Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who turned one of the vital highly effective and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. historical past and a number one advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.
Cheney died Monday night time attributable to issues of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness, in keeping with an announcement from his household.
“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the assertion stated. ““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. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents, main the armed forces as protection chief throughout the Persian Gulf Struggle underneath President George H.W. Bush earlier than returning to public life as vp underneath Bush’s son George W. Bush.
Cheney was, in impact, the chief working officer of the youthful Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, usually a commanding one, in implementing choices most necessary to the president and a few of surpassing curiosity to himself — all whereas dwelling with many years of coronary heart illness and, post-administration, a coronary heart transplant. Cheney persistently defended the extraordinary instruments of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001.
Past wielding a unprecedented stage of affect as a vp, Cheney was additionally key in creating the “unitary executive theory” of the chief department of presidency. This expansive studying of the structure grants a lot better powers to the president of the US than beforehand accepted. Lengthy-time political author Andrew Sullivan wrote earlier this yr that this principle has assist stretching again to the Seventies and the impeachment and resignation of Richard Nixon (in whose White Home Cheney served, early in his profession, together with a number of different Bush cupboard members). In that regard, the work of Cheney and his authorized counsel, David Addington, set the stage for the more and more authoritarian presidency as exercised by Donald Trump, which renders the fraught relationship between the 2 figures sudden and even ironic.
Years after leaving workplace, he turned a goal of President Donald Trump, particularly after daughter Liz Cheney turned the main Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s determined makes an attempt to remain in energy after his election defeat and his actions within the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney stated in a tv advert for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his period might by no means have imagined, Dick Cheney stated final yr he was voting for his or her candidate, Kamala Harris, for president in opposition to Trump.
A survivor of 5 coronary heart assaults, Cheney lengthy thought he was dwelling on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke every morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd picture for a determine who at all times gave the impression to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency outlined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that he had had the wi-fi perform of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of worry terrorists would remotely ship his coronary heart a deadly shock.
In his time in workplace, now not was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. As a substitute, Cheney made it a community of again channels from which to affect coverage on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, power and different cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Mounted with a seemingly everlasting half-smile — detractors referred to as it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize repute as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he requested. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
A tough-liner on Iraq who was more and more remoted as different hawks left authorities, Cheney was proved fallacious on level after level within the Iraq Struggle, with out ever dropping the conviction that he was basically proper.
He alleged hyperlinks between the 2001 assaults in opposition to the US and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He stated U.S. troops can be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its final throes in Could 2005, again when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by warfare’s finish.
For admirers, he saved the religion in a shaky time, resolute even because the nation turned in opposition to the warfare and the leaders waging it.
However nicely into Bush’s second time period, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts dominated in opposition to efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord particular harsh therapy to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea weren’t absolutely embraced by Bush.
Cheney operated a lot of the time from undisclosed areas within the months after the 2001 assaults, saved aside from Bush to make sure one or the opposite would survive any follow-up assault on the nation’s management.
With Bush out of city on that fateful day, Cheney was a gradual presence within the White Home, no less than till Secret Service brokers lifted him off his ft and carried him away, in a scene the vp later described to comical impact.
From the start, Cheney and Bush struck an odd discount, unstated however nicely understood. Shelving any ambitions he might need needed to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded energy comparable in some methods to the presidency itself.
That discount largely held up.
“He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a good friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and labored with him in Washington, as soon as stated. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a worth. He got here to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq warfare. And when he shot a looking companion within the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie had been sluggish to reveal that extraordinary flip of occasions.
The vp referred to as it “one of the worst days of my life.” The sufferer, his good friend Harry Whittington, recovered and rapidly forgave him. Comedians had been relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush started his presidential quest, he sought assist from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil enterprise. Cheney led the staff to discover a vice presidential candidate.
Bush determined your best option was the person picked to assist with the selecting.
Collectively, the pair confronted a protracted 2000 postelection battle earlier than they may declare victory. A sequence of recounts and courtroom challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest courtroom — left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took cost of the presidential transition earlier than victory was clear and helped give the administration a easy launch regardless of the misplaced time. In workplace, disputes amongst departments vying for an even bigger piece of Bush’s constrained funds got here to his desk and infrequently had been settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s applications in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican Home chief.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the actual No. 1 on the town; Bush didn’t appear to thoughts and cracked a couple of himself. However such feedback turned much less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly got here into his personal.
Cheney retired to Jackson Gap, not removed from the place Liz Cheney a couple of years later purchased a house, establishing Wyoming residency earlier than she gained his previous Home seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew nearer, too, because the Cheney household turned one in all Trump’s favourite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s protection in 2022 as she juggled her lead function on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with attempting to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the rebellion earned her reward from many Democrats and political observers outdoors Congress. However that reward and her father’s assist didn’t hold her from dropping badly within the Republican main, a dramatic fall after her fast rise to the No. 3 job within the Home GOP management.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He turned a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ailing,, serving underneath him in two businesses and in Gerald Ford’s White Home earlier than he was elevated to chief of employees, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the put up for 14 months, then returned to Casper, the place he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.
In that first race for the Home, Cheney suffered a gentle coronary heart assault, prompting him to crack he was forming a bunch referred to as “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He nonetheless managed a decisive victory and went on to win 5 extra phrases.
In 1989, Cheney turned protection secretary underneath the primary President Bush and led the Pentagon throughout the 1990-91 Persian Gulf Struggle that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the 2 Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a big engineering and development firm for the oil trade.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Division employee. Senior class president and soccer co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a yr however left with failing grades.
He moved again to Wyoming, finally enrolled on the College of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with highschool sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He’s survived by his spouse, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
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Related Press author Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.
