“There was no reason in the world,” Cheney recalled, “why he should reach down and take this guy with a quasi-sordid past and who’s been kicked out of Yale and pull me up by my bootstraps and give me a job that a lot of people would have killed for.” Of all the presidents Cheney would serve, none could match this gracious gesture by Ford. “When you get that kind of response from somebody, when they are willing to stand up and take the heat during a controversy, rather than chuck you over the side and go with someone less controversial, you never forget that.”
