Dick Cheney, whose funeral will be held in Washington on Thursday, wasn’t one to cozy up with journalists. But there was a way to stop him in his tracks: bring up fly-fishing.
Assuming this tactic was mine alone, I’d mention Montana in our chance conversations, knowing that the vice president was keen on fishing the Bighorn. But his favorite fishing holes lay hidden beneath the bountiful South Fork of the Snake River near his home in Wyoming.
Among the most powerful vice presidents in American history, Cheney cherished what little privacy he could get, especially when casting a fly rod. He’d fish with close friends and even a few White House colleagues, but inviting a reporter on a float trip was simply out of the question.
Which made it all the more gobsmacking when Matt Labash, an accomplished wordsmith and self-described “fishing slut” (he and I served as election observers in Adjara, the final fortress of the former Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic), cleverly wangled his way into Cheney’s boat for a one-of-a-kind fishing trip down the Snake.
If you ask me, his resulting article, published in the conservative Weekly Standard toward the close of the Bush-Cheney second term, should be mandatory reading for journalism students, political junkies, and fly-fishermen alike.
“I like that he doesn’t seem to care about being liked,” Labash wrote right off the bat of Cheney, “which is lucky for him, since his approval rating hovers at 18 percent.”
Which seemed ironic, given the vice president was such an avid sportsman. Yet his critics in certain fish and wildlife conservation circles continuously blasted Cheney, going so far as to dub him “Darth Vader,” for working to suppress science and trashing the Endangered Species Act and Clean Air and Water Act.
Back to the story, Labash was attending a book party on the rooftop of an upscale hotel near the White House when he spotted Cheney in the crowd: “I made a beeline for him, squared up, looked him in the eye, and said, I understand you’re an avid fly-fisherman.”
“Yes,” Cheney replied.
“So am I,” said Labash (I tried the same exact line, to no avail).
“From there, we we were off,” the reporter recalled, with Cheney becoming fascinated by an experiment Labash had undertaken: catching catfish on a fly.
“He asked where I fish, and, when I gave generalities, he pressed for specifics,” he continued. “As we talked, my wife sidled up to me, elbowing my ribs for an introduction. I told Cheney this was my fishing widow. He said hello to her and that he had one, too.”
The writer, not surprisingly, acknowledged that he was angling the entire time “for an invite to fish Cheney’s home river, the majestic Snake in Wyoming—an invitation I was convinced was forthcoming, but which never materialized after Cheney was interrupted and pulled away.”
An entire year passed, and with time running out in the Bush administration Labash took another crack at hooking Cheney, proposing to his handlers that he go fishing with the vice president.
In the meantime, while covering a reception of sorts, Labash had reason to visit the vice president’s official residence and even nose around Cheney’s library. He discovered “a fly-fishing library within a library, books on every subject from entomology to minor tactics of the chalk stream to practical dry-fly fishing.”
In all, the reporter counted 37 fishing books on the shelves, and 43 more in stacks, which doesn’t include whatever books Cheney had at his homes in Wyoming and on the Chesapeake Bay. It was no wonder the Secret Service gave him the handle “Angler.”
During his confirmation process for defense secretary, Labash pointed out, Cheney told his vetters that they should be aware of his “youthful indiscretions” in Wyoming, which besides two drunk-driving arrests included being fined for fishing out of season.
“Not a catch-and-release man back then (he tells me he hasn’t killed a fish on purpose in roughly 15 years), ‘The $25 fine was not the worst part,’ he said. ‘They took my f-ing fish.’”
And there were plenty more fishing tales that Labash collected, like the White House aide who smacked Cheney on the back of his neck with an errant fly—resulting in a vice presidential yelp that brought the Secret Service rushing out from behind trees—to Cheney’s loyal group of eight friends who every year put in two days on the Bighorn before heading south for an overnight float down the South Fork.
“Dick Cheney is an excellent fisherman,” recalled his close friend Dick Scarlett, a Wyoming banking executive. “He can place a fly from 40-50 feet out, into shrubbery, in between bushes where the big fish lay. Where most people are fishing two or three feet away from the bushes so they don’t hook up, Dick can place a fly on a saucer at 40 feet.”
Sensing correctly that his work was cut out for him, Labash headed west a day early to fish solo with a guide from the same outfit Cheney used. The guide, he wrote, “is not some delicate Orvis-catalog-issue trout teapot, but a take-no-prisoners river rat. The bed of his pickup truck is littered with Twisted Tea and Budweiser empties …
“We do a 10-mile float through what is truly God’s country. It is wallpapered with wildflowers and golden willows, mountain maples and cottonwood forests, populated by bobcats, moose and black bears. Red-tail hawks and bald eagles patrol the skies overhead. More important, however, the river is thick with trout—browns and cutthroats, rainbows and hybrid cutbows—about 7,000 fish per mile.”
The fishing outfitters, Labash noted, regard Cheney as “a gentleman without pretense, who’s a pleasure to row,” and “who takes both fishing and solitude seriously, and the river is his place to escape. Other drift-boaters will often float by having no idea that they just passed the vice president of the United States.”
The sight of Cheney on the river was so unexpected, the guide continued, that he saw an Idaho Fish and Game officer come “out of the brush, walk right up to Cheney, ask to see his license, and still never put together to whom he was talking.”
Prepping him for the next day’s float trip with the second most powerful man in the free world, the guide informed Labash that the vice president always “gets the front of the boat. Second, this is pretty much his backyard. I could candy-coat it, but I’d be lying. He’s going to smoke your ass.”
Then there was the question of how much the vice president would even communicate, especially with a journalist.
“Many had warned me of Cheney’s lust for silence on the river,” Labash noted. “[Diplomat] Ken Adelman once wrote, ‘Despite pleas over the years, he adamantly refused to take me fly-fishing in Wyoming. When pressed, he finally explained, ‘You talk too much to go fly-fishing.’”
Clad in zip-off cargo pants and fly-fishing shirt, chest waders at the ready, the vice president arranged for Labash to meet him at his Jackson home so the pair could ride to the river in the backseat of Cheney’s black Suburban.
“I probably should have gone the responsible-journalist route and grilled Cheney on matters of electoral politics and world affairs. But all either of us really wanted to talk about was fishing. So we did,” Labash recalled.
“I ask him if he’s worried that our fishing trip will infringe on him getting back in time to watch that night’s festivities at the Democratic convention. He smiles an unregretful smile, and says, ‘It’s been my good fortune to go fishing at crucial times in my career.’”
Arriving at the swift-moving South Fork, Cheney winced when the reporter pulled out his tape recorder. “I don’t want to be on all day,” he said, suspiciously eyeing Labash’s “beyond-raggedy, lucky fishing cap” he wore backwards.
“‘They ever offer to buy you a new hat, Matt?’ Staying on the theme of my employers, he adds, ‘You know the only reason I agreed to this? I wanted to see what kind of reporter had the cojones to convince his editors to pay for him to come fish the South Fork.’”
As it was, Labash went fishless all morning, while “Cheney hits for the cycle: browns and rainbows, cutties and hybrids.” At one point, after the guide netted a splendid trout and was about to cut it loose, Cheney piped up: “Wait a minute, do you want to let Matt get a good look at that so he can see what he’s missing?”
“But there is another reason, of course, that Cheney is outfishing me,” Labash observed. “It’s probably the more important reason: He’s a lot better fisherman. He is a fierce caster. He has pinpoint precision with his fly, throwing sliders under branches, lopping flies over tree limbs, dropping his hopper just off the bank’s edge …
“We hit the end of our 12-mile float and … Cheney does not count his fish, though I do, obsessively (I’ve caught 869 so far this year, back when I used to catch fish). I tell him what the damage is:
“Dick Cheney: 20.
“Me. 2.”
At which point Cheney flashed “the full-on smile of an ebullient child. He shows back molars and dental work, everything. In several decades of watching him, I’ve never seen him smile this big.”
Prior to returning to Washington, Labash had lunch with Jack Dennis, a longtime friend and guide of Cheney’s who introduced fly-fishing to the likes of Arnold Palmer and Harrison Ford. On his office wall are the words of Henry David Thoreau: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.”
A committed environmentalist, Dennis opined the vice president had gotten a bad rap as a despoiler of the land and instead did things behind the scenes, like torpedoing prospective stream-polluting mines in Wyoming.
Cheney once asked the guide: “How do you think fly-fishermen view me?”
“I don’t think they view you very well, as a lot of people don’t,” Dennis replied. “I said, ‘If they all went fishing with you, that would be a different story.’”
My favorite part of the story, and perhaps the strangest moment for Dennis, as Labash wrote, “was one afternoon on the river, just days after Cheney had a heart defibrillator implanted. Dennis says Cheney was reclining in the boat with ‘his head leaned back—he’d never done anything like that. I went back to look and see if he was breathing.’
“Cheney popped open one eye and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m checking to see if you’re breathing.
“‘Well so what?’ Cheney snapped back. “What would happen if I wasn’t? Will you just not worry about me? Leave me alone and whatever happens happens. I can’t think of a better place to die than right here.’”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.