluded that, especially from the standpoint of the white house and the president, that what was really distinctive about the job was it was a different for every president, and it depended a lot upon the time in which they govern it. you usually cannot forecast what it was that they were going to have to deal with. the bush administration, when i ran with then governor bush, we were focused on a lot of domestic issues. he had been governor of texas. tax policy, education, and so forth. in eight months into the administration, 9/11 happened. 3000 americans killed by terrorists that morning. that fact and our responsibility to defend against any further attacks and so forth, is what dominated the rest of our presidency for the next seven years. that was the prime focus. the other thing that was crucial and vital is the personal characteristics of the individual behind the desk in the oval office, and each one of them is dramatically different. it is very hard to protect how dwight eisenhower might have dealt with the kind of thing we had to deal with, or fdr, who obviously had not only world war ii but also the depression to cope with. we were fortunate during some of our times of great crisis to have individuals who could step up and do what needed to be done. but it is interesting. i just finished a book on dwight eisenhower, a new biography called "eisenhower: war and peace." it covers his life. what i come away with is a much higher regard for president eisenhower then the sort of conventional wisdom that the academic community may see. from time to time, they will list presidents and the historians will rank them in terms of who was the best and so forth. i would have to say that those rankings, there is almost no resemblance at all to my experience in terms of how i look at those individuals. the chief of staff's job, it is very different from being vice president. it is focused very much on what the president needs to have done. he needs to have somebody around him who is going to be there from early in the morning until late at night and do whatever he needs to have done and you can speak with the authority of the president, never to use it, never mistake his own position as chief of staff for what the president is doing. you only have one president. he is the guy that runs for office and put his name on the ballot. you're totally expendable as chief of staff. it is very, very important that you function, i think, in a way that emphasizes the staff part of that title. we, from time to time, have had chiefs of staff that did not do that. they spend a lot of time in front of the tv camera. they sought the ability to be sort of a major public player, putting a voice to their views in various issues, sometimes even a sort of managing the process to get the policy outcome they want. that is not why you're there. you are there to meet the president. you have to have the confidence to carry out his instructions and to do what he needed to have done. the vice president, on the other hand, mayor may not have much to do. it is a very interesting proposition. part of what you do, obviously, is your there in case something happens to the president. beyond that, it is really up to the president and what his relationship is what the vice president in terms of how much you're asked to do and what you get to do. it is really totally in his hands. we have had a lot of vice presidents that nobody remembers, because there were never asked to do anything. in my situation, the first, was offered a chance to be on the list to be considered for the job, i said no. i had a good private sector job and had 25 years in politics, and i did not want to come back to washington. eventually persuaded me that i was the guy who he needed in that post. he put me in charge of the search committee. and some of my friends subsequently said, yes, cheney went to work and he searched and searched, and he found himself. that is how he got to be class president. that is not accurate, but it is a charge. a very different kind of function, you're not in charge of anything. you're not in charge of white house staff. you're not in charge of troops or civilians. there is a huge difference between cabinet members and a vice president on the one hand and a staff on the other. i love both jobs. there were absolutely fascinating. but they were very, very different. >> why did not work for richard nixon or nelson rockefeller? they did not like the job of vice president, nor did lyndon johnson. yet, you enjoyed it. al gore said he had a lot of responsibilities. what works and what does not? >> well, the norm has been, i guess i was the 46th vice president, and when you look at the typical pattern, my guess is he may have somebody who is a very diligent student who could name all our vice presidents, but i could not. oftentimes, it has been described in various ways by other politicians or the vice presidents themselves, some were not even allowed to go to cabinet meetings. eisenhower and nixon had a somewhat strained relationship. they did not really know each other before nixon was picked. and it never was a close relationship. a lot of t