Harry Whittington, a wealthy and well-connected lawyer who gained sudden global fame as the unintended victim of a shotgun blast by former Vice President Dick Cheney, died early Saturday morning, his wife said. He was 95.
Mr. Whittington typified the breed of Texan known as the good ol’ boy, a traditional Lone Star tribute to wit, understatement and loyalty. He regularly played cards with a nonagenarian former Texas Supreme Court chief judge and enjoyed a bantering relationship with President George W. Bush. He died peacefully at home, his wife said on Sunday.
His strong Republican connections led to his hunting on a Texas ranch with a group that included Mr. Cheney, whom Mr. Whittington had before met only briefly. In the encroaching dusk of Feb. 11, 2006, Mr. Cheney abruptly wheeled around to shoot a quail, and instead shot Mr. Whittington in his face and upper body. He suffered scores of gunshot wounds.
The story seized the nation’s attention as two eyewitnesses and a White House spokesman blamed Mr. Whittington for the accident, saying he stepped into Mr. Cheney’s line of fire. Texas authorities cited Mr. Cheney only for the offense of not having a proper game stamp on his hunting license.
But at the time and later, hunting experts questioned whether the vice president had followed proper safety procedures and had heeded a shooter’s obligation to know what is in front of him before pulling the trigger.
Many were surprised — late-night comedians were delighted — when Mr. Whittington, not Mr. Cheney, apologized for the incident. Mr. Cheney acknowledged only that he was responsible for pulling the trigger.
After his release from intensive care a week later, a frail Mr. Whittington famously said, “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”
In an interview with The Washington Post in 2010, Mr. Whittington said that his wounds were more serious than was revealed at the time. Doctors reported that he had a mild heart attack after birdshot moved into his heart. He suffered a collapsed lung and around 30 pieces of shot remained in his body, including one near his heart.
In 2011, Mr. Cheney offered an apology of sorts. “I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family had gone through,” he wrote in a memoir, “In My Time.” “The day of the hunting accident was one of the saddest of my life.”
Mr. Whittington achieved wealth through a law practice focusing on oil and gas, and through real estate investments. In politics, he was at the forefront of former Texas Democrats who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, ultimately making it the dominant party in the state.
In 1960, he managed John Tower’s successful campaign to become the first Texas Republican senator since Reconstruction. He later worked on campaigns for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and helped the Republican strategist Karl Rove set up his first direct-mail firm. This political work led to him being appointed to state boards by five governors over 27 years.
As a lawyer and investor, Mr. Whittington was a fierce proponent of property rights. He repeatedly questioned the city of Austin’s use of eminent domain to acquire private property — some of it his own — for public purposes.
Harry Whittington was born in Henderson, Texas, on March 3, 1927, and his family struggled in the Depression as his father lost his dry-goods store and cotton gin. Harry did many odd jobs to pay his way through the University of Texas and its law school, from which he graduated in 1950. He then practiced law in Austin.
In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he found himself the only Republican on a nine-member board that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him, from drug-running by prison officials, to no-bid contracts, to families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity won the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens using prisoners to punish other inmates.
Mr. Whittington ultimately became a prime catalyst in toppling corrupt management. When he served on the state’s bond approval agency, he fought for disclosure of contributions to political candidates from Wall Street firms. As chairman of the agency that oversees the funeral industry, he was credited with improving the handling of consumer complaints.
In 2001, Mr. Whittington urged Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to sign a bill banning the execution of developmentally disabled people. (The issue mattered to him; one of his daughters has such disabilities.) Mr. Perry, a Republican, vetoed the bill, saying that it would diminish juries’ power and that Texas did not execute people with mental disabilities anyway. The United States Supreme Court later struck down capital punishment for developmentally disabled prisoners.
Mr. Whittington married Mercedes Baker in 1950.
In 2018, the shooting accident was featured in a scene in “Vice,” a biopic on Mr. Cheney starring Christian Bale. Mr. Whittington said that he planned to see the movie, although he disputed some of the details portrayed in a trailer for the film. He also told The Daily Mail that he had “no hard feelings toward the vice president.”
Mr. Whittington kept the bloodstained vest he was wearing when Mr. Cheney shot him, using it to show children the danger of firearms, The Washington Post reported. He said he hunted infrequently after the accident, explaining, “Some of my enthusiasm is gone.”
April Rubin contributed reporting.
