Dick's Vietnam Hypocrisy
by John Nichols
The Nation magazine, May
17, 2004
Dick Cheney has positioned himself as
the Bush Administration's point man in the ongoing work of questioning
the national security credentials of presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee John Kerry. Cheney's latest attacks on Kerry come as part
of a renewed push by the Bush/Cheney campaign, the Republican
National Committee and their media allies to suggest that somewhere
in the story of Kerry's evolution from decorated Vietnam War combatant
to outspoken antiwar activist in the early 1970s can be found
evidence that he is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief.
But what of Cheney's Vietnam-era story?
Like Kerry, Cheney was "of age" for service. Faced with
the chance to engage on the battlefield or the home front, however,
he dodged out-not for moral reasons but selfish ones. Pulitzer
Prize-winning author David Maraniss, who interviewed Cheney for
his book They Marched Into Sunlight, says the Vice President just
couldn't be bothered. "I think he's emblematic of a certain
type. He wasn't against the war, just didn't want anything to
do with it," explains Maraniss. "He wanted to get on
with his life and not let the world get in the way."
Unfortunately, the world had a tendency
to get in the way of young men who, like Cheney, were of draft
age when the US troop presence in Vietnam began to rise in the
mid-1960s. As a result, there was one sense in which Cheney mirrored
the actions, if not the politics, of his fellow students. Dick
Cheney was definitely opposed to the draft, at least as far as
it affected him. Indeed, unlike George W. Bush, who performed
some sort of service-ill-defined and unrecorded as it may have
been-in the Texas Air National Guard, Cheney reacted to the prospect
of wearing his country's uniform like a man with a deadly allergy
to olive drab. Between 1963 and '65, Cheney used his student status
at Casper College and the University of Wyoming to apply for and
receive four 2-S draft deferments. As the war in Vietnam heated
up, Cheney fought to defend and expand his deferments. Twenty-two
days after Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in
August 1964, raising the prospect of a rapid expansion of the
draft, he "coincidentally"-in the words of a Washington
Post profile-married Lynne. The advantage was that even if his
student deferment was lifted, his married status might carry some
weight with his draft board.
But the Vietnamese were not cooperating
with Cheney's schemes. The war kept demanding more and more young
American men, and the range of those who were eligible for the
draft expanded rapidly. On May 19, 1965, Cheney was reclassified
with the most dangerous draft status: 1-A, "available for
military service." Soon afterward, Lyndon Johnson announced
that draft call-ups would double, and on October 26, Selective
Service constraints on the drafting of childless married men were
lifted. Danang was calling. And it didn't look like Dick had any
excuses left.
But there was one way for ambitious young
men to avoid serving their country while maintaining their political
viability. If Cheney had a child, he'd be reclassified 3-A, removing
him from the pool of those likely to be drafted. Cheney needed
a kid-quick. And he got one. Precisely nine months and two days
after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for
childless married men, Cheney was no longer childless. His daughter
Elizabeth was born on July 28, 1966. Convenient? Coincidence?
That's not Cheney's style. Writer Timothy Noah did the math and
suggested that the timing of Elizabeth's arrival "would seem
to indicate that the Cheneys, though doubtless planning to have
children sometime, were seized with an untamable passion the moment
Dick Cheney became vulnerable to the Vietnam draft. And acted
on it. Carpe diem! Who says government policy can't affect human
behavior?" Cheney applied for 3-A status immediately, receiving
it on January l9, 1966, when Lynne was still in the first trimester
of her pregnancy.
Twenty-three years later, when Cheney
appeared before the Senate to plead the case for his confirmation
as George Herbert Walker Bush's Defense Secretary, he was questioned
about his failure to serve. Cheney responded that he "would
have obviously been happy to serve had I been called." In
a more truthful moment that same year, Cheney admitted to a reporter,
"I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
Cheney's lie to the Senate has never caused much concern, but
that "other priorities" line has dogged him. After he
selected himself to serve on the 2000 Republican ticket, former
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown, a Vietnam veteran disabled
by a gunshot wound to his right arm, said, "As a former Marine
who was wounded and nearly lost his life, I personally resent
that comment. I resent that he had 'other priorities,' when 58,000
people died and over 300,000 returned wounded and disabled. In
my mind there is no doubt that because he had 'other priorities'
someone died or was injured in his place."
That may sound like a harsh assessment,
but the fact is that at least a dozen men aged 19 to 47 from Cheney's
adopted hometown of Casper, Wyoming, died in Vietnam during the
period when Cheney might have served. Because local draft boards
had to fill quotas when a man who was eligible got a deferment,
someone else had to fill the slot. The vagaries of draft quotas,
military service and the war itself make it impossible to say
whether Leroy Robert Cardenas or Walter Elmer Handy or Douglas
Tyrone Patrick or any of the other sons of Casper who perished
in Southeast Asia might have survived the war years and gone on
to explore their "other priorities" if Cheney had responded
to his country's call. But that doesn't stop some of those who
served from asking, "Who died in your place, Dick Cheney?"
Vietnam veteran Dennis Mansker raises that question on his website,
where he maintains a list of the dead from Casper. Maybe Cheney
did have other priorities, Mansker argues, but "so did these
guys."
John Nichols's book on Dick Cheney, Dick:
The Man Who Is President will be published this summer by the
New Press.
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