http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLC,GGLC:1969-53,GGLC:en&q=cheney&tab=wn&scoring=dNEWSWEEK COVER: Cheney's Secret World Behind The Shooting Furor
Cheney Believed He, His Family and Staff May Have Been Exposed in an Anthrax Attack After 9/11; Was False Alarm But Story Kept Quiet
After Hunting Accident, Cheney Was 'Shaken, Crushed, Miserable,' Says Host Katharine Armstrong
Newsweek Looks at World of Most Powerful and Secretive Veep
NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- A few weeks after 9/11, Newsweek has learned, Vice President Dick Cheney worried that he and his family and his staff might have been exposed in an anthrax attack. According to knowledgeable former officials, a mysterious letter turned up at the vice president's mansion. (A former senior law-enforcement official recalled that sensors went off.) The alarm turned out to be false. Still, to be safe, Cheney and his entourage began taking Cipro, the powerful antibiotic. The story was hushed up. (Cheney's office referred Newsweek to the Secret Service, which declined to comment.) In the February 27 Newsweek cover story, "Cheney's Secret World," (on newsstands Monday, February 20), Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas examines Cheney's private world, his relationship with President Bush, and how last week's hunting accident once again drew attention to the unusual nature of Cheney's power. He remains by far the most powerful vice president in history, and one of the most secretive and mysterious public officials to ever hold such high office, Thomas writes.
The night of the shooting of 78-year-old Harry Whittington in a hunting accident, Cheney sat alone on the porch of his guesthouse, saying very little as others came and went. "He was shaken, crushed, miserable," his host, Katharine Armstrong, tells Newsweek. "I could have gotten up and wrapped my arms around the vice president." But she didn't; no one did. (Lynne Cheney had not accompanied her husband on the trip.)
...
That night, according to a senior White House official who refused to be identified discussing a sensitive matter, Cheney did not speak to either Bush or the White House staff or his own press people, Newsweek reports. He did speak with David Addington, his chief of staff and former lawyer who is a strong proponent of executive power and keeping secrets. In Washington, White House staffers were quietly urging Cheney's staff to somehow go public with the shooting. But President Bush never picked up the phone to call Cheney, either to console or to offer counsel.
...
The president had met with Cheney privately on Monday morning at the White House before the daily intelligence briefing. According to a White House aide speaking, as usual, anonymously, Bush listened closely and watched Cheney's body language to see how emotional the accident had been for someone not given to public displays of feeling. "The president wanted to give him some room to handle this," the senior aide tells Newsweek. "The President could visibly tell this was weighing heavily on him and he felt, in his judgment, that he should not push him too hard."
(Read cover story at www.Newsweek.com.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11436302/site/newsweek/ 
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