Truthout: Does Cheney Keep Bush in Charge?

[babylonsister]

Some interesting observations on Cheney's history, and what lent to his evilness. Maybe we should blame it on his wife?

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/24607

Does Cheney Keep Bush in Charge?
Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2007-07-12 19:41. Media

Dick Cheney's Psychology | Part 2: The "Attendant Lord"
By John P. Briggs, M.D., and JP Briggs II, Ph.D.
www.truthout.org

For a couple of years in the early 1960s, Dick Cheney keeps returning to Yale, floundering again, before totally flunking out and losing his scholarship. In between he's on crews building power lines. His first-year roommate, Jacob Plotkin, doesn't quite understand why he keeps coming back to New Haven, since he still apparently doesn't study. Is it a combination of Lynne's insistence and his resistance?

Then finally it's over. Plotkin vividly remembers seeing Cheney for the last time. "It was a cold day and he was standing on the approach to the library steps and I was coming out of Calhoun College and I greeted him because I hadn't seen very much of him, and he told me he was leaving and wasn't coming back." Plotkin says that in the memory, "I can almost feel the cold breeze blowing on me." Standing by the library, Cheney seemed to Plotkin not angry or bitter, but "resigned."

Back in Wyoming, Cheney returns to his job on the power lines. Joan Frandsen says, "It is what guys do around here if you don't go to college." He continues drinking, gets arrested a couple of times for drunk driving in 1962 and 1963. At one level he seems comfortable with just drifting, as he had in high school. Resigned. Letting things happen. At another level he wants to succeed, whatever that means. But he can't find the engine of his own. Lynne has the engine. As Cheney later tells it, "She made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." When Lynne gives him the final ultimatum - succeed in the world or we're through - by his own account, everything changes. (Nichols 26)

In short order, he enrolls in Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming in 1963. He and Lynne marry in 1964. He follows an interest in the subject of politics. In 1965, he gets a degree from the University of Wyoming and follows Lynne to the University of Wisconsin for graduate work. She plans to make college professors out of both of them - but perhaps anything will do. The Vietnam War is on. Cheney gets five draft deferments during this period, the fifth one remarkably calculated. Cheney applies for his exemption three months into Lynne's first trimester of pregnancy, and then, exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for childless married men, the Cheneys have their first daughter. Years later, the future secretary of defense tells a reporter that he didn't go to Vietnam because "I had other priorities." At confirmation hearings, Cheney told a lie that would have been laughable if it hadn't been swaddled in the famous basso, you're-in-good-hands Cheney voice: "I would have been happy to serve had I been called." (Nichols 33, 37, 107)

We believe the "other priorities" came from Cheney having come upon a way to resolve his conflicted ambivalence. The resolution allows him to overcome his passivity by letting activity and purpose flow into him from an outside force. With Lynne's fierce wind now filling his phlegmatic sails, he finds he can move.

In the mid 1960s, a couple of academic internships take Cheney into the world of politics, where he ingeniously applies the template of his dependent relationship with Lynne to relationships with political patrons. He does their bidding, his strength of will pumped up by working for their ambitions so that a magic occurs. He holds the campaign button bag for Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles; Knowles recommends him as a staffer to Bill Steiger, a new congressman heading for Washington. Already a master go-fer, Cheney gets the Washington nod, though he is only fourth choice for the congressman's staff (an early, "What about Dick?" moment). He next offers his services to Donald Rumsfeld, a rising star of the Nixon administration.

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