be secretary of defense and then i got to be vice president. i mean, you can't plan it. there's no place to go do a job fair and say that's the package i want. i was extraordinarily fortunate. it's been from my standpoint, it's been a wonderful career. i've loved every minute of it. i'm only sorry i'm not young enough to go back and do it all over again. >> thank you very much. i appreciate t.fs >> let me ask you about the ford years. you were not part of the ford administration when he pardoned richard nixon. in the book you said the impact of the pardon would have been lessened if more thought was given to how the pardon was announced. in terms of public relations, what do you think gerald ford or people around him should have done? >> well, rumsfeld and i came in and helped with a transition for about two weeks, i guess. and then we both left. i went back to the private company where i was working and don went back to nato and then a

couple of weeks after that we got called back after the president had been there about a month, and he decided he needed a new chief of staff and that was the job he gave rumsfeld, and then made me his deputy. and it was during that couple of week period between our tours that he issued the pardon for nixon. i thought it was the right thing to do from the standpoint that it was just in a sense. nixon was resigning under fire. the only president ever to do so. he made a very, very difficult call. and president ford made the decision because he thought it was the right anything for the country. put watergate behind us so we could move on and deal with other things. the only problem i saw and i talked about it in the book was that the president announced the pardon on a sunday morning on nationwide television. nobody is up watching nationwide television on sunday morning

unless you're a glutton for punishment or "meet the press" or fox sunday mornings, but in those days, very, very few people actually saw the broadcast. if you look at it, go back and look at those old tapes, you can see the sun streaming in the windows of the oval office. the leaves are out on the trees. it was early september still. it was just a beautiful day and fantastic setting and ford gave a great speech, but nobody heard it, and there hadn't been any effort made to sort of lay the groundwork, like maybe, for example, some leaks to the press or maybe bring in the congressional leadership and brief hem in advance. and so everybody was really surprised by it when it happened. and it dropped us about 30 points in the polls in a week. we went from close to 70% approval rating down to about 40%, and it was a burden we carried all the way through the '76 election, and i think it contributed to our defeat.

but the thing i really loved when i think about it was when presidentford died what a lot of people remembered and were reminded of is that he had had the courage knowing full well that it might cost him the presidency to make that decision and to stick by it. and he was a remarkable man. and as i look back now, i think one of the things that proved that was in fact his decision to pardon nixon. >> let go to anna gopher, westfield state uni. >> thank you for being here first of all. i'm going to go back to the beginning a little bit. you start interning in d.c. and worked your way up to chief of staff and then eventually vice president. do you feel your internship was vital to that process, and what kind of lessons did you learn there that you couldn't have learned anywhere else? >> well, the internships were

vital. i had -- i did an internship in the wyoming state senate, but they only met 40 days every other year so it wasn't like it was an extensive career, which is, by the way, the way congress ought to meet 40 days every other year, but that was my first political experience. and when i entered that, i was sort of non-partisan. i was a graduate student. then i worked for the governor of wisconsin for a year. and both of those were republican state senator, republican governor, and out of that then i got the -- the summons, if you will, the opportunity to go to washington as a congressional fellow which was a year-long proposition and also paid. i had to feed my family. the predominant impact those experiences had, i really thought i wanted to be a political science professor. i had worked hard at that and i had done everything except the

dissertation for a phd, and wisconsin is a great school, very strong department. what i found after i had been back here for a while and based in part on those early experiences was i decided i was much more interested in doing it than i was teaching about it. so when it came time for me after we lost the '76 election, and i had to go find something to do, what i really wanted to do was to go run for congress, put my name on the ballot. and 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. these were great guys who had given me tremendous opportunity, so it really is -- it was those experiences that led to the change in my basic life, and i

never did finish the dissertation. i never did get my phd. i never did go back and teach. probably some political adversaries in wyoming who wish i had, instead of running for congress. but i got caught up in the political wars, and i loved it. it was fascinating. it was interesting. it was something that -- it fundamentally changed my life. that's how i net norm mineta. i was serving in the house of representatives back in the 1980s. >> thank you. >> there is a juxtaposition in the book, which is emblematic of the american process. you began the morning of january 20th, 1977, in the white house, and by mid-afternoon, you and your family were having lunch at a mcdonald's at andrew's air force base. >> right. >> take that metaphor and what that tells you about politics in america. >> well, it was a unique kind of

experience to go through. you know, i didn't know at the time that i was ever going to get a chance to go back to the white house or back to senior levels of government. we'd lost the election in '76. jimmy carter was taking over. we'd run the transition and on january 20th i rode up to capitol hill in the president's mode cade and we swore in president carter and then got on the presidential helicopter and flew over the city a couple of times and out to andrews air force base. the president got off the helicopter and got on air force one. it was the first time, in most of the time i had been working for him, first time he got on air force one all by himself without me, and that was a bit disconcerting, and as his plane took off, a guy in a trench coat came out and had a big aluminum suitcase that he laid open on

the ground in front of us. i was there with my staff, my advance man and military assistance and so forth, guys that had worked with me in my capacity as chief of staff and he said, okay, gentlemen, i need your radios. everybody had the ear pierses and took it off the aluminum belt and threw it in the suitcase. he closed it up and said it's been great working with you guys. my family was there and we went to the mcdonald's across the street and had a leisurely lunch. big macs. it was an interesting time in part because at that time i was out of work. i had two kids. lynn, my wife, was finishing up her phd. she finished and i didn't, and we had to decide what i was

going to do, and that's when i made the basic decision that i wanted to go back home to wyoming. if i was going to run for office, that was the place to do it. that was home. so that spring as soon as school was out we loaded up a uhaul truck and hauled home to wyoming, and that fall, just a few months later, the incumbent congressman announced his retirement. surprised everybody. everybody thought he was going to run for re-election, and he didn't, and that was my opening so i jumped in and won a tough three-way primary and then won the general election, so in less than two years after i left i was back here as a freshman congressman from wyoming. >> real quickly. there's a story that you tell when you're running for re-election and one of your constituents didn't know who you were. >> well, that happened on more than one occasion. i'm trying to remember -- >> when they said that you ran for re-election and -- you know

the story >> my favorite story had to do with the fellow down in torrington, the house painter. this was a guy -- one of these guys that runs all the time anyway and never -- you know, never wins anything but he always files. he actually ran his dog one year. that was an insult, by the way, when he ran the dog, but i ran into him, i'm trying to remember the -- the exact events now, but we were at a big barbecue that came along late in the campaign down in torrington, wyoming, down in rural nebraska. all the farm groups were there that day. and i had a guy come up to me at the barbecue, as i recall. i was introduced as dick cheney,

candidate for congress. he said, son, are you a democrat, and i said, no, sir. he said are you a lawyer? i said, no. he said i'll vote for you. that's all he wanted to know, that i wasn't a democrat and i wasn't a lawyer. no offense, norm. >> sarah keller from ball state university. >> thank you for being with us today first of all. so you served as the chief of staff in the ford white house. and then later obviously as the vice president with president george w. bush. i was wondering if you could tell us the similarity and differences between those two roles in the white house and how your position as the chief of staff helped you be better prepared to serve as the vice president. >> thank you, sarah. >> that's a good question. when you're studying political science, and i don't know if you've had this experience or not, but i came away in my years as a student and a scholar, we were always looking at

administrations, trying to identify institutional factors to see in each congress or presidency what they had in common. after i had been involved doing it for a while i changed my sort -- sort of my attitude in terms of what was significant an concluded that especially from the standpoint of the white house and the president, that what was really distinctive about the job was that it was different for every president. and it depend a lot upon the time in which they governed. you usually couldn't forecast what it was that they would have to deal with. in the bush administration, i ran with then governor bush. we were focused on a lot of domestic issues. he'd been governor of texas. he was focused on tax policy and education and so forth, and eight months into the administration 9/11 happened, and 3,000 americans killed by

terrorists that morning. and 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 -- prime focus. the other thing that was crucial and vital is the personality or personal characteristics of the individual behind the desk in the oval office. and each one of them is dramatically different, and it's very hard to predict, you know, how dwight eisenhower might have dealt with the kind of thing that we had to deal with or fdr who obviously had not only world war ii but also the depression to cope with. we'd been 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's interesting.

i just finished a book on dwight eisenhower by a man named gene edward smith. it's a new biography called "eisenhower in war and peace." it covers his life, and what i come away with from that is a much higher regard for president eisenhower than sort of the conventional wisdom in the academic community. you may see from time to time, they will list presidents and the historians will rank order them in terms of who was the best and so forth. i would have to say those rankings bear almost no resemblance at all to my experience in terms of how i look on those individuals, but the chief of staff's job, it's very different from being the vice president. it's focused very much on what the president needs to have done. he needs someone around him to be there from very early in the morning and late at night to do

what needs to be done, speak with authority to the president, never abuse it and never mistake his own position as chief of staff for what the president's doing. you only have one president. he's the guy who runs for office. he puts your name on the ballot. you're totally expendable as chief of staff, and it's 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 who didn't do that. they spent a lot of time in front of the television camera. they sought the ability to be sort of a major public player or to voice their views on various issues or sometimes even try to sort of manage the process to get the policy outcome they want. that's not why you're there. you're there to serve the president. he needs somebody in the job that he has total confidence in

to carry out his instructions and to do what he needs to have done. the vice president, on the other hand, may or may not have much to do. it's a very interesting, very interesting proposition. part of what you do obviously is you're there in case something happens to the president. and beyond, that it's really up to the president in what his relationship is with the vice president in terms of how much you're asked to do, what you get to do. it's really totally in his hands, and we've had a lot of vice presidents that nobody remembers because they were never asked to do anything. in my situation, the first time i 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. i had 25 years in politics, and i didn't want to come back to washington. eventually he persuaded me that i was the guy that he needed in that post. he put me in charge of the search committee, and some of my

friends have subsequently said, yeah, cheney went it work and he searched and searched and he found himself, and that's how i got to be vice president. that's not accurate, but that's the charge that's often made. it's a very different kind of a function. you're not in charge of anything. you're not in charge of the white house staff. you're not secretary of defense commanding 4 million people, troops and civilians or running the treasury department or transportation the way norm did. there's just a huge difference between cabinet members and vice presidents on the one hand and staff on the other. i love both jobs. they were absolutely fascinating, but they were very, very different. >> so what works? why did it not work for richard nixon or nelson rockefeller? they didn't like the job of vice president, nor did lyndon johnson and yet you enjoyed t.al gore said that he had a lot of responsibilities, so in the dynamics of the relationship,

what works and what doesn't? >> well, the norm has been to go back over, and i guess i was the 46th vice president. and you look at what the typical pattern has been, my guess is he may have somebody here who is really diligent student who can name all our vice presidents, but i couldn't. and it's a -- oftentimes it's -- it's been described various ways by other politicians or the vice presidents themselves. some of them weren't even allowed to go to cabinet meetings. eisenhower and nixon had a somewhat strained relationship. they didn't really know each other before nixon was picked to be vice president, and it never was a close relationship. a lot of that had to do with nixon's own background. he had been the supreme allied commander in europe throughout world war ii. he wan a military-style

operation, and there really isn't any place in that for a, quote, vice president. you can have, you know, a deputy commander. can you have a chief of staff who runs things on behalf of the supreme allied commander, but his whole style of operation was very much to delegate a lot of authority down, especially to the cabinet. he didn't delegate much of anything to the vice president, and then he'd focus on the big issues him selves. in other cases where i was involved, president bush was -- he'd spend a lot of time thinking about it, and when he asked me to help him find somebody after i had said no the first time around, i had the opportunity over several months to hear him talk about what kind of individual he was looking for, and what he really wanted was somebody who could be part of the team and heavily involved in policy-making, and he -- that's in effect what he offered

me. what he said to me after we finished the search and we'd reviewed all the candidates. he turned to me and he said, dishes you're the solution to my problem, and then at that point he basically put the arm on me and a few days later made the decision to sign me on. but it worked well in our case. i got to do an awful lot. part of it was because i happen to have a set of experiences as secretary of defense on the intelligence committee and the congress and so forth that was very relevant after 9/11. and so i was a valuable commodity in that sense. and he asked me to spend a lot of time on those kinds of issues. but i became persuaded that he wasn't worried about a big state. wyoming is the smallest state in terms of population. we only have three electoral votes. of course, it turned out in the election of 2000 those three

electoral votes were the difference between victory and defeat, but that wasn't ordinarily the case. i didn't have any special appeal in terms of ethnicity or gender or there's a lot of reasons people talk about hiring vice presidents. but he decided that he wanted me, primarily because of my past experience, and i would guess also, he probably consulted with his father, that he might work for secretary of defense back in the early '90s when he was president. i think all of those things came together. >> just to go back quickly, the chief of staff, you make it a point in your book, your code name was back seat. >> right. it was. i took it as a point of honor. the secret service had given me that. and they had a dinner for me, my staff did before i left just before we turned thins over to

the carters, and they gave me as a token of affection the back seat out of an old beat up junker of a car. i mean, it had rats living in it. it was really a bad piece of equipment, and they presented it to me that night to commemorate my code name, secret service code name, but it was in keeping in the sense that i believe in keeping your head down and doing everything you could for the president and try to stay out of the line of fire. don't become a target, if you will, for the president and for other politicians. >> jeremy hunt. >> mr. cheney, thank you very much for taking time out of your schedule to speak with us today. i just wanted to know. have you ever felt like there were teams whether you either stood alone on an important issue, and if so, how did you handle that issue or the situation? >> well, there were times when i guess i felt outnumbered. that's easy to do sometimes when you're a republican in a house that's run by the democrats, for example.

but i had the attitude, i suppose i'm trying to think about some of the controversies we were involved in. some of the strongest controversy surrounded some of our post- 9/11 policies. we had to do a couple of things that i felt were very important. the president made the basic decision, signed off on it. i didn't do it by myself. but one was to set up our terror surveillance program that let us collect intelligence on people calling from outside the united states to people inside the united states if we had reason to believe that that call may have come from an al qaeda type. and the other was our enhanced interrogation techniques that we applied to a handful of al qaeda terrorists when we captured them that were controversial. i won't bore you today here with

all the who struck johns. but we were very careful to make sure they were legal, we stayed within the limits, but we did develop techniques that were absolutely vital in collecting information from people like sheikh omar abdel-rahman -- from khalid sheikh mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. we captured him in the spring of '03. he wasn't cooperative at the outset. after he'd been involved with the enhanced interrogation technique, ie, waterboarding, he decided he wanted to cooperate and was a wealth of invaluable information for us in terms of our putting together our program to -- well, to defend the nation against al qaeda. panta, leon panetta when he was cia director at the time that they got osama bin laden said that he believed their ability to get bin laden had been influenced in part by a lot of the intelligence we collected through that means before and

that gradually led to the location of bin laden when president obama and the s.e.a.l.s took him out. >> thank you. >> let's go to zachary who is next, from tennessee. >> yeah, mr. vice president, thank you for joining us at the washington center today. my name's zachary. i'm from tennessee tech university. i just like to know what attribute do you have as an older professional that you wished you'd had, you know, whenever you were a younger professional in washington. >> well, i'd almost state it the other way. in terms of what -- now that i'm an older professional, thank you for -- >> experienced, how's that? >> experienced. no, one of the most valuable experiences that i learned over time that i did not have when i started is i thought when i started that the quality of my contribution was directly related to how many hours a day i put in at my desk.

and the longer i stayed and the harder i worked the more i was contributing. that was sort of my mind-set. that wasn't true. what i didn't understand until later was there was such a thing as quality. and that it was important not just to be at your desk, you know, sending memos out and responding to memos. you've got to do all that sort of thing, but it's much, much better to be organized in a way that you had good help, good staff, working for you, that you could get them to focus on things and give them guidance on what they ought to be doing and then focus on the big issues yourself but also to pace yourself. to take that time to occasionally grab a day with the family. seven days a week, sometimes is necessary in the midst of a crisis. but as a steady diet, it will wear you down. i also had made the mistake of smoking two or three packs a day when i was younger.

the last one i had was when they wheeled me into the emergency room with my first heart attack. but that came only about two years after i left the white house. and there's something to be said for the notion that the way i lived during that first cycle in government if you will, drinking a lot of block coffee, smoking cigarettes, not getting much sleep or exercise. you know, to some extent, i brought it on myself because i didn't take care of myself. what i learned over the years since is that there is such a thing as quality and sometimes less is more. but it's very important if you're going to make a career out of it, as i have, and pursue it over a long period of time, you really need to develop that capacity it know what's important and what's less important and to be able to focus on the big things and don't sweat the small stuff. >> great, thank you. in your book, this is at the conclusion, but it might be a question on the state of american politics, you wrote

this, you said our political battles are messy, shrill and sometimes cruel. yet for all of that, you say the system has a way of producing courageous and compassionate action when it is needed the most. so in terms of what you're seeing today, in congress, in american politics, what are your thoughts? >> well, i'm still looking for it in this cycle. i think about it in terms of -- when i'm asked today lots of times, people will say isn't this the worst period in american politics, the worst time when rhetoric's harsher and the relationships are more strained and people are nastier to one another, but then i harken back and then i think, let's see. when i came to washington in the summer of 1968, martin luther king had just been assassinated. bobby kennedy had just been assassinated.

the cities had been in flames as a result of the riots and protests that came out of that. when i arrived in washington to find an apartment to live in that summer, i came down for a day and then went back to wisconsin, they had troops stationed on the steps of the capitol. elements of the 82nd airborne had been moved into washington to maintain order during that period of time. 12 people had been killed in rioting here that summer. and, you know, that was a difficult time. we -- what we went through, a civil war, the bloodiest conflict in our history. over 600,000 dead. and it was -- oftentimes we look at it at a time like now and say, gee, it's really gotten -- gotten not bad and nasty out there and they don't remember the struggle that we had, for example, to end slavery and to build freedom and democracy as we know it today.