While we're talking about government employees named Dick, let's revisit one who used to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. from 1969 until August 1974. That would be the one whom we knew as Tricky Dick. Hard to believe, but thirty-nine years ago today (January 23, 1973), he announced the signing of a peace agreement with North Vietnam. The conditions of the agreement were very similar to those offered by North Vietnam and the NLF back in 1969, but that detail was not mentioned by Nixon, Kissinger, or any other US official. Nor was the fact that there was little difference between the agreement signed in January 1973 and the one that North Vietnam and the NLF were ready to sign in October 1972. Of course, if the US had signed the accord in October, Nixon and Kissinger would not have been able to order the infamous Christmas bombings that took place while Americans celebrated their December holidays. Perhaps, our current Dick and his boss, Dubya, want to celebrate the Feast of St. Valentine with bombing runs that will come to be known as the Valentine's Day attack.

     But what about our Dick? Where was he in 1973? Working in the White House, that's where. He left later that year to become vice president of Bradley, Woods and Company, an investment firm. Within eighteen months, however, he was back in the White House working for the appointed president, Gerald Ford, who had assumed the job when Tricky Dick waved goodbye on the White House lawn and headed back to San Clemente and an alcohol-saturated and bitter couple of years. Unfortunately for the good name of the United States, Tricky Dick didn't stay drunk. Instead, he came back (like all vampires do) and began to publish volumes on his career. It was a career that he characterized as glorious and momentous, but was in reality bloody, imperial, paranoid, and petty.

     After Mr. Ford's term, our Dick (Cheney, that is) didn't leave government again until he had been elected to Congress five too many times, served as the head of the increasingly racist Republican Party, and helped to kill thousands of Panamanians and Iraqis as Pappy Bush's Secretary of War (Defense). And now he's back. Or at least he was during the coup of 2000 and after the terror attacks in September 2001. Where he's gone to now is anybody's guess. Me, I'm hoping for the Wal-Mart greeter theory. He can't do much damage in that position.