March 14, 2007

“I look at this White House and I ask myself, how did they get so many draft dodgers in one place? The President; Dick Cheney, five deferments; John Ashcroft, six deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hassert, Rush Limbaugh – well, you know, there are a lot of people who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war. But not these people. These people loved the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it.”
                   – Robert Kennedy Jr.

A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, played football as a youth and was senior class president at his Natrona County High School in Casper, Wyoming. His sweetheart and future wife, however, was more popular – she was a state-champion baton twirler and was voted Mustang Queen her senior year. When Lynne Vincent performed her famous flaming baton twirl at public gatherings, it was quiet Dick who put the fire out backstage while she basked in the applause of center stage.

Cheney earned a scholarship to Yale University and went East for the first time, but he was asked to leave after one year because of “poor academic performance,” the university’s polite way of saying that he flunked out. He re-enrolled two more times before dropping out for good, according to Yale’s enrollment records. Jacob Plotkin, a retired MSU mathematics professor, was Cheney’s college roommate during his freshman year.

“It’s hard to flunk out of Yale. It’s something that one really has to put effort into. Yale at that time tried to make sure everybody who entered graduated,” said Plotkin. “Where others might spend some time on the weekend studying, Dick was either talking, drinking or playing cards with his football buddies.”

Like other young folks in the ‘60s, Cheney dropped in and out of college, got caught drunk driving twice in one year, and used deferments to dodge the Vietnam War draft. Unlike most young men of his era, however, Cheney sought and received a total of five deferments. In January 1959, an 18-year-old Cheney was classified by the draft board as 1A and fully fit to join the Army.

The military wasn’t drafting young men in those early years of the American misadventure in Indochina, but things were different by 1963 when Cheney was granted the first of two deferments he requested that year as a new Casper Community College student.

Dick and Lynne had impeccable timing when it came to keeping him home from the war. They married in August 1964, just three weeks after Congress authorized President Lyndon Johnson to use military force in Vietnam. A third deferment followed in October, which kept Dick safe until he graduated from the University of Wyoming in May 1965.

 At that point he was once again classified 1A, but his status as a married man made it unlikely that he would be called up. On October 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. In November Cheney started graduate school, obtained his fourth deferment, and announced that he and Lynne were pregnant.

Cheney’s final “hardship” deferment granted him 3A status in January 1966, which exempted men with children. The following year Cheney turned 26 and passed the age limit to be drafted. In a 1989 interview with The Washington Post, when asked about his unusual total of five deferments, Cheney replied:
“I had other priorities in the ‘60s than military service.”

But at the time of his confirmation hearings as defense secretary, when Cheney was asked by an interviewer about American involvement in Vietnam, he said, “Was it a noble cause? Yes, indeed, I think it was.”

Rob Lafferty, former editor of Haleakala Times, lives in Oregon and writes regularly on the outrages of national and international politics.

Rob Lafferty