Reply #12: Initially, did they hope to completely cover-up the shooting? [View All]

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I have been rethinking how they acted Saturday night and now think they were hoping to be able to cover up the entire episode. When they realized that Whittington's condition would require the Corpus Christi hospital, they were faced with the need to get their stories straight and start notifying. They may have also started to realize that there were too many people working on the ranch to totally keep a lid on it. (Initially, the White House was not informed that Cheney was the shooter.)

(When considering their actions, I consider how a group of teenagers act when they are trying to hide something from authorities and parents. Initial optimism minimizes the severity of the situation. This over-confidence inspires actions in a panic that make things worse. Then a sobering realization that things can not be completely hidden leads to efforts to sanitize the narrative in an attempt to limit the scope of the problem. When they tell the story, they admit some slightly incriminating details to explain their behavior with the hope of continuing to hide things much worse.)

When the deputy arrived at the ranch to followup on the ambulance call, the Border Patrol agent guarding the gate was unaware of any problem and turned him away. There were no official reports of the shooting for quite a while because the Sheriff had been contacted at his home and probably deferred to the Secret Service and the Armstrongs. A guest on Sunday at lunch, related that they did not talk about the shooting.

From the NYT/IHT story today, it appears that the other spouses were on the ranch, so I doubt that was what they were hiding. (Still curious where Lynne Cheney was. Interestingly, some early reports had her with Dick at the Sunday hospital visit of Whittington, but later ones removed that. There might have been confusion because of the mention of Whittington's wife.) They even encourage speculation in this area by not their reluctance to identify the other shooter, etc.

They tried to hide that Cheney had been drinking at lunch, sending various surrogates to spin (Matalin). Since this was the first thing I thought of when I heard of the accident, lots of reporters in Texas were certainly crawling all other this aspect. Cheney has now admitted to having "a beer" at lunch, knowing that staff would have seen him and eventually someone would talk about it. Armstrong has also said that Cheney had a cocktail immediately after the ambulance left (which would have invalidated any later alcohol tests).

The early limited cover story might have worked if Whittington's condition had not worsened. Lots about hunting licenses and stamps (Oops, I'm guilty of missing one. Sorry, here is $7.), speculation about hunting weekends with mysterious "other" women, and late night jokes might have run their course in a day or two, to be replaced by something else. But the blizzard delayed other news being reported, and just then Whittington had his heart problem.