Former vice president of the United States dies at 84

During his tenure, the vice presidency was no longer simply a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney turned it into a network of backchannels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.

Wearing a seemingly permanent half-smile (detractors called it a smirk), Cheney joked about his enormous reputation as a sneaky manipulator.

“Am I the evil genius in the corner that no one sees coming out of his hole?” asked. “It’s actually a good way to operate.”

Cheney, an Iraq hardliner who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left the administration, was proven wrong point after point in the Iraq War, never losing the conviction that he was essentially right.

Charging

He argued that there were no links between the 2001 attacks on the United States and pre-war Iraq. He said American troops would be welcomed as liberators; They weren’t.

He declared that the Iraqi insurgency was in its final throes in May 2005, when 1,661 American service members had been killed, not even half the number at the end of the war.

To her admirers, she kept the faith in an unstable time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders who waged it.

But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s influence waned, controlled by the courts or changing political realities.

The courts ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential authority and grant harsh special treatment to suspected terrorists. Bush did not fully accept his tough positions on Iran and North Korea.

Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, staying at arm’s length from Bush to ensure that one or the other survived any subsequent attack on the country’s leadership.

With Bush out of town that fateful day, Cheney was a constant presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents picked him up and led him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comic effect.

From the beginning, Cheney and Bush reached a strange agreement, unspoken but well understood. Setting aside any ambition he may have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was granted power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.

That deal largely held.

“He’s built in a way to be the No. 2 best guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He’s congenitally discreet. He’s remarkably loyal.”

As Cheney put it: “When I signed on with the president, I made the decision that the only agenda I would have was his own, that he wasn’t going to be like most vice presidents, and that was digging, trying to figure out how he was going to be elected president when his term was up.”

His penchant for secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvering came at a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a botched response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting buddy in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his circle were slow to reveal that extraordinary turn of events.

The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.

When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retired from the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.

Bush decided that the best choice was the man chosen to help in the election.

Together, the two faced a protracted post-election battle in 2000 before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and judicial challenges – a storm that raged from Florida to the highest court in the country – left the country in limbo for weeks.

Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped the administration get off to a smooth start despite the lost time. While he was in office, disputes between departments competing for a larger share of Bush’s limited budget found their way to his desk and were often resolved there.

On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in the halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and No. 2 House Republican leader.

Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real number one in town; Bush didn’t seem to care and made some himself. But those comments became less appropriate later in Bush’s presidency, when he clearly became his own.

Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where a few years later Liz Cheney bought a house, taking up residence in Wyoming before winning her old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter also grew closer, as the Cheney family became one of Trump’s favorite targets.

Dick Cheney came to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she combined her leading role on the committee investigating January 6 with trying to be re-elected in deeply conservative Wyoming.

Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But those praise and his father’s support didn’t stop him from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic fall after his rapid rise to third place in the House GOP leadership.

Politics first attracted Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a member of Congress. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., and worked under him at two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before being promoted to chief of staff, the youngest in history, at age 34.

Cheney held the position for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where she had grown up, and ran for the state’s lone congressional seat.

In that first House race, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to say he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still achieved a decisive victory and won five more terms.

In 1989, Cheney became secretary of defense under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, which expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney ran Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.

Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a former Department of Agriculture worker. President his senior year and football co-captain at Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for one year but left with failing grades.

He returned to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming, and renewed a relationship with his high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, whom he married in 1964. He is survived by his wife, Liz, and a second daughter, Mary.

AP

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