From the Archive: As Republicans and the Tea Party seek todismantle the New Deals social contract, one of their heroes, Dick Cheney, concedes that his personal success traces back to the federal governments intervention against the depredations inflicted on Americans by free-market capitalism, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry (Originally publishedSept. 16, 2011)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney would agree that he is about as right-wing as an American politician can be, openly hostile to the federal governments intervention in society. But one surprise from his memoir, In My Time, is that Cheney recognizes that his personal success was made possible by FranklinRoosevelts New Deal and the fact that Cheneys father managed to landa steady job with the federal government.

Ive often reflected on how different was the utterly stable environment he provided for his family and wondered if because of that I have been able to take risks, to change directions, and to leave one career path for another with hardly a second thought, Cheney writes.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney

In that sense, Cheneys self-assuredness may be as much a product of the New Deal as the many bridges, dams and other public works that Roosevelt commissioned in the 1930s to get Americans back to work. By contrast, the insecurity that afflicted Cheneys father was a byproduct of the vicissitudes from laissez-faire capitalism.

So, it is ironic that as an adult, Cheney has contributed as much as almost anyone todismantlingthe New Deal, the social compact that pulled his family into the American middle class and opened extraordinary opportunities for him.

In sketching his familys history, Cheney depicts the hard-scrabble life of farmers and small businessmen scratching out a living in the American Midwest and suffering financial reversals whenever the titans of Wall Street stumbled into a financial crisis and the bankers cut off credit.

After his ancestors would make some modest headway from their hard work, they would find themselves back at square one, again and again, because of some market crisis or a negative weather pattern. Whenever there was a financial panic or a drought, everything was lost.

In 1883, as the country struggled through a long economic depression, the sash and door factory that [Civil War veteran Samuel Fletcher Cheney] co-owned [in Defiance, Ohio] had to be sold to pay its debts, Cheney writes. At the age of fifty-four, Samuel Cheney had to start over, moving to Nebraska.

Read the original here:
Dick Cheney: Son of the New Deal