The rigging of this ringing of this well. It just seemed such a shame when we came here. Then we went to columbia, the president ial palace, every piece of furniture has some link with the past. I thought the white house should be like that. Ladies, we are committed, and as citizens of the world, we promised to do all possible. Starting next monday with in a lady edith roosevelt. Few moments, a conversation with dick cheney and his daughter. That, a forum on the digital revolution. The Senate ForeignRelations Committee tomorrow will consider authorization for military force. That will be live starting at 2 30 eastern. Join the conversation on facebook. The statehouse dome is one of , but it iconic symbols not the first dome to cover the building. Completed, it had a small kubla. Couple up. Pola. P afterhan two Years Congress was in annapolis, construction begins on a new dome. It takes about 12 years to it is the largest all wooden dome. It is truly an architectural masterpiece. 1912 the statehouse is used as a lookout. Documentationdous of William Barney going to the statehouse and observing troop akinents akin fourth fourth. Back and forth. Sundayook at annapolis at 5 00 on cspan three. The conversation now with former vicet the cheney president dick cheney and his wife. It is at the Freedom Conference and was just under an hour and a half. Well, we are delighted to be here tonight. I have watched the development of the organization of bill and tony thompson. I probably would not have gotten elected to congress in 1978 if theyll and tony had not helped me get cheyenne. You may or may not agree with the outcome, but it was all liberal. It has been a privilege to have the opportunity to spend time with my daughter. As i finished up my time in the white house, i decided to write a book, and it is nice to have your oldest child interested in your old war stories. I notice she has the book in her lap. I have no idea what is planned. I am not sure where this is going. What it is all good, all good. Im delighted to be here tonight and have the opportunity to spend the time with all of you, and with that, i will introduce my daughter, liz cheney, who is seeking political office, but this is not a political event, all right . Not working. Is there a way to turn off their . All right. I am guessing we will have the opportunity [no audio] hello . Move the mike up. Its ringing. Talk into it. Thank you. I think the nsa is not operating these microphones, clearly. Or maybe barack obama is. That is a good point. It is wonderful to be here tonight, wonderful to be here with the Steamboat Institute. It is long past time that the Aspen Institute got a dose of truth and reality and facts. We are thrilled to be part of that effort here tonight. We thought we would do a couple of things, talk about current events, but the most important current event in our lives, in our family, has been the fact that my dad was blessed, we were all blessed because my dad was the recipient of a new heart a little over a year ago. And his story he talks about his campaign for office when he was elected, and 1978, when he was running the first time, was also the first time he had a heart attack. I have been going back for reasons you can imagine, looking at old clippings for political campaigns in wyoming, and came across one where my dad was asked about his heart attack in 1978, after he had the attack and decided he was wanting to stay in the race. He was interviewed, and the porter said to him, are you concerned that having had a heart attack it might hurt your ability to get elected . He said, no, nobody has ever tried the heart attack shtick before. I wanted to talk about his book called heart, and it talks about his challenge in dealing with and overcoming Heart Disease. I want to start tonight as the you to talk about that, you are this most famous cardiac patient in the country and maybe in the world, and you accomplished great things while you doubt with the challenge of Heart Disease. A be you could talk about how you dealt with it and in particular, what i think is interesting is the mental attitude you always had about the disease and not letting it pull you back. Well, thank you liz. Most of you know i dealt with a few heart problems along the way, in the midst of my career, and after i finally obtained a heart transplant 16 months ago, my cardiologist came to me, john reiner, and he suggested that there was a book that he and i might do together. If you look back at the historical record, between 1968 and 2008 we reduced the incidence of death by her disease by 60 in this country. The fact that i am here tonight at all, that i survived, through that time, and he described at one point to me as the only heart patient he still had a live who had a heart attack back in the 1970s. We had the experience a couple years ago, what happened was i had lived and dealt with this in its various forms from 1978, through congress, Vice President , and so forth. Then i went into end stage Heart Failure after i left the white house. They worked on me one night and put in a pump to supplement my heart. That got me through the transplant 16 months ago, and it is nothing short of a miracle. It is an interesting story, the way john told her, and i got a phone call one day for the transplant from the cleveland clinic, and they were going to put on a conference on innovation in cardiology and care of Heart Disease, and they said, we have all the suppliers, makers of the device, so forth, we have a lot of the docs coming, but we decided we needed patient. Somebody said, lets get cheney. Up to that point i have not had a transplant yet. This gave us the idea that you can tell the story of that 40 year miracle, really, of what has happened with respect to our ability to deal with Heart Disease in this entry through my story and my case history. And most of the things that saved my life over the last 35, 40 years were not even around when i had the first heart attack in 1978. The treatment then is what Dwight Eisenhower got 23 years before in 1955 when he had a heart attack in colorado. So what we do with Jonathan Reiner writing as the physician, i write as the patient, and we tell the story of all those developments, including the historical background to where stents and deferred relators come from, and transplant surgery, the whole body of technology and development of medicine of cholesterollowering drugs, etc. We tell that story to my case. Also lay it against the background against mic, and public service. I was uniquely blessed in many respects. Obviously you can never express enough ready to for a donor or the donors family. You can not talk about what i went through and how i survived it without talking about liz and her sister mary and their moern,ith whom i will celebrate my 49th wedding anniversary next week. When you go through everything we went through as a family and the only way to go through it is as a family, if at all possible. I wake up every morning with a big smile on my face thankful for a new day i never expected to see. The book is bought by simon schuster. It is called heart an american medical odyssey. It is not political. It has a thing to do with politics. I suppose you could say all of my critics who said i never had a heart may want to have that proposition challenged now, that i have proof that i do have, but it has been an important part of my life. You do not talk about it when it is going on. Evil were not interested in me as Vice President , secretary of defense, if i had a bad heart. They wanted somebody to do the job. Because of the great support that i had from my family, from friends all over america who prayed for me, and who were there when i need support and help, made it possible for me to live a very full and active and otherwise normal life in spite of the fact that for regarding five years i was a cardiac patient, you had everything done to him that you could do to a heart patient. I am grateful to be here tonight, grateful for all of the support that the people have provided over the years, including many in this room tonight, and grateful to be here with my daughter and my first child and hopefully my that remains to be seen. I will leave it at that. You are supposed to tell a story. Oh, yes. She has the script. She never gives me the script. Liz has got five of our grandchildren. Kate is the oldest, the sophomore down at Colorado College starting this fall, but the youngest is my namesake, richard, and after i had the transplant, the rule is you cannot sit in the front seat of the car because they do not want you to get hit with an airbag, hard on the plumbing, and instead of sitting in the backseat with might grandson richard, and he said, did you get a new heart, grandpa . I said, yes, i did. He started asking questions. I did the best i did to explain the process and so forth, and how it all came about. He listened very carefully for about five or 10 minutes and the nature he said, yeah, i had one of those when i swallowed the quarter. My other favorite richard story he was in kindergarten, came home from school one day, and he told his mom, he said, mom, tomorrow i have to stand up in front of the whole class and tell what is special about me, why i am special. She said, what are you going to say . He said, i have two choices. I could say my grandpa was Vice President of the United States. She said, yes, that is a good answer. What is the other one . He said, i could tell them i got my cat at the dump. And you can guess which one he used. I will now tell a richard story. This was not in the script. The other thing in our lives obviously, caring for my dad has brought the family together. We are a family very much, politics has brought us together, and the chance to Campaign Together as a family when my sister and i were young and we traveled wyoming with my mom and dad and grandparents, it brought us together and gave us a chance as kids to see how democracy works, to understand how important that process is, and it is a process that i am now going to go through with my own kids. People have asked me, you have five kids. How is it that you are able to run for office with five kids . What of the things i know for sure is the exposure that i had, the chance i had as a little girl to see what democracy looks like was an invaluable lesson for me. It is a lesson that i am really honored now to be able to share with my own kids. And so, the latest event we did together was the wyoming state fair parade in douglas, wyoming, last weekend. We had my kids and my cousins kids, so we had a gaggle of kids walking into parade with baskets full of candy. My Campaign Manager decided that it would be important for the prayed again or us to brief the kids, because when youre out there tossing candy, it can get dangerous. She brought them all together and she said, now we will talk about the roles of being in a parade, the rules of throwing candy in a parade. Rule number one, and my older son raises hand, said, do not check the candy heart. She said, that is right, that is an important rule. What is rule number two . One of my cousins little girl said, do not throw it in faces. My manager said that is right, do not throw that faces. She said rule number three, and richard raised his hand, and he said, no farting. That is a good life lesson. In addition to the life lessons that you learn in a campaign, we want to talk about Current Affairs and about what is happening and about the concerns i know that Steamboat Institute has and about the concerns that people across this nation have about the direction of the country. And we are not here to do a political event, but it is very much those are concerns that made me decide to run for office this time around. I believe that we are living very clearly at this moment through a critical point in our nations history. You can look back at other nations and at our own, in other times, and see when it was that countries came to a fork in the road, when they came to a turning point. You can think about Winston Churchill and his election as Prime Minister in britain in 1940. The extent to which people around him said you got to seek terms with adolph hitler, that if you do not surrender, you will be destroyed. He refused, he refused to capitulate. He knew the odds were against him, but he saved civilization and freedom by doing that. You can look at Margaret Thatcher when she was able in 1979 to safer country from the ravages of socialism. She said im going to turn this nation around, against all odds. In our own nation, Ronald Reagan provided that same example of a president who came to office and who saved us from the malaise of the jimmy carter era. I think many times in history when you look back, you have the ability to see those moments. You do not always know them when youre living through them. We know right now as we sit here tonight that we are living through one of those moments, and it is a moment that we have all we have got to make a decision what are we going to do . Are we going to let this president to his country down a path which could lead to instruction, or are we going to stand and fight and defend our freedom . And i know that you think of this like i do, when you think of it in terms of the blessing that we have, this nation that we live in, the legacy that we have inherited, the unbelievable miracle of our fan think, when for the first time in the history of the world, the Founding Fathers said this nation will have its people be the sovereign. It never happened before. And it is an unbelievable blessing that we get to live in a nation where we are free and where men and women have died for our right to be free. But that fact imposes an incredible obligation and duty on every Single Person in this room, every single american across this country, and that is a duty to defend that freedom and to defend that freedom against both external enemies, against terrorism, against threats to our National Security, but also to defend it against president s like this radical man in the oval office today who believes that the government is the answer to every problem, does not believe we are an exceptional nation, who is that we ought to control at least 1 6 of our economy who said that the private sector is the enemy. I think we have the opportunity today, the opportunity over the next year, frankly, to be in a position where we send a very strong message to washington and that is a message that we are not going on to get along anymore, we are not content with business as usual, we are taking back our freedom, taking back our values, and we are going to fight to defend what every one of us knows this country was built on. And before i get the mike back to my dad, do not lose hope. It can be really easy, particularly if you listen to the Mainstream Media, to think that somehow conservatives are a minority, that we are powerless, to think that we ought to just be discouraged about 2012 and give up the fight and sit down and be quiet. If you start to lose hope, think about this the president of the United States used the irs, ive used the power of his office, to go after political opponents, conservatives, republicans, members of the tea party. He had the irs people asking what people said in their prayers. That is unamerican. It tells you something about our power. The president would not bother the to use the irs to go out after us if he was not afraid of every single one of us. Wherever you live, you have the opportunity to cast a vote, work for an important cause, to work for an important organization, dedicate yourselves over the course of the next year to making sure that 2014 will be critical for us, critical for taking back the nation, and it is going to be a moment when everybody around the country can hear especially from those of us in the Rocky Mountain west, that we are not going to stand for it one minute longer. One of the questions i get a lot and then i will ask my dad, because i would like to hear his view, the media in particular likes to talk about how the Republican Party is in disarray. We are facing these huge challenges, but we have got this abuse going on inside our party. I would like to hear you talk of about the introspectives on it, as somebody who has obviously participated in politics and policy for a long time and who has seen our party and the Democratic Party does through times of change. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on where the party is today and what we have got to do to take back the white house in 2016. After the obviously i was not happy about the outcome in 2008, but president bush and i have had our eight years, we had worn out our welcome in some quarters, although we are looking better and better every day. It was easy after not easy, but it happens to a lot of people, to be down after the 2008 election, and we lost, but then we went through i can remember that morning on january 20 of 2009, when we swore in the new president , there is a certain ritual that goes with that that i have always been fascinated by. There have been five republican president s since eisenhower. I have worked with four of them. I worked with a fifth as part of the congressional leadership. I have been intrigued why that transfer of power. I can remember when president ford lost in 1976. One of my jobs as chief of staff was to read his cap concession statement over the telephone to jimmy carter, because president ford had lost his voice. He had been working so hard in this closing weeks of the campaign, his voice was gone. All he could do was a bear whisperer. He called me into the oval office. We drafted a telegram, and then he told me to get governor carter on the phone, which i did. He introduced me and then i had to read that statement. That was a real armor. That was about as low as