Transcript of Cheney interview

Hume: But there were some things you knew.  I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you’d shot him.

Cheney: Correct.

Hume: And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called.  I realize you didn’t know the outcome, and you could argue that you don’t know the outcome today, really, finally.

Cheney: As we saw, if we’d put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then — one report came in that said, superficial injuries.  If we’d gone with a statement at that point, we’d have been wrong.  And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so —

Hume: Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?

Cheney: I did not.  The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself.  I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning. 

Hume: Not until Sunday morning?  Was that the first conversation you’d had with anybody in the — at the White House?

Cheney: Yes.

Hume: And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?

Cheney: No, Karl talks to — I don’t recall talking to Karl.  Karl did talk with Katharine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us.  Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well —

Hume: Say that again?

Cheney: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we’re both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katharine Armstrong.  And Katharine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she’d put the story out.  And I thought that made good sense for several reasons.  First of all, she was an eye-witness.  She’d seen the whole thing.  Secondly, she’d grown up on the ranch, she’d hunted there all of her life.  Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this. 

And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew.  And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting.  And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out.  And I thought that was the right call.

Hume: What do you think now?

Cheney: Well, I still do.  I still think that the accuracy was enormously important.  I had no press person with me, I didn’t have any press people with me.  I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch.  In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we’re even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katharine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn’t know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun — a rifle bullet and a shotgun.  And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding.  And so we were confident that Katharine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it.  She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I’d only seen one piece of it.

Hume: By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?

Cheney: The next morning I talked to his wife.  And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.

Hume: When was that?

Cheney: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.

Hume: Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?

Cheney: I believe it had.  I can’t remember what time Katharine actually talked to the reporter.  She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter.  But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that’s when the story then went out.

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