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February 14th, 2006 1:11 am
Cheney and shooting victim were hunting illegally, officials say
By Dave Michaels and Todd J. Gillman / Dallas Morning News
DALLAS - Vice President Dick Cheney was hunting illegally - without the required $7 stamp on his license for quail - when he accidentally shot one of his hunting partners, Texas Parks and Wildlife officials said Monday.
And so was Harry Whittington, 78, who was recovering Monday from a shotgun blast to the face, neck and chest.
In its report, the state agency that oversees hunting and fishing said it found that neither Cheney nor Whittington had purchased the game bird stamp required to hunt quail in Texas, although both had valid hunting licenses. Both will get warning citations, and there will be no fine or other penalty.
Cheney's office said Monday he hadn't realized he was lacking the proper stamp and has since sent a $7 check to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"I don't know how they missed it," said Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Mayfield. A statement from Cheney's office said his staff had asked for applicable permits and would "take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules."
Cheney has not commented publicly about the accident, which took place on the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch in Kenedy County on Saturday afternoon.
The incident dominated cable TV, radio and talk shows Monday and provoked heated exchanges between the White House press corps and Bush press secretary Scott McClellan on the nearly 24-hour delay in disclosing the accidental shooting.
McClellan said Cheney's first priority - and that of the White House - was to ensure that Whittington got proper medical care, though he had no ready explanation for why that precluded public disclosure.
He said Bush aide Karl Rove told the president about 8 p.m. Saturday that Cheney had shot someone, and McClellan learned that night from the White House Situation Room "that there had been a hunting accident, and that is was a member of the vice president's hunting party." More details emerged in a 6 a.m. Sunday call from aides, and McClellan said he urged the vice president's office to get the news out "as quickly as possible."
Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III said he knew about the incident Saturday evening and decided then not interview witnesses based on information from others that the shooting was accidental.
Bush said nothing about it when he passed reporters at church Sunday morning, and no one from the White House staff discussed it with the national media until that afternoon, nearly 24 hours later.
"The vice president thought that Mrs. Armstrong should be the first one to go out there and provide that information to the public, which she did. She reached out early Sunday morning" to the local newspaper in Corpus Christi, McClellan said.
Joel Goldstein, an authority on the vice presidency and a law professor at St. Louis University, said the incident is ready-made for late-night comics, noting that apart from the famous duel in which Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, "you don't think about the vice president going around shooting people."
That alone can hurt both Cheney and the administration, he said, adding, "This is just going to make him more of a lightning rod-slash-laughingstock."
But the real damage, he said, comes from the delay in revealing the incident. The benefit of avoiding mention on the Sunday morning's talk shows, he said, was far outweighed by the fact that it fuels perceptions of a vice president "obsessed with secrecy."
He cited the Cheney-led energy task force, the "time spent in undisclosed locations," the vice president's role in the domestic wiretapping policy and the fact that his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has been implicated in leaking the name of a CIA officer to discredit her husband.
On Monday, the third hunter in Cheney's hunting party said that she believes Cheney was not at fault.
"We really thought he (Whittington) was way back behind us," said Pamela Willeford, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland since October 2003.
She was on a brief vacation visiting her husband, Dr. George Willeford, III, a gastroenterologist in Austin. Dr. Willeford was also hunting at the Armstrong ranch but in a different field at the time of the shooting about a mile away.
She said Whittington was perhaps 90 feet away when the vice president shot him, as he was tracking a quail that had flown up and dipped back down, and only she, Cheney and Whittington were hunting at the time.
Two others were waiting in a car nearby - Katharine Armstrong and Serita Hixon - in keeping with a safety rule that limits the number of hunters to three at a time, she said.
"The three of us were out of the vehicle hitting a covey," she said. "Harry Whittington dropped back to pick up a bird he'd shot. The vice president and I moved on to shoot another covey and unbeknownst to us Harry had picked up a bird and caught up with us. He had walked up and we didn't realize that he had caught up with us," she said.
"He was back behind us and we turned off to the left to shoot another covey ... The bird came up and was going back down and you know how you swing on it, with your gun, following a bird," she said.
Mrs. Willeford said she'd hunted once before with Cheney and would do so again.
"Absolutely," Mrs. Willeford said. "He's a great shot. He's very safety conscious. This is something that unfortunately was a bad accident and when you're with a group like that, he's safe or safer than all the rest of us."
She said she was surprised at the hubbub stemming from the delay in putting out word of the incident.
"The focus was on Mr. Whittington and his well being. There was no intention not to share the pertinent info at the proper time," she said, adding that Cheney never consulted with her over how the handle the incident.
Armstrong said she made the decision to inform the Corpus Christi Caller-Times about the accident on Sunday. Armstrong and her mother, Anne Armstrong, were too occupied with tending to Whittington and worrying about his condition to make it public on Saturday, she said.
She said she spoke to Cheney on Sunday and he agreed with her decision.
"I said, `Mommy, this important news. This needs to get out,'" Katharine Armstrong said. "We ran it by the vice president and he was very mindful of his role as a guest. He said something along the lines of, `You all do whatever you are comfortable with.'"
Cheney stayed at the Armstrong Ranch on Saturday night.
"We had dinner and went to bed," Katharine Armstrong said. "We were all very worried about Harry. That was the main thing on our mind."
Sally (Whittington) May said her father does not recall a lot of the incident, nor was he involved in how or if information about the incident was released: "He didn't know at the time if he was going to the hospital or the mortuary."
The doctors were back around Monday morning. They have mostly been concerned with injuries to his throat.
She said her dad is back to joking.
"One of the surgeons said, `We'll get this BB from near the liver, and go ahead and get that other one at the same time.' The surgeon looked at him and said, `that way we'll kill two birds with one stone.' And he said, "I consider that a poor choice of words.'"
Kenedy County investigators on Monday determined that the shooting was an accident after interviewing their last witness and said "there was no alcohol or misconduct on anyone's part."
But questions remained as to why Cheney was not interviewed on Saturday.
Chief Deputy Gilbert San Miguel suggested he always knew where the vice president and the other witnesses were.
"We were always in contact with Secret Service," he said.
Salinas said he decided Saturday night not to send anyone to the ranch and added that he was relying on information from others that it was an accident.
"If I wanted to go in there, we would have gone in there," said Salinas. "If someone called and told me there was a shooting and they didn't think it was an accident, I'd have five or six people on the ranch."
Chief San Miguel returned to the ranch about 8 a.m. Sunday and interviewed Cheney and other witnesses, Salinas said.
"They've cooperated," he said. "They didn't treat us like backdoor law enforcement. They didn't hide anything or try to coerce anybody to say anything."
Cheney "felt kind of bad" about the accident, Chief San Miguel told Sheriff Salinas, but everyone was calm, Sheriff Salinas said.
"It's just another accident," Salinas said. "But of course it' s the vice president. Nobody's perfect."
The other hunters present on Saturday included ranch manager Anne Armstrong; Whittington's wife, Merce; Ambassador Willeford; and her husband, George "Boots" Willeford. Anne Armstrong's two daughters, Katharine Armstrong and Serita Hixon, were there. So was Hixon's husband, Bob.
Whittington shot two birds, which he left to retrieve and put into a truck, Katharine Armstrong said.
As Whittington re-approached the group, he was walking through a low point in the land where they couldn't see him, Ms. Armstrong said.
"The cardinal rule is you stay on line," Katharine Armstrong said.
A Secret Service agent called Salinas on his cell phone "five to 10 minutes" after the shooting occurred, the sheriff said. And San Miguel, the department's chief deputy, went to the scene.
Dallas Morning News correspondent Christy Hoppe in Austin contributed to this report.
