Straight shooter? Not with public

IF a 78-year-old man hadn’t spent most of this week in a Corpus Christi hospital with a body full of birdshot, Vice President Dick Cheney’s travail probably would have been amusing, as well as instructive.

Just days after the vice president mistakenly shot him, Austin, Texas, attorney Harry Whittington was cracking jokes, sitting up and doing a little work. That’s surely testament to the quality of the emergency medical care he received, his strong constitution and a civil lawyer’s irrepressible urge to rack up billable hours.

That’s mainly surmise, of course, since the last time participants in a significant news event were less forthcoming, they were somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle.

Even former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan found the incident slightly comedic, noting that Cheney has “been painted as the dark force of the administration, and now there’s a mental picture to go with the reputation. Pull! Sorry, Harry. Pull!”

But seriously folks, has the press been hounding Cheney?

President Bush’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told NPR that he doesn’t think so. “It’s news if the vice president of the United States shoots somebody. I think the White House press corps is correct on this one.”

In the information storm created by today’s 24-hour news cycle, secrecy and evasion create their own microclimate. In this case, Cheney’s initial silence and subsequent reticence triggered a frenzy of accusatory speculation among conspiracy-minded bloggers and commentators critical of the administration. Much of this centered on some perplexing details in the fragmentary accounts of what occurred last Saturday on the Armstrong Ranch in South Texas. As someone who, in years long past, was regarded as a pretty fair wing-shot, a couple of those “facts” sent my eyebrows into an arch.

Whittington, according to Cheney, was 30 yards away when he was hit. The vice president was shooting a 28-gauge, Italian-made over-and-under shotgun. That’s a fairly light weapon, but certainly one a practiced hunter with a good eye would choose for quail. Still, 90 feet is extreme range, even if Cheney fired his gun’s fully choked barrel. (Usually, one barrel of a double-barreled shotgun is constricted -- or choked -- to hold the pellets as tightly together as possible for longer range shots; the other barrel is straight -- or open -- to spread the pellets quickly for closer ranges.) Yet at least one of the pellets went deep enough into Whittington’s body to migrate to his heart and another reportedly lodged in his liver. At first blush, that seemed much too deep for a gun that light at that range.

Moreover, the medical reports on the size of the pellet that triggered Whittington’s minor heart attack were just plain odd. Shotgun shells are loaded with pellets called “shot” of various sizes, depending on the target. Shot is numerically graded, with the lowest number assigned to the largest pellet and the highest to the smallest. Quail hunters usually fire 7 1/2 or 8 shot, both quite small -- otherwise you end up with quail tartare. However, Whittington’s doctors said the pellet in his heart was the size of 4 shot, something big enough to kill ducks or geese.

Maybe the Internet conspiracy mongers weren’t so crazy. This stuff just didn’t make sense, but not because there was deceit involved. It didn’t add up because there’s a difference between what you think you know and what’s true. Reporting is an excellent way to distinguish between the two.

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Call the experts

So, calls were placed to two of the country’s leading forensic scientists -- a ballistics expert and a forensic pathologist. Both also are expert in crime scene reconstruction and testify frequently for prosecutors and defense attorneys across the country. Neither wanted to be identified, because they didn’t want to be caught up in the speculative frenzy.

Both were absolutely confident that there was nothing even remotely contradictory between Whittington’s wounds and what the vice president said occurred. The ballistics expert did a quick calculation based on the average distance between head and waist for a man of Whittington’s size and the spread of pellets that you’d expect to see from a 28-gauge shotgun fired from 30 yards away. It matched the wounds Whittington’s doctors have reported.

What about the penetration? “It wouldn’t at all surprise me to see that kind of penetration, even at that distance, if the pellet slipped between the ribs or went into soft tissue and the barrel was fully choked,” the ballistics expert said. The pathologist agreed and said he had found similar penetration while doing autopsies on people shot at roughly similar ranges by 4-10 shotguns, which are less powerful than Cheney’s weapon. (As the word “autopsy” indicates, their wounds were more serious than Whittington’s.)

OK, so what about the pellet size? “Unless we have a pathologist looking right at the actual pellet, we routinely disregard what doctors say,” the ballistics expert said. “It’s really hard to accurately estimate the size of a shotgun pellet or bullet fragment off an X-ray, as they tried to do down there in Texas.” The pathologist said, “Normally, I wouldn’t even try, and certainly not in a case that involved the vice president of the United States.”

So, whatever he did to poor Harry Whittington, Cheney’s secrecy amounted to shooting himself in the foot. A simple chronology of events and a spokesman’s response to follow-up questions would have laid most of this to rest.

There is, however, the question of what role -- if any -- alcohol may have played in this accident. The participants have told various stories about whether they’d been drinking. The ranch’s owner initially said that nobody involved had consumed alcohol, then that there had been beer available in coolers. Whittington reportedly has said that nobody was drinking. In his only interview this week, Cheney told Fox News’ Brit Hume that he’d had a beer with lunch.

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The alcohol issue

Some of the conspiracy enthusiasts have alleged that the vice president waited to notify authorities because he wanted sufficient time to pass before he might be asked to take a blood alcohol test, though news reports suggest he didn’t have much to fear from the hapless local sheriff’s office. When Whittington’s doctor was asked whether he’d been given a blood alcohol test on admittance, the physician declined to answer.

The truth is, we’re never going to know precisely who drank what, how much or when -- unless somebody else who was there talks. It’s possible the vice president was hoping to conceal how much he’d been drinking last Saturday. It’s also possible that, as an experienced outdoorsman, he was embarrassed that he’d been drinking at all. One of the first rules of hunting safety taught to children is that guns and alcohol don’t mix. But that was only one of the basic rules Cheney may have broken that day: You’re taught to keep track of where your companions are at all times. You don’t swing on a bird that flies past you, because you don’t know what’s behind you. You certainly don’t fire when you’re looking into the sun -- as Cheney told Hume he did -- because you can’t see where you’re shooting.

Even by his sketchy account, Cheney has a lot to be embarrassed about. Under normal circumstances, one would be inclined to leave it at that and not hound a guy who feels bad enough over shooting his friend. The problem is that these are not normal circumstances.

As Noonan put it, “A vice president of the United States shot a guy in a hunting accident, and nobody on his staff told the press. That’s a story.”

It’s a story because this isn’t a personal matter. It’s a potentially life-threatening accident caused by the second-highest ranking executive in our national government, a man who is just an unfortunate moment away from the presidency. When he shoots somebody, it’s the public’s business and not a personal problem.

The real issue here is that Cheney’s behavior this week is all of a piece with this administration’s dangerous tendency to treat all the public’s business as a personal matter and to ration the public’s information as if it belonged to the White House.