Copyright independent
Accidents happen, but rarely do they end with a victim apologizing to the person who, even unwittingly, committed the offending act. But such was the case in 2006, when Dick Cheney, the sitting vice president of the United States, accompanied by members of the Secret Service, accidentally fired a shotgun blast into the face and torso of an acquaintance: Harry Whittington, then a prominent attorney in Austin, Texas, who was quail hunting with the veep. What followed was what passed for a weird news cycle in the aughts — a far cry from any scandal of the Trump era, but a punctuated moment of George W. Bush’s presidency. Cheney, whose death was announced Tuesday and was then in his 60s, was one of the most consequential vice presidents of the modern era. His oversized influence on his boss, known colloquially as “Dubya,” was the subject of the 2018 biographical satire Vice, analyzing Cheney’s rise to political power. The Adam McKay movie depicted a quiet, calculating manipulator who puppeteered the president from behind the scenes. The truth amounted to a much less sinister relationship between the men, but Cheney never escaped his image as the architect of some of America’s greatest foreign policy blunders, now including the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq as the former fell back into Taliban hands and the latter was wracked with violence by the Islamic State and its affiliates for a decade after the invasion. And the statement read by Whittington as he left the hospital a week later, was revealing at the time of the kind of politician Cheney became and the type of influence he wielded within the GOP. Whittington, who was struck in the face, neck and chest by shotgun pellets, told reporters afterwards that he was incredibly sorry for not updating them sooner on his condition, while then pivoting to a surprising move: apologizing to Cheney, and the vice president’s family, over the media’s coverage of the shooting. “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that vice president Cheney has had to go through this past week. We send our love and respect to them as they deal with situations that are much more serious than what we’ve had this week,” said the man who’d just been shot in the face. Then, in an even more effacing move, he added: “And we hope that he will continue to come to Texas and seek the relaxation that he deserves.” Talk about influence! Few people can say that after grievously injuring someone, their victim went on an extended tirade about how overworked and important they were. But it speaks to the kind of clout Cheney wielded within the GOP, especially in Texas where the Bush family also remained one of the most powerful and politically-connected clans well into the Trump era. Just to be clear, there was no private understanding between the men. This was not an act of friendship. Whittington, who died at 95 in 2023, later refused to answer and grew tense when the Washington Post asked him if Cheney ever apologized, five years later. It was clear that an apology had been expected but never materialized. “Harry Whittington is too gracious to say it out loud, but he doesn't dispute the notion, either,” the publication’s Paul Farhi reported at the time. He did, however, grudgingly tell the outlet that his injuries were far more serious than he had publicly let on, revealing that he'd suffered a mild heart attack after some of the birdshot traveled to his heart. At the time of the hunting accident, the White House came under criticism, which it batted away. Democrats suggested that the delay in revealing the shooting was a sign of the administration’s hostility to public scrutiny. A Republican senator chastised the vice president for showing poor gun safety skills. But in a truly Trumpian play — deadces before that was even a term — George W. Bush declared that Cheney’s explanation had been “strong and powerful.” "Yesterday when he was here in the Oval Office, I saw the deep concern he had about a person who he wounded,” said Bush of the man whom Cheney died before apologizing to. It was only with the rise of Trump that Cheney and Bush would see their influence wane, both with politicians and the broader social spheres of wealthy conservatives around the country. The damage caused by Trump’s pillaging of Bush and Cheney’s record in 2015 and 2016 never really went away, and the accelerated transition of the party from Bush-era neoconservatives to Trump-era paleo-conservatives and isolationists was helped along by the relative silence of both men after their departures from the White House. Cheney made his last foray into politics last year, joining his daughter, Liz Cheney — the former Wyoming congresswoman who was virtually run out of office over her opposition to Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol — in an effort to boost Kamala Harris to victory. It didn’t work, and Democratic voters seemed less than thrilled at the prospect of making their party the new home for Republicans driven out by their own tribe. In many ways, the former vice president’s errant shooting of an acquaintance is most reflective of the bubble that surrounds the American political class at all times, seemingly shielding them from accountability, consequences or criticism. Trump railed against that same system as he came to power, only to reorganize it around himself and his close allies. Dubya, whose years-earlier drunk driving arrest was made public days before his election to the presidency the first time, was happy to shield his running mate from criticism. So was Whittington, a longtime backer of the state Republican Party who clearly had no appetite in challenging two scions of that movement. In the end, the incident was a preview of the consequence-free world of the modern Republican Party, where disloyalty is the only sin and an ungracious response to one’s own shortcomings is merely a speed bump.
