As usual, I’m glad when quail-hunting season is over. This year, more than ever. Ordinarily, I’m just interested in protecting the quail that live in our canyon from a neighbor a half-mile up the road who takes delight in shooting them.
Last week, however, quail hunting became a catalyst in the ongoing frustration over secrecy in the Bush administration and Vice President Dick Cheney’s disdain for the press.
After Cheney wounded his friend in a quail hunting accident the Saturday before last, he delayed reporting the incident to the White House or the press, for what has been widely seen as an unconscionably long time. He left the owner of the ranch where they were hunting to inform a local Texas newspaper. And he left Press Secretary Scott McClellan to fend off questions from the contentious White House press corps. The point of contention: it’s their beat and they should have been told first. McClellan, we’re told, had urged Cheney to get the story out quickly, but to no avail.
Cheney telephoned White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Sunday and didn’t speak to Bush until Monday. Bush is the one who should have felt slighted. But even after he knew, McClellan didn’t mention the incident at a press briefing Monday. When later asked why not, he said, “I’m not his doctor.” Huh? He’s not a general either, but that doesn’t stop him from briefing the press on war issues.
Cheney made no public statement until midweek when he granted a private interview with Brit Hume of Republican-friendly Fox News. Cheney said it was his decision to withhold the news until Sunday and to have the ranch owner call a reporter from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which he said was “just as valid a news outlet as the New York Times.” Really.
Cheney dismissed the media dust-up as “professional jealousy.” I suppose the fact he’s not held a public news conference in more than three years may have something to do with this.
Cheney told Hume his primary goal was accuracy, and that to understand details of the incident required knowledge of hunting. I guess McClellan isn’t a hunting expert either.
But Cheney did have a point. Many TV news reporters said the victim, lawyer Harry Whittington, had been sprayed with “buckshot.” It doesn’t take an expert hunter to know that buckshot is used on deer (hence the name), not birds, and would more likely have been fatal at 30 yards than the smaller birdshot fired by Cheney’s 28-gauge shotgun.
Anyway, this has not been the national news media’s finest week. They had to know Cheney would cut them out of the loop, choosing to give the interview to Fox News, where he was unlikely to face tough questions.
The incident has also raised questions among nonhunters about the sport of staged hunts, where groups of shooters take aim at captive birds released for the event, sometimes into a fenced area. Cheney reportedly has taken part in such “canned” hunts, once bagging 70 pheasant in a single day. There’s something about this that is repugnant to many hunters who consider it unsporting.
As for me, I think grown men ganging up on a 14-ounce bird is more about power than sport. But then, I grew up in Beverly Hills where shooting was definitely not a sport, involving only gangsters and the occasional movie star. Reports were tightly controlled by studio press agents and were generally withheld until everyone had their ducks in a row, so to speak.
The only person I knew who had a gun was my grandfather, a retired railroad engineer from the Midwest, who was an avid duck hunter. When I married a rancher it was culture shock. There were guns everywhere. I was expected to learn but confined my practice to trap and skeet, and didn’t even like that because the recoil hurt my shoulder and the noise hurt my ears. And besides, with the eye-hand coordination of a bat, I was doomed to fail.
Still, I raised a family of hunters who stuck to a strict code: If you shoot it, you eat it. That cut down on plunking inedible species or shooting more than one’s legal limit of game birds or deer. My live shooting was confined to defense of my children, puppies and garden-rattlesnakes and a few gophers.
But even knowing the rules didn’t prevent someone dear to me from accidentally shooting a friend. The pain of that moment, the fear that his young friend could die, stuck with him his whole life.
So I believed Cheney when he said it was one of the worst moments of his life. And I understand his fear that his friend could have been blinded or might have died from a subsequent heart attack. Obviously, he wanted to wait until he knew Whittington would fully recover.
But he should have understood that making a public statement immediately would have stopped the media feeding frenzy and quashed the rancorous political debate that followed. It may even have kept Cheney from being the butt of late-night comics. Then he could have retreated to heal in solitude. Who knows, he may even have earned some respect and empathy from those of us who don’t share the culture of shooting.