Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died. He was 84.
Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family confirmed in a statement NBC News. He was surrounded by his wife Lynne, daughters Liz and Mary, and other family members, the Cheneys added.
“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.”
After leaving office Cheney remained in the headlines for his commentary on current events and disclosures about his health and time in office. In his 2013 memoir, he recalled an emergency surgery, three years earlier, that he didn’t think he’d survive. “I believed I was approaching the end of my days, but that didn’t frighten me,” he wrote. “I was pain free and at peace, and I had led a remarkable life.”
Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his 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 our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
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.
Cheney had suffered five heart attacks over the course of his political career, which saw him rise from Congress to the top of the Defense Department and finally to the side of President George W. Bush as one of his most influential advisers. The former vice president struggled against heart disease since he was a 37-year-old Congressional candidate in Wyoming, where the disease was announced. its arrival via a tingling sensation in his fingers – the precursor to Cheney’s first heart attack in 1978.
As the illness progressed, Cheney underwent numerous procedures to fight it, including the installation of a defibrillator, and eventually a heart transplant. In a 2013 memoir about living with the disease, Cheney recalled brushes with death and revealed that, at his request, doctors in 2007 deactivated a wireless feature on his defibrillator after it occurred to him that an enemy could possibly hack into the device, sending a fatal electric shock to his heart.
“I was aware of the danger that existed,” he said in a “60 Minutes” interview. interview about the memoir.
That same fear of vulnerability characterized many of his policy recommendations and decisions, which continue to shape the country, riling civil libertarians. Following the attacks on 9/11 – a defining moment in his career – Cheney pushed for a variety of anti-terror programs that were prohibited by law, but crucial, Cheney and Bush argued, for the security of the American people. Two of the most notable included a wiretapping program that gave government officials the right to eavesdrop — without a warrant — on the conversations of American citizens, and a beefed up interrogation program that allowed military officials to use otherwise prohibited forms of torture on terror suspects in their custody.
Cheney stood firmly by these decisions long after they were enacted and remained a harsh critic of the journalists and whistleblowers responsible for exposing the programs to the public. While Bush largely retreated from the public eye after leaving the White House, Cheney, on the other hand, remained a constant voice in the media and conservative circles, in defense of Bush-era policies. Meanwhile, he vehemently opposed those enacted under President Barack Obama, whom he saw as a weak leader who responded insufficiently to the threat of American enemies.
The evidence on 9/11 of the damage terrorists could inflict on Americans without the use of sophisticated weapons amplified Cheney’s concerns about enemies gaining access to nuclear technology. Less than two years after the attacks, President Bush declared war on Iraq, on the pretext that its leader Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction.
As the National Security Council’s point person on terrorism, the decision to go to war was as much Cheney’s as it was Bush’s, and he defended it, even after it became apparent that Iraq did not have the nuclear weapons the US initially argued it did. That Iraq could have developed WMDs was justification enough for Cheney.
“When we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq” as a potential proliferator of nuclear weapons, Cheney told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in 2013 when asked what America gained from the nearly decade-long, trillion dollar war.
Cheney’s pursuit of Hussein dates back to his time as defense secretary under President George HW Bush, when he pushed for war as a response to Iraqi forces’ invasion of Kuwait. Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated a wait-and-see approach, but recalled in a Biography channel interview that Cheney demanded he give him military options.
“He can be very tough,” Powell said with a laugh. “I can assure you, from personal experience.”
The war, the largest military effort since Vietnam, was largely hailed as a success and made Cheney a household name, although he had been a powerful voice in the federal government for years.
He arrived in Washington in 1968 as a 27-year-old fellow for US Rep. William Steiger, a Republican from Wisconsin. There, he decided to drop his plans for a career in academia and pursue politics instead.
His rise in Washington was rapid. He first joined the Nixon administration as the number two for Donald Rumsfeld, who then led the Office of Economic Opportunity. At the age of 34 he was tapped by President Gerald Ford to be the youngest ever White House chief of staff and later spent a decade in the House, maintaining a staunchly conservative record. Despite criticism for receiving five Vietnam draft deferments, Cheney was eventually selected by Bush senior to lead the Department of Defense.
When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Cheney transitioned to the private sector, becoming the chief executive officer of the energy company Halliburton. In that position, he amassed a fortune, only returning to Washington when George W. Bush picked him as his running mate.
During the campaign, the typically all-business Cheney known more for his scowl than his smile, showed flashes of wit during live debates with Al Gore’s running mate, Joe Lieberman. When Lieberman, in one debate for example, said he was pleased that Cheney was better off than he was eight years ago — a reference to his Halliburton wealth — Cheney was ready with a retort.
“I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
During the campaign Cheney also showed that he was not tied to the conservative platform on all issues — particularly a personal one. As the father of a gay daughter, Cheney took a much more liberal view of the topic of gay marriage than fellow Republicans. He came under criticism from members of his party when he said in a 2000 debate that states should decide on the issue of gay marriage and that “people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want.”
Once elected, he quickly became known as the most powerful vice president in American history, who deeply involved himself in everything from national security issues to decisions at the Environmental Protection Agency. His personal campaigns to influence EPA policies that were at odds with the business community was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series published in the Washington Post. Cheney also made headlines during his tenure for accidentally shooting and injuring a friend during a hunting expedition in 2006.
Born Jan. 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney later moved with his staunchly Democratic family to Casper, Wyoming, where he played high school football and met his future wife, Lynn Ann Vincent. After graduating, he went to Yale but promptly flunked out and returned to Wyoming where he briefly worked for a power company. He took another crack at higher education at the encouragement of Vincent, whom he married in 1964. It was at the University of Wyoming where he developed an interest in political science, which paved the way for his career in Washington. After graduating, he and his wife had two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, who were both active supporters during his political career.
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