ASPER, Wyo. - Joe Meyer remembers those days of youthful pleasures, back when he and his pal Dick Cheney knocked heads in football, hunted rabbits by the sackful, and waterskied on planks with a car towing him along the Alcova Dam aqueduct.
They shared so much, yet early on it was clear that Cheney was a cut above, a boy with an air of seriousness and a clear sense of purpose that made him stand out in the class of 1959 at Natrona County High School.
His life seemed to stay on a fast track: The senior class president went on to become White House chief of staff at age 34. The run continued with six terms as Wyoming's lone US representative, including a stint in the House Republican leadership, followed by his appointment as secretary of defense. It was in that post that Cheney coolly directed the Gulf War, earning him bagfuls of fan mail.
''He just always evidenced leadership,'' said Meyer, now Wyoming's secretary of state. ''We were into band and things, but he just seemed to be there leading things.''
Despite his early achievements, Richard B. Cheney was never elected to the White House, contrary to what some of his classmates had predicted. But now, at age 59, Cheney is getting his shot at national office, as the running mate for Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.
Cheney, the ultimate fast-starter, was picked not so much for youthful successses, but because his image today as an elder statesmen complements Bush, a late-bloomer who wandered professionally before joining the family business - politics.
With gray hair and respect inside Washington and around the world, Cheney brings a hefty resume and an aura of credibility to the ticket. They are commodities with value for the two-term Texas governor, who could come off as cocky and inexperienced.
Together, they make a ticket clearly not crafted for electoral considerations. Wyoming offers only three electoral votes - slightly more than 1 percent of the 270 Bush will need to defeat Vice President Al Gore.
''Bush needs someone to even things out,'' said Lori Millin, 30, vice chairman of the Laramie County Democratic Party. Sitting last weekend with in-laws from Norwood, Mass., in a food hall at the annual Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne, Millin said: ''He seems kind of wild, and it would be nice to have someone who's a little more straight-laced.''
The Democrat added: ''I wouldn't support Bush, but I would with Bush and Cheney. I think a lot of Wyoming Democrats would feel the same way.''
Washington long ago claimed Dick Cheney, but in his youth here amid the sagebrush, cattle ranches, and oil derricks at the edge of the Casper Mountain Range, it became apparent he had traits for a life of success.
Cheney was the oldest child of Richard and Marjorie Cheney. He worked for the US Soil Conservation Service; she was a homemaker. Born Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Neb., Cheney was followed by a brother, Robert, and a sister, Susan. Cheney is a Methodist, as is Bush.
The family moved to Wyoming when Cheney was 13, and he immediately impressed his friends and classmates at Dean Morgan Junior High School with his intellect and earnestness.
Dave Nicholas, who attended nearby St. Anthony's Catholic school and later was Cheney's best man, said: ''He was decent and everything, not serious but earnest, just straight as a die, just true. The way he handled his studies, he never shaded anything.''
Cheney spent his summers at the library, where he nurtured a lifelong love of military history and biographies.
At the time, Casper was an oil boom town of 17,000, and Cheney and his friends indulged in all its simple pleasures. There was rabbit hunting and poker games and fishing on the North Platte River, a prelude to Cheney's current passion for fly-fishing.
Proving his mettle
Cheney also was an athlete, yet as a sophomore he was considered too small to make the varsity football squad for the Natrona Mustangs. He and Meyer set about to change the coaches' minds.''We lined up for one-on-one drills and ran at each other as hard as we could four or five times,'' Meyer recalled. ''Dick was slower than a fence post, but once he got up a head of steam, he was a very good halfback.''
The two ended up making the varsity.
In high school, Cheney also found a steady girlfriend, Lynne Vincent. She was equally smart and accomplished, an expert baton twirler who was voted homecoming queen. She later became head of the National Endowment for the Humanities; today, she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Cheney earned a scholarship in the fall of 1959 to Yale University, Bush's alma mater. But once there, he did something atypical: He flunked out. ''I had a lack of direction, but I had a good time,'' he told Business Week in 1998.
Cheney came back to Casper and worked as a lineman for the power company. He gave Yale another shot, but, turned off by the East Coast, he withdrew in June 1962 and continued working until January 1963, when he began a semester at Casper College. He later enrolled at the University of Wyoming and footed his own tuition of $96 per semester, spending his junior year rooming off-campus with his old buddy, Meyer.
''Dick's a chili connoisseur,'' Meyer remembers. ''We had an iron pot, and we'd cook chili and we'd leave it on the stove for a week, and everytime we got hungry, we'd just turn on the stove and heat it up and scoop some out.''
Cheney and Lynne Vincent married in August 1964, and the following spring, he earned his bachelor's degree. In 1966, he received a master's, before heading off to the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctorate in political science. He completed all his work except his dissertation.
Cheney's college years coincided with the build-up in Vietnam, and he compiled a complicated draft history. According to a Washington Post study of his record, Cheney received four student deferments from 1963 through 1965, as well as a fifth deferment in 1966 as a ''registrant with a child or children.''
Cheney faced the greatest risk of being drafted after May 19, 1964, when he received a 1-A classification designating him ''available for military service.'' The Selective Service Administration also lifted the ban against drafting childless married men on Oct. 26, 1965.
The Cheneys' first child, Elizabeth, was born nine months and two days later, on July 28, 1966.
The Post study, conducted in 1991, found that Cheney applied for his final deferment as a registrant with child on Jan. 19, 1966, when his wife was 10 weeks pregnant. Cheney remained protected until January 1967, when he turned 26 and was no longer eligible for the draft.
''I had other priorities in the '60s than military service,'' Cheney told the newspaper in 1991.
The family moved to Washington in 1968 so Cheney could begin a one-year congressional fellowship. He impressed Republican Representative Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois, who took along his protege when he joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. A year later, Cheney became a White House staff assistant before moving on to become assistant director of the Cost of Living Council.
Cheney left the White House in 1973 to work in private business as the Watergate scandal consumed President Nixon. He returned a year later as deputy assistant to President Gerald Ford, supervising the transition to the new administration.
When Rumsfeld was appointed defense secretary, Cheney replaced him in November 1975 as Ford's chief of staff. Only 34 at the time, he became the youngest ever to hold the post.
Cheney stayed on through Ford's loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976, then became a consultant. In 1978, after Democratic Representative Teno Roncalio announced his retirement, Cheney returned to Casper to make his own bid for elective office, drawing charges of carpetbagging.
It was at that time Cheney first experienced the heart problems that have raised questions about his choice as Bush's running mate. At 37, Cheney had a mild heart attack while he and his wife were staying at Meyer's house during the summer.
''Lynne knocked at the [bedroom] door and said, `Dick's arm is tingling.' We drove him to the hospital and they said, `You had a minor episode,''' Meyer recalled.
Cheney spent six weeks recuperating but resisted talk of quitting the campaign. Instead, he persevered and beat a popular Republican - state Treasurer Ed Witzenburger - in the primary by 7,705 votes, according to Congressional Quarterly. He won the general election in a landslide, much like he would his five reelection campaigns.
Cheney had a second heart attack in 1984 and a third in 1988. On Aug. 19, 1988, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery. During the Gulf War in 1991, Cheney's doctor termed his recovery ''excellent.''
Expecting questions about the issue, Cheney underwent a full medical examination last week. Bush and his father, former President Bush, later asked a Houston cardiac surgeon, Dr. Denton A. Cooley, to review the results. Cooley told Governor Bush that Cheney was fit enough for the stress of a political campaign, according to a statement the doctor issued.
In 1983, Cheney and his wife coauthored a book, ''Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives,'' an examination of important House leaders. The congressman soon became a leader among his GOP colleagues, and in January 1988 they elected him to their number two post, House minority whip.
Cheney appeared destined for the speakership if the Republicans regain control of the House. But in 1989, President Bush nominated him for defense secretary. The president's first choice, former Texas senator John G. Tower, had been rejected by the Senate. Cheney was confirmed in less than a week.
While at the Pentagon, Cheney fought for a bigger military budget with big-ticket hardware like the MX missile and the B-2 Stealth bomber.
He also presided over a massive military restructuring that included a 25 percent cut in troops and the closing of 800 bases worldwide.
At the same time, Cheney confronted two controversies.
In March 1992, he was named along with a number of current and former representatives in the House banking scandal. He acknowledged overdrawing his account 21 times, but in a military-style briefing featuring blowups of canceled checks, Cheney showed the amounts ranged from $12 to $1,945. He also pointed out that he never went more than five days before a paycheck covered the overdrafts.
Cheney was also criticized for giving Pentagon briefings to supporters who had donated $5,000 to the Republican National Committee.
Leading push against Iraq
The Defense Department, however, also gave Cheney his greatest public exposure. He was the one who picked Army General Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the two became household figures in 1991 as they presided over Operation Desert Storm.
Cheney and Powell regularly briefed the nation, explaining the progress as 500,000 US troops and a multinational coalition repelled Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.
''He studied the facts, digested it all and executed the plan,'' Nicholas, who was Cheney's adviser to NATO and later his representative in Europe, said of his childhood chum.
Nicholas said sometimes he walked into Cheney's office and saw bags of fan mail.
Referring to later criticism when the administration halted the war short of Baghdad, Nicholas said, ''It also takes intellectual integrity not to be diverted by a lot of political considerations.''
Cheney was mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 1996, but in 1995, he took himself out of the running and accepted a job heading Halliburton Co., a Dallas oil and engineering conglomerate.
As chairman and chief executive officer of the $9 billion firm, he oversaw development of so-called smart wells that used computer assistance to identify deposits. He also worked to gain business in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region.
In April, Bush asked Cheney to lead the effort to vet potential running mates. In May, Cheney reassured Halliburton's shareholders that he would not become part of a Bush administration.
All that changed last week, when Cheney moved into contention himself with a medical examination and his decision to switch his voter registration from Texas to Wyoming. The move avoided the risk of losing Texas' 32 electoral votes because of a constitutional provision that prohibits Electoral College members from voting for a presidential and vice presidential candidate from the same state as the electors.
With the stroke of a pen Friday morning at the county clerk's office in Jackson, near his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Cheney made himself eligible to vote in the state's Aug. 22 presidential primary.
At the same time, he filled gaps in Bush's political resume and positioned himself to perhaps add that final achievement on his resume envisioned long ago by so many of his schoolmates.
Skip Larson, a high school classmate who now works for the National Park Service in Washington, recalls running into Cheney after he was elected to Congress in 1978 and hearing him say, ''If there's ever anything I can do for you, just call.''
Years later, the two met at the Wyoming State Society, a Washington social group for expatriates of the state.
''He said, `You've never asked me for anything,''' Larson recalled. ''I said, `I'll ask you one time, and that's when you're in the White House.' He laughed and said that would never happen.''
