Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Breaking four days of silence, an obviously shaken Vice President Dick Cheney accepted blame Wednesday for shooting his hunting companion last weekend, said alcohol wasn’t involved and defended his handling of the incident.

Speaking with uncharacteristic emotion, Cheney recalled his horror when he realized that he had wounded lawyer Harry Whittington while hunting Saturday in South Texas. Cheney spoke publicly about the incident for the first time about an hour after Whittington’s doctors had predicted a full recovery for the 78-year-old Austin man.

“The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there was Harry falling,” Cheney told Fox News. “It was, I would have to say, one of the worst days of my life.”

Cheney said he ran over to the bleeding victim and told him, “Harry, I had no idea you were there.” He said Whittington didn’t respond.

While speculation on the Web and elsewhere has focused on the possibility that alcohol may have been a factor, the vice president ruled that out. He said he’d had a beer at lunch – four or five hours before the incident – but wasn’t under the influence of alcohol at the time of shooting.

The other members of the hunting party were Pamela Willeford, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland; Katharine Armstrong, a ranch owner and Cheney’s host; and Sara Armstrong Hixon, Armstrong’s sister.

“Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence,” Cheney said.

While he was contrite about the shooting, he expressed no regrets about his failure to acknowledge the incident publicly until about 18 hours later. The first public notice came Sunday afternoon, when Armstrong called a local newspaper.

“I thought that was the right call. … I still do,” Cheney said. “I’m comfortable with the way we did it.”

Although some administration officials initially had suggested that Whittington was at least partly to blame for the shooting by failing to make his presence known, Cheney took full responsibility in the television interview.

“It’s not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else,” he said. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”

In Texas, a hospital spokesman said Whittington was “doing extremely well” after a mild heart attack Tuesday that doctors blamed on a birdshot pellet that lodged in his heart.

Peter Banko, a spokesman for Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, said Whittington “wonders what all the hoopla is about” and considers the controversy surrounding his wounds “much ado about nothing.”

“We’ll just continue monitoring him,” Banko said. “He’s sitting up in a chair, eating regular food, and he actually plans on doing some of his attorney work in his room.”

David Blanchard, the head of the hospital’s emergency room, said Whittington was no longer at risk from the pellet in his heart and was likely to leave the hospital in about six days.

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