WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney, a staunch conservative who became one of the most influential and controversial vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading supporter of the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.
Quiet and tenacious, Cheney served presidents father and son, leading the military as chief of defense during the Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush and then returning to public life as vice president under Bush's son, George W. Bush.
Cheney was essentially the chief operating officer during the Bush presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions that mattered most to the president, some of his own greatest interest—all while living with heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant for decades. Cheney has consistently defended the unusual surveillance, detention and interrogation tools used in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the years since leaving office, he has become a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became a leading Republican critic and scholar of Trump's desperate attempts to stay in power following his election defeat and his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“In the 246-year history of our country, there has been no man who has posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to disrupt the last election by using lies and violence to cling to power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”
Dick Cheney said last year that he was voting for their candidate Kamala Harris for president over Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long believed he was living on borrowed time and said in 2013 that he now wakes up every morning “with a smile on his face, grateful for the gift of another day” – a strange image for a man who always seemed to be on duty on the ramparts.
His vice presidency was defined by an era of terrorism. Cheney said he turned off the wireless function of his defibrillator several years ago out of fear that terrorists would remotely deliver a fatal shock to his heart.
During his tenure, the vice presidency was no longer just a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney has turned it into a network of backroom channels through which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, the presidency, energy and other cornerstones of the conservative agenda.
With a seemingly permanent half-smile—his detractors called it a smirk—Cheney joked about his enormous reputation as a secretive manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that no one has ever seen coming out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s actually a good way to work.”
A hardliner on Iraq that became increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was repeatedly proven wrong in the Iraq War but never lost his conviction that he was right.
He argued that there was no connection between the 2001 attacks on the United States and pre-war Iraq. He said American troops would be greeted as liberators; they weren't.
He said the Iraqi insurgency was in its final throes in May 2005, when 1,661 American troops were killed, not even half the death toll by the end of the war.
To his admirers, he kept faith in uncertain times, being resolute even as the nation turned against the war and its leading leaders.
However, already in Bush's second term, Cheney's influence weakened, constrained by the courts or changing political realities.
Courts have ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential power and treat terrorism suspects especially harshly. His hawkish stance on Iran and North Korea was not fully supported by Bush.
In the months following the 2001 attacks, Cheney spent much of his time operating from unknown locations, keeping his distance from Bush to ensure that one or the other would survive any subsequent attack on the country's leadership.
With Bush out of town that fateful day, Cheney was a constant presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents picked him up and carried him away—a scene the vice president later described to comic effect.
From the very beginning, Cheney and Bush struck a strange deal, unspoken but well understood. By putting aside any ambitions he might have had as Bush's successor, Cheney gained power in some ways comparable to the presidency itself.
This deal basically went through.
“He's built to be the perfect No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyo., and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He's naturally reserved. He's surprisingly loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “When I signed with the President, I made the decision that the only agenda I would have was his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents—and that was a thinking exercise, trying to figure out how I would be elected President when his term ended.”
His penchant for secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvers came at a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a fellow hunter in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and those around him were slow to reveal the unusual turn of events.
The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians have been relentless on this issue for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush launched his presidential campaign, he turned to Cheney, a Washington insider who had gone into the oil business, for help. Cheney led the search team for a vice presidential candidate.
Bush decided that the best choice would be the person chosen to help with the selection.
Together, the pair faced a lengthy post-2000 election battle before winning. A series of recounts and legal challenges, a storm that brewed from Florida to the nation's highest court, left the country in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped the administration get off to a smooth start despite the lost time. While in office, disputes between agencies vying for much of Bush's limited budget came to his desk and were often resolved there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president's agenda in the halls he walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 leader of the House Republicans.
There were many jokes about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn't seem to mind and took a few bites himself. But later, during Bush's presidency, such comments became less appropriate as he clearly became independent.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney bought a house a few years later, and settled in Wyoming before winning her old House seat in 2016. The destinies of father and daughter also grew closer as the Cheney family became one of Trump's favorite targets.
Dick Cheney came to his daughter's defense in 2022 as she juggled her leading role on a committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 with a bid for re-election in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney's vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that praise and her father's support didn't stop her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a sharp fall from her rapid rise to third place in the House GOP leadership.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a member of Congress. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., working under him at two agencies and in Gerald Ford's White House before being promoted at age 34 to chief of staff, the youngest ever.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he grew up, to run for the state's lone congressional seat.
In that first House race, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, causing him to announce he was forming a group called Heart Disease for Cheney. He still managed to win a decisive victory and win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Gulf War, which expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney headed Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a major engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a longtime Department of Agriculture employee. President of his senior class and co-captain of football at Casper, he attended Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with poor grades.
He returned to Wyoming, eventually attending the University of Wyoming and rekindling his relationship with high school sweetheart Lynn Ann Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, Liz, and his second daughter, Mary.
