Before the Storm Clouds, Nothing but 'Blue Skies'

Lynne Cheney wants time to stand still. Not now, not in this present tense of bloodshed and bile, where she is the stalwart wife of a vice president vilified as a warmonger. She wants the past back, she wants then.

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Which is why her new memoir stops in 1959, when Lynne Cheney was just graduating from high school, her life scarcely yet lived in a Norman Rockwell America, where girls twirled batons and played competitive jacks, and boys joined "car clubs" to work on their Chevys. Back then Lassie always came home.

The book -- titled "Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family," published by Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster imprint helmed by family friend Mary Matalin -- includes no discussion of Cheney's adulthood. There is nothing about her academic career or her tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And there certainly is nothing about life as the wife of a controversial politician, Dick Cheney.

What Lynne Cheney has written instead is a homage to her childhood, her husband's childhood and the American West -- specifically Casper, Wyo. -- where they were raised. A place and a time she describes as "heaven for little girls" and "paradise for little boys."

"Is it nostalgia?" she says, balking a bit. "Nostalgia implies to me, a little bit, you've got your rose-colored glasses on at all times. And I certainly do mean this book to be a valentine to the place and time I grew up. But there are also just sort of facts you can look at, and I think the facts form a different pattern then than they do now."

Now, she is tucked into a favorite chair in the sunroom at the vice president's residence, a home she will inhabit for 15 more months. The room -- which she redecorated, like much of the residence, to remind her of Wyoming -- is done in neutral tones, with a framed map of the Cheneys' home state on the wall and a sculpture of an elk on a table. (In the adjacent library, there is a buffalo sculpture under a table; there is also an entire shelf of fishing books, including two intimidatingly large tomes titled "Trout, Volume I" and "Trout, Volume II.")

With a beautiful wraparound porch and grounds that deer have made their home, it's a peaceful place, and Cheney, 66, seems serene in a brilliant turquoise jacket that perfectly matches the cover of her book. She is in the beginnings of a publicity blitz for her book, which includes a taped segment to air on "CBS Sunday Morning" tomorrow and an appearance Tuesday on "Good Morning America." She talks of her six grandchildren, of her husband's fishing trips and expansively about the beauty and wonder of the Wyoming prairie she so loves. She is extremely adept at turning questions about politics into answers about her book, or her devotion to promoting education in American history. It is, for a moment, as if the world outside the Naval Observatory's gates -- the one where protesters carry signs bearing angry messages and her husband's face, and where talk-show hosts ridicule him -- is some alternate universe.

"We don't watch a lot of it and I don't know what talk shows you're talking about, but we've been in public life for nearly 40 years and it kind of goes with the territory," she says. "I do think it's perhaps rougher now than it has been before. . . . I think if you're plunged straight into this from private life, where you know your every doing isn't considered fodder for the news, where people don't hover over you constantly, it might be harder. But we've been doing it for so long it does seem like it's just part of public life -- perhaps unfortunately."

So, what is planned for their return to private life, inasmuch as life can be private after one has resided in this household?

"I'd like to walk out the door and go to a bookstore," she says.

Logistically, the Cheneys plan to split time between the property they own on the Eastern Shore, the spread in Wyoming and a yet-to-be obtained home in Northern Virginia, which they want so they can be near their daughters, Elizabeth Cheney Perry and Mary Cheney, and six grandchildren, ranging in age from 13 to 4 months (Samuel, Mary Cheney's first child). Asked about what her husband's plans are beyond that, she will only answer: "He'll just have to do what makes him happy. I'm sure that he'll get more time fishing."

Politics? "I think it's impossible to escape," she says. "We're living in such a time of challenge that I'm sure we will continue to be interested and involved."