WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 age 84.
Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.
“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 statement said. 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, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under Bush’s son, George W. Bush.
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 terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now 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.
His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile -- detractors called it a smirk -- Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“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.”
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 ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States 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.
Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.
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.
“He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”
Cheney’s political journey began in Wyoming and took him to the heights of power in D.C., where he remained a significant figure all the way through his daughter Liz's political challenges.
Cheney, having worn the mantle of one of America's most controversial vice presidents, leaves behind a complex legacy marked by significant achievement, undeniable critique, and the fierce loyalty of his family.
