By Lisa Rein and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Millions of dollars in charitable contributions from Vice President Cheney and his wife, Lynne, will nearly double the budget of a scholarship fund for low-income area teenagers to attend private schools and will help George Washington University create a center to study heart disease.

The Cheneys' 2005 federal tax return, released by the White House late last week, shows that they made a $2.7 million donation to the Cardiothoracic Institute of George Washington University Medical Center, where the vice president has been treated for heart ailments.

They also gave $1.3 million to Capital Partners for Education, a Georgetown-based scholarship fund that helps finance education at private schools for area teenagers. It was the largest single contribution in the charity's history.

Together with a $2.7 million to the University of Wyoming, where the vice president graduated in 1965 and his wife taught English, the couple made about $6.8 million in charitable donations last year.

The donations, under an agreement to disburse the Cheneys' corporate stock options, represents an unusually large set of gifts from a sitting vice president.

George Washington officials said yesterday they envision their gift as seed money to set up an institute that will expand research and education on heart disease, pulling from radiology, surgery and other medical disciplines.

Richard Katz, director of the division of cardiology at the George Washington University Medical Center, said he and his colleagues approached Cheney during the 2000 campaign about creating a heart institute in his honor.

"We didn't solicit money," he said. "You always hope that people will help you raise money."

Katz, who will direct the institute, added, "At a time when research money is becoming more and more dear and hard to compete for, this will give us seed money for research and pilot programs." One focus will be identifying and tracking patients at risk for heart disease, particularly those with certain patterns of genes and proteins, said Katz, a member of the team that has treated Cheney.

The donations to the three charities, made in December, were set in motion by an arrangement the vice president and his wife made in early 2001, when he was a candidate for vice president, to give away the eventual profits from their corporate stock options.

The options largely were from Halliburton Co., a Texas oil-services firm of which Cheney had been chief executive before President Bush chose him as his running mate. Smaller amounts came from companies for which the couple had been board members, including Electronic Data Systems, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin and Anadarko Petroleum Corp.

Under the arrangement, the Cheneys designated George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates and the University of Wyoming Foundation to each receive two-fifths of the donations and Capital Partners for Education to get one-fifth. The Cheneys appointed an administrator, whose identity they have not disclosed, to manage the gifts. Among other things, the administrator was assigned to decide when the stock values were high enough to make the gifts as large as possible.

According to a Cheney legal adviser, who spoke about his client on condition of anonymity, the administrator distributed the first amount -- totaling nearly $110,000 -- in 2004.

Last year, the adviser said, the administrator made the much larger donation of nearly $7 million after deciding that the "options were at a good value for the benefit of charity."

Based on current estimates, about $1 million remains to be given away, although that amount could prove larger or smaller depending on the price of the stocks.

Since its founding in 1993, Capital Partners has sponsored 70 high school students from families in the District and Prince George's County, using donations from individuals and corporations to fund its $800,000 operating budget, Executive Director Khari Brown said. Scholarship awards to private schools range from $3,000 to $4,000.

The money is not enough to cover tuition at most private schools, so most students choose to attend neighborhood Catholic schools that cover the rest of the cost, he said.

The Cheneys' connection to Capital Partners goes back to the mid-1990s, when they became intrigued by a similar group founded by a friend in New York. Carol Adelman, another longtime friend who served with Cheney in the Nixon administration, joined the board of the Washington group and now serves as president.

"If we had gotten a gift like this 10 years ago, we probably wouldn't have known what to do with it," Adelman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, said yesterday. "But we've gotten everything in good shape to receive it."

She said the board will work quickly to use the gift. "We have to figure out how quickly we can ramp up and bring in new kids for next year." She said she hopes to spend the money over 10 years.

In an e-mail yesterday, Lynne Cheney noted the scholarship fund's relatively low attrition rate -- 15 percent -- and success at sending students to college. "But for both the Vice President and me, the individual students, their stories, their ambition, and their hope for the future are the overwhelming reasons for supporting this organization," she said.