Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died on Monday at 84, his family said in a statement.
The cause of death was complications from pneumonia and heart and vascular problems, according to the statement. Cheney had a history of heart problems.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement said. “We are immensely grateful for everything Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are immensely blessed to have loved and been loved by this noble giant.”
In a statement, former President George W. Bush, who chose Cheney as his vice president, said the death “is a loss for the nation and a sadness for his friends. Laura and I will remember Dick Cheney as the decent and honorable man he was.”
Bush added that Cheney “was a calm and steady presence in the White House amid great national challenges. I relied on his honest and straightforward advice, and he never failed to give his best.”
An inauspicious beginning
In Cheney’s youth, little indicated the immensely influential role he would one day play in the highest echelons of American politics. Son of a government employee responsible for environmental conservation in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, he flunked out of Yale University and worked as an electrician for a power company in his new state, Wyoming. Add to that two convictions for driving under the influence, and we have an inauspicious youth.
But Cheney turned it around: he married his high school girlfriend, Lynn; had two children; graduated from the University of Wyoming; and earned a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin.
While Cheney was turning his life around, the U.S. was mired in the Vietnam War. Cheney supported that war but never fought in it. He received five deferments from military service. Decades later, critics would seize on that, since Cheney helped lead the U.S. into another controversial war—this time in Iraq.
From ordinary to extraordinary
The future vice president began his political career as a congressional intern in 1969. That same year, he went to work for a future partner in the Bush administration—Donald Rumsfeld, who ran an economics office in Nixon’s White House.
Cheney left the White House before Nixon’s resignation, but by 1974 he was back, working for the new president, Gerald Ford. Cheney rose quickly, becoming Ford’s chief of staff at 34.
It was then that he began to develop a philosophy that would fully blossom in George W. Bush’s White House. His belief was that the power of the presidency should not only be protected but also restored. In the 1970s, he watched Congress enact reforms in response to the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.
“We saw the War Powers Act, an asset seizure control law, and repeatedly, previous administrations negotiated away the president’s authority to carry out his functions,” he said in a 2002 Fox News interview. “We will not do that in this administration. The president is determined to defend those principles and to pass this office, his and mine, to future generations in better condition than we found it.”
War, a recurring theme
In 1978, Cheney ran for Congress from Wyoming and won. That same year, he suffered the first in a series of heart attacks. He served in Congress for a decade and finally left his seat to become defense secretary for President George H.W. Bush.
The post brought Cheney’s first confrontation with Saddam Hussein, when he directed Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. The war ended quickly after expelling Iraqi troops from Kuwait. At the time, some argued that the U.S. should advance to Baghdad and topple Saddam’s regime. President Bush refused; in 1994, Cheney defended that decision.
“The idea that we should go to Baghdad now and somehow take control of the country strikes me as extremely serious in terms of what we would have to do when we got there,” he said. “We would probably have to put in a new government. It’s not clear what kind of government that would be, or how long we would have to stay. For the U.S. to get militarily involved in determining the outcome of who governs Iraq strikes me as the classic definition of a quagmire.”
Cheney left the Pentagon when the first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Two years later, he considered running for president but instead headed to the private sector, joining the energy services giant Halliburton.
Changing the vice presidency—and foreign policy
The job made Cheney a wealthy man, but he remained involved in conservative politics. In 2000, he was asked by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to lead the search for a vice president. Bush later announced with surprise that he had chosen none other than Cheney.
In the role, Cheney became a target of criticism from administration opponents. Cheney also redefined the vice president’s role. He became President Bush’s closest adviser and a dominant figure in policy-making. Critics claimed Cheney was, in fact, the one running the White House.
The events of September 11, 2001, only reinforced that notion. While Bush was in Florida that day, Cheney was at the White House. He was literally carried by Secret Service agents to an underground bunker. In a later interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cheney said he was the one who told Bush not to return to the White House.
“I said: ‘Delay your return. We don’t know what’s happening here, but it looks like we were targets,’” Cheney said, adding that “the things we did later that day were directly tied to ensuring presidential succession.”
After the 9/11 attacks, Cheney advocated a new aggressive foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift and preemptive action. The U.S. would no longer wait for the enemy to strike first. He helped justify the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he memorably predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.
On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who hosted the show at the time, asked Cheney if the American people were prepared for a long and bloody battle.
“I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” Cheney said.
As the war dragged on, Democrats seized on that statement as proof of how Cheney’s determination to go to war had clouded his judgment. There were rumors that his views had changed from his early days in politics.
Controversies dog Cheney
Although Cheney’s temperament was never particularly mild, critics attacked the vice president as a relentlessly dark figure. Late-night talk show comedians called him Darth Vader. Even President Bush had fun with the image of his vice president one Halloween.
“This morning I was with the vice president,” Bush told reporters. “I was asking him what costume he was planning. He said: ‘Well, I’m already wearing it,’ and then muttered something about the dark side of the Force.”
There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration’s popularity plummeted in his second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name. Cheney was not legally implicated in the case but was still affected by the scandal.
Then, in one of the most bizarre incidents involving someone of Cheney’s stature, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, lawyer Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot during a quail hunt at a Texas ranch in 2006.
Even in a strange story like that, some of Cheney’s classic traits, like secrecy, were present. The story didn’t come out for two days, and when it finally did, Cheney himself took even longer to talk about it, finally granting an interview to Fox News.
On his last day in office, Cheney, sitting in a wheelchair—consequence of an accident—bundled up against the bitter cold, watched President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Out of office, he became a frequent and fierce critic of the Obama administration, even accusing the president of not understanding that the United States was at war.
In February 2010, he made a surprise appearance at CPAC, the conservative political action conference in Washington. The crowd cheered him fervently.
It was one of Cheney’s last moments of great public admiration. With Donald Trump’s rise, Cheney’s political style and interventionist foreign policy lost popularity within the party. Trump frequently criticized Cheney for launching what he called “endless wars.”
The controversy extended to the next generation, when Trump attacked Cheney’s daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), for voting to impeach Trump after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s relentless criticism of her contributed to Liz Cheney’s defeat in her 2022 reelection bid. During the campaign, her father appeared in television ads supporting the candidate.
“In the 246 years of our nation’s history, there has never been an individual who represented a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney said in the ad.
That was his last major public moment in the political arena. Two years later, he would endorse Democrat Kamala Harris over Trump for president.
In the end, the power of the Cheney name was greatly diminished in Republican politics. His legacy became contradictory: Trump supporters despised him, while some Democrats embraced him—however reluctantly—and many others always condemned him as a war criminal for his role in Iraq.
Now Cheney has died, leaving a legacy in public service, foreign policy, and the balance of power among government branches. Regardless of his contradictory legacy, he leaves a personal mark on the presidency greater than any vice president before him.
Source: npr.org by Don Gonyea