On purely genetic grounds, I was always considered to be a Republican in Wyoming and had worked for several years as a precinct captain in Sublette County. In 1978, I was elected as the chairman of the Republican Party in Sublette County, and I went to the Republican state convention in June.
Alan Simpson, an old family friend who was about to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Wyoming, said, “I’ve got a guy here I want you to meet and consider working for. I don’t think you’re going to like him because he’s too smart by half. But Dick Cheney does know how to deal with the federal government. He can play fuck ’em with anybody in Washington, D.C., and he cares just as much about protecting Wyoming as you do.”
That was precisely what I wanted in a state where 78 percent of the land was controlled by the federal government, which meant that somebody other than the people who lived there were in charge and rarely making decisions that anybody there agreed with.
I met with Cheney, and I wasn’t predisposed to like him on the strength of what Alan Simpson had said but I was prepared to swallow it and act like I did. He knew who I was, but I think he treated everyone like they were less than him, and in some respects, they were. Dick Cheney is one of the two smartest men I’ve ever met, the other being Bill Gates. He could take you on a devastatingly rapid tour of all the weak points in your arguments. That didn’t mean he was right, but it sure meant that he could show you where you were wrong.
After having served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the White House, Cheney had run Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. In great part, Dick’s motivation in running for Congress from Wyoming was his desire for legitimacy.
As is almost always the case in Wyoming, that particular election was decided in the Republican primary. I began working for him as his western Wyoming campaign coordinator with some enthusiasm because he seemed like a crisp unit and I could see launching him on Washington and getting everything we wanted. Having already been the éminence grise for the better part of the Ford administration, Dick would have a hell of a lot more standing in Congress than any other freshman representative from Wyoming, and therefore be able to do more for us in Washington than anyone else ever had. To be honest, I didn’t do a great deal for him during that campaign, but that was partly because it was haying season on the ranch.
After Dick got elected, he was a fierce advocate for Wyoming, and we worked together on a lot of issues, both at home and in D.C. At the time, I was president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the largest homegrown conservation group in the state. We were not a preservation group; rather, we believed there were many uses of the federal ecosystem that could be accessed by humans without diminishing their biological integrity. But we did not wish to be trapped in the long-running battle between the urban professional class and the rural working class, which is far too often where environmental battles get disputed.
I’d actually first gotten involved in all this when I returned to Wyoming in 1971. At the time, the El Paso Natural Gas Company and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had come up with the bright idea of blowing up five separate 100-kiloton nuclear devices right below Pinedale so they could shatter the entire Pinedale Anticline formation and then begin doing wide-scale fracking there.
I helped stop this with some cowboy theater. Floyd Bousman, a central-casting rancher as well as a man of great probity, and I went on the Today show together, and we basically just deep-sixed the entire plan. There was a whole community effort behind stopping it, and President Richard Nixon promised that if we came to Washington, we would be given the opportunity to meet with James Schlesinger, who was then the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
By the time we got to D.C., Nixon had just made Schlesinger the secretary of defense, and his replacement at the AEC, Dixy Lee Ray, refused to meet with us. The truth was that they were scared, and they had good reason to be because after that project got shut down, there was no more discussion about the nuclear stimulation of natural gas.
After Dick Cheney took office, our biggest concern was the glut of new oil production in the Jonah Field down below Pinedale that was going to release a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. We were diametrically opposed to that because we were already getting about as much acid rain as we could take, or at least that was how it seemed to me.
Dick wanted to know why that was, and I explained that there were three giant copper smelters along the Mexican border. In cooperation with the Natural Resources Defense Council, we had proven a direct correlation between production at those smelters and acid rainfall levels in the mountains. Although the smelters were quite far away, the stuff would get way up into the atmosphere, and then solar conditions would turn it all into sulfuric acid. Cheney was appalled to find out this was happening and got right on board with us. Within a short period of time, all three plants were shut down. Dick’s power in Washington was that he knew how to get shit done.
Even back then, there was all this prissy bullshit about nature and what nature wanted. As far as I could tell, nature just wanted to be left alone as much as possible and otherwise it didn’t give a shit. For me, the most important issue was to vouchsafe the quality of life for the habitat. That was the only thing I wanted to focus on. I didn’t care if you were bait fishing or fly-fishing just as long as you were taking care of the habitat.
As a result I found myself constantly dealing with class warfare by another name. When Congress was about to pass a Wyoming wilderness bill that would have put additional land under federal control, a whole bunch of snowmobilers were distressed by the prospect that they would no longer be allowed to go into what would now be a designated federal wilderness area. So I came up with the bright idea of having an additional category of federal wilderness where people could snowmobile during certain months because all the wildlife would be asleep and the only animals who would actually get disturbed were cross-country skiers. But of course the skiers were very disturbed. That was what I meant by class warfare: The cross-country skiers were mostly young urban professionals, whereas the people who liked to ride snowmobiles were kind of rough and tumble and lower middle class.
In the end, Cheney got my new designation put into effect, but in the process, both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society made me into their leading enemy. If you go to the middle of the road, chances are good that you will get run over.
Another ongoing issue at the time was that unscrupulous developers were dividing large chunks of motherless sagebrush into forty-acre tracts without granting a right of way to others. The entire state was rapidly becoming more and more yuppified because all these decisions were being made by the federal government in Washington rather than by locals in Wyoming.
During this period, I watched Wyoming change around me, and so I tried to amplify greatly the idea that what we wanted was “Wyoming on Wyoming’s Terms,” which had been a founding idea of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. By then, Jackson Hole had started to make Aspen look like a good start. When I was born in Jackson Hole, there had been only one doctor in the entire town.
But it was so beautiful there and you could ski and so it went. I always felt that the guy riding a bucking horse on the state license plate was anyone who was trying to stay on top of Wyoming.