“The former vice president died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease,” according to a family statement released early Tuesday. His wife, Lynne, and daughters Liz and Mary as well as other relatives were with him when he died on Monday night, the family said.
As
Cheney had come to office intent on reinvigorating the US presidency, which he believed had been weakened by the War Powers Act and other legislation in the 1970s inspired by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The Sept. 11, 2001, attack by al-Qaeda, which killed about 3,000 people, infused his longstanding political goal with a new focus on
Cheney “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,”
On Sept. 11, Cheney was at the White House, while Bush visited a school in Florida, when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists used hijacked passenger airplanes to attack the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia.
He was hustled by Secret Service agents to the underground command center, where he guided the government’s initial response, including authorizing the military to shoot down, if necessary, other suspicious civilian aircraft. (The shoot-down order didn’t reach military pilots in the skies over Washington and New York, who, regardless, were too late to encounter any of the hijacked planes, according to the national 9/11 commission’s final report.)
Cheney gave a “calm, commanding performance,” Jane Mayer wrote in The Dark Side, her 2008 book that took a critical look at how the war on terror changed America. She took the title from Cheney’s early, blunt assessment of how the US would have to respond to being attacked. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press the first Sunday after attacks, he said:
“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’re gonna spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.”
‘Secure Locations’
After a false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001, raised fears that a radioactive, chemical or biological attack had taken place, Cheney began spending less time there and more at what came to be called “undisclosed secure locations” — usually, the vice presidential residence in Washington, Cheney’s own home in Wyoming, or the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains.
With his chief counsel, David Addington, Cheney took the lead in crafting the policies that guided the administration’s approach to terrorism. Secretly, with minimal congressional involvement, they asserted broad new powers to monitor Americans at home and to use methods that many considered torture — including the drowning simulation called waterboarding — to interrogate military prisoners overseas.
WATCH: Former US Vice President Dick Cheney has died. He was 84. Bloomberg Contributor and former Rep. Patrick McHenry, (R-NC) discusses Dick Cheney’s legacy. Source: Bloomberg
“Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint,” Barton Gellman wrote in
In a statement on Tuesday, Bush said of Cheney, “History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation – a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held.”
Mass Destruction
Cheney played a similarly central role in turning US terrorism fears into a case for preemptive military action against Iraq. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that
His reputation suffered when no such stockpiles were found, the American military became ensnarled in sectarian fighting and public support for the war evaporated.
He rarely conceded mistakes in strategy or planning. In May 2005, he said of Iraqi fighters, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” In an interview for The World According to Dick Cheney, a 2013 Showtime documentary, he said, “The ones who spend all their time trying to be loved by everybody probably aren’t doing much.”
Cheney’s eldest daughter,
Though staunchly conservative on most issues, she ran afoul of the Republican Party for voting to impeach President
Her father, true to form, didn’t mince words in backing her. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” the former vice president said in a campaign ad for his daughter in August 2022, shortly before she
Cheney and his daughter both crossed party lines and endorsed Vice President
Richard Bruce Cheney was born on Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the first of three children in a family of New Deal Democrats. His father, also Richard, worked for the federal Soil Conservation Service, a program created under President
The family moved to Casper, Wyoming, when Cheney was 13, and he was senior-class president and co-captain of his high school football team. He also dated the homecoming Mustang Queen, Lynne Vincent, whom he would marry in 1964, and who would go on to become a conservative scholar and serve as a chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Yale Dropout
On a scholarship arranged by a local businessman, Cheney went east to attend Yale University. His poor grades led him to drop out in his second year, and he returned to Wyoming to work laying power lines. Twice in a nine-month span, in 1962 and 1963, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated. He returned to college, got married and earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.
From 1959 to 1967, he requested and received five deferments from the military draft that could have sent him to Vietnam — four for being a student, one for being a new father.
While studying for a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison — where anti-war protests he viewed as distasteful solidified his conservative views — Cheney was selected for a fellowship with the American Political Science Association and spent a year in Washington working for Representative William Steiger, a Wisconsin Republican.
In 1969, he was hired by
He left government after Nixon’s 1972 reelection and before the Watergate scandal brought down his presidency. After Nixon resigned, and
Ford’s loss to
Reaganesque Record
Long viewed as a political centrist in Ford’s image, Cheney used his decade in the House to build a record appealing to supporters of President Ronald Reagan. Cheney, like Reagan, believed that “government had gotten too large” and “American defenses were too weak and the nation’s resolve too dubious,” the Almanac of American Politics wrote in 1984.
Cheney was the top-ranking House Republican on the congressional committee that in 1987 investigated the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan White House’s secret effort to aid anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua with money raised from arms sales to Iran. Cheney helped produce a minority report that said the administration’s mistakes didn’t justify new limits on presidential authority. In his memoir, Cheney said it was “crucial to defend the presidency itself against congressional attempts to encroach on its power.”
President
Out of power when
The younger Bush was governor of Texas and on his way to the Republican presidential nomination in April 2000 when he asked Cheney to head his search for a vice presidential running mate. Bush later said he had Cheney in mind for the job the whole time.
Cheney’s extensive resume bolstered the ticket, easing concerns that Bush lacked the experience required to manage the federal government. While the results of the election were being contested in court, Cheney got to work assembling the administration as head of Bush’s transition — choosing, among others, his old friend, Rumsfeld, as defense secretary.
Over the course of his life, Cheney suffered five heart attacks starting in 1978, and had the fourth one in November 2000, as Bush’s election hinged on a recount in Florida. A defibrillator was implanted in his chest in June 2001 to control episodes of rapid heartbeats. He revealed in his memoir that, two months after taking office, he “took the extraordinary step of writing a letter of resignation as vice president,” to be delivered should he become medically incapacitated. In March 2012, following 20 months on a waiting list, he received a heart transplant.
Cheney helped shape the Bush administration’s agenda on early priorities such as tax cuts and energy policy, often steering the White House toward textbook conservative principles rather than the more centrist “compassionate conservative” idea that Bush had campaigned on. In 2003, according to Gellman, Cheney worked discreetly with Republican allies in Congress to implement a capital gains tax cut that Bush had intentionally omitted from his tax legislation.
Cheney provided ample fodder to critics. In 2004, he swore at a Democrat on the Senate floor. In 2006, he accidentally shot and wounded a hunting companion. A subsidiary of Halliburton became the largest military contractor in Iraq, often receiving contracts outside the competitive-bidding process.
A Friend’s View
“I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for 30 years,” Scowcroft said. “But Dick Cheney I don’t know any more.”
While he became a favorite among conservatives, Cheney didn’t sign onto the religious right’s campaign against gay rights, including the right to marry — a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that his youngest daughter,
So pervasive was the public impression of an all-powerful vice president that Bush spent a few weeks considering Cheney’s offer to step aside before Bush’s 2004 reelection bid.
“He was seen as dark and heartless — the Darth Vader of the administration,” Bush wrote in “Decision Points,” his 2010 memoir.
In the end, Bush decided Cheney was too important to lose: “He accepted any assignment I asked. He gave me his unvarnished opinions. He understood that I made the final decisions. When we disagreed, he kept our differences private. Most important, I trusted Dick.”
(Updates with Bush statement in 13th paragraph.)
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