On Friday, Cheney sat in the front row during Bush's joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the East Room of the White House. Matalin spoke with Cheney yesterday morning, and he "wanted to talk about the campaign," she said.
After having breathing problems in the morning, Cheney consulted Reiner, director of George Washington's cardiac catheterization laboratory. According to Matalin, Reiner told Cheney to "come in and get the tests." Cheney did not go in an ambulance but left from his residence -- at the Naval Observatory on upper Massachusetts Avenue NW -- in his customary motorcade. One of his daughters, Liz Cheney, joined her parents at the hospital. She told Matalin that Cheney was in his street clothes and walking from room to room for the tests, which included blood work and an electrocardiogram.
In June 2001, doctors at GWU Medical Center inserted a special pacemaker, known as an implantable cardioverter defibrillator into Cheney's chest to help regulate his heartbeat. The pager-size device would administer a shock to the heart if abnormal rhythms occurred; the heart then would resume a normal pace.
Matalin said doctors read the device yesterday and found no abnormal activity over the previous 90 days, the period it records.
Medical experts said the concern was warranted because -- given Cheney's history of heart disease -- a possible cause of his breathlessness was congestive heart failure. In that condition, the heart cannot pump forcefully enough to keep up with the amount of blood returning to it from the rest of the body. When that happens, blood backs up in the lungs, causing a sensation of shortness of breath.
Cheney has had a long history of heart problems, dating to 1978, when he suffered his first heart attack. Since then, he has had three more. The most recent was a mild one in November 2000, when the outcome of the presidential election was hanging on a few hundred votes in Florida.
Over the years, Cheney has undergone a series of treatments to clear his clogged arteries. He had a quadruple bypass in 1988 after suffering his third heart attack and had a springlike wire tube known as a stent implanted in an artery in November 2000 to hold it open. He returned to the hospital for further treatment to the same artery in March 2001.
After Cheney's last annual checkup, in May 2004, doctors reported that the pacemaker was working fine and had never been activated, indicating that he had not suffered from arrhythmia.
If Cheney were to die in office or become incapacitated, Bush would have the right to nominate a new vice president, in accordance with the 25th Amendment, which went into effect in February 1967. The only stipulation is that the president's candidate be confirmed "by a majority vote of both houses of Congress."
The amendment was last invoked in August 1974, when President Gerald R. Ford, after President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, nominated Nelson A. Rockefeller for vice president.
Staff writer David Brown contributed to this report.
