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AP Interviews Lynn Cheney
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lynne Cheney's self-portrait of life after Sept. 11 looks
less forbidding than any image conjured by those ``undisclosed secure
locations'' where her husband supposedly is hidden: She writes in the
cluttered office of her day job; Vice President Dick Cheney browses the
neighborhood grocery's apple bin.
In an expansive interview with The Associated Press, Mrs. Cheney settled on a
vanilla velvet loveseat and shooed away notions that heightened security has
forced her husband into a cave, or kept the couple apart too much.
``I've always worked. Dick's always been gone a lot. I've always been gone a
lot. I've traveled a lot,'' said Mrs. Cheney, a corporate director and former
college professor whose husband is a former defense secretary and corporate
CEO. ``So I don't think our lives are that different now from the way they
have been for many years.''
One thing that has changed since the Sept. 11 terror attacks: The
conservative author once paid to argue on live TV keeps an even tighter lid
on her opinions.
Mrs. Cheney refused to comment Thursday on President Bush's move toward
military tribunals for suspected foreign terrorists. She also passed on a
question about bipartisanship.
Looking back on her two outspoken years on CNN's ``Crossfire Sunday,'' Mrs.
Cheney said:
``That was then, this is now. I'm not sure that kind of theatrical and
sharply pointed debate is one I feel as comfortable in. ... We all live in a
different time, where we're perhaps a little more considerate of each
other.''
In the library of the vice presidential residence, Mrs. Cheney, 60, was
genial and undistracted by an afternoon schedule that had her giving a speech
at Princeton University.
American history is her cause - her topic at Princeton and in ``America: A
Patriotic Primer,'' the alphabet book she is writing for children.
Social studies often supplants history in curriculums, she said, calling for
all states to develop standards for teaching history and tests to measure
learning. Bush's education initiative seeks standards and testing only for
reading and math.
But Mrs. Cheney, Bush's education adviser in the campaign, said she felt
``not even the slightest inclination'' to find the president's plan lacking.
And now, she would never propose history standards - or any other idea - to
Bush.
``When I see the president, I just enjoy his company. In the same way, I
don't push Dick on policy issues either,'' she said.
``There's also an element here of appropriateness and seemliness and common
sense. I just can't imagine that, after my dear husband has been dealing with
these issues all day and were he to come home at night and have me do it all
over again to him - it just doesn't seem the right thing to do.''
She wasn't keen on him being vice president in the first place. ``We had a
nice, very settled life and I didn't really want to unsettle it,'' she said.
But now that they're in power, Mrs. Cheney relishes her position's built-in
megaphone. She gave Princeton students a vivid accounting of George
Washington's most harrowing Revolutionary battles and can, with her cowgirl
tales, leave audiences longing for the untamed West.
She writes speeches herself on a laptop whose screensaver replicates a serene
aquarium - down to the sounds of swooshing water - that belies her messier
work style.
In the mansion tended by Navy stewards, Mrs. Cheney feels guilty scattering
papers and books, so she prefers to work in her office at the American
Enterprise Institute, a think tank where she said also finds ``intellectual
companionship.''
``I can just lock up my office and nobody knows what a horrendous amount of
chaos I've created in trying to get two pages written,'' she said.
Having quit six corporate boards, Mrs. Cheney expects her 2001 income to be
less than the $956,000 she earned last year (she won't say how much less).
She still serves on the boards of American Express Mutual Funds and the
Reader's Digest Association, each of which take her away from home six or
eight times a year.
Asked about a newspaper that once called her ``tart, take-charge and too busy
to shop,'' Mrs. Cheney acknowledged that most of this year's Christmas
shopping will be by catalogue - mostly because she's lost the freedom to roam
shops unnoticed and on her own.
``I will tell you who really misses it is the vice president. He still goes
to bookstores ... and it's amazing to me the way he sort of forgets that
everybody is seeing what book he just took off the shelf.''
He recently ventured to the grocery for fruit - the kind of outing, Mrs.
Cheney said, where strangers approach to say they pray for him.
Mrs. Cheney said she always knows the location of the secret sites where her
husband works at a safe distance from Bush in order to preserve the
continuity of government in any future attack.
``He's in an undisclosed location from time to time,'' she said. ``I go with
him from time to time.''
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