Transcript of Cheney interview

Hume: Now, what about this — it was said you were hunting out of vehicles.  Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that’s your — the way you chose to hunt that day?

Cheney: No, the way — this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres.  You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt.  Birds are oftentimes — you’re looking for coveys.  And these are wild quail, they’re not pen-raised.  And you hunt them — basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail.  And when they spot them, they’ve got radios, you’ll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail.  So you need —

Hume: So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?

Cheney: Well, usually you’ll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards.  Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.

Hume: Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly —

Cheney: No, you always — in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is.  Then you get off — there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey.  And then you walk up on the covey.  And as the covey flushes, that’s when you shoot. 

Hume: Was anybody drinking in this party?

Cheney: No.  You don’t hunt with people who drink.  That’s not a good idea.  We had —

Hume: So he wasn’t, and you weren’t?

Cheney: Correct.  We’d taken a break at lunch — go down under an old — ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue.  I had a beer at lunch.  After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters.  Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game.  We didn’t go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m. The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon.  Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence. 

Hume: Now, what thought did you give, then, to how — you must have known that this was — whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news.  What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?

Cheney: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think:  I need to call the press.  My first reaction is:  My friend, Harry, has been shot and we’ve got to take care of him.  That evening there were other considerations.  We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of.  His wife was on the ranch. She wasn’t with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry.  He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn’t hear on television that their father had been shot.  And that was important, too.

But we also didn’t know what the outcome here was going to be.  We didn’t know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in.  We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how — whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot.  We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay. 

Hume: When did the family — when had the family been informed?  About what time?

Cheney: Well, his wife — his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch —

Hume: Right, what about his children?

Cheney: I didn’t make the calls to his children, so I don’t know exactly when those contacts were made.  One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited.  But one of the things I’d learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down.  And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth — a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages.  But we really didn’t know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn’t been any serious damage to any vital organ.  And that’s when we began the process of notifying the press.

Hume: Well, what — you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.

Cheney: Well, true, it was unprecedented.  I’ve been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this.  We’ve had experiences where the President has been shot; we’ve never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody. 

Hume: Not since Aaron Burr. 

Cheney: Not since Aaron Burr —

Hume: Different circumstances.

Cheney: Different circumstances.

Hume: Well, did it occur to you that sooner was — I mean, the one thing that we’ve all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.

Cheney: Well, if it’s accurate.  If it’s accurate.  And this is a complicated story.

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