Packer on Cheney

From George Packer's remembrance of Ted Kennedy and Ken Bacon, an advocate for refugees, an account of being at a party for Bacon also attended by Dick Cheney:

I didn’t want to shake hands with Cheney, unless I also had the chance to tell him what I thought of him. But as soon as I saw the ex-Vice President and his ideologically combative wife making their way around the reception room, I knew that it would be impossible not to shake hands. Cheney was shorter and heavier than I expected, and he was leaning on a cane. This is the problem with meeting the high and mighty, and perhaps with Washington journalism: once you see important people in the flesh, they become just a little bit human, and it’s no longer quite so easy to preserve the dispassionate hatred that, for example, Cheney richly deserves.