The New Yorker:

By Nicholas Lemann
April 30, 2001

If I were entering a contest to win a dream date with Dick Cheney, here is what I would say: We would definitely go fishing. Not bait fishing, which is for amateurs, a category that does not include Cheney, but fly-fishing. Way up in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, someplace beautiful and remote like that. We’d make camp, and then we’d get up before dawn and go out on the river. You have to be cool and patient and quiet to be a good fly fisherman—that’s Cheney. We’d spend the whole day out there, just working the pools, not talking. With Cheney you do a lot of not talking. Maybe every hour or so, I’d ask him a question, and he’d answer with a “yep” or a “nope” or a “little bit,” nothing more. Any fish we caught, we’d throw them back. Then at the end of the day we’d build a fire and Cheney would make dinner—he’s a really good cook, just basic American stuff, though, spaghetti and chili and stew. But I would tease him about how bad his cooking is. That’s one of the rules with Cheney: he won’t tease you, but you can tease him—under that masculine proviso by which you can express affection only through patently unmeant insults—and he kind of likes it.

One thing that would be sure not to happen would be Cheney starting in with the big-shot, puffed-up Washington talk. He’s still real. But maybe, around the fire, relaxed, I’d work up the nerve to ask him what he really thought about the important matters he deals with, and maybe, if the date was going well, he’d answer, laconically, but I’d know I could take it to the bank. Gorbachev? He’d tug the corner of his mouth down, the way he does. Unrealistic, ambitious, fancy-pants: no need to spell it out, the meaning’s clear. Alan Greenspan? “Good man.” With Cheney you learn not to interrupt; sometimes there’s one sentence and then quite a long time passes before the next sentence. “Patriot.”

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