Former Vice President Dick Cheney spent all or part of four decades at the highest levels of the US government, but the one event he regretted the most happened nearly 1,500 miles from Washington.
Cheney, who died on Monday at age 84, became the subject of years-long ridicule after he accidentally shot attorney and real estate investor Harry Whittington during a Texas quail hunting excursion on Feb. 11, 2006, riddling his buddy’s face, neck and torso with more than 100 shotgun pellets.
“You can’t blame anybody else,” Cheney told Fox News Channel in an interview four days after the shooting. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”
The two-term VP added to interviewer Brit Hume that the shooting was “one of the worst days of my life at that moment.”
According to a contemporaneous account by Katharine Armstrong, whose family owned the ranch where the shooting occurred, Whittington had left the hunting group to retrieve a bird he had shot when Cheney suddenly turned and began shooting at another group of birds, putting Whittington in the line of fire.
“Mr. Whittington left the spot where he had been and came up behind the hunters, and was standing in a low spot of ground with the sun behind it,” said Armstrong, who insisted the VP was not at fault.
“I’ve been doing this all my life,” she said at the time. “Mr. Whittington failed to announce himself and say, ‘Hey, I’m behind you guys.’”
Despite the explanation, Cheney was criticized for not confirming what was in front of him before pulling the trigger. The White House was also slammed for taking nearly a full day to disclose the incident.
While Cheney accepted responsibility for shooting Whittington, he never publicly apologized. Meanwhile, Whittington, who suffered a minor heart attack days after the shooting and spent the rest of his life with more than two dozen pellets in him, told reporters upon leaving a Corpus Christi hospital Feb. 17, 2006, that he was “deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with.”
“Accidents do and will happen,” added Whittington, who said that he hoped Cheney would “continue to come to Texas and seek the relaxation that he deserves.”
Following the shooting, Cheney became an easy target for mockery among comedians and late-night hosts, and the episode features prominently in the 2018 film “Vice,” starring Christian Bale as Cheney.
Whittington, who died in 2023 at the age of 95, claimed to USA Today in 2018 that the movie’s depiction of what happened was “inaccurate and misleading,” insisted that he bore no ill-will against Cheney and added that the two had even dined together since the accidental shooting.
Whittington’s daughter, Sally May, echoed her father’s feelings, saying the accident was never far from her family’s minds but that they never held any animosity for Cheney.
“It was just a very unfortunate incident, but as my dad said, accidents happen,” she told the Daily Mail on Tuesday.
“It was an accident, and my father handled it very respectfully, as he always did … It was just a funny kind of incident in our family’s life,’ she added.
