Cheney Family Values

6 minute read
Alex Altman / Cheyenne

Inside a Cozy Wyoming living room, Liz Cheney is putting family first. The Republican Senate hopeful opens a pitch to a wine-sipping crowd with a tale about the time her daughter Grace, now 13, heard Barack Obama say he wanted to bring accused terrorists to the U.S. for trial. “Use your brain, dude,” the girl chirped at the TV, according to her mom’s retelling. “That’s totally stupid.” The room burst into applause.

An admirable closeness has long been the defining feature of the Cheney clan. “The Cheneys have always done everything as a family,” says Bill Thomson, a Cheyenne lawyer and longtime friend who is co-chairing Liz’s campaign. Grace, a junior rodeo champion, drops in on events and stars in Liz’s first ad. The candidate’s speeches are dotted with references to her famous dad. The former Vice President waded into the race by claiming that Liz’s Republican opponent, three-term Senator Mike Enzi, lied about being an old fishing buddy of Dick’s–as low a blow as can be laid on the High Plains. A few weeks earlier, Liz’s mom Lynne tore into former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson at a charity event for refusing to sign a piece of memorabilia, which in this case happened to be a giveaway football.

But the family unity is fraying. After Liz reaffirmed her opposition to same-sex marriage during a Nov. 17 appearance on Fox News, her sister Mary, who is married to a woman, tapped out a blistering note on Facebook. “Liz, this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree,” Mary wrote. “You’re just wrong–and on the wrong side of history.”

All families have their spats and squabbles, but rarely do they become national news. The Senate campaign of Liz Cheney, designed in part to pass the political torch from the Vice President to his talented progeny, has become more like a range war. It is tearing Wyoming Republicans in two and threatens to sunder a powerful family facing the real prospect of fading from public life for the first time since the mid-1970s.

Dick and Lynne Cheney find themselves caught between one daughter’s ambitions and another’s rights. The day after Mary exploded at Liz, the parents issued a statement that seemed to side with the candidate, who is trying to court the conservative base in a solidly Republican state. “This is an issue we have dealt with privately for many years, and we are pained to see it become public,” they wrote. “Since it has, one thing should be clear. Liz has always believed in the traditional definition of marriage.”

It is not the first time the family has faced the contradiction. When he ran for Vice President in 2000, Dick Cheney defied Republican orthodoxy by backing same-sex-marriage rights. Mary Cheney, who wed her longtime partner in 2012, served as an adviser to that campaign. Four years later, George W. Bush, in a bid to galvanize movement conservatives, made a constitutional ban on gay marriage a cornerstone of his platform, while aides worked behind the scenes to put the question onto the ballot in key swing states like Ohio. Mary wavered on joining the re-election campaign but decided to do so to support her father, who was under fire for bucking the base.

Mary, who works as a political consultant outside D.C., generally keeps a low profile. Liz, by contrast, likes the spotlight. She was a fixture on the trail when Dick first ran for Congress in 1978, rattling around Wyoming in an RV, listening to eight-track tapes of the Carpenters. A decade later, her college thesis argued for expansive presidential powers in wartime, a pillar of her father’s governing philosophy. Liz prepped him for vice-presidential debates and became a national-security hawk at the Bush State Department and later on Fox News and at the foreign policy group she co-founded, Keep America Safe. After he left office, she co-authored his memoir. “You’d be hard-pressed to find any daylight at all between Liz’s and my father’s views,” Mary said in 2009. “It’s not because she’s been indoctrinated. It’s because he’s right.”

When Liz jumped into the Wyoming primary in July, her dad bequeathed the campaign some of the Bush Administration’s brightest minds and biggest donors, not to mention a network of friends and former campaign hands. The most powerful Vice President in history and an architect of everything from the Bush Administration’s tax cuts to its warrantless-wiretapping program, Cheney never made a secret of his wish to see his daughter win a Senate seat. “When I told them I was going to run,” Liz says of her parents, “they were very excited.”

But she learned there were both benefits and burdens to running as a legatee. She is fighting history–not just her dad’s controversial record but also her own Washington résumé and Enzi’s decades of service to a state that locals liken to “a small town with really long streets.” Wyoming prizes an old-fashioned style of retail politics in which candidates are comfortable “driving five hours to visit a town with a population of three,” explains Enzi, 69, a white-haired former shoe salesman who first served as a state legislator and small-town mayor.

Since moving back to Wyoming last year, Liz, 47, has adopted its habits. She’s clocked 16,000 miles (25,750 km)crisscrossing the Cowboy State to pitch herself as an uncompromising conservative. Smart and tenacious, she rattles off the merits of a smaller government and a muscular foreign policy as easily as anyone. But she is finding that what some voters want is not so much a famous name as a familiar neighbor. And she is struggling to shed the carpetbagger label. “It feels like an alien takeover,” says Liz Brimmer, a Wyoming-based Republican strategist who supports Enzi. “This is a highly engineered effort by the people who are the very face of the D.C. establishment trying to spin it as an antiestablishment campaign.”

Liz Cheney says the race is about public service, not brand or bloodlines. “There’s nothing about this that’s about legacy,” she told TIME in an interview at the Cheyenne public library a few days before the feud erupted. “I believe in the things I’m fighting for.”

Is a Senate seat worth the cost to family peace? It is likely to be months before the answer is clear. For Liz, the past may be prologue. Asked to name the chief lesson of her father’s career, she replies, “Having the courage of your convictions.”

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Write to Alex Altman at alex_altman@timemagazine.com