Weaned on Politics,
Cheney Daughters
Find a Place at the
Table
By TODD S. PURDUM,
NYTimes on the Web, May 31, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 30 -- The big
sister is the first deputy assistant secretary of state ever to have her own
Secret Service detail, having passed up lucrative offers to become a television
commentator for the privilege of promoting democracy in the Middle East.
The little sister may well be the first previously unknown presidential campaign
aide to earn a million-dollar advance for her memoirs.
But Elizabeth and Mary Cheney are no ordinary siblings -- and their parents,
Dick and Lynne, are no ordinary mom and dad. Like the Adamses, Roosevelts,
Tafts, Kennedys, Gores and Bushes before them, they are a family act, a foursome
fully immersed in conservative politics and public policy.
In February, Liz, 38, was hired as the No. 2 official in the Bureau of Near
Eastern Affairs at the State Department, her second tour in the region. In
March, her husband, Philip J. Perry, was nominated to be general counsel for the
Department of Homeland Security. That same month, Mary, 35, agreed to
write about her role in running her father's re-election campaign last year and
her life as the first openly gay member of a Second Family.
Dick Cheney may be most influential behind the scenes, but his daughters are
increasingly out front. It is a role that Lynne Cheney, whose most recent
children's book came out last fall, describes as a natural evolution.
"I just think they were always part of campaigns," Mrs. Cheney said in a recent
telephone interview. "It seemed like kind of the healthy way to do it, to
not leave them home with a baby sitter but to take them along."
Over the past 25 years, it has been quite a ride, from a Congressional seat from
Wyoming to the inner circle of perhaps the most influential vice presidency in
American history. Such extraordinary blending of family careers and the
nation's business has generated controversy, though. A Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette editorial, for example, condemned Mr. Perry's nomination to the
Homeland Security post, which pays about $140,000, as "a pure form of nepotism
not usually seen in American government" and complained that Liz, who earns
$149,2000, "also feeds at the government trough."
Edward S. Walker Jr., who headed the State Department's Near Eastern bureau at
the end of the Clinton administration and is now president of the Middle East
Institute, a research organization here, noted that there was a long tradition
of bringing political appointees into the bureaucracy.
"Sometimes they are good, and sometimes they are bad," Mr. Walker said, adding:
"Liz is a little different, obviously, because of the name. But the name
doesn't bother anybody I know, simply because she did her job." He said:
"She could have been a disaster, given her father, given the fact that she knew
all the players, she could have run roughshod" over career Foreign Service
officers. "But she didn't."
Adam Bellow, a son of the novelist Saul Bellow, whose 2003 book "In Praise of
Nepotism: A Natural History" explored society's longstanding ambivalence
about the issue, noted that the Founding Fathers were deeply skeptical of
British notions of entitlement, but that "they all bent over backwards to help
their family members." Mr. Bellow said families like the Cheneys "had
better be prepared for all kinds of scrutiny, and for the very highest standards
to be applied to them."
Supporters of the Cheneys, including some prominent Democrats, note that the
daughters have built their own reputations, while Mr. Perry did the same as
general counsel to the White House Office of Management and Budget in Mr. Bush's
first term. He was brought to Homeland Security by its new secretary,
Michael Chertoff, his former law partner at Latham & Watkins, where he
represented the Lockheed Martin Corporation in dealings with the department.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has recommended
him unanimously to the full Senate.
All the Cheneys have advanced degrees (Dick has a master's degree in political
science; Lynne has a Ph.D. in literature; Liz has a law degree from the
University of Chicago, where she met her husband; and Mary earned an M.B.A. from
the University of Denver in 2002), a demon work ethic, and a devotion to free
enterprise and the projection of American principles and power.
"I guess I would just say that these are people who really believe in what
they're doing, and they really believe in what they're saying," said Ken Bacon,
a longtime acquaintance who was a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton
administration and is now president of Refugees International. "They
believe their policies make our country stronger."
Mary Matalin, a longtime political adviser to Mr. Cheney whose new publishing
imprint at Simon & Schuster acquired Mary Cheney's memoir, allowed that "nobody
ever really understands any of them, because they're not about trying to be
understood because they're too busy trying to do what they do."
"They're just multifaceted, normal people," Ms. Matalin added. "Now, the
difference about them is that if you have a dinner conversation about women's
rights in Saudi Arabia, they can go to Defcon 1 dialogue because they know
everything there is to know on the topic."
The Adamses and Bushes produced father-son presidents, the Tafts a father-son
president and senator combination, and the Kennedys a trio of brothers and
cousins in the family trade. In World War II, all five of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's children were either in uniform or held unofficial jobs helping
their father, while Al Gore's eldest daughter, Karenna, played a central role in
his presidential campaign in 2000.
Carl Anthony, who has written extensively about presidential families, said the
Cheneys were products of the women's movement. "Even if you're a
traditionalist, conservative Republican, women have benefited," he said, "with
not only the wife but the daughters pursuing such an active role in the
intellectual and political life of their father, and not just in a private way."
For her part, Mrs. Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and a president of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan
administration, said that Mary had once told her that "it took her a long time
figuring out what I was doing at the dining room table" -- writing, when the
girls were young -- and that only when a story she had written about Elizabeth
Blackwell, the first female physician in American history, wound up in the
girls' first-grade textbooks did they begin to understand her career.
When Liz Cheney first went to the State Department to work on Middle East
affairs in 2002, some there worried that she was her father's spy in an agency
that often disagreed with the White House. She had relatively little
experience in the region, having worked after college at the United States
Agency for International Development in the bureau that handled aid to large
swaths of the world.
But after two years of working on projects to promote women's rights and
democracy in the Arab world, she won praise from skeptical foreign service
officers, the European press, Arab leaders and prominent Democrats. After
working on the campaign last year, she returned to government this winter and is
now seen as even more influential and single-minded in pursuit of her agenda.
Ken Mehlman, who was Mr. Bush's campaign manager last year, said Mary Cheney's
influence had also extended well beyond working with her father. "She also
understands and weighed in on almost everything we did in the room when we were
planning our message, our surrogates, our travel schedule," he said.
Mary has worked to expand the Republican Party's gay outreach efforts, but drew
sharp fire from many gay rights advocates for declining in last year's campaign
to address contentious topics like same-sex marriage (or Mr. Bush's support for
a constitutional amendment to ban it, which her parents opposed). She and
her longtime partner, Heather Poe, sometimes did not appear at big celebratory
moments. But Ms. Matalin says that with the campaign over, Mary now feels
free to speak out. Robert B. Barnett, a Washington lawyer, literary agent
and prominent Democrat who at one time or another has represented all four
Cheneys, said the family took pride in each other.
"I heard Liz once refer to Mary as her hero," Mr. Barnett said, "and they all
have great pride in their dad. That's one of the motives for Mary writing
this book, to give the other view of him, because the caricature is certainly
out there."
Mrs. Cheney said she completely supported Mary's decision to write the book.
"They're just wonderful stories," she said, adding: "Mary's got a really
sharp eye for absurdity," which she called "a very good thing to have in
political life."
The Cheney daughters declined, through intermediaries, to be interviewed for
this article. Longtime friends say the family remains unusually close.
Liz and Philip Perry's four children -- Kate, 11, Elizabeth, 7, Grace, 5, and
Philip, 10 months -- often spend weekends with their grandparents, with the
girls sleeping on the floor of the vice-presidential bedroom in sleeping bags
and the baby in a crib upstairs.
Former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who has known Liz and Mary since they
were babies, said that despite the pressures of official life, the family is
"fiercely trying to protect a life of their own," adding: "When they say
Dick's at an undisclosed location, well, he might be in Jackson, Wyo., and he
and Lynne are sitting down to dinner."
David Gribbin, who has known Mr. and Mrs. Cheney since their days as high school
sweethearts and who worked for Mr. Cheney for 17 years in Congress, at the
Pentagon and at Halliburton, said that the daughters had an unusual degree of
self-confidence and calm. In the 2000 campaign, he recalled, it was not
immediately clear who would be running Mr. Cheney's debate preparations, but it
gradually became apparent that Liz was in charge.
"She was working with a bunch of people who were her father's age," he said.
"Do you call them 'Mr. Hadley' and 'Mr. Wolfowitz' and 'Mr. Libby,' or do you
call them 'Steve' and 'Paul' and 'Scooter'? By the time it was all over,
the answer was clear."
Lynne Cheney said it would be a mistake to see their family life as "an ongoing
policy discussion." She said some of their "funniest times" could be in
Wyoming, playing Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit or skiing cross-country.
She also made it clear that the third generation was well on its way to
understanding the burdens of the family trade.
"My oldest granddaughter was on the floor conducting some sort of large art
project with a friend," she recalled. "Someone on TV was railing against
Dick, going on and on. Kate's friend said to her, 'Don't you feel so sad?
He's talking about your grandpa?' And Kate said: 'I don't worry
about it. He's a psycho.' We never told her that was the right thing
to say, but you have to learn to let it roll off you a little."
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