WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he offered to resign three times in 2004.
That,
and many other revelations about the 46th vice president of the United
States, are detailed in Cheney’s book, “In My Time,” a tell-all memoir
that hit stores Tuesday.
“If President Bush felt
he had a better chance to win with someone else as his running mate, I
wanted to make sure he felt free to make the change,” Cheney wrote.
In
a taped interview that aired Monday night on NBC’s “Dateline,” Cheney
described the book as his “one chance to write your version of events,
your history, your story.” He said he did not set out to embarrass
former President George W. Bush, though early reviews of the book
suggest Cheney contradicts Bush’s view of crucial events that occurred
during the eight-year administration.
Cheney said
he makes “no apologies” for controversial policies — maintaining secret
prisons, wiretapping and the use of waterboarding as an interrogation
tool — that he championed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“It worked,” he told NBC’s Jamie Gangel. “It produced results.”
Cheney,
who had four heart attacks before he became vice president — the first
at age 37 — reveals in the book that he had a secret resignation letter
on hand because he thought he’d found a flaw in the Constitution.
“There’s no provision made for a situation in which the vice president becomes incapacitated,” he said.
He
also offered to resign three times. Bush dismissed the first two
immediately, Cheney said. But the third time Cheney offered, Bush took
some time to think it over.
“I really pushed hard
and said, Mr. President, you really need to sit down and think about
this,” Cheney said. “And that time, he did. And then he came back and he
said, ‘No, I’ll leave it the way it is, Dick.’ ”
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©2011
Distributed by MCT Information Services
