About the guy "Big Dick" Cheney shot

It wasn't possible to cover up the fact that "Big Dick" Cheney had shot a guy, but we sure as shootin' didn't find out how severely the poor guy, Dick Whittington, was injured.

by Ken

Credit Washington Post reporter Carl Farhi with a nice piece of reporting in following up on the man whose identity was transformed into the guy "Big Dick" shot.

One of the things we learn is that, contrary to the impression created at the time of the shooting, Whittington wasn't an old friend, or really a friend of any kind, of the vice president. We also learn that they haven't become any closer since what Whittington himself insists was, an accident, "plain and simple." ("It could happen to anyone.") They haven't seen each other in two years, Whittington says -- not since the funeral of Anne Armstrong, their hostess on that fateful day.

The two men barely knew each other. Before the shooting, they had met briefly only three times since the mid-1970s and had never gone hunting together before. "The most you could say is that he was an acquaintance," Whittington says. . . .

Although Whittington says they've exchanged birthday greetings, they haven't seen each other for two years. The last time they met was when they attended the funeral of Anne Armstrong, the ranch owner whose invitation drew the two men together.

Another thing we learn is that Whittington's injuries were way more severe than we ever knew, presumably thanks to Big Dick's ability to stage-manage the infotainment news media.

Nearly five years on, Harry Whittington still speaks with a slight flutter in his voice -- a "warble," he calls it, inadvertently choosing a bird metaphor. His easy East Texas drawl changed forever one day in February 2006 when a tiny lead pellet pierced his larynx. It's still there.

Whittington sweeps a hand up to his dusky face and points near his right eye, then to the right side of his forehead. The eye socket, hairline and hand have birdshot pellets lodged in them, too. If you look closely -- and strangers occasionally sidle up to him to do just that -- the accident's remnants are evident; there's a tiny bump in each spot.

Every so often, for months afterward, some of the lead in Whittington's body worked its way to the surface. But many pieces remain too deeply embedded to remove, including one near his heart. At 82, Whittington knows he will live the rest of his days with about 30 pieces of shot inside him. Somehow, he jokes, he can get through a metal detector without causing a commotion.

I for one didn't know that once the guy got to a real hospital, he spent a week in intensive care.

The shotgun sprayed upward of 200 birdshot pellets at Whittington, causing scores of wounds. His facial lacerations were the most dramatically bloody, but the injuries to his neck and chest were the most serious. Four days after being hit, the birdshot near his heart prompted it to beat erratically, forcing him back into the intensive care unit. Doctors said Whittington suffered a mild heart attack; he thinks it was something less, a heart "event."

Still, the injuries were more dire than previously disclosed. Whittington suffered a collapsed lung. He underwent invasive exploratory surgery, as doctors probed his vital organs for signs of damage. The load from Cheney's gun came close to, but didn't damage, the carotid artery in his neck. A rupture could have been fatal, particularly since it took the better part of an hour to transport him from the vast Armstrong ranch to the Kingsville hospital.

Yes, the guy is conservative, but "conservative" in the sense that he really believes in the bedrock of traditional conservative philosophy. He grew up hard.

He grew up in the boom-and-bust oil patch in Henderson, 140 miles from Dallas. His family struggled through the Depression, and Whittington never forgot it. His father lost his dry-goods store and cotton gin after the community suffered four successive crop failures.

Attracted by the GOP's small-government/low-tax message, Whittington shocked his family, Democrats for generations, by becoming a Republican as a young man.

I doubt that Whittington and I would find much to agree about if we found ourselves talking politics.

Whittington managed John Tower's successful 1960 bid to become the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a Senate seat in Texas. He became "social friends" with a transplanted Texan named George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, eventually working on Bush's failed campaign for the Senate in 1964. He supported another friend, future secretary of state James Baker, when he lost the race for Texas attorney general in 1978. He helped a young man named Karl Rove set up his first direct-mail firm, leasing office space to him in his building (Whittington still sits on the board of Rove's consulting firm).

But at least as presented by reporter Farhi, Whittington comes across as a man with some real principles, and real compassion. As he rose to prominence in the Texas Republican establishment, he was tapped for a series of commission-type assignments.

His most lasting work was on the state prison board from 1979 to 1985. Whittington pestered lawmakers and held public hearings to expose a series of messes: drug-running scandals, rampant cronyism, no-bid contracting and a barbaric system in which wardens permitted prisoners to discipline other prisoners. The crusade culminated in the ouster of the prison system's director.

Whittington eventually launched an initiative on behalf of nonviolent, developmentally disabled inmates, pushing the state to adopt a legal standard for determining who deserves such consideration. Whittington later aided in the legal appeals for Walter Bell, a developmentally disabled man who was on death row for 28 years for a double murder (the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down capital punishment for the developmentally disabled, leading a judge to commute Bell's sentence to life in prison). For Whittington, the issue was personal: One of his four daughters was born with such disabilities.

"Harry is a patrician Republican; he's as conservative as they come," says Scott McCown, a former state's attorney who now runs the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin think tank that advocates on behalf of the state's poor. "He came on the prison board having a pro-corrections, pro-administration stance. But he's a hard-nosed guy, and he didn't like being lied to. He raised hell. When he sees a problem, he speaks his mind. And since he's richer than God, he can afford to."

And beyond insisting that the shooting incident was nobody's fault ("'Naturally, people want to make it appear that it's someone's fault,' he shrugs"), he "bears no ill will toward Cheney ("He calls him 'a very capable and honorable man' and adds, 'He's said some very kind things to me").

Indeed there's a lot to respect about Whittington, and what's nice above all in Farhi's piece is the dimension he manages to accord his subject. We're really only interested in him for the accidental brush with history he had that day on Anne Armstrong's spread. However, Farhi gives us a real life.

To his considerable credit, at least in my book, Whittington -- although he won't say so, or talk about it at all, seems to remember only too well that Big Dick has never apologized.

[D]id Cheney ever say in private what he didn't say in public? Did he ever apologize?

Whittington, who has been talking about his life and career for hours, suddenly draws silent.

"I'm not going to go into that," he says sharply after a short pause.

Harry Whittington is too gracious to say it out loud, but he doesn't dispute the notion, either.

Nearly five years on, he's still waiting for Dick Cheney to say he's sorry.

A notion I'm hearing talked about more and more by friends and colleagues in the wake of the government response to the economic meltdown -- with highest, if not sole, priority assigned to making their bankster bankrollers whole, and lowest priority assigned to determining who might be criminally culpable and doing something about it -- is that this has become, more or less officially, a government of men and not of laws. Big Dick's shooting spree seems to me a classic example of a class of people who truly believe they're above the law, starting with the way he and his retainers succeeded to such an extent in suppressing coverage of the event and continuing with the astounding chutzpah of attempting to blame the victim, who by the way still feels sheepish about the statement he made when he was released from the hospital, seeming to apologize for being shot. Basically, he just wanted the incident to go away.

So did Big Dick, but for very different reasons. And if we hope to have a government of laws, those reasons matter.

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