Odyssey Eased by Perks of Office

Prescription for a man with a heart condition: Visit 12 countries in 11 days. Cross nine time zones. Dine on the fare of exotic palaces. Work under pressure.

Perhaps not.

Nevertheless, Vice President Dick Cheney is following just such a regimen, while dodging some on-the-road hazards to lend a heart-healthy cast to his Middle Eastern odyssey.

To do so, he is making ample use of the perks of his office. In many cases, in fact, they are the perks of the presidency, putting the unobtrusive Cheney in the rare position of appearing to the untrained eye every bit the president he is so careful not to overshadow.

As a result, at midpoint of the trip, he is showing little wear--save for a very visible scrape on his head from a too-close encounter with the door frame of his limousine.

Cheney, 61, has had four heart attacks since 1978, most recently in November 2000. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1998. After he experienced abnormal heart rhythms last June, a high-tech pacemaker was implanted in his chest.

He travels with an exercise bicycle. His calendar isn’t quite as full as suggested by his travel agenda. And aboard his airplane, he appears to be sticking to his diet.

Consider:

Others aboard the plane were served a lunch of gravy-smothered beef shavings on white bread, with mashed potatoes. The salad was topped with bacon bits, sunflower seeds and little bits of something that, if they weren’t Rice Krispies, they shouldn’t have gone snap, crackle and pop. For Cheney, a more typical lunch is poached salmon on greens.

At a luncheon with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing St., the menu was soup, fish, fruit and what a senior Cheney aide happily called “lots of fresh vegetables.” White wine was poured but left untouched.

The fare was heavier when the vice president dined with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik: Soup with pasta, lamb, “boiled shrimp with a sole thing,” as described by a fellow diner, and baked Alaska.

His doctor stays nearby--not just in an automobile close to the vice president’s limousine but, at least on some occasions, in Cheney’s elevator.

The perks are presidential, but the schedule is not.

In Washington, Cheney routinely arrives at the White House by 7:30 a.m., according to an aide who said his motorcade often passes her as she’s making her way downtown.

This week, however, he has followed neither the pattern of President Bush, who regularly starts days on the road at sunup (and ends them at dusk whenever possible) nor former President Clinton, who would engage in diplomacy all day and gather friends and aides to enjoy a late-night and lengthy dinner in a foreign capital, or leave at night for a flight to the next city.

Rather, Cheney’s initial days on the road have followed a pace that is less than frantic, although that promises to pick up this weekend, when he will wake up in one country, stop in a second at midday and wind up in a third for a late meeting and an overnight stay.

The flights have all been during daylight hours. At the first stop in London, Cheney didn’t leave Winfield House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park, until midday. He was back well before dinner, following a relaxed schedule that allowed time to overcome jet lag.

He even fit in a tourist stop, one particularly apt for this vice president, the caveman of Washington who has spent many days since Sept. 11 in a “secure, undisclosed location.” He toured the Cabinet War Rooms, the once-secret underground World War II bunker of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

If anything could have affected his blood pressure, it would have been the famously cheeky London tabloids.

One ran a picture of Bush to illustrate a story on a White House plan that could expand the potential targets of U.S. nuclear weapons. It had Bush declaring, “Let’s Nuke ‘Em All.”

Cheney made the cover of another tabloid, as he sought British support for an expansion of the war on terrorism. His photo had been doctored to include fangs. The headline trumpeted the “American Warwolf in London.”

Most of the security precautions being taken for the vice president are less than visible. Some would seem inconsequential, others merely unusual.

Members of Cheney’s traveling party are carrying schedules of the trip. But unlike on other trips, when the cover of the schedule carries the names of the countries he is visiting, these covers bear only the names of the people to whom they were issued and control numbers, to better keep track of them. Journalists have been asked not to report on his planned stops before he arrives.

Inside, every page carries this reminder: “You are required to keep this document with you at all times. Loss of this document constitutes an operational security violation and will be treated as such.”

On most legs, Cheney is traveling aboard an Air Force Boeing 747 bearing the tail number 29000. It’s one of two jumbo jets designated Air Force One when the president of the United States is aboard, and it’s just back in the fleet after an 11-month overhaul. The only time a vice president had previously been “bumped up” to one of the planes was when Al Gore, on a last-minute assignment, hurried to Kyoto, Japan, to revive stalled negotiations for a climate change treaty.

The aircraft carries extensive and sophisticated communications gear, including secure telephone lines, as well as antimissile defenses.

Among the accompanying perks: The shiny blue-and-white aircraft jumped to the head of the queue of a dozen planes waiting to take off from London’s Heathrow Airport on a busy Tuesday morning.

The airplane is more than a convenience.

The vice president is meeting with two kings, two emirs, one sultan and assorted crown princes. In a part of the world where status and appearance weigh heavily, the plane invests in Cheney’s mission the second-most recognizable symbol of the American presidency; indeed, it is known as the flying White House.

And unlike the Boeing 757 that functions as Air Force Two, it has a medical suite that can serve as an operating room.

But Cheney eschewed all that for his hour-and-a-half visit Thursday in Yemen, which which the administration views as a potential hiding place for Al Qaeda terrorists fleeing Afghanistan. It was considered the most dangerous stop on his itinerary.

In a bow to security concerns, Cheney never left the airport, meeting there with President Ali Abdullah Saleh before flying on to Oman. Much of his traveling party, including a small group of reporters, was kept on board the plane.

For these stops, the vice president flew--in the cockpit--aboard an Air Force C-17 cargo plane.

On the ground, Cheney is traveling in one of a number of Cadillacs that the Secret Service moves around the world for the president and vice president.

It was one of those limos that delivered the red scrape to the vice president’s head as he exited.