Dick Cheney, the architect of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and considered by presidential historians one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, has died at the age of 84, his family announced in a statement Tuesday.
Cheney died Monday night of complications from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease, his family announced.
The Republican, a former Wyoming congressman and defense secretary, was already a major figure in Washington when then-Texas Governor George W. Bush chose him as his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, which Mr. Bush went on to win.
Cheney, who served as vice president from 2001 to 2009, fought tirelessly for greater presidential power, feeling that it had been eroded since the Watergate scandal that forced her former boss, Richard Nixon, out of office. He also created a national security team that often served as its own power center within the administration, expanding the influence of the vice president’s office.
Cheney was a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was one of the most outspoken Bush administration officials in warning of the dangers posed by Iraq’s suspected stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. No such weapon was found.
He clashed with several of Bush’s top aides, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and defended “enhanced” interrogation techniques for terrorist suspects, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights, among others, have called these methods “torture.”
His daughter Liz Cheney also became an influential Republican, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, but lost her seat after she opposed Republican President Donald Trump and voted for impeachment after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Her father agreed with her and said he would vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.
“In the 248-year history of our country, no one has posed a greater threat to our country than Donald Trump,” said the longtime enemy of the left.
Cheney suffered from heart disease most of his life, suffering multiple heart attacks at the age of 37. He underwent a heart transplant in 2012.
war with iraq
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who were colleagues of President Nixon, were key voices pushing for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In the run-up to the war, Cheney suggested there might be a link between Iraq, al-Qaeda, and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The Commission on the 9/11 Attacks later discredited this theory.
Cheney predicted that U.S. troops would be “welcomed as liberators” in Iraq and that the deployment, which would last about a decade, “will end relatively quickly…weeks, not months.”
Although no weapons of mass destruction were found, Cheney later maintained that the invasion was the right decision, based on contemporary intelligence and the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power.
More than a decade ago, as Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney led the U.S. military operation that drove Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War.
After Saddam Hussein sent troops to occupy Kuwait in August 1990, President Cheney urged President Bush to take an uncompromising line against Iraq. At that point, however, President Cheney did not support an invasion of Iraq, saying that the United States would have to act alone and the situation would become muddy.
Because of Cheney’s long ties to the Bush family and experience in government, George W. Bush chose Cheney to lead his search for a vice presidential candidate in 2000. Bush then determined that the person who conducted the search was the best person for the job.
Upon returning to politics, Cheney received a $35 million severance package from Halliburton, the oil services company he ran from 1995 to 2000. Halliburton became a major government contractor during the Iraq War. Cheney’s ties to the oil industry were the subject of frequent criticism by opponents of the war.
The first Republican in generations
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, the day of then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s 59th birthday, to Marjorie Lorraine (née Dickey) and Richard Herbert Cheney. His mother was a waitress turned softball player, and his father was a federal employee with the Soil Conservation Service.
In his 2011 book, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” he wrote that both sides of his family were ardent New Deal Democrats.
Mr. Cheney’s grandfather, convinced that the president would want to know that he and the newborn had the same birthday, urged Mr. Cheney and Mr. Richard to telegraph to the White House.
He was “probably the first Republican in his family since my great-grandfather, who fought on the Union side in the Civil War,” he said in the PBS documentary “Dick Cheney: A Heartbeat Away.”
He moved to Wyoming with his family as a boy and later attended Yale University. “I was a mediocre student at best,” he says, and dropped out.
“A fatal allergy to olive drab”
He returned to Wyoming in 1962 and worked on building power lines and coal-fired power plants, eventually earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.
He recalled then-President John F. Kennedy’s visit and spoke to students about the importance of using what they learned to build a better country and a better world. “He was an inspiration to all of us. As I was trying to rebuild my life, I was especially grateful for the uplifting sense of possibility that he spoke of,” Cheney wrote in his memoir.
In his 20s, Mr. Cheney recalled in his memoir that he strongly opposed students who shut down campus to protest the Vietnam War. “As a general proposition, I supported our troops in Vietnam and the right of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to decide to participate,” he wrote. He himself was never drafted.
According to biographer John Nichols, Cheney repeatedly applied for deferments and exemptions to avoid the draft. “Cheney reacted to wearing his country’s uniform like a man with a deadly olive drab allergy,” Nichols wrote in The Nation in 2011. Mr. Cheney said he would have gladly served in the military.
Hug Darth Vader
Mr. Cheney came to Washington as a Congressional intern in 1969 and held various positions in the White House during the Republican administrations of Presidents 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. Cheney replaced Rumsfeld when he became Ford’s chief of staff.
During her 10 years as Wyoming’s only member of Congress, Cheney had a deeply conservative record, consistently voting against abortion rights. He also voted against the release of imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela, gun control, and environmental and education funding measures.
His wife, Lynne, his high school sweetheart, became a conservative voice on cultural issues. The couple’s eldest daughter, Liz, built a reputation for promoting hawkish foreign policy views similar to her father’s, and was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016.
During his time as vice president, late-night TV comedians referred to Cheney as Darth Vader. He shrugged it off, joking that it was an honor to be compared to the Star Wars villain, and even appeared on the Tonight Show dressed up as Vader to promote his memoir.
“Thank you Satan”
Even before Trump’s rise, his support for conservative issues was uneven. His second daughter, Mary, a Republican fundraiser, is a lesbian. Cheney has made supportive statements about same-sex relationships, and is at odds with the Bush administration’s push for a constitutional amendment to address same-sex marriage. That amendment ultimately failed.
In 2006, he made headlines when he accidentally injured his friend, Texas attorney Harry Whittington, in the face with bird shot during a hunting trip in Texas.
Controversy continued to haunt Mr. Cheney even after he left the Bush administration. He was the subject of the hard-hitting 2018 biopic Vice starring Christian Bale, where he gained 40 pounds (18 kilograms) and shaved his head to emulate the former vice president’s dignity and baldness.
Bale won a Golden Globe for his role as Cheney and said, “I want to thank Satan for giving me the inspiration for how to play this role.”
During his memoir’s publication tour, Cheney seemed to enjoy incurring the ire of his critics. Shortly before its release, he gleefully predicted that it would “explode” attention across Washington.
He spent part of the book reconciling with former colleagues like Rice, who he portrayed as naive. Cheney also took aim at then-President Barack Obama’s worldview, baffled by Democratic concerns that the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would negatively impact America’s image.
