We remember Dick Cheney, the powerful and polarizing Vice President
Dick Cheney, the ultra-conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at the age of 84.
On Tuesday, his family said in a statement that Cheney died on Monday due to complications from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease.
Strong and calm, Mr. Cheney has served presidents father and son, leading the armed forces as chief of defense during the Gulf War under Cheney. President George H.W. Bush Before returning to public life as Vice President under George W. Bush, Mr. Bush’s son.
In fact, Mr. Cheney was the chief operating officer of Bush’s presidency. He played a leadership role, often in implementing the decisions that were most important to the president and some that were beyond his concern for himself – all while living with decades of heart disease and after a heart transplant. Cheney has consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, arrest, and search that were used in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
President Bush described Mr. Cheney as a “respected and honorable man” and said his death was a “loss to the nation.”
“History will remember him as one of the best public servants of his generation, a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held,” Bush said in a statement.
Years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney He became the leading Republican critic and scrutinizer of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power afterward His defeat in the 2020 elections And his actions in Riots January 6, 2021 In the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, no individual has presented a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in his speech. TV commercial for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to stay in power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a development that Democrats of his era could not have imagined, Cheney said last year He was voting for their candidateKamala Harris for president against Trump.
Cheney, who has survived five heart attacks, had long believed he was living on borrowed time, declaring in 2013 that he woke up every morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an uncanny image of someone who always seemed to be guarding the fences.
During his time in office, the vice presidency was no longer just a ceremonial idea. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels through which he could influence Policy towards IraqTerrorism, presidential powers, energy, and other pillars of conservatism.
With a seemingly permanent half-smile — which critics described as a smirk — Mr. Cheney joked about his outsized reputation as a secret manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that no one saw coming out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a great way to actually work.”
Iraq war
A hardliner on Iraq, Cheney was increasingly isolated as other hawks left the government, and he was proven wrong point after point in the Iraq war, without losing the conviction that he was fundamentally right.
He claimed that links between the September 11 attacks and pre-war Iraq did not exist. He said that American forces would be welcomed as liberators. They weren’t.
The Iraqi insurgency was declared in its final throes in May 2005, when 1,661 American soldiers were killed, a number not even half the number killed by the end of the war.
For fans, he maintained faith in a fragile time, and was resolute even when the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But long into President Bush’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned, curbed by the courts or changing political realities.
Courts have ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential power and treat suspected terrorists harshly. Mr. Bush has not fully embraced his hard-line positions on Iran and Iran north korea.
Cheney’s relationship with Bush
From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck a strange deal, unspoken but well understood. Quite apart from any ambitions he might have to succeed Bush, Cheney was granted power in some ways similar to that of the presidency itself.
That deal has largely held up.
As Mr. Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed with the president that the only agenda I was going to choose was his, and that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was an attempt to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was up.”
His penchant for secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvering had its price. He has come to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavellian orchestrating a failed response to criticism of the Iraq War. When he shot a hunting buddy in the torso, neck and face with an errant rifle blast in 2006, he and his gang were slow to come clean.
It was “one of the worst days of my life,” Cheney said. The victim is his friend Harry WhittingtonHe recovered and soon forgave him. Comedians have been relentless about it for months.
When Bush began his presidential bid, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had gone into oil trading. Mr. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential nominee.
Mr. Bush decided that the best choice was the man chosen to assist in the selection.
Together the pair faced a long battle after the 2000 elections before they were able to achieve victory. Recounts and court challenges left the country in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory became clear, and helped give the Republican administration a smooth start despite the lost time. During his time in office, disputes between administrations competing for a larger portion of Mr. Bush’s constrained budget came to his office and were often settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Cheney lobbied for the president to enter the halls where he walked A very conservative member of Congress And the No. 2 Republican leader in the House of Representatives.
Jokes abounded about how Mr. Cheney was the real No. 1 man in town; Mr. Bush didn’t seem to mind, and broke out some of the words himself. But such comments became less appropriate later in Mr. Bush’s presidency, as it became clear that he had reached the presidency.
Cheney’s political rise
Politics first attracted Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressman. He became a protégé of Representative Donald Rumsfeld, Republican of Illinois, and served under him in two agencies and in the White House under Gerald Ford before being promoted to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at 34 years old.
Cheney served for 14 months, then returned to Casper, Wyoming, where he grew up, and ran for the state’s only congressional seat.
In his first House race, Mr. Cheney had a mild heart attack, leading him to believe he was forming a group called “Cardiologists for Cheney.” He achieved a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became Secretary of Defense under President Bush I, and led the Pentagon during the Gulf War (1990-1991), which drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Mr. Cheney headed Dallas-based Halliburton, a large engineering and construction firm for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a longtime Department of Agriculture worker. Senior class president and co-captain of Casper’s football team, he went to Yale on a full-year scholarship but failed out.
He returned to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and rekindled his relationship with his high school sweetheart, Lynn Ann Vincent, whom he married in 1964. He is survived by his wife, Liz, and his second daughter, Mary.
This story was reported by the Associated Press.
Associated Press writer Meade Grover in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.