1969: Cheney Hired by Rumsfeld to Serve as Aide

Dick Cheney. [Source: Boston Globe]Dick Cheney, a long-term college student who avoided the Vietnam War by securing five student deferments [Washington Post, 1/17/2006] and now a Congressional aide, is hired by Donald Rumsfeld, who had been a congressman but resigned to run the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Cheney is a young staff assistant to Representative Bill Steiger (R-WI), who took Cheney under his wing and taught him what he knew of the ins and outs of Washington bureaucracy. There are two versions of how Cheney comes to Rumsfeld’s attention. Rumsfeld sends a letter to Steiger asking for advice on how to run the OEO. The official story has Cheney spying the letter and writing a ten-page policy memo on how to run a federal agency, a memo that so impresses Steiger that he recommends Cheney to Rumsfeld’s attention. Authors Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein will write, “A more plausible version has Steiger (who died in 1978) assigning Cheney the task of collecting information on the OEO for Rumsfeld.” Either way, Rumsfeld is so taken with the memo that he hires Cheney on the spot. Rumsfeld, who is also an assistant to President Nixon, takes Cheney with him to morning and afternoon meetings in the White House. Cheney later says these meetings taught him “what [a president] has to do in the course of a day.” [Dubose and Bernstein, 2006, pp. 24-25]