Dick Cheney,
Powerful Vice President and Washington Insider,
Dies at 84
A former defense secretary and congressman, he held the nation’s No. 2 job
under President George W. Bush and was an architect of policies
in an era of war and economic change.
![[Image: f9hPpae.md.jpg]](https://iili.io/f9hPpae.md.jpg)
Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history,
who was George W. Bush’s running mate in two successful campaigns for the presidency
and his most influential White House adviser in an era of terrorism, war and economic
change, died on Monday. He was 84.
The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according
to a statement by his family, who said he died in Northern Virginia. Mr. Cheney had homes
in McLean, Va., and Jackson, Wyo.
Plagued by coronary problems nearly all his adult life, Mr. Cheney had five heart attacks
from 1978 to 2010 and had worn a device to regulate his heartbeat since 2001. But his
health issues did not seem to impair his performance as vice president. In 2012,
three years after retiring, he underwent a successful heart transplant and had been
reasonably active since then.
Most recently, he startled Americans of both parties by announcing that he would vote
for Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, in the 2024 election, denouncing her
Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, as unfit for the Oval Office
and a grave threat to American democracy.
“We have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,”
Mr. Cheney said.
His announcement echoed that of an earlier one by his daughter Liz Cheney, the former
Republican representative from Wyoming, who broke with Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021,
attack on the Capitol by his followers. She, too, said she would vote for Ms. Harris.
As vice presidents go, Mr. Cheney was a singular figure: more powerful and less ambitious
for higher office than any vice president in modern times. A 10-year member of the
House of Representatives, the youngest White House chief of staff in history, the
defense secretary from 1989 to 1993, a confidant of presidents and lawmakers,
Mr. Cheney had impeccable credentials and contacts and was a master in the art
of getting things done, preferably without fanfare.
In many ways an inscrutable personality, he had no patience for small talk, almost
never spoke about himself and rarely gave interviews or held news conferences,
although he sometimes went on television to promote administration policies and
was often in the news. He preferred the backstage to the spotlight.
A consummate Washington insider, Mr. Cheney was an architect and executor of
President Bush’s major initiatives: deploying military power to advance, they said,
the cause of democracy abroad, championing free markets and deregulation at home,
and strengthening the powers of a presidency that, as both men saw it, had been
unjustifiably restrained by Congress and the courts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War
and the Watergate scandal.
As Mr. Bush’s most trusted and valued counselor, Mr. Cheney foraged at will over fields
of international and domestic policy. Like a super-cabinet official with an unlimited portfolio,
he used his authority to make the case for war, propose or kill legislation, recommend
Supreme Court candidates, tip the balance for a tax cut, promote the interests of allies
and parry opponents.
But it was the national security arena where he had the most profound impact. As defense
secretary, he helped engineer the Persian Gulf war that successfully evicted Iraqi invaders
from Kuwait in 1991, and then took a leading role a decade later in responding to the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. To prevent future attacks, he advocated aggressive
policies including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention and brutal interrogation
tactics. And he pushed for the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003,
completing the unfinished job of his previous stint in power but leading to years of warfare.
![[Image: f9hDGDu.jpg]](https://iili.io/f9hDGDu.jpg)
Mr. Cheney being sworn in as defense secretary in March 1989.
Mr. Bush, left, valued his loyalty and discretion, as his son,
President George W. Bush, would years later
Early in Mr. Bush’s first term, many Democrats and even some fellow Republicans
wondered if Mr. Cheney might be the real power in a White House occupied by an
untested president whose qualifications had been questioned. While Mr. Bush
eventually asserted his authority and Mr. Cheney’s influence declined by the
second term, the image of him as a Machiavellian paterfamilias was never quite dispelled.
Even Mr. Bush worried about that perception, as he noted in his 2010 memoir,
“Decision Points.” He wrote that Mr. Cheney offered to withdraw from the ticket
for the 2004 presidential election, having become “the Darth Vader of the administration.”
Mr. Bush considered the offer, aware that accepting it “would be one way to demonstrate
that I was in charge.” But he ultimately kept his running mate, saying he valued the
vice president’s steadiness and friendship.
There was no question about Mr. Cheney’s steadiness.
On Sept. 11, 2001, when hijacked airliners destroyed the World Trade Center in
New York and crashed into the Pentagon and into a Pennsylvania field, killing
nearly 3,000 people in the nation’s worst terrorist attack, it was Mr. Cheney
who took charge at the White House.
![[Image: f9hyYXe.png]](https://iili.io/f9hyYXe.png)
Mr. Cheney with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, on Sept. 11, 2001.
With the president traveling and sent to secure locations after the terrorist attacks
that morning, it was Mr. Cheney who took charge of the response from the White House.
Mr. Bush, who was visiting a school in Florida as the attacks took place, was shuttled
to secure locations in Louisiana and Nebraska. The vice president activated defense
measures across the nation, put American forces on alert around the world and ordered
the Capitol evacuated and government leaders removed to safety. From a
White House bunker, he maintained continuous contact with the president and other
officials and kept what many called a steady hand at the helm through the crisis.
In the aftermath, Mr. Cheney became the strategist behind a rapid expansion of
presidential power to fight terrorism and a forceful proponent of Mr. Bush’s doctrinal
warning to the world: that nations and regimes would be counted as for or against
the United States in the new age of terrorism, and that pre-emptive military action
would be taken against anyone who posed a threat to the security of the country.
A Wartime Leader
Six weeks after the attacks, Mr. Cheney helped engineer a swift, lopsided passage of the
USA Patriot Act, a sweeping law that greatly expanded the government’s powers of investigation,
surveillance and detention to fight terrorism. With the wounded nation still seething over
Sept. 11, public opposition to the law was muted, though civil libertarians warned that it
authorized the government to spy on ordinary Americans.
Later, it became clear that the act was being used to underpin secret courts, wiretaps
without warrants, the unlimited detention of suspects without hearings or charges, and
interrogation methods that skirted bans on torture in the Geneva Conventions. There were
wide protests and even constitutional challenges. But Mr. Cheney strongly defended the
law and its expansion of presidential power, and it remained in force.
Mr. Cheney also strongly influenced Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan to hunt for
Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, and to suppress
a fanatical Taliban regime that had sheltered terrorists and imposed a brutal theocracy
on the Afghan people
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Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell briefing the news media on troop movements during the
Persian Gulf war in August 1990.
And it was Mr. Cheney who was a dominant voice behind Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in
2003 and then to justify the war. He insisted that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had ties
to Qaeda terrorists, possessed weapons of mass destruction and would threaten America and
its allies with nuclear blackmail.
What began as a one-month combat operation in Iraq gave way to a nearly nine-year occupation,
a struggle against Iraqi insurgents and internecine warfare that would claim the lives of nearly
4,500 American military personnel and, it is believed, at least 100,000 Iraqis (estimates vary);
cost more than $2 trillion, according to some reports; and leave a staggering trail of destruction
throughout the country.
As the war dragged on, the outlines of an enormous intelligence failure began to emerge.
The Sept. 11 commission, an independent panel given the task of investigating the 2001 attacks,
found no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the chief weapons inspector
of the Central Intelligence Agency, a White House appointee, concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles
of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
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Mr. Cheney, Mr. Powell and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf during a parade in
Manhattan in June 1991 to honor the troops who had fought in the Gulf War.
But these findings were released as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney campaigned for re-election
in 2004, and the candidates conceded nothing. “To delay, defer, wait wasn’t an option,”
Mr. Cheney said. “The president did exactly the right thing.”
The Democratic candidates, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and his running mate,
Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, tried to press the matter, but the debate over
whether America had been led into war under false pretenses appeared to lose coherence
as a grinding election-year issue.
It came into focus again in Mr. Bush’s second term, however, as American patience with
the war started to wear thin amid a rising toll of American and Iraqi deaths, soaring costs
in the face of an economic downturn at home, persistent questions about the humiliation
and torture of enemy detainees, and the administration’s lack of a clear timetable and exit strategy.
By the midterm elections in 2006, with the war into its fourth year and no end in sight,
public frustration had reached a tipping point. Democrats, energized after years of passivity,
promised changes. Riding a wave of voter dissatisfaction, they swept to majorities in
both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994.
After the election, Mr. Bush dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — Mr. Cheney’s
closest administration ally and a lightning rod for war critics — and named Robert M. Gates,
a former director of central intelligence, as his successor. The president also spoke of
cooperating with Congress and said he would consider proposals from a bipartisan
Iraq Study Group calling for gradual disengagement from Iraq.
![[Image: f9jB5s2.jpg]](https://iili.io/f9jB5s2.jpg)
American troops in action in Baghdad during the Iraq War in 2007.
Mr. Cheney had been a dominant voice behind Mr. Bush’s decision to
invade Iraq in 2003.
But it soon became clear that Mr. Bush intended to do neither. In early 2007, with
Mr. Cheney’s endorsement, the president sent tens of thousands of American troops
to Iraq, augmenting the 132,000 there, in a surge to help the government quell
violence around Baghdad. The House passed a nonbinding resolution against the plan,
to which Mr. Cheney declared, “It won’t stop us.”
It seemed nothing would. After years of carnage and sectarian violence that had
left Iraq on the brink of civil war, Mr. Cheney dismissed suggestions that the country
was on the verge of collapse. “The reality on the ground is that we’ve made major
progress,” he said. He argued that pulling out before Iraq was able to defend itself
would set off a blood bath between Sunni and Shiite sects.
By the spring of 2008, as the war entered its sixth year and American deaths surpassed
4,000, it was apparent that the conflict would be inherited by the next president.
Mr. Cheney said that the war had “lasted longer than I would have anticipated” but
that it had been “well worth the effort.”
Defending a Legacy
During the 2008 presidential race, the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama
of Illinois, castigated the administration over the Iraq war. The Republican nominee,
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who often used the shorthand “Al Qaeda” to refer to
a protean and increasingly divided enemy, warned against a premature troop withdrawal
from Iraq, but rarely mentioned Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, distancing himself from a team
whose day was nearly over.
After an almost two-year campaign, Mr. Obama’s election presaged broad changes in
foreign and domestic policy. And the Iraq war was hardly the only leftover problem.
In Afghanistan, a resurgent Taliban posed new dangers. Bin Laden’s terrorist network
had been rebuilt in tribal strongholds of Pakistan. America’s alliances were frayed.
Disputes with Iran, North Korea, Russia and other potential adversaries lingered. And
the American and global economies were in deep distress, a result, many experts said,
of Republican policies.
A month before leaving office, Mr. Cheney struck an unapologetic tone in exit interviews,
defending the use of broad executive powers in waging war, in the treatment of terrorism
suspects and in domestic wiretapping, insisting that historians would ultimately look
favorably on the administration’s efforts to keep the nation safe.
On Jan. 20, 2009, Mr. Cheney, who had hurt his back moving boxes and attended the
inauguration at the Capitol in a wheelchair, was succeeded by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.
of Delaware. The two had been lobbing verbal grenades at each other for months.
Mr. Biden had called Mr. Cheney “probably the most dangerous vice president we’ve had
in American history” and vowed to “restore the balance” to the office. Mr. Cheney fired back:
“If he wants to diminish the office of vice president, that’s obviously his call.”
![[Image: f9jxk4p.jpg]](https://iili.io/f9jxk4p.jpg)
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Mr. Cheney, pictured here with the
Bidens in 2009, became the leading Republican critic of the new administration.
As Mr. Obama took over, Mr. Cheney broke with a longstanding practice of becoming inconspicuous
after leaving office. He contended that the new president was endangering the country by planning
to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, suspending military trials for terrorism
suspects and prohibiting interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
In a blitz of television appearances and speeches, Mr. Cheney soon emerged as the leading
Republican critic of the new administration. No one envisioned that he would run again for
elective office, but with his tenacity and insider’s knowledge of government and politics,
he seemed to be mounting more than a rear-guard defense of Bush policies; rather, the aim,
it appeared, was to influence the continuing national security debate as well as his own legacy.
By then, he had joined a parade of Bush associates working on memoirs.
His book “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir” (2011, with Liz Cheney) expressed
few regrets over the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration. While defending
its actions, the book sidestepped many important questions in discussing the debates that
had ensued over its policies, some reviewers said.
By 2014, five years after leaving the White House, Mr. Cheney’s command of public attention
seemed undiminished. Far from fading into the background of history, he thrust himself into
national debates with an onslaught of more broadcasts and published commentaries assailing
Mr. Obama’s responses to Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria. He also went to Capitol Hill
to urge Republicans to reject a rising isolationism in their party and embrace strong military
and foreign policies.
And when the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the C.I.A. of torturing terrorism
suspects during the Bush years, Mr. Cheney rose to defend the agency, arguing that its
interrogations had been legally authorized and “absolutely, totally justified.” He roundly
dismissed allegations that the C.I.A. had misled the White House about its methods or
inflated the value of the information obtained from prisoners.
Tensions in the White House
Several years before Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney left office, evidence that there had been no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was overwhelming, and even Mr. Cheney abandoned
the claim. But debate over the administration’s justification for waging war never went away,
with the focus turning to the vice president’s office in the fall of 2005, when Mr. Cheney’s
chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
The charges were filed by a special prosecutor investigating the illegal disclosure of the
identity of a covert C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV,
a former diplomat, had gone to Niger to investigate a report that Iraq had bought
weapons-grade uranium there in 1999. Mr. Wilson had found no evidence to support the
story and had written an opinion article for The New York Times undermining the
administration’s rationale for invading Iraq.
The significance of the case lay not in the disclosure of an agent’s identity, but in what
seemed to lay behind it: a plan orchestrated by the White House to discredit Mr. Wilson
after his article was published by portraying his trip as a boondoggle that had been set
up by his wife.
Mr. Libby, who resigned, was not accused of leaking Ms. Wilson’s name but of lying to a grand jury
and federal agents when he told them that he had learned her identity from a reporter. The indictment said
he had actually learned it from administration officials. It cited Mr. Cheney in three passages and, while
it did not accuse him of wrongdoing, strongly suggested that he had been behind the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.
At Mr. Libby’s trial in early 2007, his lawyers argued that he had not lied, but had only
misspoken. Neither Mr. Libby nor Mr. Cheney testified. But prosecution witnesses swore
that Mr. Libby had learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity from officials, and he was found guilty,
becoming the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a felony since the
Iran-contra scandals of the 1980s.
Mr. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a $250,000 fine and two years’ probation.
Mr. Bush commuted the prison term but did not grant a pardon, leaving the fine and probation
in place. The president portrayed the commutation as a compromise, but his action reignited
passions in the case. Critics called it a subversion of justice to keep Mr. Libby from disclosing
White House war planning. Mr. Libby’s supporters said his resignation and humiliation
had been punishment enough.
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