A Very Cheney Valentine's Day

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Former Vice President—and hopeless romantic—Dick Cheney.

Valentine’s Day and Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney and Valentine’s Day. Think of one and you’ll inevitably think of the other.

So who better to explain to us the true meaning of Valentine’s Day than Cheney’s paramour, Lynne Cheney? Campus Progress scored an exclusive interview with Mrs. Cheney.

LYNNE CHENEY: I’ll always remember the first Valentine’s Day after I met Dick. That’s when he “made his move,” as young people say today.

So it’s Valentine’s Day of 1968—a Friday, I think—and I’m alone at the bus stop near my house. A few minutes before the bus is supposed to arrive, a truck rolls up.

A split second later, three men in all-black outfits and ski masks are wrestling me to the ground, duct-taping my limbs together, tying a sack over my head, and throwing me into the back of the truck.

The truck started driving around like crazy! I couldn’t see where I was going because of the sack, but luckily I was chained to the floor so I didn’t flop around too much—just a few nicks and scrapes and a broken collarbone. I was terrified, of course.

Why were these people kidnapping me? But in the back of my mind a little voice said, “Lynne, you do remember it’s Valentine’s Day, right?”

Then I thought of Dick, and despite the fact that I had just been kidnapped and was in a van careening off to heck-knows-where, a smile crept across my face—or it would have, if they hadn’t gagged me.

Several hours later we arrived at our location, and when they pulled off the sack I found myself in a small cellar filled with cold water up to my knees.

There was a single chair to sit in, but I could barely see it because the room was so dark. I sat there for a few hours and thought about how I could escape, but the door was big and metallic and wasn’t about to budge.

A couple hours later, a song came on some sort of PA system: “Love Letters In The Sand” by Pat Boone! It had come out the previous year and was one of my favorites. This was when I started to suspect that the whole thing had been orchestrated not by a heartless psychopath, but by Dick.

I still wasn’t sure, though. What I did know was that whoever was responsible knew how much I loved that song, because they played it non-stop, at a very high volume, for a very long period of time.

I didn’t have a watch and lost all sense of how long it had been, but it was somewhere in the range of 48 or 72 hours, give or take. I slept when I could and occasionally someone would open a little peephole in the door and drop a bag of dog biscuits into the water. I ate them ravenously.

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