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A Very Cheney Valentine's Day

Campus Progress scores an exclusive look at Lynne and Dick Cheney’s first Valentine’s Day together.

By Jesse Singal
February 13, 2009

Former Vice President—and hopeless romantic—Dick Cheney.

Valentine’s Day and Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney and Valentine’s Day. Think of one and you’ll inevitably think of the other. The two are permanently intertwined in America’s consciousness, like apple pie and ice cream or softball and a warm summer night.

And so, with the annual blitz of Cheney-themed Valentine’s Day products upon us, from Hallmark Cards (“You have rendered my heart extraordinarily warm,” read one of last year’s bestsellers) to life-size plush products, it’s a good time to step back from the rampant commercialism that has come to dominate Valentine’s Day. The holiday, after all, is about love, about the anxiety of waiting for a phone call, the butterflies of a first kiss—not just the excitement of opening up a Dick Cheney Erotic Massage Kit (available for $59.95 at select retailers).

So who better to explain to us the true meaning of Valentine’s Day than Cheney’s paramour, Lynne Cheney? Campus Progress scored an exclusive interview with Mrs. Cheney and asked her to tell us about her first Valentine’s Day with the former vice president. The transcript has been edited for length, clarity, and to excise some shockingly ribald content.

Lynne Cheney: I’ll always remember the first Valentine’s Day after I met Dick. That’s when he “made his move,” as young people say today, and all these years later I can still feel the excitement that came with being pursued by so passionate a man.

Of course, today people know Dick for his compassion, warmth, and remarkable empathy, but believe it or not, back in our younger days he was actually a bit stiff. I know—people never believe me when I tell them that! Like many teenagers, he had trouble expressing affection, and I think that is part of the reason I ended up having the most lovely, memorable Valentine’s Day of my life.

We were 16 and he was on the football team. Sometimes I would see him looking at me from across a classroom, or from the bushes outside my house, but he would never approach me. He was so shy back then. But one day that finally changed.

So it’s Valentine’s Day of 1968—a Friday, I think—and I’m alone at the bus stop near my house. A few minutes before the bus is supposed to arrive, a truck rolls up. A split second later, three men in all-black outfits and ski masks are wrestling me to the ground, duct-taping my limbs together, tying a sack over my head, and throwing me into the back of the truck.

The truck started driving around like crazy! I couldn’t see where I was going because of the sack, but luckily I was chained to the floor so I didn’t flop around too much—just a few nicks and scrapes and a broken collarbone. I was terrified, of course. Why were these people kidnapping me? But in the back of my mind a little voice said, “Lynne, you do remember it’s Valentine’s Day, right?” Then I thought of Dick, and despite the fact that I had just been kidnapped and was in a van careening off to heck-knows-where, a smile crept across my face—or it would have, if they hadn’t gagged me.

Several hours later we arrived at our location, and when they pulled off the sack I found myself in a small cellar filled with cold water up to my knees. There was a single chair to sit in, but I could barely see it because the room was so dark. I sat there for a few hours and thought about how I could escape, but the door was big and metallic and wasn’t about to budge.

A couple hours later, a song came on some sort of PA system: “Love Letters In The Sand” by Pat Boone! It had come out the previous year and was one of my favorites. This was when I started to suspect that the whole thing had been orchestrated not by a heartless psychopath, but by Dick.

I still wasn’t sure, though. What I did know was that whoever was responsible knew how much I loved that song, because they played it non-stop, at a very high volume, for a very long period of time. I didn’t have a watch and lost all sense of how long it had been, but it was somewhere in the range of 48 or 72 hours, give or take. I slept when I could and occasionally someone would open a little peephole in the door and drop a bag of dog biscuits into the water. I ate them ravenously.

I must have been sleeping when the lights came on and the music stopped all at once. Temporarily blinded by the intense glare, it took me a few moments to realize something was written on the back wall, across from the door.

“ONE DAY I WILL CONTROL THE WORLD (AND YOUR HEART),” it said, and to this day I don’t know whether the blood it was written in was Dick’s or someone else’s.

A door opened up and I was retied, regagged, and rehooded. I was thrown back in the truck and driven around some more—perhaps just to disorient me and make it even harder to get a bearing on my location—and when they pulled the hood back up I was handcuffed to a chair across a table from a very angry, very little German man. (I eventually learned that the German’s name—or at least the nickname the Allied powers used in their endless, futile discussions about how to capture him and put him on trial before a world court—translated roughly to, “The one who tortures without remorse, pity, or humanity, and who really doesn’t have that much of a sense of humor.”)

“Do you feel ze affection for anyone in your class?” he screamed, much louder than was necessary.

“Well…yes,” I said, coyly. He threw a freezing bucket of water onto me.

“Good,” he said. “Zat was ze right answer.”

“So why did you throw water on me?” I asked. I was peeved!

“I follow ze orders I am given.”

He proceeded to yell question after question at me. Stuff about my schedule, the routes I walked home, who my friends and enemies were. But the question he was circling around didn’t come until the end.

“Ze football player in your class, Dick Cheney.”

“Yes?” My heart fluttered. Although I couldn’t tell if it was because of the mention of Dick’s name or the dozens of hours of trauma I had endured.

“Do you…fancy him?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

Another blast of ice-cold water—I was well into shock now, so I didn’t even feel it—and that was it. The German walked over to the interrogation room’s door and opened it without a word. Dick was standing behind it, in full game-day football gear, including a helmet, with a bouquet of flowers.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, baby,” he said.

And that’s how I met my husband. He hasn’t let me out of his sight ever since.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.

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