Dick Cheney's daughter gets top envoy post

Dick Cheney's daughter gets top envoy post
February 16, 2005

Daughters of Vice President Dick Cheney, Elizabeth, left, and Mary.
SOURCE:

Washington: Elizabeth Cheney, a daughter of the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, will become the second-ranking US diplomat for the Middle East, the State Department said.

Ms Cheney previously worked in the department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and left to work on her father's 2004 re-election campaign. She will become the bureau's principal deputy assistant Secretary of State, deputising for the assistant Secretary of State for near eastern affairs.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters on Monday that Ms Cheney would also serve as "co-ordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives" - a US-backed idea to try to spread democratic and economic reform in the region.

"Her duties will include a focus on US bilateral and multilateral efforts to support freedom, democracy and expanded education and economic opportunities," Mr Boucher said.

Reuters
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... ticket to a $1,000-a-head fundraiser featuring Vice President Dick Cheney at the ... Elizabeth H. Roberts , D-Cranston, a 47-year-old Brown University grad known ...

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Elizabeth Cheney, Deferment Baby - How Dick Cheney dodged the ...
... politics. Elizabeth Cheney, Deferment Baby How Dick Cheney dodged the Vietnam
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Elizabeth Cheney, Deferment Baby
How Dick Cheney dodged the Vietnam draft.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, March 18, 2004, at 2:09 PM PT

"[T]he Senator from Massachusetts has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security," Vice President Dick Cheney said during a March 17 visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. He was talking, of course, about John Kerry, the putative Democratic presidential nominee. During the past three years, we've all become better acquainted with Vice President Cheney's judgment and attitude toward national security, which are a good deal more hawkish than Kerry's. A widely observed irony is that the dovish Kerry saw combat in Vietnam while the hawkish Cheney accepted a series of student and family-related draft deferments. Cheney's unself-consciousness about this is (or at least was) so pronounced that in 1989 he told George C. Wilson of the Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

What Chatterbox never realized until recently, however, is that Cheney's eldest daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, likely owes her very existence to her father's avoidance of the Vietnam draft.

The Washington Post's Phil McCombs made the intimate calculations in a profile published in April 1991, when Cheney was defense secretary. The timeline:

Continue Article

Aug. 29, 1964: Dick and Lynne Cheney marry.

May 19, 1965: The Selective Service classifies Dick Cheney 1-A, "available immediately for military service."

July 28, 1965: President Lyndon Johnson says draft calls will be doubled.

Oct. 26, 1965: The Selective Service declares that married men without children, who were previously exempted from the draft, will now be called up. Married men with children remain exempt.

Jan. 19, 1966: The Selective Service reclassifies Dick Cheney 3-A, "deferred from military service because service would cause hardship upon his family," because his wife is pregnant with their first child.

July 28, 1966: Elizabeth Cheney is born.

Jan. 30, 1967: Dick Cheney turns 26 and therefore becomes ineligible for the draft.

Dedicated students of obstetrics will observe that Elizabeth Cheney's birth date falls precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service publicly revoked its policy of not drafting childless husbands. This would seem to indicate that the Cheneys, though doubtless planning to have children sometime, were seized with an untamable passion the moment Dick Cheney became vulnerable to the Vietnam draft. And acted on it. Carpe diem!

Who says government policy can't affect human behavior?

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097365/
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