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The first event kicks off August 30th in Cleveland, featuring matchups with some of the best wrestlers on the planet. You've never seen wrestling like this. Learn more. At RealAmericanFreestyle.com. And the right thing would be to talk about Dick Cheney in the middle of Fox and Friends, actually, in the first hour we hear.
He passed away at the age of 84. At 37, he had his first heart attack. He's had five of them his entire life, got a heart transplant. He's always been battling it. It didn't seem to slow him down, but the career he had to put in perspective, huge impact on America.
Yeah. First of all, he's got a very interesting background. Born in, I think, Lincoln, Nebraska, grew up in Casper, Wyoming. Uh modest Upbringing, dad was a federal bureaucrat with the Conservation Service of the IAG Department. Gets a full ride to Yale.
'Cause he's so bright. and then gets kicked out not once but twice for uh spending too much time imbibing. Drinking. And goes back to to uh to Casper, goes to work as a lineman for the telephone company, which you know, even on a pleasant day in Wyoming is not an easy job. And marries his high school sweetheart.
Uh and Goes to the University of Wisconsin because he's incredibly bright, incredibly smart. Becomes a congressional fellow, which is a very highly sought-after opportunity. Goes to work for a congressman from Wisconsin named Bill Steiger and never goes back, never graduated from college. Did you know that? No, never graduated from college.
No, never got his BA. And goes to work for Bill Steiger. Bill Steiger is a bright force in the Republican Party at that time, in the House. And he has a great friend who's another bright young face, congressman from the North Shore of Chicago. Don Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld goes into the Nix administration, brings along Dick Cheney, who's, I think, maybe 30 at the time, works in the Nixon administration. Uh Nixon leaves. Rummy is close to Gerald Ford. goes into the White House and And at the age of thirty four, Dick Cheney becomes the youngest White House chief of staff in history. White House Chief of Staff, he then went after the Carter defeats Ford.
He goes back to Wyoming, gets elected to the U.S. House from Wyoming, one congressional seat from the state, gets elected and is made a member of the Republican House leadership in his first term. His first term. He is that bright, that able, serves for ten years, becomes the Republican leader in the House. Then is brought into the Bush 41's administration as Secretary of Defense.
Presides over the First Gulf War. After the defeat in 92, he goes to work in the private sector, running the world's largest oil field service company, Halliburton. And it's from there that he becomes George W. Bush's vice president. This guy has spent, this man spent his life in service to his country, and I knew him well.
We became close friends. He was an astonishing person to be around and to work with, so smart, so able, knew what his role was, knew that he was there in order to give the President his candid advice with the Barkov.
So much has been missed about him. One of the nicest people on the face of the planet, and a really good colleague and friend. The way I understand it, and he said this, and my personal belief is this is true. The criticism didn't bother him. The Darth Vader side commented.
He made fun of it. He loved that. I mean, I wouldn't say he loved it, but he made light of it. Was it tough balancing the fact that this young. Republican governor from Texas without any known foreign policy experience, hires a lot of experienced people like Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld the second time he's Secretary of Defense and then Dick Cheney.
How did you, as an advisor to the president, make sure that Dick Cheney was, the perception wasn't that Dick Cheney was running the White House?
Well, look, the press was going to run with that. They simply knew it. In fact, in 1920, Bush is thinking about who is running Mate Ought to be. And we were looking at nine people, and we had these big, thick notebooks. The guy in charge of the process was Dick Cheney, assisted by his brilliant young lawyer daughter, Liz Cheney.
And they compiled these thousands of pages of material and boiled it down to nine big thick notebooks. And the more Bush went through this process, the more he liked the cast of Cheney's mind and became convinced Cheney ought to be. His running mate, and I was against the idea, and he knew it.
So Bush is out on the campaign trail. He calls me up and he says, I'm going to be back tonight late, as you know. Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock, I want you to come to the governor's mansion, and I want you to make the case why I should not go with Dick Cheney. I want to know why you don't want me to go with Cheney.
So come prepared. 10 o'clock the next morning, I show up at the governor's mansion, sitting in the Austin Library, named after Stephen F. Austin. It's about half the size of this. It's not much, it's smaller than this room that we're in here today, your studio.
And I'm sitting on one side of the room, Bush is on the other. He says, okay, why shouldn't I go with Cheney? I have a list, eight reasons. I still have the piece of paper. Number one, don't worry about Wyoming.
Number two, the guy had his first heart attack at 37, been working on perfecting it ever since, had four more. You know, number three, a very conservative congressman 18 years ago from a very conservative state and cast some really stupid votes, like being one of three members of the House of Representatives to vote against the resolution calling on the South African Apartheid regime to release Nelson Mandela from the island prison where he didn't have health care and move him to the mainland prison where he would get a doctor. And Cheney's one of three who votes no. You know, we've worked really hard to develop an image of you as your own guy, not mini-me to your dad.
Okay, great. Let's pick the guy who's the Secretary of Defense for your dad in a time of war. Everybody's going to be saying he's running the West Wing. People are worried about you being an oilman. What the hell?
Let's get the guy who runs the world's largest oil field service equipment. That issue is going to go away in the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic. And anyway, Bush, as you know, President Bush is not a monologue guy.
So this is like World Wrestling Federation. I mean, we're going at it. He wants you to come that hard, right? Yeah, he wanted to. That's the way he operated it.
And I literally, at the end of the conversation, after 30, 35 minutes, I realized I couldn't unbutton my coat because I had sweat through my shirt. It was so high intense. And the final reason was the, you know, the 12th Amendment, blah, blah, blah.
So Bush says, got anything else? I said, no, that's it, sir. He said, good, really, really good. Turns to the guy sitting next to him and says, Dick, got any questions for Carl? Cheney'd been sitting there while I kicked his ass around for half an hour.
Wow. And as we walked out, Cheney said, I agree with some of what you had to say. And we became, he never held it against me. We became close. You know, did he want it?
He wanted to do what the president wanted to do. No, he didn't really want to do it. But the president said, I need you. I want somebody as my As my assistant, you know, as my deputy, as my vice president, who's going to walk into the Oval Office and give me their considered opinion. And I'll make the call.
And you'll accept it. And that Bush knew from having seen the Reagan White House and his father's White House how powerful that office is and how easy it is for a President to get isolated, and he wanted somebody who would give it to him straight. Each and every time. And he gave Cheney some specific responsibilities. I served on a committee that was not public.
Where we vetted and kept a running list of prospective Supreme Court nominees. And Cheney and I, I think, were the only two people who weren't lawyers. And now that I realize we were also the only two members of the committee who never graduated from college. You know, and we became friends. We went hunting almost every year after about 2003 or 4 and hunting together.
He loved to fish. He loved to bird hunt, and he was a really kind person and smart and smart.
So unbelievably smart. And the kind of person who would read something and immediately grasp the important elements of it and have the best questions. I mean, that was one of the great things about him is that he didn't know it all. But he wanted to know as much as he could. Hi everyone, it's Brian Kilmead here.
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So, I want you to hear Dick Cheney in 2018 talking about the criticism that he got from 41, cutting on. First of all, I was more, I guess, of an iron ass when I was vice president, a thing that had intervened between my time at defense. For 41 and my time as vice president was 9-11. We'd had 3,000 of our people killed on 9-11, more people than we lost at Pearl Harbor. And we moved, I think, legitimately, into a wartime setting rather than simple law enforcement.
I think it was important to do that.
Now after uh he made those comments Um he uh Sent me a note. One of the notes are great to have. This one said, Dear Dick, I did it. And then he went on at great length to uh Tell me what a great American I was. But he also, that year, we went to the annual Alf Alpha Club.
He enjoyed those dinners. And he invited me to sit at the head table with him at the dinner, and that sort of dampened down any notion that there was a fundamental break between Bush and Cheney. Because you want to give some context to that, I guess 41 had called him an iron ass. Yeah, an iron ass. He's changed a lot since he was my Secretary of Defense.
Yeah. Yeah, but look, both men were right. He had become more. He had been. I don't want to use the word radicalized, but his attitude had changed as it did for a lot of people after 9/11.
You know, we we had the first attack on the World Trade Center, and we turned it over to the Southern District in New York and the FBI and blindly went forward. And The realization by the Commander-in-Chief and the Vice President after 9-11 was that we had to fight them over there so we didn't have to fight them over here again. It's Will Kane Country. Watch it live at noon Eastern Monday through Thursday at FoxNews.com or on the Fox News YouTube channel. And don't miss the show.
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