In My Time by Dick Cheney

learned when Rumsfeld sent me to Breathitt County to see if I could figure out what was going on.
    Treva Turner Howell, whose parents had established the Turner dynasty, took me around to show me all the good works OEO was funding. At the end of the day she drove me back to her house, sat me down at the kitchen table, and poured us both stiff bourbons. With great charm and even more insistence, she restated her case, reminded me of Chairman Perkins’s interest in her work, and indicated that as far as corruption was concerned, she had the goods on Louie Nunn.
    OEO funds were, without doubt, strengthening the political hold of Breathitt County’s Democratic machine, headed by Jeff Davis Howell, Treva’s husband, and while it could be argued that this was improper, my job was to find out whether it was illegal. When I got back to Washington and Rumsfeld wanted to know whether the program was corrupt, my answer was: possibly, but there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to charge illegality. That was enough for him. He overrode Governor Nunn’s veto.
    Louie Nunn went through the roof, and Rumsfeld found himself in a meeting with Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, who had taken Nunn’s call. Ehrlichman conveyed the governor’s particular unhappiness that some interloper named Cheney had undercut his authority,and he suggested sending a White House team to investigate, a step Rumsfeld argued against. Because the basic question was whether the operation was illegal, Rumsfeld suggested sending the FBI. I was not surprised when I heard that the FBI reached the same conclusion I had, and the veto override stood.
    ON APRIL 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese had been stockpiling ammunition and staging troops for the war in South Vietnam.

    Meeting President Nixon for the first time with Don Rumsfeld in the Oval Office in 1970. I had seen President Johnson at his last address to a joint session of Congress in January 1969. I’d also seen President Kennedy when he visited the University of Wyoming in 1962, and President Harry Truman in 1948 when he’d done a whistle stop tour campaigning through Nebraska, but Nixon was the first president I’d ever met. (Official White House Photo)
    Shortly after that, on May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen, sent into Kent State University after protestors burned down the ROTC building, shot and killed four students and wounded others. A hundred thousand protestors, mostly students, descended on Washington, causing enough apprehension that the Secret Service arranged to ring the White House complex with D.C. Transit buses parked so closely together that no one could squeeze between them. Someone decided that it would be a good idea if some young White House staffers could be found to go out beyond the wall of buses, talk to some of the demonstrators, and judge their mood.
    And so it was on a mild May afternoon that Rumsfeld and I, our jackets and ties left in the West Wing, walked the few blocks to the National Mall. We had a few intense discussions with protestors along the way, but this was not a threatening crowd. As we got close to the long Reflecting Pool, we noticed a commotion, as though someone had fallen in. On closer inspection we could see that a few young women, naked from the waist up, were cavorting in the shallow water and being cheered on by a fast-growing audience.
    We soon realized that one of the cavorters worked for us at OEO. We had inherited her as a photographer in the press office, and she had made an impression as a free spirit even before the day she photographed the ceremony in which Rumsfeld awarded a grant to the Navajo Tribal Council. She arrived dressed head to toe as a Native American in a costume straight out of a thirties Hollywood western, complete with a fringed beaded dress and feathers in her hair.
    Now here she was, topless in the Reflecting Pool. In those days, there were free