The would-be Professor Cheney

Dick Cheney, giving the graduation speech at Brigham Young university in Utah --

And my career in politics itself was an unplanned enterprise. On the day of my own graduation from the University of Wyoming, I had no ambitions of holding higher office. If you'd asked me at the time what I planned on doing, I could have described in some detail what the next 10 years would be like. First would be graduate school, then wrapping up that Ph.D., and down the road, with luck, a faculty position at a university. It all worked out very differently. Within a few years, Lynne and I were living in Washington, D.C., and beginning a journey in government and public life that neither of us had ever imagined.

Dick graduated from college in 1965, just as the Vietnam war (which he supported) was reaching a new level of intensity. The above thus describes the infamous "other priorities" that kept him from going to help fight the war himself. That would be left to suckers like John Kerry.

For those keeping score, Dick had already accumulated 3 Vietnam deferments by the time his story reached the point where he dreamed of graduate school. His dream of graduate school got him his 4th deferment in 1965, and his wife getting pregnant right after the Pentagon got rid of deferments for able bodied childless men got him his 5th. With Vietnam decisively out of the way for him (when he got to age 26), he soon moved to Washington, interned for Richard Nixon, and got his first real job with Don Rumsfeld. Thus the prequel to the nation's current disaster in Iraq.