Harry Whittington, Texan famously shot by Dick Cheney in accident, dies

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s day by day publication that retains readers in control on essentially the most important Texas news.

A potent Democratic machine used to dominate Texas politics. But Harry Whittington was amongst those that helped change that, methodically aggrandizing the state’s Republican Party because it rose to energy in the final century.

Whittington, an old-school Austin legal professional and GOP heavyweight, died early Saturday morning after a brief sickness, in accordance with two folks near his household. He was 95.

He turned the middle of nationwide consideration in 2006, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney by accident shot him whereas searching quail on a ranch close to Corpus Christi. He spent the final years of his life with greater than two dozen shotgun pellets nonetheless in his physique.

Whittington grew up in Henderson in East Texas to a household of Democrats. But he was drawn to the Republican Party’s messages of small authorities and low taxes. He put himself by way of faculty on the University of Texas at Austin and its legislation faculty.

The Henderson Republican then later entered state GOP circles. He joined George H.W. Bush on the marketing campaign path in 1964, throughout the future president’s failed bid to characterize Texas in the U.S. Senate. He supported James Baker in an unsuccessful bid for Texas legal professional common in 1978 and John Tower in his victorious 1961 bid to be the primary Republican to win a Senate seat since Reconstruction, in accordance with a Washington Post report. He was additionally a fervent ally of George W. Bush; he financially backed him in each presidential races — donating $1,000 to the primary presidential race and $2,000 to his reelection.

Republican governors additionally chosen Whittington for appointments to Texas boards and commissions. He served on the board of Texas Department of Corrections and the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, amongst others. He pushed an initiative for higher therapy of incarcerated Texans with developmental disabilities.

And, after a sequence of shakeups on the Texas Funeral Service Commission, it was Whittington who the youthful Bush, then the governor, requested to chair the state entity. Whittington helped settle a lawsuit filed by a state regulator who claimed she had been fired over investigating an organization headed by a Bush supporter. Leading his first assembly on the fee, he stated, “If any agency needs divine guidance, it’s this one.”

Settled in his old school methods, Whittington didn’t have a pc or invoice his authorized shoppers by the hour, in accordance with the Austin American-Statesman.

Whittington, an actual property investor, was additionally in a authorized battle with the town of Austin for greater than a decade after it tried to grab a block of property he owned. In 2013, a Texas district courtroom dominated the property belonged to the town however ordered the town pay Whittington $10.5 million in compensation.

But Whittington gained his most widespread notoriety in 2006 throughout the ill-fated South Texas quail searching journey with Cheney. They had been on Armstrong Ranch, owned by one other household with deep ties to the Republican Party. Cheney fired on a chicken and hit Whittington in the face, neck and physique.

“Quail hunting is a fast-moving procedure,” Whittington told the Austin American-Statesman years later. “The birds fly and you swing on them and shoot the best you can. I had been hunting for 50 years before this accident. I wasn’t exactly an inexperienced hunter, and I’d never seen an accident.”

“And I can see how it can happen when the sun is setting and a person is swinging the gun and not seeing who he is swinging toward,” he informed the Statesman. “It was just an accident. … Cheney was swinging to his left and when he did he swung over into where I was hunting.”

Whittington was rushed to a hospital, and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times broke the news of the accident a couple of hours later. He spent per week in the ICU.

It turned a world story. Cheney famously didn’t publicly apologize for the accident in its instant aftermath, although Whittington did say after he was launched from the hospital that he was “deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”

And although he later stated he wasn’t significantly near the vp, the 2 remained cordial. After Cheney had dinner with Whittington’s household in 2018, the Statesman reported on the time, Whittington stated, “they all enjoyed meeting him and found him to be very likable and so forth.”

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a monetary supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news group that’s funded in half by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Financial supporters play no function in the Tribune’s journalism. Find an entire list of them here.