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CNN Saturday Morning News
The Novak Zone: Interview With Lynne Cheney
Aired December 14, 2002 - 09:29 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ARTHEL NEVILLE, CNN ANCHOR: And she's one of the most powerful and influential women in Washington, the wife of the vice president, Lynn Cheney joins Robert Novak in this week's edition of "The Novak Zone."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": Welcome to "The Novak Zone." I'm Robert Novak.
And my guest is Lynne Cheney, the second lady of the land, the wife of the vice president. And we're in her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mrs. Cheney, a lot of the young people I come in contact with in television right out of college, very eager, intelligent, they don't know American history. They don't even know who Lyndon Johnson or Dwight Eisenhower is. Is this something that I should be worried about, or am I just an old fuddy-duddy?
LYNNE CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY'S WIFE: Well, I think that what you are observing personally certainly reveals a large trend. There was a survey not long ago of 55 elite colleges and universities, this was the top 55 that "U.S. News and World Report" ranks each year. And in these top 55 colleges and universities, the seniors were surveyed. And they showed a remarkable lack of knowledge, some pretty startling gaps in knowledge.
One that I remember is, ask who Ulysses S. Grant was, they identified him as a general in the Revolutionary War.
So there is a problem with our knowledge of history.
NOVAK: You were the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
CHENEY: It was a great job.
NOVAK: ... from -- great job, 1984 to 1993. And you had a project called The American Memory, where you tried to alleviate this problem. That was, Ms. Cheney, in all due respect, that was 10 years ago. Would you say you didn't succeed, and it's...
CHENEY: Oh, I definitely would say that we haven't succeeded to the extent we would. What I did when I was at the Endowment was begin to call attention to the problem. I do think, though, that it's sort of the other side of a very positive aspect of American life. We are a future-oriented society. And that's one of the wonderful things, is that we are always looking for tomorrow, always planning for the future. And that's a good thing.
I think, though, we need to strengthen our young children, and indeed ourselves. We need to work to make our knowledge of the past stronger, for lots of reasons.
I -- it occurs to me that children who grew up without understanding that past decisions affect their lives grow up without understanding that the decisions they make will affect the future. That's a very basic need, I think, is to see oneself in a stream of time.
So that -- there are many reasons, but I offer that one at the beginning.
NOVAK: Well, Ms. Cheney, there must, there must have been a conscious decision by educators to not teach us about things like Washington crossing the Delaware and the privations at Valley Forge. Is it because the educators and the people who write our school books and the people who teach history just don't like the history of this country? Maybe they don't like this country much? Or am I being too negative? The...
CHENEY: Well, I think we did go through a period, and I think we're still at the end of that period, where there was a mistaken notion that kids knew the basic stuff, that they knew about George Washington and they knew about the Constitution and the major events and figures of American history.
But we -- what we've forgotten to tell them was the other stories, the story of Frederick Douglass, the story of the women who sought equality, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And so what we should do is focus on that, since they already knew the other stuff.
The problem is, they didn't know the major events and figures that we traditionally taught. What we need to do is teach both. You know, our kids need to know about George Washington, and they also need to know about Harriet Tubman. They need to know about the major figures, and they to know about the figures we didn't learn about when I was in school and that are such fascinating reading.
I can remember the first time I began seriously to read women's history. It was so interesting, so enlightening so see what -- you know, people who were like me, how they made the overland migration, for example, to California, and what life was like for them.
So that is an interesting and important part to teach, but we also need to teach the traditional history.
NOVAK: You were on a program not too long ago. One of the presenters got into a sort of a side issue of what we're talking about now, and that is a revisionist history, that George Washington was a slave owner, that Sam Adams was a drunk, John Adams was a very unpleasant fellow, Abraham Lincoln was a racist.
Isn't this a problem when we are facing the possibility as we sit here of the United States going into war, of downgrading our national heroes, the people we should -- that should be our role models?
CHENEY: The presenter was Peter Gibbon, who's written a wonderful book called "The Call to Heroism." And he has, I think, exactly the right approach. We need to understand that we're all human beings with mortal failings, but we also need to understand that some of us have accomplished great and good things, that Sam Adams was an amazing figure in the American Revolution...
NOVAK: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)...
CHENEY: Exactly. And that Ben Franklin was crucial in our history at so many stages, there at the Declaration of Independence, there at the creation of the Constitution, there representing the United States in Europe.
So Gibbon's point is, we need to understand that all of us have failings, but that shouldn't keep us from admiring the heroism of men and women who've contributed so much to our story and to making us what we are today.
NOVAK: Last summer, this past summer, I read for about the third time the full transcript of the Gettysburg debates. You say, Well, why don't you get a life?
CHENEY: No, that's great.
NOVAK: But I'm -- it's the kind of thing I enjoy. And I hadn't done it in many years. And I was struck by how many racist things Abraham Lincoln said. But he hated slavery. He thought it was an evil. He made that clear. And you've got to realize -- I mean, the idea is to denigrate Lincoln because he was a man of 1860s, that's a mistake too, isn't it?
CHENEY: Well, and I -- you need to read about Frederick Douglass, and how -- his interaction with Lincoln, and how he, I think, helped bring Lincoln along. And Douglass, of course, didn't think the Emancipation Proclamation went far enough. But it was certainly a significant step.
And you're exactly right. We need to -- especially for little kids, I think, not overdo the dark side of our history, not overdo the negatives in various human personalities. We are so remarkably fortunate to be Americans, and I think we can't understand how it is we came to live on this mountaintop of history that we're on unless we understand the contribution that great people like Abraham Lincoln have made.
NOVAK: And now the big question...
CHENEY: Oh, dear, I didn't know we did that. NOVAK: ... for Lynne Cheney. Ms. Cheney, you've had a remarkable career. I like to think one of the highlights of your career was that you were the -- for a long time the co-host of "CROSSFIRE SUNDAY," and you're an author, a government official in addition to being second lady of the land.
Now, I was preparing for this interview by looking at some old files, and they wanted you to run for the Senate from Wyoming a few years back. And you told the then-campaign chairman, Al D'Amato, you didn't even live in Wyoming any more.
CHENEY: Oh, that's not true.
NOVAK: Not true?
CHENEY: No, no, that's not true. But in fact, we were in Wyoming at the time, living in Jackson Hole, one of the beautiful places in this beautiful country.
No, I was -- I thought about it, actually, for a minute or two. The problem was, I wouldn't have been able to spend enough time with Dick. And I actually like Dick. You know, I've been married to him for 38 years, and I wanted to spend time with him.
NOVAK: Well, just briefly, we're just about out of time, but you do definitely live in Wyoming. You won't be the vice president's wife forever because he won't be vice president forever. Would you consider going back and running for office?
CHENEY: Well, that's an interesting question and one that certainly isn't on my radar screen right now. I'm just starting a new book, "Abigail Adams," "A Is for Abigail Adams: A Book of Amazing American Women," to go along with -- I see you have my other book here.
NOVAK: "America: A Patriotic Primer, it's very good for children as Christmas gifts in this Christmas season. And all your proceeds go to charity.
CHENEY: That's right. And, you know, maybe it's because I'm a grandmother now. I absolutely adore trying to tell the story of this amazing country of ours to little kids.
NOVAK: Lynne Cheney, thank you very much...
CHENEY: Thank you.
NOVAK: ... for being in "The Novak Zone."
And thank you for being in "The Novak Zone" this week.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired December 14, 2002 - 09:29 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ARTHEL NEVILLE, CNN ANCHOR: And she's one of the most powerful and influential women in Washington, the wife of the vice president, Lynn Cheney joins Robert Novak in this week's edition of "The Novak Zone."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": Welcome to "The Novak Zone." I'm Robert Novak.
And my guest is Lynne Cheney, the second lady of the land, the wife of the vice president. And we're in her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mrs. Cheney, a lot of the young people I come in contact with in television right out of college, very eager, intelligent, they don't know American history. They don't even know who Lyndon Johnson or Dwight Eisenhower is. Is this something that I should be worried about, or am I just an old fuddy-duddy?
LYNNE CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY'S WIFE: Well, I think that what you are observing personally certainly reveals a large trend. There was a survey not long ago of 55 elite colleges and universities, this was the top 55 that "U.S. News and World Report" ranks each year. And in these top 55 colleges and universities, the seniors were surveyed. And they showed a remarkable lack of knowledge, some pretty startling gaps in knowledge.
One that I remember is, ask who Ulysses S. Grant was, they identified him as a general in the Revolutionary War.
So there is a problem with our knowledge of history.
NOVAK: You were the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
CHENEY: It was a great job.
NOVAK: ... from -- great job, 1984 to 1993. And you had a project called The American Memory, where you tried to alleviate this problem. That was, Ms. Cheney, in all due respect, that was 10 years ago. Would you say you didn't succeed, and it's...
CHENEY: Oh, I definitely would say that we haven't succeeded to the extent we would. What I did when I was at the Endowment was begin to call attention to the problem. I do think, though, that it's sort of the other side of a very positive aspect of American life. We are a future-oriented society. And that's one of the wonderful things, is that we are always looking for tomorrow, always planning for the future. And that's a good thing.
I think, though, we need to strengthen our young children, and indeed ourselves. We need to work to make our knowledge of the past stronger, for lots of reasons.
I -- it occurs to me that children who grew up without understanding that past decisions affect their lives grow up without understanding that the decisions they make will affect the future. That's a very basic need, I think, is to see oneself in a stream of time.
So that -- there are many reasons, but I offer that one at the beginning.
NOVAK: Well, Ms. Cheney, there must, there must have been a conscious decision by educators to not teach us about things like Washington crossing the Delaware and the privations at Valley Forge. Is it because the educators and the people who write our school books and the people who teach history just don't like the history of this country? Maybe they don't like this country much? Or am I being too negative? The...
CHENEY: Well, I think we did go through a period, and I think we're still at the end of that period, where there was a mistaken notion that kids knew the basic stuff, that they knew about George Washington and they knew about the Constitution and the major events and figures of American history.
But we -- what we've forgotten to tell them was the other stories, the story of Frederick Douglass, the story of the women who sought equality, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And so what we should do is focus on that, since they already knew the other stuff.
The problem is, they didn't know the major events and figures that we traditionally taught. What we need to do is teach both. You know, our kids need to know about George Washington, and they also need to know about Harriet Tubman. They need to know about the major figures, and they to know about the figures we didn't learn about when I was in school and that are such fascinating reading.
I can remember the first time I began seriously to read women's history. It was so interesting, so enlightening so see what -- you know, people who were like me, how they made the overland migration, for example, to California, and what life was like for them.
So that is an interesting and important part to teach, but we also need to teach the traditional history.
NOVAK: You were on a program not too long ago. One of the presenters got into a sort of a side issue of what we're talking about now, and that is a revisionist history, that George Washington was a slave owner, that Sam Adams was a drunk, John Adams was a very unpleasant fellow, Abraham Lincoln was a racist.
Isn't this a problem when we are facing the possibility as we sit here of the United States going into war, of downgrading our national heroes, the people we should -- that should be our role models?
CHENEY: The presenter was Peter Gibbon, who's written a wonderful book called "The Call to Heroism." And he has, I think, exactly the right approach. We need to understand that we're all human beings with mortal failings, but we also need to understand that some of us have accomplished great and good things, that Sam Adams was an amazing figure in the American Revolution...
NOVAK: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)...
CHENEY: Exactly. And that Ben Franklin was crucial in our history at so many stages, there at the Declaration of Independence, there at the creation of the Constitution, there representing the United States in Europe.
So Gibbon's point is, we need to understand that all of us have failings, but that shouldn't keep us from admiring the heroism of men and women who've contributed so much to our story and to making us what we are today.
NOVAK: Last summer, this past summer, I read for about the third time the full transcript of the Gettysburg debates. You say, Well, why don't you get a life?
CHENEY: No, that's great.
NOVAK: But I'm -- it's the kind of thing I enjoy. And I hadn't done it in many years. And I was struck by how many racist things Abraham Lincoln said. But he hated slavery. He thought it was an evil. He made that clear. And you've got to realize -- I mean, the idea is to denigrate Lincoln because he was a man of 1860s, that's a mistake too, isn't it?
CHENEY: Well, and I -- you need to read about Frederick Douglass, and how -- his interaction with Lincoln, and how he, I think, helped bring Lincoln along. And Douglass, of course, didn't think the Emancipation Proclamation went far enough. But it was certainly a significant step.
And you're exactly right. We need to -- especially for little kids, I think, not overdo the dark side of our history, not overdo the negatives in various human personalities. We are so remarkably fortunate to be Americans, and I think we can't understand how it is we came to live on this mountaintop of history that we're on unless we understand the contribution that great people like Abraham Lincoln have made.
NOVAK: And now the big question...
CHENEY: Oh, dear, I didn't know we did that. NOVAK: ... for Lynne Cheney. Ms. Cheney, you've had a remarkable career. I like to think one of the highlights of your career was that you were the -- for a long time the co-host of "CROSSFIRE SUNDAY," and you're an author, a government official in addition to being second lady of the land.
Now, I was preparing for this interview by looking at some old files, and they wanted you to run for the Senate from Wyoming a few years back. And you told the then-campaign chairman, Al D'Amato, you didn't even live in Wyoming any more.
CHENEY: Oh, that's not true.
NOVAK: Not true?
CHENEY: No, no, that's not true. But in fact, we were in Wyoming at the time, living in Jackson Hole, one of the beautiful places in this beautiful country.
No, I was -- I thought about it, actually, for a minute or two. The problem was, I wouldn't have been able to spend enough time with Dick. And I actually like Dick. You know, I've been married to him for 38 years, and I wanted to spend time with him.
NOVAK: Well, just briefly, we're just about out of time, but you do definitely live in Wyoming. You won't be the vice president's wife forever because he won't be vice president forever. Would you consider going back and running for office?
CHENEY: Well, that's an interesting question and one that certainly isn't on my radar screen right now. I'm just starting a new book, "Abigail Adams," "A Is for Abigail Adams: A Book of Amazing American Women," to go along with -- I see you have my other book here.
NOVAK: "America: A Patriotic Primer, it's very good for children as Christmas gifts in this Christmas season. And all your proceeds go to charity.
CHENEY: That's right. And, you know, maybe it's because I'm a grandmother now. I absolutely adore trying to tell the story of this amazing country of ours to little kids.
NOVAK: Lynne Cheney, thank you very much...
CHENEY: Thank you.
NOVAK: ... for being in "The Novak Zone."
And thank you for being in "The Novak Zone" this week.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
