While her husband Dick Cheney has served as vice president, Lynne V. Cheney has made almost $1 million by writing books, giving all of it to charity.
"I was looking at it this morning, because it's getting to be the time of year when I make charitable contributions," Cheney told me. "By the end of the year, the figure will be over $930,000. Next year, I'll get to over $1 million for sure."
Her latest book,
Beginning with Massachusetts and ending with Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, the book devotes a page or two to each state. Each page presents a sampling of historical facts and trivia such as, "People in New Haven say that Louis Lassen served America's first hamburger from his lunch wagon in 1895."
You can learn from the book that Connecticut has more horses per square mile than any other state; the first movie house opened in California in Los Angeles in 1902; condensed soup began in Camden, N.J., in 1897; and the tune for "Happy Birthday to You" was copyrighted in 1893 by Louisville, Ky., sisters Mildred and Patty Hill.
Throughout the book, Annie, Ben, and other imaginary grandchildren of Lynne and Dick Cheney, write notes to them with observations such as, "Dear Grandma, People in Indiana call themselves ‘Hoosiers' — so far I've heard seven different reasons why! Love Annie." The Cheneys have five grandchildren, two of whom are pictured with Lynne Cheney and three other children on the back of the 74-page book.
Published by Simon & Schuster, the book is richly illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. It is currently No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list for children's picture books, and there are nearly 200,000 copies in print.
Cheney has been to all 50 states and has taken her grandkids to places like Boston, where they followed the Freedom Trail and visited Lexington and Concord. But the idea for the book arose after Cheney's son-in-law, Phil Perry, drove her two older granddaughters, Kate and Elizabeth, from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, Wyo. The children were then ages 8 and 5, respectively.
The trip would normally take three days, but Perry took a circuitous route that allowed them to see Niagara Falls; the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.; and the stone faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore.
"The little girls had such a great time, and Robin and I were trying to think how to organize a book about the states," Cheney said. "And we just decided that this road trip would be a great way to do it. Both of us remembered trips we'd taken when we were children, and how much they had been a great family adventure."
Cheney had a second agenda — to try to counteract all the negativity in the media about America by portraying each state and its history factually.
"I think if you tell the American story truthfully, it's a positive story," Cheney said. "You have to work and do some distortion to make it into a negative story. This is a great, very diverse country, where so many wonderful things have happened, and where immigrants have come from all over the world and succeeded."
On a New York page, the book notes some of the immigrants who have made contributions, such as Irving Berlin, who came to New York City from Russia as a child and wrote "God Bless America," and German immigrant John Roebling, who, with his son, designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge.
"So, I think if you just tell the whole story in all its diversity and honesty, and talk about everything that happened, it is a positive story," Cheney said. "But too often, we don't tell it that way."
At the same time, Cheney said, "We didn't ignore the fact that there is a sad tale to be told about native Americans, for example. The Trail of Tears, which the Cherokees walked when they were forced to move West, is on the Georgia page. On the Virginia page, the kids go to Williamsburg, and one of the actors down there talks to them about slavery and how hard it was."
On a New York page, the book says, "The World Trade Center, once an important part of Manhattan's skyline, is gone now; but Americans will always remember the twin towers and the heroes of Sept. 11, 2001."
Along with New York, Massachusetts rates two pages. The Massachusetts pages list the first subway, constructed in 1898; the Dr. Seuss National Memorial in Springfield; and Plymouth Rock, where Pilgrims arrived in America in 1620 "searching for freedom to worship as they chose."
The Wyoming page lists Jackson Pollock, who revolutionized American painting in the 1940s and 1950s, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who is described as an outdoorsman who grew up in Casper and is the husband of the author of the book.
The two were high school sweethearts and married in 1964. That was after Lynne, a straight-A student who was elected Mustang Queen in high school, persuaded him to return to college — details not in the book.
In the book, the little girl named Annie tries the food all across the country.
"She starts in Boston by telling her grandma that she ate some really cool food in Boston — Boston cream pie, which was yummy," Cheney said. "She ate Boston baked beans, which were good; and cod, which she sort of grudgingly said is OK. But she tries everything — Moravian cake in North Carolina, and barbecue in Kansas; and she eats Hershey Kisses in Pennsylvania. She's not real. But she seems almost real to me. And I love her attachment to her grandmother, of course, too."
As a writer, Cheney especially loves some of the poetic words quoted in the book about the states, words that capture their beauty or uniqueness.
"I knew, for example, that I would find something great about Montana if I went through ‘The Big Sky' again, a novel by A.B. Guthrie Jr. that's highly regarded by people who live out there," she said. "So there's a quote on that Montana page that reads like this: ‘Overhead there was more sky than a man could think, curving deep and far and empty, except maybe for a hawk or an eagle sailing.'"
Across the top of the South Dakota page is a quote from President Calvin Coolidge's dedication of Mount Rushmore in 1927: "We have come here to dedicate a cornerstone that was laid by the hand of the Almighty."
Cheney observed, "You know it's a mountain, and we've made something of that mountain, and so the cornerstone was God."
One of her favorite pages is the one on Florida.
"Robin's drawings around the edge are just spectacular," she said. "But there's a great quote at the top by Zora Neale Hurston about Florida in the spring: ‘Florida is . . . a riot of color in nature — glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north.' And that's true; that's what Florida is."
The largest ball of twine, in Kansas, and the 10-foot Georgia peanut are also Cheney favorites.
In Washington, D.C., she included the vice president's residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, along with the White House, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Spy Museum.
Cheney worked on the book over two years, consulting such sources as Linklater Andro's "Measuring America," which explains how each state came to be shaped as it is.
To help verify descriptions, Cheney showed pages from each state to experts from those states. When dealing with competing claims, such as where the first hamburger was served, she used qualifiers, as in the reference to people in New Haven saying that Louis Lassen served the first hamburger. A handful of other locations claim the honor.
Cheney encountered a number of surprises.
"Indiana people call themselves Hoosiers," Cheney said. "What does that mean? Well, it turned out that nobody's quite sure what it means. There are about seven different explanations for what it might mean. It might be a kind of an elision of who's here, or who's there, or who's ear, so that was interesting. I just assumed it was perhaps a native American name, I didn't know. But to find out that the Indianans aren't so sure either, that was a surprise."
In some cases, Cheney used a state to talk about the history of the entire country. "When you talk about Philadelphia's beginnings or Pennsylvania's beginnings," she said, "you're really talking about everything from the Declaration of Independence through the Constitution . . ."
After the book came out in late October, first lady Laura Bush, an expert on children's books, called Cheney to congratulate her. While it may not sound challenging, some fundamental works of western civilization fall under the heading of children's literature — books by Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, C.S. Lewis, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, to say nothing of the Brothers Grimm.
As noted in my book
"I remember Laura because she was one of the few students who made an A in my class in the many years I taught at SMU," Ehrhardt told me.
A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Lynne Cheney has a Ph.D. with a specialization in 19th-century British literature from the University of Wisconsin.
When she entered the White House, Cheney decided her goal would be to make $1 million to give to charity. The book is the third in a series of American history books she has written for children.
"The other day I discovered I've got about 1.2 million children's books in print," said Cheney. "So I'm getting close to my goal of giving away $1 million."
Cheney used some of the money to establish the James Madison Book Award, which gives a $10,000 annual prize for the best American history book for children or young people.
More importantly, Cheney said, "As I've traveled our great country, I have been struck again and again by its beauty and variety and reminded of how rich our history is." Cheney said she feels privileged to be able to portray "how fortunate we are to live in a country where all of these things — and so many more — form the fabric of our national life."
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