the forty sixth vice president of the begin ited states dick cheney he's one of the most influential and controversial men ever to hold the office he was a heartbeat away from the presidency and irony considering his long battle with cardiac disease it chronicles that in his new book heart and american medical out of he's with me at the historic way out of his hotel oval of the white house and the executive office building it's all next on politicking. for them to another edition of politicking with larry king this will be one of my favorites coasts with an old friend dick cheney the former vice president ited

states we are at a historic location this is the hay adams hotel in washington this is a washington landmark is right across from the white house was right out of the building to our left the old executive office building is directly behind the vice president's shoulders two weeks prior to his first inauguration president obama's family stayed in this hotel it is historic in many many ways i go back a long way before we even start i don't get too personal a show but dick cheney and i share some bonds when i had my heart surgery in eighty seven a year later the republican convention is mentioned in the book in one nine hundred eighty eight was in new orleans dick and i sat in the stairwell at the superdome and he was pumping me with questions about what the surgeon would like way to put the when they cut open your chest i was buffeting him with information when president bush announced that dick cheney would be his vice presidential choice his first appearance was on my old show on c.n.n. . and one night during one of his many appearances at george washington university

hospital we did a broadcast from his bed and his new book is heart an american medical odyssey the story of a patient a doctor and thirty five years of medical innovation written by dick and liz of course liz cheney helps along in the writing and jonathan reiner isn't it yes yes my cardiologist and i know him well we shared the same hospital for a while as well are you doing couldn't be better larry it's just been. but i look back a little over three years ago in july of two thousand and ten i was an end stage heart failure i had hours to live my liver and kidneys were shutting down and they went in on an emergency basis nine hours of surgery over twenty units of blood and put a pump in to supplement my heart and that bought me twenty months and then that got me to the transplant and i did the transplant one thousand months ago i was with you during both twenty one's and that was that tough love in those twenty months when you had that apparatus that you were like

a robot well as science somebody national enquirer somebody ran a picture of me on the front page of my should fall pulled open all kinds of mechanical devices and there that i was a robot that's basically the headline it was it was the toughest surgery by far partly because i was so weak when we went into the surgery partly because i was on a respirator for a number of weeks five weeks in the i.c.u. i had pneumonia a lot of complications and then thirty five weeks of rehab but when i got through it i was significantly stronger i reached the point where after baby but a year after that surgery i miss traveling coast to coast promoting my first book my my memoirs and so you learn to live with it and it's a it's a wondrous device it's still relatively new they've been around out there for a few years but it's gotten user friendly now and as i say it kept me going for twenty months until it is not a permanent thing right well that's interesting some people now are choosing to stay on the pump on the left ventricular assist device. rather than go through the

additional transplant surgery and we don't know how long someone can live on that movie i've got people who've survived for five years they tell you you go first voyage read the book we wrote the book. john reiner came up with the original concept. the way he described it he said dick it's like you get up in the morning to go to work and you're late you jump in the car and head for the office and every single stoplight is red but he said when you got to them every one turned green and in effect over that thirty five year period of time all of these new developments came along just as i needed them that the course of just dumb luck but it's a way of telling about the fantastic developments in the heart care since one thousand nine hundred seventy eight when i had my first heart attack most of the procedures and devices and medications that have kept me alive all these years hadn't been invented yet and the book was written by you and him when you resort it was a chapter each as you have all along and a progression but the the purpose i was

a few years ago this is after i had the pump installed before the transplant the folks at the cleveland clinic called one of the finest heart institutes in the world and they said look we're having a conference on innovation in cardiology and we've got the suppliers come in we've got the docs coming we decided we need a patient and then we figured out that you get everything done do you can do to our patient would you be our patient so they set their plane up and john and i flew down to cleveland and spent the day at and me answering questions about being on the receiving end of all those developments and it occurred to us that it's part of what triggered the book so that if the cleveland clinic was interested in my case as a way to demonstrate innovation and cardiology that there's probably a book there and eighty million americans out there have some form of heart and this is with the help that we tell the story the developments that are saving lives steadily improving the technology. finding ways that we can in fact defeat heart

disease and my case is a classic example in spite of heart attack at an early age of five heart attacks etc i still live a very active life and now a lot of the highest levels of government everybody should read this book because hearts and everybody's life if you don't have heart problems someone in your family has heart problems and also shows that you can make enormous recovery how did you learn you were going to get a heart well i assume as we did the implantation of the pump they all of a had. do you get registered on the if if you're the. recipient they meet the test basically health test. then you go on the list but no matter you are seventy right i will you will i was at the time i had the implant was i was sixty nine and the. the decision you have to make then you don't have to make it immediately but but in

relatively short order you're asked to decide do you want to go for the transplant or do you want to stay on the pop and for me it wasn't a close call i really want to go to the transplant that offer the best prospects in terms of return to a normal life in terms of being able to sort of take that thirty five years of hard to say yes and and get rid of the fact this is the only disease i can think of where after you've had five heart attacks sudden cardiac arrest implantable defibrillator implantable pump stance all those developments where all of that stuff that's attached to a part of the old heart goes away including the old heart itself and you get a new one and in my case the only sign that i ever had coronary artery disease but in terms of my body is that scar where they operated on me three times all of this stuff is gone all right what was it the politics in a minute did they come to you and say there is a donor they came to me and said. this is twenty months out was on

a call on friday night about midnight and i was getting ready to go to bed the phone rang and it was the woman who was the transplant team not at nova fairfax or we did the surgery she said we have a heart. and obviously that was a moment of. great joy they bring you right to the hospital now well we drove over we also had a second call then from my my cardiologist become part of the team out and over fairfax and we drove over our selves it's about twenty minutes from the house just buttons on so i'm going to get hard yeah exactly the gun was ok but the lift that's something we've been anticipating. one of the highlights of waiting for the heart was watching the evening news one night seeing a small airplane land two guys jump out of the airplane with a cooler between them that they're both carrying running across the tarmac towards

a car and they drop the cooler and the heart rolls out it was all wrapped up but it was a trance part of a transplant team and they picked it up put it back in their cooler jumped the car and took off and all i could think of us i hope that's not part of my transplant how long are the surgery take it was about four hours but it was the easiest surgery of all the surgeries i've had was the transplant it was. falling it was plumbing a you take the old one out put in a new owner took it up and it was a good hard a good match they do wonders these days with the man over with was i don't do i want to know. at least early there is a process you can go through edge lee through a third party that will broker contacts between the donor family and the ricin want to do that. and they had better priority for me part of the different by the

difficulty is when i came out from under the anesthetic after the transplant i was you know. euphoric. i'd had been given the gift of additional lives a diff conditional years of life and for the family of the donor they've just been through some terrible tragedy they've lost a family member but can't tell why obviously when you don't know the details but the way i think of it from a psychological standpoint is it's not it's my new heart not somebody else's old heart i always think the donor generically thank donors and for the gift that i've been given. but i don't spend time wondering you know who had it what they did. what kind of person were you insured yes for did a cover preexisting conditions because no one had more preexisting conditions than you well but i'd also taken out on skis my blue cross blue shield health insurance

policy back in my twenty's when i first went to work for the government and then when i was in the private sector i carried that policy paid the entire premium myself and i've had that for forty years you may have a disagreement with no four and i imagine you knew that i was suspect i don't want to put words in your mouth that you do agree that people with preexisting conditions should be covered i don't have any problem with. with that proposition obviously. in my case as i say i already had insurance before i ever knew i had heart disease clearly there are people out there that have had problems in the past that have preexisting conditions and find it difficult to. if health care so there are parts of our health care system i would agree we can find ways to improve i think our of the that obamacare and the direction we're headed there is that is i think it's a do enormous damage i think there because it's well for example they want to tax

medical devices and what's a bit of all of us well it's a stent or it's an implantable defibrillator or it's a. the l. that itself that kept me alive and they see that as a source of revenue. in obamacare both house and senate have expressed their their objections to that men which have been offered both places but so far they have taken it out why shouldn't it be well take the. oh that's developing the stent and we tell the story in the book he had two guys doctors came up with this concept that you could build a structure of some kind a stand that you could insert into a coronary artery and keep it open and it was a much better way to deal with a clogged artery and bypass surgery which is far more complex you and i both had it and but they did have a new money when found an investor who is willing to put up some money to support

it eventually was a great success and and they were enormously successful financially and if a person with income taxes and corporate taxes depended upon the structure of their situation but what the medical device tax does is from the very first dollar of revenue coming in the government's going to take part of that i think it's exactly the wrong way to go if you want to encourage that kind of innovation and entrepreneurship the book is hardly an american medical odyssey dick cheney and jonathan reiner where you're watching politics a little larry king will be right that.

plus. that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of joy and a great thing rather that there had to be added brenda arquette a court of law found online is a story made for

a movie is playing out in real life. we're back on politics it would larry king our special guest vice president dick cheney the former vice president says the forty sixth vice president of this country were at the hay adams hotel overlooking the white house the old executive office building on a beautiful november day before giving some old politics what is it like emotionally to wake up with a new heart well it's. it there was a point. three years before when i was near death and resigned to it i'd known soon ventura i would die as a result my heart disease had been battling that for over thirty years that's how my dad died so i fully expected it and it wasn't

a surprise when i reached that point it's not like all of a sudden bang he had a serious heart attack and you're near death it gradually been coming and i had resigned myself to that even talked with my family about final arrangements and then they came up with the. l bad. when you received the new heart there is a part of it was when i was near death through that earlier surgery i was in a particular room in the i.c.u. at inova fairfax the night they took me back to put in the new heart i was in the same room but the mood was totally different in one case i'm near death it's an emergency and and it's a very serious business. the second time around it's it's there's a great sense of expectation and it is the gift of life itself and it will hold a whole different mindset for the team and so forth i. my cardiologist told me at

one point he said you know that he said that the transplant is a it's a spiritual experience not just for the patient but also for the team our friend dave carroll you know days of our ears dave the other day ask me and i told him as well as a spiritual experience it and he said well does that mean you're a democrat. and i said well that's not that spiritual but it's a. it's the gift of life itself it's the notion that that at one point i had to literally reached the end of my days and now all of a sudden the future extends in front of me ever better i feel better i'm much stronger. i can. out. to the unlimited future like anybody else without serious disease as give us some political questions what's the current state of your party. well it's there's a lot of ferment and. turmoil going on inside the party i don't think we're

the only ones of a times that passed the same thing happens the democrats but we're right now we're the party that. doesn't have a lead spokesman we've got john boehner the speaker of course and he's got his hands full managing the house probably the toughest job in washington but on the democratic side you've got an incumbent president so there's less turmoil over there i think because the president sort of dominates what's happening we're at a situation where we're between presidential candidates and you have a tea party and you have a division well we do have a division but that's not new for the republican party i remember barry goldwater nelson rockefeller or gerry ford and ronald reagan we've often had divisions in the past and frankly my experience of the tea party is that the vast number of people who identify themselves as such are basically conservative republicans who are just

fed up with what's happening in the country they're pretty much united in their opposition and us delegate to the present administration or they're not the majority of the party no i don't think there are the majority but i think we want to be in the party i don't want to see the tea party go spinning loses some third party movement i think we need to be big enough as a as a party and broad enough and i think you can so that folks who are conservative who believe in fiscal discipline who are opposed to the expansion of government power similar to what obama's doing who believe deeply in the constitution are welcome into the republican party and we're willing to make them have them part of the debate you know want to bowl most third party and that would have it would who then how do you view the coming of. age of in a christie how do you view the senator cruz this this division now. i. from my perspective i find that the press and our democratic friends focus on it

more talk about it more than we do this and it's when we get into one of these situations we've lost two presidential campaigns that the democratic my democratic friends and i have well as always i want to argue with you know gee if you guys are just be more like us democrats should win more elections well that's not what we're about we have deep beliefs about where we want the country go and we think we're on a seriously misguided course now christie says you have to come together on some things or you're not going to win you've got to come together on the advance of minorities in this country on the latino question on immigration if you don't it's a very fine stand to take with you not going to win a national lead but larry i was part of the administration in two thousand and four captured forty four percent of the hispanic vote it's doable we did it george bush was very pro immigration well it was not just pro-immigration he also was a border state governor he had great respect for the legacy of mexican community

that they liked him he spoke the language about as good as he spoke english and seventy eighty percent yeah but. you know we've we we did well in that community but we clearly without question we'd have to go back we've lost two elections now that can be because of candidates because of issues and part i think the obama administration is playing out organized as they put in the field a full time paid professional staff all through that period between elections and they did a much better job you know how to run identify and identify and voters and get into the polls is there anything now do you have a favorite among the republican potential standard bearers you know my hope is that we'll get someone who can win i haven't signed on with anybody who states who may be a strong word. who do you worry about the most on the other side. and well everybody

assumes hillary is going to run and and she may well i don't have any reason to believe she won't but i'm not inclined to think this is going to be a very hot prospect for the democrats in two thousand and sixteen if we look at the mess that is men created out of obamacare by the president having said you can keep your policy if you like it you know guaranteed period but it turns out that was a lie and he would peter did over and over and over again his numbers are dropping dramatically i think the two thousand and fourteen election will show some significant gains on the republican side because i think in time it's going to be so bad given the current performance of the administration so i think when we go into two thousand and sixteen i think our prospects are going to be pretty good now hillary will she run won't and i don't have to do a formidable she'll be for him formidable without question on the other hand she was beaten by barack obama last time

a daughter is running against an incumbent in wyoming but not in her carpetbagger there's a lot of vitriol go on back and forth obviously you are personally involved in that how do you feel i'm delighted liz as somebody who's i think got the experience i think it's extruded scored an early important for our party to bring along that next generation of leaders and she's forty seven years old a mother of five an attorney two tours in the state department had her own committee that was set up after we got into the problems after nine eleven she's a great candidate and she's working her fanny off and. we react to the proper baggage thing though that she's moving in well is accused to be the carpetbagger larry one after i'd spent ten years in washington working with gerry ford and so forth i went back home to wyoming and of course they said carpetbagger was true. he's got ancestors that they go back to two great grand great great grandmothers

and walked a mormon trail in eight hundred fifty two to wyoming her great grandfather settled in wyoming in one thousand nine hundred seven as a tally and then raised a family of five in a tent in the midwest oil fields one of whom was her grandmother and she became the first woman deputy sheriff in its own a county i mean we've got good roots in the state and it's of the car that also the polls at this point we've been focused more on images and perception and issues and we don't really we haven't taken head and yet partly because it's not very useful at this stage so i would assume at this point the incumbents had but one hundred year history of wyoming we've only had one senator serve more than three terms and that was back in the fifty's everybody else has called it quits after three terms mike enzi has had three terms and i think it's time for him to step down what's your reaction to this and say i would knowing the dick cheney i know you would have

favored n.s.a. looking into other people's business i'm finding out what's going on for the pure as you said before in the past national security is is the forefront of your thinking but i was a had a major hand in creating the program when i was a vice president. i can remember taking it to the president and discussing it with my cade was and at the n.s.a. and george tenet at cia and we decided if we could get more authority n.s.a. they could do a better job of intercepting terrorist communications and that's why it was set up . i've have not been involved since i left the white house out what do you make of the lessons well i think the revelations are terrible but because they were they were better revealed. there are reasons why we have classified programs i think you think the program is good the revealing was bad exactly and i think this notion that. what's his name no yes no doubt and i think he's

a traitor i think he's done enormous damage to the country and but i but one of the things that i'm frustrated by there is the sort of this view out there in the country part of a lot of conservative friends of mine that the n.s.a. is in the end your business. that where we want to know all this we had talked into that who you're talking to and so forth. it's the program was a nice and still is a no teeth alexander the current and it's a chief he is one of the finest officers i ever met and n.s.a. has spent an enormous amount of time over the years as part of the culture of being very very careful to protect privacy and civil liberties so the unfortunate thing was it came up right after the i.r.s. scandal and they are asking and a clearly is an abuse of power clearly is a gross. distortion of what they're expected to do and is being manipulated apparently for political purposes to target certain groups we haven't seen any of

that out of the n.s.a. there's sort of this fear. but the fact of the matter of course is out there that all of us these days who are using the internet and our credit cards and so forth these are probably knows more. about us in terms of our lifestyle and our habits and our likes and dislikes than the n.s.a. or will. obama on one side has been a rather aggressive president in the area of drones unlike when you were the that is surprising. no it's. it's something we developed on our watch we knew we had to go on platform and he uses them well in sort of way but we always we were the ones that put together the drone with a weapon system and they simply they were unarmed and we used them i think to great effect but. i think i have supported is efforts to use drones i think that's an appropriate weapon i think it

helps significantly but it's not enough he seems to have the attitude that well we put some drones out there and then we get troops out and the boys home and and not be actively involved in that part of the world we're going to get out of afghanistan but were we launched the drones keep track of what's going on in pakistan or to take out the taliban leader as we did ration them and launch out of afghanistan oh it's a. it the those programs are put in place for a reason they've kept the safe from another mass casualty attacks that's nine eleven. and there's a great deal of evidence that we would have had additional attacks if it hadn't been for those programs only have a little over a minute do you think we will work something out with iran personally you know. i think what i'm worried about is that there's going to be some kind of

symbolic agreement but that when you dig into it it's not going to achieve the objective i worry that they radians of gotten up on the step now they have a lot of enrich uranium that's not quite weapons grade but they're now position where they could break out very rapidly and i don't think this administration will be tough enough in those negotiations to guarantee that the iranians don't have nuclear capability it's great seeing you looking so well we go by the law i feel tied to you would go back a long way to get. all right through all the life thank you sir and you do both his heart dick cheney and jonathan reiner and liz cheney hope the board to this is been another edition of politicking with larry king next week bob woodward thanks for joining us today.