Elizabeth Cheney
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Elizabeth Cheney (born July 28, 1966), an American attorney and diplomat. She is the elder daughter of United States Vice President Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney. She has been appointed to posts that make her influential in her own right, and she is married to Philip Perry, the former General Counsel of the United States Department of Homeland Security.
[edit] Early life
Elizabeth graduated from McLean High School in 1984. She received her bachelor's degree from Colorado College and her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1996.
Prior to attending law school, Cheney-Perry worked for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development between 1989 and 1993. After 1993, she took a job at Armitage Associates LLP, the consulting firm founded by Richard Armitage, then a former Defense Department official who later served as Deputy Secretary of State.
After graduating from law school, Cheney practiced law in the private sector and as an international law attorney and consultant at the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. She has also served as Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State for Assistance to the former Soviet Union, and as a USAID officer in U.S. embassies in Budapest and Warsaw.
She and husband Perry have five children: three daughters, Kate (b. 1994), Elizabeth (b. 1997), and Grace (b. 2000); and two sons, Philip Richard (b. July 2, 2004) and Richard (b. July 11, 2006).
[edit] Political career
In 2002 she was appointed to the newly created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. According to unnamed US State Department officials, the new post was created specifically for the vice president's daughter, adding that she would work primarily on economic development in the Middle East. The appointment followed publicized policy divisions between the Vice President's office and the State Department on Middle East policy.[citation needed] She left that post in 2003 to serve in her father's re-election campaign.
In February 2005, she returned to the US State Department and was appointed the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State For Near Eastern Affairs and Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives.
In this position, Cheney supported the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, C. David Welch, and coordinated U.S. multilateral efforts to promote and support democracy, expanded education and economic opportunities in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Her position made her the second-ranking U.S. diplomat for the Middle East.
Cheney also headed the Iran-Syria Operations Group (ISOG), a unit within the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. ISOG has an $80 million budget to promote democracy in Iran and to develop administration policy for Iran and Syria.
Cheney resigned from the State Department in the spring of 2006 after having her fifth child.
In late January 2007 Cheney penned an editorial in the Washington Post outlining the military and national security faults of Senator Hillary Clinton's recently adopted position on the war.[1] On the same day military historian, pundit and author Robert Bateman published a scathing attack against the Post for publishing such a column, calling into question the legitimacy of publishing an opinion on military theory and counter-terrorism by one who has no discernable education, training, or experience in either of those fields.[2].
