Dick Cheney, the hardline conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate of the invasion of Iraq, has died at the age of 84.
Mr. Cheney died Monday of pneumonia and heart and vascular disease, his family announced Tuesday in a statement.
Mr. Cheney, quietly energetic, served both father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under Mr. Bush’s son, George W. Bush.
Mr. Cheney was, in fact, the director of operations for the younger Bush presidency. He played a role, often dominant, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of primary interest to himself – all while living with decades of heart disease and, after the administration, a heart transplant. Cheney has consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
President Bush called Mr. Cheney “a decent and honorable man” and said his death was “a loss to the nation.”
“History will remember him as one of the finest public servants of his generation – a patriot who demonstrated integrity, great intelligence and seriousness in every office he held,” Mr. Bush said in a statement.
Years after leaving office, Mr. Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump, particularly after his daughter Liz Cheney emerged as the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power following his 2020 election defeat and his actions during the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.
“In our country’s 246-year history, no individual has ever posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Mr. Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election by using lies and violence to stay in power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist that Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Mr. Cheney said last year that he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Mr. Cheney long believed he was living on borrowed time and said in 2013 that he woke up every morning “with a smile on his face, grateful for the gift of another day,” a strange image for a character who always seemed to hold the battlements together.
During his tenure, the vice presidency was no longer simply a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Mr. Cheney has turned it into a network of secret channels through which he can influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other conservative cornerstones.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Mr. Cheney joked about his outsized reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius down there that no one ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “Actually, that’s a good way to operate.”
The war in Iraq
A hard-liner on Iraq, increasingly isolated as other hawks left the government, Mr. Cheney was wrong again and again during the Iraq war, without losing the conviction that he was fundamentally right.
He alleged connections that did not exist between the September 11 attacks and pre-war Iraq. He said American troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He said the Iraqi insurgency was at its peak in May 2005, when 1,661 U.S. service members were killed, not even half of the toll at the end of the war.
To his admirers, he kept the faith in fragile times, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders who waged it.
But during President Bush’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned, whether through the courts or changing political realities.
Courts have ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential authority and grant special and harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. Mr. Bush has not fully adopted his hawkish positions toward Iran and North Korea.
Cheney’s relationship with Bush
From the start, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush struck a strange, unspoken but well-understood deal. Putting aside any ambitions to succeed Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney was granted power comparable in some ways to that of the presidency itself.
This agreement largely held.
As Mr. Cheney said: “When I signed on with the president, I made the decision that the only agenda I would have was his, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and it was an attempt to figure out how I was going to be elected president once his term was over. »
His penchant for secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvering came at a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a botched response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a fellow hunter in the chest, neck and face with a shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose the episode.
It was “one of the worst days of my life,” Mr. Cheney said. The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. The actors have been relentless for months.
When Mr. Bush began his presidential campaign, he sought help from Mr. Cheney, a Washington insider who had retired to the oil business. Mr. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.
Mr. Bush decided the best choice was the man chosen to help him choose.
Together, the two men faced a lengthy post-election battle in 2000 before they could claim victory. The recounts and legal challenges left the country in limbo for weeks.
Mr. Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped enable the Republican administration to get off to a smooth start despite the lost time. In office, disputes between ministries vying for a larger share of Mr. Bush’s constrained budget reached his desk and were often resolved there.
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Cheney pushed for the president’s agenda in the halls where he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican leader in the House.
Jokes abounded that Mr. Cheney was the real number one in town; Mr. Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less relevant later in Mr. Bush’s presidency, as he clearly took off.
Cheney’s political rise
Politics first attracted Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressman. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before being elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Mr. Cheney served in that role for 14 months, then returned to Casper, Wyoming, where he had grown up, and ran for the state’s only congressional seat.
During that first House run, Mr. Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to admit that he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still won a decisive victory and won five more terms.
In 1989, Mr. Cheney became secretary of defense under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, which drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Mr. Cheney headed Halliburton Corp., a large Dallas-based engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Mr. Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a longtime Department of Agriculture employee. Senior class president and football co-captain at Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for one year but failed.
He returned to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming, and renewed a relationship with his high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, Liz, and a second daughter, Mary.
This story was reported by the Associated Press.
Associated Press writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.
