We have government scandals enough to keep us all busy these days, but I’m still back in the past. What happened to Cheney’s closet?
Readers probably remember that Cheney’s records were destroyed before he retired, in a closet fire in the office building where he worked, just across from the White House.
I wondered for a long time what had happened, because there was no investigation, no explanation. Then enlightenment came. Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure, newly out of prison and on one of those come-clean-and-get-back-into-the-public’s-good-graces interviews, said that hiding information was easy. All you had to do was arrange for a fire in a closet. That settled every thing. He knew that closet fires were a type of office management for executives with interesting decisions in their past.
This canceled out all of my more creative theories I had wondered if this was the sort of closet where staff grabbed a forbidden cigarette. Had someone perhaps discarded a butt or a match when a supervisor approached? Or had staffers ducked in for a little hanky-panky with a co-worker? I was inspired in this theory because of a roommate long ago, a nurse who told me she had gotten pregnant in a linen closet at San Francisco General Hospital with the aid of a surgeon and a bit of saran wrap that broke. It seemed to me that that sort of goings-on could generate quite a bit of heat.
But the television talk show seemed merely to present the more drab version of destroying documents as a clean-up operation. I still have unanswered questions. Did this fire destroy all the papers in the closet and nothing in the adjacent areas? How did that happen? What was in the closet? Given all the questions about the dubious premise for the Iraq War, why was there no investigation? After all the millions spent on investigating Benghazi that turned up nothing, why was not a penny allotted to Cheney’s closet?
Nevertheless.blog 