How Will Cheney Launch Into His Memoir?

As Dick Cheney sits down at his keyboard (Mac or PC, sir? Bic? Quill and ink?) to pen his forthcoming memoir, he'll join a host of presidents and veeps past and present who've released their autobiographical musings into the world. And how, one wonders, will Dick begin?

What about, for instance, the business of the dedication? Harry Truman rather generously dedicated his memoirs "To the people of all nations," while Ronald Reagan's "Where's the Rest of Me?" was inscribed simply "To Honey with Love."

And will Cheney include an epigraph? Joe Biden opened with a melancholy bit of Robert Frost ("The woods are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep"). Will Cheney, as Lyndon Johnson did, begin with a quote or two from his own oeuvre? (Those immortal words directed at Sen. Patrick Leahy, mayhap? Or is that slated to be the title?)

And there is, of course, the essential matter of the first paragraph. Shall the former vice president be charming or commanding? Laconic or verbose? Presidents and vice presidents have run the gamut. Thomas Jefferson, the first POTUS to publish an autobiography, limits his first paragraph to a single sentence, and Ulysses S. Grant begins with a measly 16 words. Martin Van Buren, however, clocks in at a masterful 293 words (rivaled only by Clinton's 239).

Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter all begin with "I," while both Jefferson and Van Buren begin with "At the age of . . ." And Nixon gets things cracking with a nifty, Sue Grafton-style bit of scene-setting: "It was an eerie ride from the airport to the governmental guest house in Beijing." Chills!

Both Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan start out by mentioning the Dutch, and five presidents refer to a stream, river or lake. Calvin Coolidge, Hoover and Carter all begin with descriptions of the American landscape that range from the mildly palatable to the skull-crushingly boring. "The town of Plymouth," Coolidge starts, "lies on the easterly slope of the Green Mountains, about 20 miles west of the Connecticut River and somewhat south of the central part of Vermont. This part of the state is made up of a series of narrow valleys . . . ."

One might observe, too, that Biden (who, like Obama, penned his memoirs before assuming office) is the only vice president to begin with a rollicking story about Latin class, and George Bush père is the only president to mention booze. Ditto Barack Obama and cigs. (Okay, fine, the Marlboros don't show up until the second 'graph, but still . . . .)

Cheney's memoir will reportedly cover his past 40 years. So we probably won't hear about his victorious emergence from the birth canal, though Bill Clinton, Nixon, and Reagan all begin with accounts of their birth. One notes that Reagan is the only president to describe his own naked buttocks in his first sentence. Nice hook, sir!

According to the ever-illuminating Gender Genie, an online resource that guesses a writer's gender based on a text sample, the majority of these distinguished gentlemen's first paragraphs employ a predominately feminine prose style. (Words like with, and, we, and me are "female" while as, who, is, a, etc., garner "male" points.)

Said Genie informs us that our current vice president and president, and our past two presidents, are overwhelmingly ladylike in their elements of style, at least so far as opening 'graphs go. Only Bush the Younger's manages to be entirely feminine, while Eisenhower's writing is (very nearly) all man.

And as for the opening paragraph that the former vice president will produce -- whether terse or lengthy, lurid or learned, uber-macho or 100 percent female -- whatever it is, well . . . we're on tenterhooks.