In Cheney, Rumsfeld had found a right hand who took so little for granted that he would later, by the account of his daughter Mary, make a three-hour drive from Casper to Laramie to have coffee with three voters, two of whom had been in his wedding. In Rumsfeld, who would be described by Henry Kissinger as “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly,” Cheney had found a model. In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were known as “the little Praetorians,” Cheney cultivated a control of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of “little dishes of salt with funny little spoons” rather than “regular salt shakers.”

Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld contrived to marginalize Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president and edge him off the 1976 ticket. They convinced Ford that Kissinger was a political liability who should no longer serve as both secretary of state and national security adviser. They managed the replacement of William Colby as CIA chief with George H.W. Bush, a move interpreted by many as a way of rendering Bush unavailable to be Ford’s running mate in 1976. They managed the replacement of James Schlesinger as secretary of defense with Rumsfeld himself. Cheney later described his role in such maneuvers as “the sand in the gears,” the person who, for example, made sure that when Rockefeller was giving a speech the amplifier was turned down. In 1975, when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, it was Cheney, then thirty-four, who replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff.

Relationships matter in public life, until they do not. In May, during a commencement address at Louisiana State University, Cheney mentioned this long relationship with Rumsfeld by way of delivering the message that “gratitude, in general, is a good habit to get into”:

I think, for example, of the first time I met my friend and colleague Don Rumsfeld. It was back in the 1960s, when he was a congressman and I was interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill. Congressman Rumsfeld agreed to talk to me, but things didn’t go all that well….

We didn’t click that day, but a few years later it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work and offered me a position in the executive branch.

Note the modest elision (“it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work”) of the speaker’s own active role in these events. What Cheney wanted to stress that morning in Baton Rouge was not his own dogged tracking of the more glamorous Rumsfeld but the paths one had possibly “not expected to take,” the “unexpected turns,” the “opportunities that come suddenly and change one’s plans overnight.” The exact intention of these commencement remarks may be unknowable (a demonstration of loyalty? a warning? to whom? a marker to be called in later? all of the above?), but it did not seem accidental that they were delivered during a period when …