The Puppeteer

Richard Cheney, Vice President of the United States

Jan 30, 1941 Born in Lincoln, NE.

Nov 1962 Arrested for drunk driving.

1963 Second arrest for drunk driving.

1963 Flunks out of Yale.

Aug 29, 1964 Marries high school sweetheart, Lynne Anne Vincent.

Oct 1965 The Selective Service subjects married men without children to the draft. Cheney seeks a 3-A deferment, for a person with dependents, when Lynne is ten weeks pregnant. Cheney quoted in 1989: "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

1965 Graduates from the University of Wyoming with a BA in political science.

1966 Completes MA in same field.

1968-1970 While working as a congressional fellow for Wisconsin Rep. William Steiger he meets Donald Rumsfeld, then director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Rumsfeld is so impressed by a memo written by Cheney that he offers him a job as his special assistant.

1971 Becomes White House Assistant and later the Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council where he stays until 1973.

Nov 1975 Appointed Ford's Chief of Staff, a position he holds for two years.

1977 With the election of Carter, Cheney returns to Wyoming to run for its only Congressional seat. During the campaign, he suffers a heart attack. Ironically, the heart attack helps the Cheney campaign, giving voters something to associate him with.

1988 Suffers two more heart attacks and undergoes quadruple heart bypass surgery.

1989 Appointed Secretary of Defense by George H. W. Bush, where he presides over Operation Just Cause (the invasion of Panama) and Operation Desert Storm.

1990 While in office, he meets several times with executives from the Halliburton Company. He recommends that the Pentagon pay Halliburton $9.9 million to provide a strategy for providing support for troops.

1991 Halliburton is awarded a contract to do all the work needed to support the military during the next five years in accordance with the plan it had itself drawn up.

1992 With the Clinton victory, Cheney leaves Washington and establishes a Political Action Committee. Records from the FEC show that Cheney's PAC contributors include executives at several of the companies that have since won the largest government contracts in Iraq. Among them: Thomas Cruikshank, Halliburton's C.E.O. at the time; Stephen Bechtel, whose family's construction-and-engineering firm now has a contract in Iraq worth as much as $2.8 billion; and Duane Andrews, then senior vice-president of Science Applications International Corp., which has won seven contracts in Iraq.

1995 Cheney is named CEO of Halliburton and capitalizes on his contacts to secure overseas business for the firm. Under Cheney, the company evades U.S. sanctions and does business with Saddam Hussein using the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

June 23, 1998 Cheney in a speech at the Cato Institute: "The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Spring 2000 Heads George W. Bush's Vice-Presidential search committee. He picks himself. He resigns as CEO of Halliburton after having earned $44 million dollars. Although he has said that he "severed all my ties with the company," he continues to collect deferred compensation worth approximately $150,000 a year, and he retains stock options worth more than $18 million. He announces that he will donate proceeds from the stock options to charity.

Jan 20, 2001 Inaugurated as Vice President.

2001 Serves as one of the most hawkish members of the Bush administration, forming an Energy Task Force which draws up plans to invade Iraq even before 9/11.

Aug 26 2002 Cheney: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Mar 16, 2003 On Meet the Press, he declares: "We know that based on intelligence, that (Saddam Hussein) has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts (acquiring nuclear weapons)... And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

2003 The Bush administration quietly gives Halliburton a noncompetitive contract for up to $7 billion to rebuild Iraq's oil operations. The company is subsequently accused of overcharging the government by as much as $61 million in the course of buying and transporting fuel from Kuwait into Iraq. Cheney refuses to discuss his relationship with Halliburton with the media.