Dick Cheney, one of the most influential and divisive US vice presidents, dies at 84

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney, the forceful conservative who became one of the most powerful and divisive vice presidents in American history and a leading supporter of the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.

Cheney died Monday due to complications from pneumonia and heart and vascular diseases, his family said in a statement Tuesday.

Low-key but assertive, Cheney served father-son presidents, leading the military as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George HW Bush before returning to public life as vice president to Bush’s son, George W. Bush.

Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the young Bush’s presidency. He played a role, often dominant, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of supreme interest to himself, all while living with decades of heart disease and, after his term, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Bush called Cheney a “decent and honorable man” and mourned his death as “a loss to the nation.”

“History will remember him as one of the greatest 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, she became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after her daughter, Liz Cheney, emerged as the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election loss and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

In a television ad for her daughter, Cheney claimed that “in our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He attempted to steal the last election using lies and violence to stay in power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”

In a twist that Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year that he would vote for their candidate, Kamala Harris, in the presidential election against Trump.

For all his conservatism, Cheney privately and publicly supported his daughter Mary Cheney after she came out as gay, years before gay marriage was widely supported and later legalized. “Freedom means freedom for all,” he said.

A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 that he now woke up each morning “with a smile on my face, grateful for the gift of another day” — a strange image for a figure who always seemed to be on the barricades.

During his time in office, the vice presidency ceased to be a ceremonial position. Instead, Cheney turned it into a network of backchannels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other pillars of a conservative agenda.

Wearing a seemingly permanent half-smile—detractors called it a grimace—Cheney joked about his inordinate reputation as a secretive manipulator.

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

The Iraq War

A staunch supporter of the Iraq invasion who became increasingly isolated as other hawks left the administration, Cheney was wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, never losing the conviction that he was essentially right.

He alleged links between the 2001 attacks on the United States and prewar Iraq that did not exist. He said that American troops would be welcomed as liberators, but that was not the case.

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

To his admirers, he kept the faith in an unstable time, resolute even when the nation turned against the war and the leaders who waged it.

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

Courts ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential authority and grant especially harsh treatment to terrorism suspects. His warmongering positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully adopted by Bush.

Cheney’s relationship with Bush

From the beginning, Cheney and Bush made a strange pact, unspoken but well understood. Setting aside any ambition he may have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was given power comparable in some respects to the presidency itself.

That pact was largely kept.

As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I joined the president that the only agenda I would have was his agenda, which was not going to be like most vice presidents, trying to figure out how I was going to get 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 touchy 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 a stray shotgun blast in 2006, he and his team were slow to publicize the episode.

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.

When Bush began his presidential search, 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 the best choice was the man chosen to help with the election.

Together they faced a protracted post-election battle in 2000 before they could claim victory. A series of 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 administration a smooth start despite the lost time. In office, disputes between departments competing for a larger share of Bush’s limited budget reached his desk and were often resolved there.

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

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

On September 11, 2001, with Bush out of town, the president gave Cheney the authority to order the military to shoot down any hijacked airliners still in the air. By then, two planes had hit the World Trade Center and a third was heading toward 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 took him to a bunker beneath the White House. “It wasn’t that he asked me, ‘Let’s go?’” Cheney told NBC News years later. “He didn’t do it politely.”

Cheney spoke to Bush again from the bunker and told him: “Washington is under attack and so is 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 to try to ensure that at least one of them survived any subsequent attack.

Cheney recalled that his first reaction upon learning of the crash of the fourth hijacked plane, in Pennsylvania, was that it was shot down on his order. It crashed after passengers fought off the hijackers.

He became the youngest chief of staff

Politics first attracted Dick 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 being promoted to chief of staff, the youngest in history, at age 34.

Cheney held the seat for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where she had grown up, and ran for the state’s only seat in Congress.

In that first House race, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to joke that he was forming a group called “Hearts for Cheney.” Still, he achieved a decisive victory and won 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 that drove 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 Department of Agriculture worker. Senior class president 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, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife and daughters.

___________________________________

Correspondent Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this story.

___________________________________

This story was translated from English by an AP editor using a generative artificial intelligence tool.