LATE BLOOMER
On a personal level, Cheney was not always a bull-by-the-horns guy. After Cheney graduated from high school, Tom Stroock, a local oilman who was impressed by the young man, arranged his entrance and full scholarship to Yale. After four semesters, Cheney's grades were so bad, the university asked him to leave. David Nicholas, who has known Cheney since junior high school and who went to Harvard, thinks part of the problem was that the Casper schools had not prepared the boys for Ivy League academics. "We were competing with kids who went to Andover and Exeter, and they knew what it was all about," Nicholas observes. What's more, say those who knew Cheney then, he spent more time "in the bend-your-elbow club," as a former Yalie puts it, than in the library. Cheney hung out with his cohort on the freshman football team, stayed up late playing cards and drinking beer. "Dick wasn't big on studying," remembers Jacob Plotkin, one of his roommates.

Cheney got a union job laying power lines in the blue-collar town of Rock Springs, Wyo. He stayed in constant touch with Lynne, who was in college in Colorado; he had had to endure teasing from Plotkin for writing her almost daily from Yale. On occasion, he drank too much—a practice that led to two DUI arrests within a year. Cheney told Nicholas years later that the arrests motivated him to get his career on track. In addition, Lynne, according to Stroock, "was firm that she did not want to spend the rest of her life married to a lineman."

Lynne persuaded Cheney to go back to school. This time, he started small, enrolling in Casper College for a semester, then transferred to the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he majored in political science. There Cheney landed his first political gig, an internship in 1965 with the state senate, which was controlled by the G.O.P. It was his first engagement with the Republican Party. His father, a career federal bureaucrat with the Soil Conservation Service, and mother, a homemaker, were staunch Democrats who were proud their son shared a birthday with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Cheney would never leave the embrace of the G.O.P. When he was a Republican Congressman, his father would kid him that "you can't take my vote for granted."

Dick and Lynne Cheney were just ahead of the baby boomers. They were married (in 1964) and had two daughters (in 1966 and '69) as the grand social transformations of the 1960s were heating up. The responsibilities of a new family might have dissuaded them from joining the experiment of hippie culture, but that was not their wont in any case. "It was a time of great upheaval," remembers Celeste Colgan, a friend since the mid-'60s. "We talked about it a lot—Dick particularly. He was worried about the direction of the country. It was a tremendous wake-up call, and all of us got really serious really quick."

Cheney, who avoided military service in Vietnam with education and then marriage deferments, arrived in Washington for the first time in 1968 as a University of Wisconsin graduate student on a fellowship. His patron, Wisconsin Congressman Bill Steiger, sent Cheney on a fact-finding mission to university campuses that had experienced violent anti­Vietnam war protests. As Cheney told the New Yorker in 2001, it was while he was attending a faculty meeting at his own school that he realized he no longer wanted to finish his Ph.D. and become a professor. The faculty members, he thought, were full of hot air, critical of everyone but unwilling to act. That, Cheney decided, was not for him.

POWER HOARDER
If you're in politics and you believe in leadership and action, the Executive Branch of government is the place to be. Cheney was happy and effective in his 10 years as a Congressman, and he rose to be the second-ranking Republican in the House, with a real chance of one day becoming Speaker. But when President Bush in 1989 asked him to be Secretary of Defense instead, he leaped at the offer. Even when he was in the House, Cheney displayed a strong bent—atypical in that chamber—for Executive privilege. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress had moved aggressively to trim back presidential powers and expand its own. Cheney was opposed. In 1987 he was the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, which concluded that Ronald Reagan had overstepped his powers as President. Cheney's minority report was a full-throated rejection of that view.

Cheney, as Vice President, is still fighting the battle for Executive perquisites. That struggle moved to the courts when Cheney refused to identify the energy-industry officials who were consulted last year by his task force on energy policy. Members of Congress directed the General Accounting Office (GAO) to sue. Some outside interest groups also filed suit. But Cheney, with Bush's support, refused to yield, citing the need to protect private advice to the President and Vice President. When Matalin told him calls were coming in even from allies begging Cheney to compromise, he told her, "Suck it up, Mary. If a principle is worth having, it's worth fighting for." A federal court ruled Dec. 9 in Cheney's favor against the GAO, which is likely to appeal.

After 9/11, Cheney supported Bush in aggressively applying the President's unilateral powers—for example, creating military tribunals through a presidential order rather than seeking legislation from Congress. Cheney was the Administration figure who pushed hardest against Democrats on Capitol Hill who wanted to launch a probe into the intelligence failures before 9/11. They eventually got their way, but Cheney stalled them for a year.

Cheney's critics argue that his defense of Executive privilege is a smoke screen that masks a contempt for Congress, the media and, by extension, the public. Even some of his friends think he takes it too far. Cheney, says one, "has a kind of Father Knows Best attitude about government: We're in control, and we know what we're doing even if you don't." But Cheney is unapologetic in his view. In an appearance last February on the Tonight Show, not the usual forum for constitutional issues, he complained to Jay Leno about "a continual encroachment by Congress in the Executive Branch" and vowed, "The President and I are bound and determined not to allow that to happen on our watch."

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