For much of the world, the bald man with the crooked smile is a scary figure who operates in the shadows of a superpower, dragging the United States into wars, defending torture, making oil companies rich. For Mary Cheney, he’s just dad.
In a memoir published on Tuesday the second daughter of Vice-President Dick Cheney gives her version of what it is like to be the child of one of America’s most powerful men, and what it is like to be a lesbian and senior political operative in a party opposed to gay rights.
In the literature of White House offspring, Now it’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of a Political Life bears no resemblance to the angry exposé by Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, who described her father as remote and her mother as abusive.
Cheney’s tightly controlled account of life in high places is one of happy families. The vice-president is a cuddly, good-humoured man, who liked to talk fly fishing, not politics, at the dinner table, and who, when she came out at the age of 16, reacted by telling his daughter that he loved her. So did her mother, though she burst into tears first. They also love her partner of 16 years, Heather Poe.
It was as the vice-president’s lesbian daughter that Cheney became known to the broader American public when she essentially ran his 2004 re-election campaign. She was also involved in the 2000 race, but at that time her mother, Lynne Cheney, was saying in public that her daughter had not come out as a lesbian. By the time of the 2004 elections the Republicans were using their opposition to gay marriage to win votes.
Homosexual rights were an election issue, and so was Cheney’s sexuality as she worked to restore an administration opposed to gay marriage to the White House. Republicans were denouncing gays and lesbians as ”selfish hedonists”.
Cheney admits her discomfort with that position. She writes that she had planned to be in the gallery for the president’s state of the union speech in 2004, but cancelled when she saw a text in which he pledged to defend the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
”I didn’t want to be there when the members of the House and Senate and all the invited guests applauded the president’s declaration,” she writes. ”I sure wasn’t going to stand up and cheer.”
Later, when Bush decided to endorse a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, Cheney remained silent. Her father, in one of the presidential debates, said he did not agree with the amendment. In the book, Cheney calls it ”fundamentally wrong — and a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere”. ”Society may not recognise gays and lesbians as deserving of the same rights and protections as other citizens, but nowhere in the Constitution are they specifically excluded from having them,” she writes. ”The Federal Marriage Amendment would change that.”
She says she thought about returning home to Colorado when Bush came out in support of the amendment. But she did not, and she rejected the president’s offer to issue a dissenting statement. Instead, she reserved her greatest anger for the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, who referred to her sexuality in one of the debates.
”She herself called him a profanity, she recounts with relief,” the Washington Post said on Tuesday.
In the spotlight
Barbara and Jenna Bush
The 25-year-old twin daughters of George and Barbara have made headlines as socialite party girls: Jenna once carried fake ID and was photographed after falling on the floor of a student party, while Barbara eluded her secret service bodyguards at university to go out drinking
Chelsea Clinton
The only child of Bill and Hilary was 12 when her father was elected. Although uneasy in the public eye at first, Chelsea, right, soon wowed the press. She gave her first political speech in November 2004 with five other prominent daughters as part of a last-minute campaigning tactic by the Democratic party. – Guardian Unlimited Â