name and tornado if you wish to opine. no catter walling. -- caterwauling when writing the factor. remember the spin stops right here because we are definitely here because we are definitely looking out for you. closed captioned by closed captioning services, inc. >> sean: welcome to a special edition of hannity. vice president cheney served for eight years along side president bush. the vice president and his daughter liz are recounting his long career in politics in a new book. i traveled to the beautiful state of wyoming to sit down with the former

vice president. mr. vice president so good to see you. >> good to see you again. welcome to wyoming. >> sean: it is beautiful here. now i know why you have a will have of this great state. dick cheney, in my time with liz cheney, a personal and political memoir. you have been working on this for a long time. >> we have. we started out on it, spent two years. started it after i left office. i had a lot of material, notes, oral histories that had been done over the years. in terms of working on the book, having a contract, it has been the last two years. >> sean: one of the things that keep coming up, a lot of people are concerned. you had a heart attack in 1978. quadruple bypass. in the course of your life you ended up with five heart attacks. recently you had a tough struggle. i guess they have new technology, mechanical heart pump. i read you don't have a pulse,

is that true? >> it is very weak. and the pump, it is called a vlad. at the time they put it in i was in the latter stages of heart failure. it has been a little over a year now and it has worked. i'm a big fan. >> sean: how do you feel now? it struck me. it came up a lot during the book when president bush was asking you to be his vice president. you brought up the issues of your heart. since the age of 37 you have had to deal with that at least in the back of your mind. that's got to be difficult, psychologically. >> it would be if you worried about it everyday. you can't let yourself do that. what happened in my case was, i had that first heart attack in the middle of my first campaign for congress. found myself in the emergency room at cheyenne memorial

hospital, 37-years-old. all of a sudden, heart attack. does that mean i have to give up my political career, campaign over? i asked the doctor, dr. davis has gotten to be a lifelong friend if i had to forego the campaign? he said hard work never killed anybody if you want to do it, do it. he said the worse thing would be to spend your life doing something you don't want to be doing. i took that advice and crossed that bridge in 1978. and i've always operated on the basis that you do the things that an intelligent man bo do. you don't smoke. take care of yourself. watch what you eat. i've been able, partly because of technology, stayed head of my disease to have had my entire political career has taken place after that first heart attack. >> sean: it is amazing how far they've come. you are feeling better, i'm glad. >> 15 months ago, i was a very

sick puppy. today i'm in much better shape. thanks to the technology and great doctors. >> sean: great news. do you miss the day-to-day? do you miss the involvement? do you miss being vice president? what like most about the job? what did you dislike the most? >> well, i loved the job. it was great fun to go back after all these years and settle in, in the white house in an office in the west wing right next to the one i'd occupied 20 years before as white house chief of staff. when i back as vice president, i was the oldest guy in the west wing. i had been one of youngest in the next son administration when i had first gone in. to have the opportunity after service in the congress for 10 years, through "desert storm" at the defense department and so forth. time with ford to have the perspective of that experience was very valuable for me.

it was great to have the opportunity to come back and sit and look back on that experience and deal with the issues we had to deal with. of course, president bush had a huge, huge set of issues within months of our return. all of a sudden 9/11 0 curse. we are in the midst of a war -- occurs. and we are in the midst of a war on terror that dominated everything for the next 7 1/2 years. wasn't anything you could have planned on before you arrived. in many respects, i felt the experiences i had before. my service on the house intelligence committee. my time as secretary of defense, overseeing a big part of the intelligence community. all of those things stood me in good stead, when we got into the global war on terror. >> sean: you talk about one of the saddest days in your life is the hunting accident with your friend.

you describe it in detail. as i was reading this, you always had a medical team as part of your staff that would follow you wherever you went. you talked about it very open about it. you know, that was a hard day. tell us about it. >> well, it was. one of the things i loved to do was hunt quail in south texas. the armstrong ranch, they were longtime friends of ours. it was -- it was on such a hunt, it was my fault, i accidentally shot, didn't know that one of my compatriots had come up decide us. it was late in the day. the sun was starting down. visibility wasn't that good. a bird flashed, i turned and fired. fortunately it was a 28 gauge, smaller shotgun. but obviously it was

devastating in terms of it hit him in the upper body. he had protective goggles on, so his eyes weren't injured. harry whittington, the gentleman i was hunting with, could not have been kinder about the whole thing. he was more worried about me and the press flap that was bound to develop than about his own situation. the good thing was that i had my medical crew with me. they were always with me they were more likely to get business -- >> sean: that probably helped a lot. >> yeah. they did remarkable job immediately on the scene. we always had an ambulance in my motorcade. he was loaded in the ambulance. taken to the hospital in corpus christi. and fully recovered. but, one of the interesting things, the -- when i was sick last year in the intensive care unit for five weeks, i

got a lot of letters from people around the country. one of the very nicest most thoughtful was from harry whittington. and he's just a great gentleman. and we've managed to get through all of that and all the an late night jokes. >> sean: including president bush. >> provided a lot of material for the gridiron dinner and for jay leno and -- >> sean: i used to use a joke on the stump too. the reason alan colmes left was because i gave him an all expense hunting trip with you. >> we kept track of some. some were good. it was the event itself for me was devastating. one of the most difficult things i ever had to go through. but it was my fault.

and i wished it hadn't happened. >> sean: coming up, vice president cheney explains why the biggest mistake the kerry-edwards mistake made was making his wife lynn angry. that and much more, straight ahead.

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first time you turned him down when he asked you to manage his campaign in 2000 for the campaign, you said no. when he first asked you to be his running mate, you said no. in 2004 you twice said you should think about replacing me as your vice president. the one yes you did give then governor bush was you would run the search committee is >> right. >> sean: you had no idea that you would still be on the list. >> if i were interested in pursuing the vice president presidency, i get accused sometimes of ma nip laying the search to put myself -- manipulating the search to put myself on the list if i was interested i would have said yes a couple months before when they first asked me. i could do the search process. i had been through the vp process off and on over the

years went back to the ford days. i could do that without having to give up my daytime job. it was a defined task, it would take a couple months and we would come up with a vice presidential candidate. i would have performed a good service for the campaign. i wanted him to win. fascinating process. i was delighted to have the opportunity to serve. but it was true, i did turn it down, until we got to the end of the process. he persuaded me i was what he was looking for. >> sean: you are on the campaign trail. president bush spots a "new york times" reporter. >> [ bleep ] >> sean: you got a new nickname. >> i got a new nickname. for several weeks. >> sean: i enjoyed the behind scenes of getting ready for debates. joe lieberman was a friend of

yours. i know you genuinely respect each other. i thought you won that debate cleanly. it was an important moment. i think what you are saying is, if you can't handle the stress of the debate the country is watching closely, you are not going to be able to handle the stress of a crisis. your advice to people is, you better get some rest. probably counterintuitive people want to cram last minute, memorize this and that. you worked hard preparing for those debates, both with lieberman and later john edwards. >> that's right. in both instances we took a day just to rest. rob portman senator from ohio was my debate partner. he played lieberman then edwards in our practice sessions. after the edwards' practice session we had one day left i

took him over on the border and spent the day fly fishing. >> sean: when you debated john edwards, you said during that debate when they asked a question about gay marriage, you were furious that he immediately how dare he presume he can talk about my family. >> you can't have anything respect for the fact that they are willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter. the fact that they embrace her. >> sean: you controlled your emotions you couldn't get angry with the country watching that bothered you? >> yeah, we felt that in 2004 that the kerry-edwards campaign tried to make an issue out of daughter mary. and mary is gay. and that's been well-known for a long time. but they clearly were trying the way they described it, one of their campaign managers, deputy managers described it and said mary was fair game.

and i thought that was totally inappropriate. biggest mistake they made, they made lynn, my wife, angry. and she really laid into them. -- we joke about it in the family after, because we got a bounce in the polls coming out of that debate on that issue. we always called it the mary cheney bounce around hour houselhold. >> sean: election night 2000 daughter liz wakes you up, congratulates you, you are vice president and al gore retracts. who retracts a concession speech. you called it amateur hour.do)% >> we were all trying to figure out what was happening. we were contacted by i think it was bill daley. and indicated that gore was

going to concede. florida had been called for bush. then he called back to say that gore had changed his mind and is withdrawing his concession. may have called back himself. this business of conceding and withdrawing a concession i had never seen anything like that. >> sean: what were those days like, hanging, swinging, dimpled, chads and you know, not knowing the results, shifting results on a daily basis? what was that like for you during that time? >> we had plenty to do. my big concern was we were going to miss the transition. we had an awful lot to do. we had to pick a cabinet and fill thousands of positions. everyday we lost time on that because of the ongoing

recount. >> sean: ever have any doubt it wouldn't come out that way? >> no, every time they recounted, we won. we never had a single time when the result came out the other way. >> sean: coming up, vice president cheney relives what happened on the morning of september 11th, 2001. later, he unleashes on the obama administration for trying to undo some of the policies he fought to put in place.

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>> sean: welcome back to hannity. in his new book vice president cheney talks about that morning 10 years ago when he realized that america was under attack. september 11th, 2001. you talk a lot, obviously about it. it defined i would say your tenure as vice president. take us through that day for you. >> well, i obviously write about it in the prologue in the book starts with 9/11. i was that morning in the office in the west wing working on a speech. when my secretary called in

world trade center in new york. we turned on the television. as we were watching we saw the second plane come in and hit the trade center. at that point, obviously, looks like an act of terror. it is a beautiful clear morning. as an act of terror. then get on the telephone to the president who was in florida. and talked with him about the statement he was about to issue, agreed it probably was an act of terror. >> today we've had a national tragedy. two airplanes have crashed into the world trade center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. >> shortly after he made the statement then the door to my office burst open and my lead secret service agent came in and said sir, we have to leave immediately. he didn't say let's go or would you please come with me. he said we leave immediately.

put a hand on my shoulder and propelled me out. >> sean: that fast. >> that fast. down the hall and underneath the white house towards the presidential emergency operations center it is called the peoc. as we go down there and stopped for a moment he told me the reason we were moving was because they had a report from dulles of an airplane at low altitude, 500 miles-an-hour headed for crown, code name for the white house that turned out to be american 77. which came in and did a circle and went into the pentagon. while we were still in that space, underneath the white house, i call the president -- i called the president and told him we had been struck, washington was obviously a target as well as new york. and strongly recommended he

stay away until we could find out what was going on. my great concern was when wanted to avoid a decapitation strike. where an attack could kill the president and myself and leave us with a transitional problem, with a continuity problem. of course the speaker would be next in line for the presidency. i made sure that we had denny hastert relocated to a secure location. bobby byrd would be third after hastert. he didn't want to participate in continuity of government. he packed it in and went home. i spent the rest of the day in the peoc when arrived down there we had a list of six aircraft that had been hijacked with flight numbers. this was provided by norma net dark the secretary of -- by norm ma meta-, secretary of

transportation in charge of the faa. we worked hard get the planes ó sky so we could sort out what was hijacked and what wasn't. for a while we thought we had six, not four. we had reports of car bombs at the state department. airport headed for the ranch of crawford. threat in the air-to-air force one. a lot of that was false reporting. then we got word that flight 93 had gone down in pennsylvania, thanks to the heroism of the passengers. spent the day there, my wife lynn was brought down by the secret service she was with me most of the day. >> sean: in camp david? >> no, in the peoc. in that night, after the president came back from omaha, he gone to the air force base out there. he came in, we had a meeting

and he addressed the nation. after that, lynn and i boarded a helicopter on the south lawn and were taken to camp david. from that point forward for several months, we were in undisclosed locations so we didn't bunch up have the president and i in the same position. >> sean: you said everyone was trying to figure out what the undisclosed location was. one was here in wyoming. the vice president's residence was another. camp david a place you would regularly go to. the real purpose was to keep you two apart. that was -- that was then the strategy. >> there were two parts that morning. two major problems i focused on. first the crisis, how do you get the planes down find out how many hijacked planes there are. the second piece was continuity of government. we had programs that for years

that i participated in, various capacities that dealt with this issue the continuity of government. a lot of it was built around assumptions and planning with respect to the prospects of an all out global nuclear conflict an attack from the soviet union against the u.s. to be able to respond that to situation. those two things were foremost in my mind that day. we dealt with the second one the continuity of government one by making sure the president was not at the same location i was at. we were separated. and that we had made provision for denny hastert the speaker, so there wasn't any way the enemy could take out our government. >> sean: pretty scary time. >> it was. but remarkable people working the problem from the beginning. as i say, some of us had been

involved over the years. i had a number of occasions as part of the continuity of government operation when i occupied other positions in the government. so it was something that wasn't new. >> sean: vice president cheney takes on critics of the policies at that time bush administration enacted after 9/11. then a look at the post white house life of the former vice president. remember the days before cop

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>> sean: in the wake of 9/11 the bush administration took drastic measures to prevent another attack. many were controversial. in his new book vice president tkhpb any details why they were and still -- cheney details why they were and still are necessary. you write the terrorists were emboldened they didn't feel fear there was going to be retribution. they thought they could get away with it. that played a big par. seemed like the country was united everyone agreed we should go to war there was

still some disagreement. you start the fisa law, terrorism surveillance act. gitmo, enemy combatants. these became big defense issues for the country and very controversial. and you never wavered on any of these things. you say in the book would you do the same thing overagain today. we seem to be undoing a lot of these things. your thoughts. >> well, i feel very strongly as i look back on that period. as i wrote about it, that what we did was the right thing to do. our task, after 9/11, the president and i both were absolutely committed to the proposition that want going to happen again on our watch. and we would do whatever we had to do to safeguard the

nation. those were the steps that we took. we worked closely together. we had all kinds of safeguards built in to protect against an intrusion into the privacy of the citizens to protect the individual liberty and so forth. but it was controversial. and the overall impact i think was sound, it worked. you couldn't argue against proposition that we did in fact for 7 1/2 years avoid any further mass casualty attacks again the united states. -- against the united states. to see the obama administration campaign from one end of the country to the other against those policies, you can write-off politics, presidential campaign and they

disagreed with some of what we did and it is perfectly appropriate to have that debate. what really bothered me and the reason i got actively reengaged in the debate, after i left office, you may remember in the spring of '09, i held a press conference, a speech at the american enterprise institute, was the proposition that was being discussed they were going to investigate and prosecute the career personnel of the intelligence community, the cia who had been involved in carrying out our policies. the policies we put in place, such as enhanced interrogation, were policies that had been approved by the national security council. and by the president. and only after we had gotten legal opinions from the justice department that these policies were appropriate and consistent with our international treaties and obligations.

here all of a sudden is -- within a matter of days after they took office, the obama administration is threatening these people that if anything deserved praise for having kept us safe. i really found it objectionable that is one of the reasons that i got as aggressively involved as i did. >> sean: you felt you wanted to protect those people. >> exactly. >> sean: all that was implemented after 9/11, rendition, enhanced interrogation, gitmo, is now opposed by the obama administration. you take great issue with all of these issues in the book. you talk about gitmo. people are given books movies, good food, qur'an, good medical care, able to watch tv and sports. on enhanced interrogations, you point out, but for those

interrogations, when we finally got bin laden that would not have happened. everything was president bush and dick cheney's fault, according to president obama. obviously, he didn't give you any of the credit for the intelligence that led to the location of bin laden. irritating? >> we're used to it. >> sean: mildly irritatinging? >> mildly. i think first of all -- consider i think you have to give president obama credit for making the decision to send in the seal team to get bin laden. >> sean: i gave him credit. >> so did it. i made a public statement. which was unusual for me. [ laughing ] >> i felt that the people who really deserve the credit are the professionals, the guys in the special operations

communities, the seals, delta, task force and the air force. intelligence folks and so forth. day after day, month in, month out, year after year for 10 years have worked that problem. leon panetta said at the time this happened that some of the information, some of the intelligence they used to track down bin laden had come out of our enhanced interrogation program. which, one i believe it is true and i took that as a positive statement from him on the value of some of the things we've done. i think in the final analysis, we can have a lot of arguments about who gets credit for what. the important thing is, we had first rate people working for us. they did a superb job. i think the american people were well served by the policies that we put in place.

i think the troops did a magnificent job when they captured and killed bin laden. eye prefered to have him dead, not captured. -- finish in the future you have to continue to address those kinds of issues. my concern in part over what the obama administration has done over time, since he came into office, efforts to close guantanamo bay and so forth is to strip away some of that capability that we built and that would be unfortunate. because there will be more occasions when they are going to need them. >> sean: i ask vice president cheney if he thinks president obama has a pre9/11 mentality? his answer may surprise you, next. ♪ ♪

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>> sean: welcome back. we continue with vice president dick cheney. when obama said he would close

guantanamo bay within a year, still open. when he was reluctant to use the term, war on terrorism. he called them overseas contingency operations, man caused disasters. how are we to interpret that? is there a fear our enemies may not like us? or a belief system if we are nicer to them, they will be nicer to us? where does that come from? >> i think some people, there were some in our administration who felt this way, i wasn't one. this notion that somehow global warming was a major cause of recruitment -- that guantanamo bay was a major cause of a recruitment tool for al-qaeda. i don't think that is true. my experience in that part of the world is people are more likely to respond if they respect and/or fear the power of the united states. and the notion that somehow

operating guantanamo, which is, as you mentioned, probably a much more friendly environment and comfortable situation for most of those prisoners than would be any facility in their home country. >> sean: is it fair to say that president obama has a pre9/11 mentality? >> that's what i thought at the time. i don't know whether or not it has been changed. i would think having gone through what he did with bin laden, and the capturing and killing of bin laden and what seal team 6 was able to do. and the price that our special-ops forces paid a few weeks later when we lost that helicopter and 38 of our men onboard has got to have an impact on the commander in chief the guy responsible for making those decisions and setting up an environment on

which they can operate. >> sean: you said if he pulls out of afghanistan it will have a disastrous impact in the book. >> i think it is true. i think we've made major progress in afghanistan and in iraq. they are both still fragile as general petraeus says. we've made major progress in both places. you have to remember what happened the last time we pulled out of afghanistan. in the 80s we were providing support to the afghans as they went against the soviets after we succeeded everybody walked away, including the u.s.. within a matter of years there was a civil war and the taliban took over. then bin laden was invited in '96 set up shop, established training camps, trained 20,000 terrorists and used it as a base of operations to kill 3,000 americans. because of the last time we walked away from afghanistan.

we have to be very cautious not to let that happen again. our objective has to be to get to the point where the afghans can depend their own sovereign territory. guarantee it is not again used as a safe haven against the united states or other nations. you have a lot of other equities in that part of the world. you have pakistan and pakistan's nuclear situation. we recently had the man who ran the black market operation for nuclear weapons out of pakistan, claiming that the north koreans were paying the pakistanis for nuclear weapons technology. it is a dangerous part of the world. we have a lot of friends. we have a lot of enemies and adversaries as well. we should not turn our back. we have to stay actively involve. we have to help those who want to help us. and help defend them. and we need to operate in such a way that it didn't again become safe haven for terrorist to do another 9/11.

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>> sean: welcome back to the special edition of hannity. you might think post white house life would be less stressful. vice president cheney has been rocked by major health scares, including one that kept him unconscious for weeks. you have been through one issue on your personal health issue, you've been through so much. it is almost like -- i don't know if it gives you perspective. starting at 37, the tough year that you've had. that's got to be hard. i'm trying to understand, you don't think about all of that how bad was it, how bad did it get this time? >> this was the worst i had been through. partly because i ended up five weeks in the icu, heavily sedated out of it on respirators. had contracted pneumonia. when i came to, the situation

was you had -- i had lost 40 pounds, all your muscle mass and soing for. remarkable thing was -- and so forth. remarkable thing the family was very worried about me. lynn and the girls, somebody was there 24 hours a day, people all over the country praying for me what i remembered from the experience was that i spent a good deal of time at a beautiful villa about 40 miles north, eating great italian food, great wine, totally peaceful, relaxed kind of situation. that's what i recalled when i woke up after having been out of it for several weeks. >> sean: wow. the machine that you use now was usually only a transitional device. most people would transition from that device to a

transplant. did that issue come up for you at all? >> it will come up at some point. i'll have to decide. you are right, originally, technology was developed to be able to maintain people until they could get a transplant. what has happened now the technology has gotten good enough that a lot of people are living on it. i think over time it will get progressively better. the big question is size and so forth. they've -- first one of these as big as a bed. >> sean: the first one they came out with. >> yes. i wear this vest that's got two batteries. >> sean: i thought that was a designer vest. yves --

>> thing that is helpful is the pace of technology developed and kept up with my disease. >> sean: the technology has changed, kept up. you think you might have to make a decision about a transplant at some point? >> it is a possibility. i haven't made a decision at this stage that's a possibility. >> sean: when i first saw you in bakersfield after you had been really sick. you lost a lot of weight. you are coming back. you gained a lot. >> gained some of it. a quarter of it is the gear. i lost about 40 pounds. it has been stable now. >> sean: life an -- after the presidency. when you walk out and no longer the vice president, you feel relief? do you feel a sense of accomplishment, maybe mixed emotions? >> well, to some extent, you are going to miss it. are going to, this is not my fit rodeo. i've left governmental office

several times before. i left the nixon administration, i left the ford administration, left bush one. i'd been through those transitions it wasn't as much of a sea change for me as it was for some of my colleagues. >> sean: as we look at a dangerous world today. nuclear proliferation. you wanted to go after syria, eventually israel did it, because they had been collaborating with the north koreans on nuclear technology. we see how close iran is to probably getting nuclear weapons. do you think we will see a day where extremist elements, iran, radicals, al-qaeda, terrorists, will have a nuclear weapon? do you see that as you look into your crystal ball? >> i think it is the biggest threat we face. i think the -- we manage the relationship with the soviets all those years when they had

nukes and when nukes that was the same organization. sort of balanced. now, i worry that if you fan a group of terrorist, 19 hijackers, they use airline tickets and book cutters last time. if they had a nuclear weapon, they would destroy a city. the people we lost on 9/11 would be only a handful compared what they could do if they had a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. i think's what we have to guard against. it is the ultimate threat. we can't take it for granted that it is not a problem or not out there, it definitely is. i worry, when we get into the proliferation of nuclear weapons, whether it is north korea, syria, iran, terror-sponsoring states, people that have relationships with terrorists, saddam hussein, iraq, those are the ones we have to guard against. we did a good job, we took down the