Dick Cheney's Madison Years

Earlier this week, Paul bemoaned the fact that as a UW-Madison graduate student in 1966-68, Dick Cheney missed a chance to understand how the world works, when he failed to take a course with either George Mosse or Harvey Goldberg.  This is a perfect opportunity to provide WaxingAmerica readers with important historical details about Dick and Lynne Cheney's two critical years in Madison, when the progress of two graduate students' lives would have impacts on all of us today.

Susan Lampert Smith of the Wisconsin State Journal had a piece of the story late last year:

(A) reader... actually went to the trouble of making up fake landmark signs, and briefly posting them, to mark the places Dick Cheney lived when he was a UW-Madison graduate student in the 1960s.

Using information from a book on Cheney by The Capital Times' John Nichols, he set out last fall, during the presidential campaign, to mark Madison's tie to the vice and his "undisclosed locations."

These included North Hall, where Cheney was a teaching assistant in political science in 1966-67, an apartment in Eagle Heights, and an apartment on the South Side, near Penn Park. The commentary on the South Side sign gives you the sense of the rest:

"It was to this building in 1966 that (the Cheneys) brought home their first-born child, a daughter, Elizabeth. Born in Madison General Hospital on July 28, 1966, Elizabeth, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near East Affairs, served, even in utero, to assure that Cheney spent his UW graduate school days safe from the draft, which was then chewing up American males in the Vietnam meat grinder. Born exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service regulations were changed to only exempt married men with children, Elizabeth served, even before her birth, as the justification for Cheney's fifth draft deferment."

It's time to share the rest.  I was that reader, trying on a role as conceptual artist.  Utilizing addresses found in archived UW student phone books of the era, actual fine artist Mark Harmon and I created and placed our ersatz historical markers.

At Eagle Heights:

It was here in this modest, and since rebuilt, married student housing, in 1967- 1968, that Richard B. Cheney (Nickname: “Dick”) and his wife Lynne V. Cheney, lived in their second and final year as UW graduate students in Madison.  Safe from the draft...and continuing his pursuit of his “other priorities in the 60’s than military service,” Cheney failed to complete his Ph.D. in political science while living here. Then, as now, nearly every country on the globe was represented by the graduate student families living in Eagle Heights.  Perhaps Cheney’s exposure to this diversity of humanity provided a basis for a vow to never live in proximity to these people again.

It was also (presumably) here that Mary Cheney, the second-born child of Dick and Lynne, born on March 14, 1969, was conceived.  Mary served as the director of her father’s successful campaign for re-election in 2004.  Mary’s status as an “out” lesbian forced Cheney to “soften” the administration’s hard-line position on gay marriage for campaign purposes with the claim that “it is a matter that the states should properly decide.”

Outside North Hall:

In this historic UW building, on the fourth floor, Richard B. Cheney served as a teaching assistant in political science in 1966-67. By 1968, Dick Cheney’s forward progress toward a Ph.D. in political science had stopped, as he took a job with Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles (R.) as the custodian of the “button bag.”  The principal duty of the job was to hand out “We Like it Here” buttons to anyone coming in contact with the Governor.  Cheney’s previous vocational goal, becoming a college professor, evaporated in the white heat of such important government responsibilities.

Perhaps Mr. Cheney had been frightened by the ghost of John Muir, the nation’s pioneer environmentalist, who had lived in North Hall.  Such an experience might explain Cheney’s lifelong dedication to destructive consumption based on fossil fuels,  and his “zero-sum-I’ve-got-mine-so-you-can’t–have-any” economic worldview.

 

The markers spent one day at the appropriate sites and then were removed by the artists.  Before the 2004 election, two of them were in an exhibit of "Patriotic Art" in the window of U-Frame-It on East Johnson St.

 

 

We can only wonder what would have happened if Cheney had not bailed on his PhD program to work as a gofer for Governor Knowles.  Nichols' fine book details Cheney's subsequent escape from Wisconsin, when every other eligible young Knowles staffer declined a Washington-based fellowship with Oshkosh Congressman Bill Steiger.  Cheney jumped at the job, which was considered "a glorified internship."  How Cheney parlayed that position into assisting an ever-increasingly powerful set of Republican officials is a DC story.  Read Nichols' book.

(Lynne Cheney, always the brighter and more accomplished of the couple, completed her UW PhD in English not long after the Cheneys moved from Madison.)

- Barry Orton

Comments

[nonheroicvet]

When Dick Cheney worked for Warren Knowles, It was the last time he worked for a Republican with any class.

[Sven]

As they say at McDonald's, I'm lovin' it. Joan Didion provides another glipmse at greatness in the Mad City:

[Cheney] has described a 1969 return visit to the University of Wisconsin, during which he took Bill Steiger and George H.W. Bush to an SDS rally, as having triggered his disgust with the Vietnam protest movement. "We were the only guys in the hall wearing suits that night," he told Nicholas Lemann.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

[jody]

Diggin' the tone there Barry.

Presumably, it was during these Eagle Heights Conception Sessions that Lynne Cheney became so traumatized by the realities of um, Dick, or maybe I should call him Richard for awhile, that she felt compelled to write her Lesbian Novel, which an intrepid reader of the mighty tome describes thusly:

"This story of a Washington wife who leaves her powerful husband to join a womyn's commune is charged with the kind of eroticism you just don't expect from the Second Lady of the United States of America. I was amazed at how graphically Ms. Cheney details the commune's daily "massage classes" and their predictable free-for-all aftermaths, while at the same time delivering a devastating critique of phallocentric discourse in modern culture."

What does this tell us about Dick? I mean Richard? Indeed, what does it tell us about all Republican men? Just what are they doing that so repells and frustrates conservative women? Because it's not just Lynne Cheney manifesting this national crisis.

Until reading about her on WaxingAmerica, I was completely unaware of Ann Althouse. Checking her blog today I find nothing but obsessive Body-Talk. This time I beleive it's "fornication jeans" or something like that. And crikey! the clientelle she's attracting! Listen to one commenter's reaction to the jeans discussion -

"Worst of all must be the word "JUICY" stitched across the ass. I want to shoot a paint gun at that."

OMG He wants to shoot paint gun at it???? Helloooo, Dr. Freud! paging Dr. Freud!

Even Althouse's own words, words ostensibly describing her blogging experience, seem to pulsate beneath the surface with something dangerous -

"you're newly exposed, and it's a rough arena, where you have far less control over what happens to you..."

Wowser, Scoob! I've been blogging for awhile now, but I don't think I've ever felt quite like that about it.
Ann continues -

"But we bloggers are responsible for what we write, and whatever we write reflects on our intellectual soundness....surely they are entitled to look at it as evidence of the quality of the blogger's mind."

Bad news then for both Ann and I, but for vastly different reasons.

A.A quotes at-
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i47/47b00702.htm

[Paul]

Jody:

"Juicy" Is that Juicy as in 'juicy coutre?' Does it matter?