In his first public remarks on the accident, Mr. Cheney also took full responsibility for the shooting that left his friend, Harry M. Whittington, an Austin lawyer, with pellet wounds to his face, neck, chest and rib cage.
"Ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry," he said in a televised interview with the Fox News anchor Brit Hume in Washington. "You can talk about all the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line.
"It was not Harry's fault," he went on to say. "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. It's a day I'll never forget."