Dick Cheney, a driving force behind the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and considered by presidential historians to be one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, has died at age 84, his family said in a statement Tuesday.
Cheney died Monday night from complications of pneumonia and heart and vascular diseases, his family said.
The Republican, a former Wyoming congressman and Secretary of Defense, was already a major player in Washington when then-Texas Governor George W. Bush chose him as his running mate in the 2000 presidential race, which Bush won.
As vice president from 2001 to 2009, Cheney fought vigorously for an expansion of the power of the presidency, which he felt had been eroding since the Watergate scandal that ousted his former boss, Richard Nixon, from office.
He also expanded the influence of the vice president’s office by forming a national security team that often served as its own power center within the administration.
Cheney was a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was among the Bush administration officials who most outspokenly warned about the danger of Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
No such weapons were found.
He clashed with several top Bush advisers, including Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and advocated for “enhanced” interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects that included waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
Others, including the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, called these techniques “torture.”
His daughter Liz Cheney also became an influential Republican lawmaker, serving in the House of Representatives but losing her seat after opposing Republican President Donald Trump and voting to impeach him following the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
Her father agreed with her and said he would vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who poses a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” said the man who had long been an enemy of the left.
Cheney was troubled much of his life by heart problems and suffered the first of a series of heart attacks at age 37. He underwent a heart transplant in 2012.
Facing Iraq
Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had been colleagues in the Nixon White House, were key voices in pushing for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In the run-up to the war, Cheney suggested there could be links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. A commission on the 9/11 attacks later debunked this theory.
Cheney predicted that US forces would be “welcomed as liberators” in Iraq and that the troop deployment – which would last about a decade – “would unfold relatively quickly…weeks rather than months.”
Although no weapons of mass destruction were found, Cheney insisted in later years that the invasion was the right decision based on intelligence at the time and the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
More than a decade earlier, as President George HW Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Cheney had led the US military operation to drive an Iraqi occupation army from Kuwait in the first Gulf War.
He urged Bush Sr. to take an uncompromising line against Iraq after Saddam Hussein sent his troops to occupy Kuwait in August 1990. But at the time, Cheney did not support an invasion of Iraq, saying the United States would have to act alone and the situation would become a quagmire.
Because of Cheney’s long ties to the Bush family and his experience in government, George W. Bush chose him to lead his search for vice president in 2000. Bush decided then that the man conducting the search was the best candidate for the job.
Upon his re-entry into politics, Cheney received a $35 million retirement package from the oilfield services firm Halliburton, which he had run from 1995 to 2000.
Halliburton became a leading government contractor during the Iraq War. Cheney’s ties to the oil industry came under frequent criticism from opponents of the war.
The first Republican in generations
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to Marjorie Lorraine and Richard Herbert Cheney, on January 30, 1941, the day then-President Franklin Roosevelt turned 59. Her mother was a waitress turned softball player and her father was a federal Soil Conservation Service worker.
Both sides of the family were staunch New Deal Democrats, he wrote in his 2011 book. In my time: a personal and political memoir. Convinced that the president would want to know that he shared a birthday with the newborn, Cheney’s grandfather urged Marjorie and Richard to share the news by telegram with the White House.
In his family, he “was the first Republican probably since my great-grandfather, who fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union,” he told the PBS documentary Dick Cheney: a heartbeat away. He moved as a child to Wyoming with his family before attending Yale University. “I was, at best, a mediocre student,” he said. He abandoned.
‘A deadly allergy to the color olive green’
Returning to Wyoming in 1962, he worked in the construction of electric transmission lines and coal-fired power plants, before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Wyoming.
From that time, he recalled a visit by then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who addressed the students about the importance of using what they were learning to build a better nation and world.
“He had inspired us all, and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described,” Cheney wrote in his memoirs.
Cheney, who was in his 20s, strongly disagreed with the students who closed campuses in protest against the Vietnam War, he recalled in his memoirs.
“As a general proposition, I supported our troops in Vietnam and the right of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to make the decision to participate there,” he wrote.
He himself was never drafted.
According to his biographer, John Nichols, Cheney repeatedly requested deferments and waivers to avoid the draft.
“Cheney reacted to the prospect of wearing his country’s uniform like a man with a fatal allergy to the color olive green,” Nichols wrote in The Nation magazine in 2011. Cheney stated that he would have loved to serve.
Hugging Darth Vader
Cheney went to Washington in 1969 as a congressional intern and held various positions in the White House during the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
One of his early mentors was Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense in the Ford and George W. Bush administrations. When Cheney became Ford’s chief of staff, he succeeded Rumsfeld.
During the 10 years he served as Wyoming’s only congressman, Cheney had a very conservative record, consistently voting against abortion rights. He also voted against the release of imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela and against gun control and environmental and education funding measures.
His wife, Lynne, who had been his high school sweetheart, became a conservative voice on cultural issues. Liz, the couple’s eldest daughter, was elected to the House in 2016 after earning a reputation for pushing tough foreign policy views similar to her father’s.
During his tenure as vice president, late-night television comedians referred to Cheney as Darth Vader. He brushed it off by joking that it was an honor for him to be compared to the star wars villain, even dressing up as Vader for an appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ to promote his memoirs.
‘Thanks to satan’
Even before Trump’s rise, his support for conservative issues was inconsistent.
Their second daughter, Mary, a Republican fundraiser, is a lesbian. Cheney spoke in favor of same-sex relationships, putting him at odds with the Bush administration’s push for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. That amendment ultimately failed.
In 2006, he made headlines during a hunting trip in Texas when he accidentally wounded his friend, Texas attorney Harry Wittington, in the face with a volley of birdshot.
Controversy continued to dog Cheney even after he left the Bush administration. He was the subject of a scathing biographical film in 2018 titled Vicestarring Christian Bale, who gained 18 kilograms and shaved his head to imitate the belly and baldness of the former vice president.
“Thank you Satan for inspiring me on how to play this role,” Bale said while accepting a Golden Globe award for his portrayal of Cheney.
During a promotional tour for her memoirs, Cheney seemed to enjoy drawing the ire of critics. Just before its release, he gleefully predicted that it would leave heads “exploding” all over Washington.
He devoted parts of the book to settling scores with former colleagues like Rice, whom he described as naïve. Cheney also took aim at the worldview of then-President Barack Obama, disconcerted by the Democrat’s concern that the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was damaging to America’s image.
