NEWSWEEK COVER: Cheney's Secret World Behind The Shooting Furor

NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- A few weeks after 9/11, Newsweek has learned, Vice President Dick Cheney worried that he and his family and his staff might have been exposed in an anthrax attack. According to knowledgeable former officials, a mysterious letter turned up at the vice president's mansion. (A former senior law-enforcement official recalled that sensors went off.) The alarm turned out to be false. Still, to be safe, Cheney and his entourage began taking Cipro, the powerful antibiotic. The story was hushed up. (Cheney's office referred Newsweek to the Secret Service, which declined to comment.) In the February 27 Newsweek cover story, "Cheney's Secret World," (on newsstands Monday, February 20), Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas examines Cheney's private world, his relationship with President Bush, and how last week's hunting accident once again drew attention to the unusual nature of Cheney's power. He remains by far the most powerful vice president in history, and one of the most secretive and mysterious public officials to ever hold such high office, Thomas writes.

The night of the shooting of 78-year-old Harry Whittington in a hunting accident, Cheney sat alone on the porch of his guesthouse, saying very little as others came and went. "He was shaken, crushed, miserable," his host, Katharine Armstrong, tells Newsweek. "I could have gotten up and wrapped my arms around the vice president." But she didn't; no one did. (Lynne Cheney had not accompanied her husband on the trip.)

Katharine Armstrong accompanied Cheney on the shoot and described the scene to Newsweek: It was late afternoon, and the hunters were ready to call it a day. Whittington, a prominent Austin lawyer and big-time GOP donor, had bagged two birds with two shots. "Great shot, Harry, you got a double!" called out Katharine. While Whittington went off with his dog and his guides to find the dead birds, Cheney and Pam Willeford, the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and another major GOP donor, went ahead to look for another covey of birds. Cheney spotted a bird flying behind him, swung around with his Italian-made 28-gauge shotgun toward the setting sun, and pulled the trigger. Whittington, wearing a regulation orange vest, was approaching out of a slight gully, some 30 yards away.

Armstrong, watching from an off-road vehicle about a hundred yards away, saw Whittington fall. A team of Secret Service agents bolted out of the car and ran past her, one of them shouting an expletive. Gun in hand, Cheney rushed over to the fallen Whittington. Later, the vice president rode back with Armstrong. "You'd have to be an idiot not to see what the poor man was going through," recalled Armstrong. "It was very quiet. I remember leaning forward and squeezing him on the shoulder." At one point, Cheney said, "I never saw him."

That night, according to a senior White House official who refused to be identified discussing a sensitive matter, Cheney did not speak to either Bush or the White House staff or his own press people, Newsweek reports. He did speak with David Addington, his chief of staff and former lawyer who is a strong proponent of executive power and keeping secrets. In Washington, White House staffers were quietly urging Cheney's staff to somehow go public with the shooting. But President Bush never picked up the phone to call Cheney, either to console or to offer counsel.

Shortly after 8 a.m., a local deputy sheriff arrived at the ranch to take a statement from Cheney. By then, it was clear the story could not be contained. Cheney and Katharine Armstrong talked about how to get the story out. "What do you want me to do?" Armstrong asked. "What do you feel comfortable doing?" Cheney replied. Armstrong knew a reporter at the local paper, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Powell understood hunting and had written a sensitive and favorable obituary of her father the year before. Unfortunately, Armstrong couldn't find Powell on her cell phone, and it was nearly 2 p.m., after much back and forth between Armstrong and the paper, that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times finally put a short story up on its Web site.

The president had met with Cheney privately on Monday morning at the White House before the daily intelligence briefing. According to a White House aide speaking, as usual, anonymously, Bush listened closely and watched Cheney's body language to see how emotional the accident had been for someone not given to public displays of feeling. "The president wanted to give him some room to handle this," the senior aide tells Newsweek. "The President could visibly tell this was weighing heavily on him and he felt, in his judgment, that he should not push him too hard."

Cheney's hunting friends, who describe him as a crack shot (the veep has downed as many as 70 pheasants in a single day) as well as a by-the-book and safety-conscious hunter, don't believe he will permanently lay his gun down. "You have to learn from these things, and that's the kind of hunter he is," says Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a close friend. "He'll be back. He'll be out there as soon as he can. It's in his blood."

(Read cover story at http://www.newsweek.com/.)

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