ROCK SPRINGS — Former Vice President and Wyoming Representative Dick Cheney will be remembered as one of the most powerful men in American history. However, Cheney credited an incident in Rock Springs that helped place him on the path to political leadership.
Cheney died Nov. 3 at the age of 84.
Cheney was arrested for driving under the influence in Rock Springs July 27, 1963 and spent a night in the town’s jail, which is now part of the Rock Springs Historical Museum. Cheney was 22 at the time and was arrested by Officer Overy Lemich. Cheney was fined $100. According to the National Security Archive, the Rock Springs arrest was the second of two driving while under the influence arrests Cheney had when he was 22. The first arrest took place in Cheyenne in November 1962 and resulted in Cheney having his driving privileges suspended for 30 days and forfeiting a $150 jail bond.
At the time, Cheney was working as a groundman building powerlines after he was kicked out of Yale and, as he admitted in a 2015 interview with Playboy Magazine cited by the National Security Archive, “headed down a bad road.”
“I didn’t hit anything. There were no accidents involved. I was drinking and driving, and there was no question I was guilty,” he said about the arrests.
Cheney would later mention the experience in Rock Springs as the catalyst for changing his life around. Wyofile’s obituary cites a passage in his memoir about the different trajectories he and future wife Lynne were on when he was arrested. Lynne was spending a semester in Europe and had graduated summa cum laude from Colorado College while he “was sleeping off a hangover in the Rock Springs jail.”
Following that second arrest, Cheney enrolled in the University of Wyoming and married Lynne. By 1969, he was hired as a congressional relations aide under then-Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity Donald Rumsfeld, later becoming President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff when Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense in 1975. Cheney returned to Wyoming and was elected as Wyoming’s sole representative in Congress from 1979-1989 and later served as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense and ultimately served two terms as vice president under George W. Bush from 2001-2009.
