Liz Cheney has been very quiet about the death of Nelson Mandela, which is odd since she's running for public office. We know her father, Dick was very busy calling Mandela a terrorist and voting against measures that targeted South Africa over their racist regime, but now comes this op-ed from her college days which sheds light on what she believed. Liz says she was against the regime, but thought it foolish to take action against it and even berated college protesters against South America.
In a 1988 op-ed for her college newspaper, Liz Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney who is now running for the Republican Senate nomination in Wyoming (and kicking up a family feud and a GOP civil war), had a stern message for anti-apartheid activists campaigning for freedom in South Africa: "frankly, nobody’s listening."
In the 1980s, when Liz Cheney was attending Colorado College, a campus group called theColorado College Community Against Apartheid led regular demonstrations to push the college to adopt a policy of divestment—a form of economic protest in which the college would agree not to invest in companies that had business interests in South Africa. Throughout the country in those years, students at universities and colleges were pushing administrations and boards to dump their investments in firms that engaged in commerce with South Africa, including such corporate powerhouses as IBM. The Colorado College group, as did protesters on other campuses, constructed a "shanty town" on the quad, and it organized an on-stage demonstration at the school's 1987 graduation ceremony.
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Ultimately, Cheney's argument won out on her campus. Colorado College was not one of the 167 American educational institutions to divest its financial resources from South Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, despite CCCAA's efforts. In affirming the school's policy in 1987, Citicorp president William Spencer, a Colorado College trustee, warned that divestment could "contribute to a 'revolutionary upheaval' and 'massive loss of life'" in South Africa.
