Free In My Time by Dick Cheney

professors, who tried to keep their meetings private and had largely succeeded. Although I had been a student at the university for three years, I’d never known about the group. When I came to campus with the visiting congressmen, the chairman of thepolitical science department got us an invitation to sit in on one of their sessions.
    They set some ground rules: We weren’t allowed to ask questions or say anything; we could only observe. The faculty in the room that day had a long list of concerns—about students, about the administration, about the chaos—but no one addressed the larger context. As we met, college campuses all across the country were in an upheaval, and it was a traumatic time in American politics. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the year before; the war in Vietnam was raging. We’d just lived through the Tet Offensive, the presidential election of 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run, and the election of Richard Nixon. There were many incredibly intelligent people in that room whose scholarly achievements had given the University of Wisconsin its sterling reputation. But the meeting could hardly have been further removed from the experience I was having in Washington, and I was beginning to realize that it was the political life that I preferred.
    Back in D.C., the congressmen briefed the president on their campus visits and issued a public report that offered a number of ideas, including lowering the voting age to eighteen. While condemning violence on campuses, the group stood united behind the idea of “no repressive legislation,” and the powers that be in Washington seemed to listen, because the move to deny federal aid died.
    There were a few footnotes to our visit to the Wisconsin campus. Six months after we saw Fred Hampton at the SDS rally, he was killed in a police raid on a West Side Chicago apartment. The next summer in Madison, a van loaded with explosives blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center in Sterling Hall, where as a student I had often used the computer in off-hours when the time was cheap. The four student bombers had chosen the middle of the night, thinking that the building would be deserted, but a graduate student with a wife and three young children was there working. He was killed and three others seriously injured.
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    AFTER ONLY A COUPLE of months of working for Steiger, it was, according to APSA rules, time to begin planning for the switch to the other house and the other party. Having begun the fellowship with a Republican congressman, I would be expected to complete it with a Democratic senator. In my case, it wouldn’t be just any Democratic senator, because there was a slot waiting for me in Ted Kennedy’s office.
    Ordinarily this half-and-half arrangement made great sense. Most fellows were assigned to a member of the staff and given the kinds of projects that could be completed in a couple of months; few had any direct contact with the boss except in an occasional staff meeting. But Steiger had kept me working closely with him from my first day on the job. I didn’t want to leave such a unique position just when I was starting to get up to speed.
    I had a good relationship with Bob Bates, the APSA intern assigned to Senator Kennedy’s office, and I knew that he felt the same way about working there. He had been assigned to the press secretary and had been given some significant responsibilities. We had lunch and hatched a plot to make the switch on paper and show up for a day at our “new” jobs before returning to the old ones.
    It took another lunch (and a couple of martinis) to convince the APSA program director that our intentions were as pure as our logic was sound. After I met briefly with Senator Kennedy, who was polite but distracted, and Bob Bates met with Steiger, each of us went back to the offices where we had started our fellowships. I never really worked for Senator Kennedy, though for the