WASHINGTON — Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at 84.
George W. Bush’s vice president died Monday from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said Tuesday in a statement.
In Cheney’s hands, the vice presidency became a nexus of influence and manipulation — no longer the timid office whose occupants had tended their boss’ ambitions, gone to endless banquets and often waited in the wings for their own shot at the prize.
When he bunkered in secure undisclosed locations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, that was less an inconvenience for Cheney than a metaphor for a life of power that he exercised to maximum effect from the shadows.
He was the small man operating big levers as if from Oz. Machiavelli with a sardonic grin. “The Darth Vader of the administration,” as Bush described the public’s view.
No one seemed more amused at that perception than Cheney himself. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
The force was with him.
Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life under his son.
Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush's presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
“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,” Bush said Tuesday.
Years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump's desperate attempts to stay in power after his 2020 election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at 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 said in a television ad 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 era could never have imagined, Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
For all his conservatism, Cheney was privately and publicly supportive of his daughter Mary Cheney after she came out as gay, years before gay marriage was broadly supported, then legalized. "Freedom means freedom for everyone," he said.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 that he awoke each morning "with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
Cheney made his vice presidency a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other conservative cornerstones.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile -- detractors called it a smirk -- Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
Among those who worked with him and sometimes crossed him, Bush White House adviser Dan Bartlett told a Miller Center oral history series that you always knew where you stood with Cheney.
“In Washington and politics you get a lot of people who will stab you in the back,” he said. “Dick Cheney was perfectly comfortable with stabbing you in the chest.” He liked that about him.
The Iraq War
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 9/11 attacks and prewar Iraq that didn't exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren't.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But well into Bush's second term, Cheney's clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to terrorism suspects. Bush did not fully embrace his hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea.
Cheney's relationship with Bush
From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.
That bargain largely held up.
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 price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned figure orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq War. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that episode.
It was "one of the worst days of my life," Cheney said. The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months.
When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.
Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. Recounts and court challenges left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the Republican administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush's constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president's programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn't seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.
On Sept. 11, 2001, with Bush out of town, the president gave Cheney approval to authorize the military to shoot down any hijacked planes still in the sky. By then, two airliners had hit the World Trade Center and a third was bearing down on the capital from nearby Dulles airport in Virginia.
A Secret Service agent burst into the West Wing room, grabbed Cheney by the belt and shoulder and led him to a bunker underneath the White House. “He didn’t say, ‘Shall we go?’” Cheney told NBC News years later. “He wasn’t polite about it.”
Cheney talked to Bush again from the bunker and told him, “Washington was under attack, as well as New York.”
After Bush's return to the White House that night, Cheney was taken to a secret location to keep the president and vice president separated and try to ensure that at least one of them would survive any further attack.
Cheney said his first reaction to hearing of the crash of the fourth hijacked plane, in Pennsylvania, was that the U.S. might have shot it down per his order. It came down after passengers fought the hijackers.
He became the youngest chief of staff
Politics first lured Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, Wyoming, where he had been raised, and ran for the state's lone congressional seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called "Cardiacs for Cheney." He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, which drove Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but failed out.
He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife and daughters.
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Associated Press writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.
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