When did we agree to forgive Dick Cheney? Because I would have liked a vote, and I would have liked a roll call, and I would have liked at least a non-binding sense-of-the-Senate resolution before we all got into our good coats and went to the memorial.
Eliza had us over Sunday night — duck, the good Burgundy, three Senate spouses and a bipartisan lobbyist who examined his cufflink whenever Falluja came up, which was never, because Falluja did not come up.
By the time the news broke Monday morning, the eulogies were already drafted. Men I have known since the second Bush administration, men who once used the words “war” and “crime” in close enough proximity to count, were suddenly composing tender paragraphs about his deep love of country and his quiet decency at home. One of them emailed me the Times obit with the subject line “End of an era,” as though the era had ended on a high note.
The reframing happened in real time. By noon he was “complicated.” By two he was “the last grown-up Republican.” By four someone on a podcast I will not name had compared him to Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus.
The trick, of course, is the 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, which has apparently been graded as sufficient to launder thirty years of policy. We are a country that grades on a curve so generous it has stopped being a curve and started being an apology note.
At dinner I tried — I really did — to ask whether anyone at the table remembered what the man had actually done with the office. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” The bipartisan lobbyist said the duck was extraordinary. A Senate spouse offered that the late Vice President had been “kind to staff,” which is the reflexive Washington kaddish, a prayer recited over every résumé in this town regardless of contents.
My sister-in-law Judy works at the National Archives and tells me the Cheney papers are already being prepped — the unredacted sections, anyway. There is, she says, a great deal that is not in the unredacted sections. I asked when the public would see the rest. She said her supervisor’s supervisor said “eventually,” which is the longest word in the federal vocabulary.
This is how it works now. We do not litigate; we curate. The dead man becomes whatever the room needs him to be, and the room on Sunday needed a Serious Republican, a category we have begun inventing retroactively whenever the present embarrasses us.
Eliza served a tarte tatin. The bipartisan lobbyist asked for the recipe. Someone said it was the best meal of the fall. We did not, at any point, say the word Iraq. We called it Sunday dinner, and we agreed it had been lovely, and we sent our regards to the family.