Washington – Vice President Dick Cheney broke a four-day silence on Wednesday about his accidental shooting of a hunting partner, saying he took full responsibility for the incident while vigorously defending his decision to delay releasing news about it until the next day.
“Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,” Cheney said, appearing a bit shaken in a hastily arranged interview on Fox News in which he provided his version of events in a just-the-facts monotone.
Cheney’s decision to submit to an interview was an effort to contain the political fallout on him and try to bring to an end an episode that has knocked the entire White House off stride.
But it did not obscure the tensions that have bothered the administration since the accident Saturday. In a sign of disagreement at the very top, the White House signaled that President Bush wished Cheney had made the news public more quickly.
Answering questions from Brit Hume, Cheney said that he consumed “a beer at lunch” on Saturday under an old oak tree but that the accident occurred hours later and “nobody was under the influence” of alcohol.
He said no one had intended to blame the hunting partner, Harry Whittington, for being in the line of fire after coming up unannounced about 30 yards from Cheney.
Whittington, 78, was described as being in stable condition after a minor heart attack Tuesday in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Cheney turned from a tone of regret – “It was one of the worst days of my life” – to one of defiance when questioned about the way he chose to disclose the shooting.
Cheney said that he delayed making the news public because “this was a complicated story” and that he would do so again. It was more important to contact members of Whittington’s family, he said, than to get the story out to the public immediately.
Hours before Cheney taped the interview, White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested to reporters on Air Force One that Bush believed the matter should have been handled differently. McClellan said that when he said, as he first did Monday, that “you can always look back at these issues and work to do better,” he had been “speaking on behalf of the White House and the president.”
It was a rare hint of a split between the president, who prizes loyalty and discretion, and the vice president, who has always tried to exert his considerable influence behind the scenes. Two White House officials, insisting on anonymity, said Cheney had not been eager to talk.
Cheney arranged to be interviewed by Hume, a journalist with whom the vice president has long felt comfortable. His approach to the interview was to deal with the accident as he might deal with a policy decision that turned out badly and to accept responsibility as a way of moving on.
“You can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that’s the bottom line, and there’s no – it’s not Harry’s fault,” Cheney said under polite but persistent questioning. “You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”
Asked why the White House had made no announcement of the incident, even though it maintains instant communications with Cheney’s entourage and has a multimillion-dollar press operation, Cheney said that he had had “no press person” with him. So he agreed that the ranch owner should put out the story, figuring that wire services would pick it up and disseminate it.
By Cheney’s account, he realized that Whittington was standing off to the side and in the line of fire just as he squeezed the trigger. A bird was flushed out of the brush, Cheney said, and he recalled swinging to his right to follow it.
“I turned and shot at the bird and at that second saw Harry standing there,” Cheney said. “I didn’t know he was there.”
“You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?” Hume asked.
“Well, I saw him fall, basically,” Cheney said. “It had happened so fast.”
The vice president said Whittington, dressed in orange hunting gear and wearing protective glasses, had been standing in a slight gully with the setting sun directly behind him. “That affected the vision, too, I’m sure,” Cheney said.
After Whittington fell, Cheney rushed over and found him on his back, conscious but bleeding and stunned.
“The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling,” Cheney said.