America 1982-Chapter 592 - 129: Your True Purpose

"I think the President won’t trouble himself, he just supports the investigation but won’t express more personal opinions. As for what Congress thinks and whether a committee will be formed to investigate KeyBank, he won’t interfere or show interest. However, it’s very likely that the Republican congressman Mike Bradley will step forward to establish the investigative committee. The President doesn’t like him, Mr. Cheney doesn’t like him either. This guy has been calling in Congress to revoke the resolution that designates the African National Congress as a terrorist organization, oblivious to the fact that revoking it could damage many of America’s interests in South Africa. He needs to be taught a lesson, to understand that he is an American Black, not a South African Black," Charles Salmon said, sitting opposite Tommy on the sofa, gently rubbing his lips with his fingers as he looked at Tommy.

Tommy leaned back on the sofa, stroking the tame orange cat purring softly in his arms; he had picked up the little fellow during a morning run in Beverly Hills Park. "I know the President won’t step out looking for trouble himself, but what you’re saying now makes me feel like the President is replicating the love-hate relationship between President Reagan and your future father-in-law. Reagan took care of your future father-in-law in the same way, entrusting him with tricky investigations. If Mr. Cheney weren’t so smart, he would have been politically finished by Reagan using these tactics long ago. I hope Mike Bradley isn’t that clever."

Charles Salmon’s girlfriend is named Liz Cheney, the darling daughter of the current Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Talking about their journey to discussing marriage, it was largely thanks to Tommy, who previously sponsored a veterans’ fundraising dinner at Stanford University, where among the attendees was the Republican Policy Committee Chairman and Congressman Dick Cheney, who was being severely suppressed by President Reagan at the time.

Charles didn’t attend the dinner because he had already graduated from Stanford and was studying at Yale. But that didn’t stop him from getting Cheney’s contact information through Ted and Ian, who were in charge of SSD at the time, and inviting Yale alumnus Cheney to give a few lectures at his alma mater in the name of a student organization. Initially, Charles didn’t intend to get too close to Cheney, until one time when he invited Cheney and found that Cheney had brought his family along. Then he discovered Cheney had a treasure of a daughter, Liz Cheney, who was eighteen that year, while he was twenty-four.

At the time, Liz Cheney was finishing her last year at McLean High School in Washington, where she was the cheerleading captain and the school’s top beauty, a finalist in the national high school cheerleading championship. Whether in physique or facial features, she was everyone’s ideal... or rather, she fit every male student’s aesthetic perfectly.

Blonde, fair-skinned, intelligent, and cheerful—using Charles’s own words, "The first time I saw her, I felt it was time to bid farewell to all other women."

Back then, Charles hadn’t yet thought about what it would be like to match wits with a cunning Republican congressman and future father-in-law. But he had already decided on the names for the children he would have with Liz.

Since 1984, he had been maintaining a relationship with Liz. At the beginning of their relationship, Charles was focused on making money to fund his visits to his girlfriend while maintaining his studies. All the money he earned went into the travel costs to see his girlfriend, since he was studying in Connecticut and Liz was in college in Colorado, requiring weekly flights for their dates.

If it weren’t for his SSD brothers in the computer industry, who later suggested he invest in some company stocks which had paid off well, Charles might have been drained by his part-time jobs before his girlfriend could do so.

In this regard, all his SSD brothers admired Charles because he could have easily asked his family to give him a high-limit credit card. His family operated a battery manufacturing plant, and even if they weren’t billionaires, they were still multimillionaires. But Charles insisted on paying for his romances with his own earnings, and aside from his own expenses, he still managed to buy a Mini car as a gift for his girlfriend.

Initially, the Cheney couple didn’t look favorably on their daughter’s relationship with Charles, because Cheney himself was a Yale graduate; he knew all too well what men like that were capable of, whether it came to pretentious jargon or chasing girls, they truly knew every trick in the book.

He couldn’t watch his daughter’s emotions be toyed with by some Yale brat. After all, speaking of shamelessness, no other educational institution in America could match Yale’s variety—except perhaps Harvard. For example, Dick Cheney himself shamelessly managed to escape military service and avoid dying in Vietnam by delaying his graduation multiple times; he married and got his wife pregnant before graduation, giving birth to a daughter right as he graduated, conveniently exempting himself from the draft for being over the age of twenty-six, married, and with a newborn to support.

So during that time, Charles would fly out weekly for his dates, and Cheney would make weekly long-distance calls to his daughter, encouraging her to take the initiative in college to meet other outstanding males. There was plenty of time for her to slowly discover and find a boy truly suited for her, he reasoned.

But the problem was, the male students at Colorado College paled in comparison to Charles, who had been a leader among students all the way from Stanford to Yale. Even blind, his daughter could tell which man was more outstanding. Hence, over the next two years, the Cheney parents eventually gave in. Coupled with Charles’s successful completion of his degree at Yale and his entry into a major Washington think tank, where he began his career under a renowned political theorist, and began to show his capabilities, the Cheney family accepted the reality that Charles would marry their precious daughter. Now, the two families were already spending Christmas together, just waiting for Liz to graduate from college to hold a wedding ceremony.