Dick Cheney, Powerful Vice President ...

[IceWizard]

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.







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.





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.





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






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.





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.




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.”





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.

[IceWizard]

In a memoir, Mr. Bush wrote that Mr. Cheney had offered to withdraw
from the ticket for the 2004 presidential election, having become
“the Darth Vader of the administration.”



The case had a corrosive effect on Mr. Cheney’s political stature, creating a rift between the
president and the vice president, which both acknowledged after leaving office, though the
White House initially denied it, saying Mr. Cheney was still Mr. Bush’s closest adviser. But
even then, some Republican aides acknowledged that the president had been upset, and
that Mr. Cheney had become less of an avuncular mentor to him.

Mr. Bush, in his memoir, said Mr. Cheney had lashed out at him in their final days in office for
his refusal to grant Mr. Libby a presidential pardon. “I can’t believe you’re going to leave a
soldier on the battlefield,” Mr. Cheney told him heatedly, according to Mr. Bush. The former
president wrote: “The comment stung. In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this,
or even close to this.”

In 2018, President Trump granted a full pardon to Mr. Libby. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,”
Mr. Trump said, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.” The pardon
amounted to a dramatic coda to a case that had once gripped Washington and came to
embody divisions over the Iraq war.

Mr. Cheney issued a public statement thanking Mr. Trump for the pardon, but it was a rare
grace note in an otherwise rocky relationship with the president. Months after the pardon,
Mr. Cheney, visiting Mexico, said Mr. Trump had been “wrong” during his presidential
campaign to say that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,
they’re rapists.”

In another slap at candidate Trump, Mr. Cheney spoke out against his proposal to ban
Muslims from entering the United States. “I think this whole notion that somehow we
can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we
stand for and believe in,” Mr. Cheney said.

And in 2019, Mr. Cheney, in an off-the-record exchange with Vice President Mike Pence
at an American Enterprise Institute forum, complained of Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter
diplomacy, which was often done without consulting aides or the intelligence community.
Mr. Cheney warned that the United States was “getting into a situation when our friends
and allies around the world that we depend upon are going to lack confidence in us.”

Donald Trump Jr., a close adviser to his father, hit back. “Isn’t it fitting,” he said, “that
Cheney is the one mad that Trump is ending his reckless and endless wars? I never
knew peace could be so unpopular.”





Mr. Cheney, at left, listened to Mr. Bush during a news conference in the Rose Garden
at the White House in April 2007. The vice president’s influence declined during
the president’s second term.



In the first term of Bush-Cheney, their days often began together in the Oval Office with a
review of the agenda. Mr. Cheney was there when Mr. Bush saw cabinet officials, took policy
briefings and met foreign leaders. But in the second term, Mr. Cheney increasingly lost
influence to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley,
the national security adviser.

Mr. Cheney had lost allies. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Libby were gone, and others had resigned:
Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary
of defense. Mr. Cheney was virtually the last of the inner circle.

Mr. Bush had also grown less reliant on him. On Capitol Hill, where he had easily had his way
in the first term, Mr. Cheney faced strained relationships, even with old allies. In retrospect,
White House aides said, the vice president’s power appeared to have peaked in 2003 and 2004.

But he was still the point man on national security in his second term. He defended the handling
of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, dismissing reports that detainees, who were held for years
without charges or trials, had been tortured or abused. He said they were well fed, well treated
and “living in the tropics,” adding, “They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

After The Times  disclosed in December 2005 that Mr. Bush had for years authorized the
National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on Americans and others in the
United States, the Justice Department investigated what it called a leak of classified
information. Mr. Cheney said The Times had jeopardized national security.

In Congress, Mr. Cheney defended domestic spying against charges that it might be
unconstitutional and in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which
governs intelligence gathering in the United States. Not only was it legal, but it had also
worked, Mr. Cheney contended, noting that there had been no terrorist attacks in
America since 2001.

Over Mr. Cheney’s objections, the Senate adopted a proposal by Mr. McCain, once a
prisoner of war in Vietnam, to ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees.
Outrage over Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where naked prisoners had been photographed
stacked in human pyramids and cowering before dogs, and reports of other abuses had led
to bipartisan pressure for the ban.

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the administration another setback, ruling
that it had violated the Geneva Conventions and American law by creating military commissions
to try terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial process. The court said Congress
had not authorized such tribunals. Critics of the Bush-Cheney drive to expand presidential
powers hailed the ruling.

But within months, Congress, still controlled by Republicans, gave the administration a
comeback victory, passing legislation shaped by Mr. Cheney that authorized the military
commissions, renewed Mr. Bush’s power to designate detainees “unlawful enemy combatants”
and allowed the government to imprison, interrogate and try them without judicial review indefinitely.


Architect of Foreign Policy

Mr. Cheney was candid about his efforts to strengthen the powers of the presidency, which
he said had been unduly eroded by Congress in the years after the Vietnam War and the
Watergate scandal that drove Richard M. Nixon out of the White House. The age of terrorism
warranted broad executive powers, he told reporters aboard Air Force Two on a trip to the
Iraq war zone in 2005.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,”
Mr. Cheney said. “I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the
threats we face, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers
unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security.”

Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was the paradigm of Mr. Cheney’s foreign policy influence,
as his aggressive stance prevailed over the protracted caution of Mr. Bush’s first secretary of
state, Colin L. Powell. In the spring of 2002, a year before the war, Mr. Cheney went to Britain
and the Middle East to enlist allies. He did not secure Arab support, but Britain became
America’s closest ally.

And it was Mr. Cheney, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in
Nashville on Aug. 26, 2002, who enunciated the rationale for war. Citing unnamed intelligence
sources, he said Iraq already had biological and chemical weapons and would “fairly soon”
have nuclear weapons.




Mr. Cheney with Jim Goldsmith, commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars,
in 2002. In a speech laying out the rationale for war with Iraq, Mr. Cheney said that
Iraq already had biological and chemical weapons and would “fairly soon” have
nuclear weapons.



“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,”
Mr. Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against
our allies and against us.”

White House officials said Mr. Cheney had mirrored Mr. Bush’s views. The talk alarmed
America’s allies, but it laid the groundwork for the invasion seven months later.

Mr. Cheney was portrayed in Mr. Bush’s memoir as a steamrollering force for military
intervention in Iraq. He wrote that his vice president “had gotten out in front of my position”
in his Nashville speech, when he simply dismissed the prospect of further weapons inspections.

Mr. Cheney, who traveled to more than 30 countries to promote the administration’s policies,
also adopted hard lines against Iran and North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions prompted
Mr. Bush early in his presidency to label them, along with Iraq, as an “axis of evil.” But in
his last year in office, Mr. Bush made concessions to Iran and North Korea, siding with
Ms. Rice, not Mr. Cheney, resolving the administration’s internal tugs of war but not the nuclear perils.

In 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, but in 2007 it agreed to disable its nuclear
facilities in exchange for $400 million in fuel oil and aid from South Korea, China and the
United States. Ms. Rice finessed the deal, circumventing Mr. Cheney, who, after years of
shunning Pyongyang, said it amounted to rewarding a miscreant.

North Korea began dismantling its reactor, but amid disagreements over inspections, the
deal seemed about to collapse until Mr. Bush, late in 2008, removed Pyongyang from a
blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for inspections “based on mutual consent”
to verify a nuclear shutdown. Critics voiced doubts that the arrangement would work,
and it didn’t. North Korea remained a nuclear peril.

Iran said its uranium-enrichment program had peaceful aims. A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate
said that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but that it had continued
to enrich uranium. International sanctions and warnings of military action reflected widespread
skepticism over Iran’s intentions. The Bush administration finally agreed to talks, but there
were no breakthroughs, and North Korea did go on to successfully develop nuclear weapons.

Driving a Domestic Agenda
On domestic matters, Mr. Cheney was a strong advocate for Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees:
John G. Roberts Jr., as chief justice in 2005, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2006 (though Mr. Cheney
had originally urged the president to pick the federal judge J. Michael Luttig rather than Mr. Roberts).
Steve Schmidt, a senior Cheney adviser, rode herd on the Senate confirmations, and the court
moved further toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Cheney was also a forceful exponent of Mr. Bush’s economic plans and tax cuts, which
favored businesses and the wealthy, and he pushed energy and environmental policies that
opened federal lands to oil, gas and mining exploitation.

On Capitol Hill, especially in the first term, Mr. Cheney was the administration’s chief ambassador
and enforcer. Republican lawmakers and even many Democrats regarded him as Mr. Bush’s
surrogate and a member of their club, a wily horse-trader who knew the game, the odds and
all of the players. He often played a critical role, forging compromises and, as president of the
Senate, sometimes casting deciding votes.

Mr. Cheney’s views on taxes were, in a historical way, quite radical. He favored a flat tax or a
national sales tax to replace progressive income taxes that had put the heaviest burdens on
the rich since President Woodrow Wilson’s time. No such taxes were adopted.

But the administration, arguing that taxation stifles investment, won cuts to income and
estate taxes in 2001 and to capital gains and dividends taxes in 2003 — a total of $1.7 trillion
that signaled breaks with the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
Great Society of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the bases of domestic policy for generations.

To conservatives like Mr. Cheney, the tax cuts were crucial to an agenda for shaping America’s
future. Most were set to expire in later years (“sunset” provisions let supporters claim they cost less).
But they were conceived of as “permanent” — renewable by future Congresses, stimulating the
economy for years to come and forcing deficit-ridden administrations to pare the government’s
role in health, education, welfare and other social programs.

The tax cuts, along with soaring war costs and other spending as well as temporary economic
downturns, swung the budget from a projected $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years to deficits
that some economists put at $5 trillion to $9 trillion over a decade.

By many measures, the economy was relatively healthy in most of the Bush-Cheney years,
growing about 3 percent a year, with low inflation and millions of new jobs. The administration
credited its tax cuts for the performance, but many analysts said a housing boom and other
factors were more important. As conservatives had been for decades, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney
were proponents of free markets and the deregulation of business and financial institutions.

In that environment, housing prices soared to unrealistic levels, and mountains of risky mortgages
were written and sold in lucrative packages. Many of the packages were interconnected through
an obscure kind of debt insurance that spread the obligations across the financial community
and around the world. A giant financial bubble grew as subtly as a cancer.





Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were proponents of free markets and the
deregulation of business and financial institutions.




Then, in 2007 and 2008, the economy fell into a swoon, dragged down by subprime mortgage
defaults, a sharp decline in housing prices and a wide erosion of credit and consumer confidence.
Congress passed taxpayer rebates to stimulate the economy, but they were not nearly enough.
Banks and brokerages failed. As credit markets collapsed and America drifted into recession,
Congress enacted a $700 billion rescue package proposed by the Bush administration to buy
troubled securities.

But panic spread around the world in the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression.
For an administration that had prided itself in fostering a robust economy, the collapse
represented an enormous failure. Critics said Republican deregulation, anti-tax and free-market
policies were responsible. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney accepted no blame.

Another controversy swirled around Mr. Cheney over national energy policy. After taking office
in 2001, he quietly assembled a task force that developed energy proposals for the administration.
Democrats maintained that oil companies and lobbyists had been allowed to write America’s
energy policies, and a lawsuit was filed to pry open the records. A federal judge authorized a
look. But Mr. Cheney, who refused to identify those consulted, argued in an appeal to the
Supreme Court that the judicial inquiry into affairs of the executive branch violated the
Constitution’s separation of powers clause.

When it was reported that Justice Antonin Scalia had gone hunting with Mr. Cheney while the
case was pending, there were calls for the justice to recuse himself. He declined. With his assent,
Justice Scalia joined a comfortable majority in sending the case back to a lower court, which
sided with Mr. Cheney in saying that the administration was not obligated to identify its
consultants. A list of them was leaked to the news media in 2007; virtually all the major oil
and energy companies, many of them contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaigns, were on it.


Polarizing and Idolized

The task-force case reinforced the aura of secrecy and inscrutability around the vice president,
whose character was endlessly debated. Democrats portrayed Mr. Cheney, the former chief
executive of the oil services and engineering company Halliburton, as one of the most polarizing
figures in politics, a manipulator who personified militarism, corporate corruption, government
secrecy and environmental degradation.

But to Republicans who idolized him, Mr. Cheney was a fundamentalist’s rock star — a cultural
and political icon, the lifeblood of the conservative movement and the president’s firm right hand.
To the faithful, he was also, like Mr. Bush, a man of God.

The truth lay somewhere in between and was more complex, according to White House associates,
lawmakers and others familiar with Mr. Cheney’s activities, many of which were carried out behind
the scenes. Only participants in those activities got glimpses of the nuances and the leverage at work.

Mr. Cheney was a quick study and a good listener, aides said, absorbing large volumes of information
for use in policy decisions. He steeped himself in briefings and literature about anthrax, smallpox,
the Ebola virus and other chemical and biological agents, and then helped draft a program to
combat biological terrorism.

He was not a powerful campaigner. An overweight, laconic and rather wooden grandfatherly figure
with a nimbus of white hair and eyeglasses that caught the light, Mr. Cheney looked like a man
on his way to the dentist. He was affable, but had no flair on the stump. He did not kiss babies
or wade into crowds.

He preferred informality — a mixer to a reception line, a round table to a lectern. His voice was
a low-key monotone, and his unwinding reel of facts and figures struck voters as authoritative
but uninspiring. He made scores of campaign appearances in 2000 and 2004, but many were
fund-raisers for wealthy contributors and speeches to Republican audiences.

His troubled medical history virtually ruled out a future run for the presidency. Mr. Cheney,
who discussed his cardiac problems in “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey,” a 2013 book
written with Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, his cardiologist, took medications to lower his blood pressure
and cholesterol, and aspirin to prevent blood clots. He watched his diet, rode a stationary
bike daily and had frequent medical checkups. In 2005, doctors repaired aneurysms in arteries
behind both knees, and in 2007 they treated him for a blood clot in his left leg after he spent
65 hours in nine days traveling by plane. In 2007 and again in 2008, he was treated with
electric shocks for an irregular heartbeat.





As Mr. Bush’s most trusted and valued counselor, Mr. Cheney foraged at will over
fields of international and domestic policy.



But all that meant he did not have to shoulder the handicap of earlier vice presidents, including
Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Walter F. Mondale and Nixon, who had found it necessary to play
two subtly conflicting roles — promoting a president and his programs while trying to burnish
his own image for a presidential race later. Mr. Cheney had only President Bush to worry about.

And the vice presidency suited him well. He counseled Mr. Bush with the assurance that his advice
was valued, took up policy questions as he saw the need, marshaled facts and arguments free
of pressure to justify his actions to voters, and insulated himself from attacks by ignoring them.

He did not respond to many questions about his work at Texas-based Halliburton, from
1995 to 2000, when he was paid more than $40 million. But he denied pulling strings for the
company to win lucrative contracts for supplying troops in the Middle East and rebuilding Iraq
after the invasion.

After decades in the capital, much about his personal life remained obscure to the public. He even
kept secret the names of people who visited his official residence on the grounds of the
Naval Observatory in Washington.

The Cheneys vacationed often at their mountain home in a gated community in Jackson and
in 2005 bought a $2.6 million waterfront residence on nine acres in St. Michaels, Md., on the
Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, near the weekend home of his old friend Mr. Rumsfeld.
In 2008, the Cheneys built a new primary residence in McLean, in Northern Virginia, to be closer
to their daughters and grandchildren.

Mr. Cheney sometimes slipped away to hunt in Pennsylvania or Arkansas. One of his trips, an
outing to bag quail in Texas on Feb. 11, 2006, turned into a fiasco. Aiming for a bird, the
vice president shot Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Austin lawyer. The pellet wounds were
not fatal, but Mr. Bush got an incomplete report and was annoyed. The White House’s daylong
delay in disclosing the news caused an uproar, and Mr. Cheney was silent for four days.
He then defended his actions, but the episode exposed some rarely seen tensions between
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.




In 2006, Mr. Cheney was involved in a hunting accident where he shot
Harry Whittington, 78, while hunting in Texas.



It also provided a glimpse through the cocoon that Mr. Cheney had woven about himself in the
White House, where he had a power center of his own, with a small version of the
National Security Council, his own domestic policy staff and his own communications
personnel — a team, led by David S. Addington, his chief of staff, whose debates and decisions
sometimes ran parallel to those of the presidential circle.

Mr. Cheney had regular working lunches with Mr. Bush at the White House and with lawmakers
on Capitol Hill, but associates said he almost never spoke — not even off the record to members
of his own staff — about those private conversations. For security reasons, he did not travel
with Mr. Bush. But he also rarely socialized with the president and was not a regular at
Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Unlike Mr. Bush, an early-to-bed teetotaler, Mr. Cheney occasionally attended dinner parties
with the powerful in Washington, but hosts said indiscretion never crossed his plate.
Critics accused him of violating the openness and accountability of public officials in a
democracy, but he typically responded with an enigmatic smile and no comment.

His wife, Lynne Cheney, an author, conservative scholar and talk show host, wrote more
than a dozen books and many journal articles, lectured at George Washington University
and the University of Wyoming, and was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities from 1986 to 1993.

Mr. Cheney’s elder daughter, Elizabeth Perry, known as Liz, served in the State Department
as deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs from 2002 to 2003, and as principal
deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs from 2005 to 2006. She worked on her
father’s re-election campaign in 2004. In 2013, with her father’s support, she ran for the
United States Senate from Wyoming but withdrew from the race in early 2014.






After the presidency of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Cheney and Representative Liz Cheney
were engulfed by a parade of Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the
former vice president a war criminal.



In 2016, Ms. Cheney ran for and won the House seat from Wyoming, which her father had held
for a decade, and proved to be popular. She was re-elected in 2018 and 2020 by overwhelming
margins. She supported Mr. Trump’s positions on nearly 93 percent of her House votes. But after
he refused to accept defeat in his bid for re-election and roused a mob that attacked the
Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she turned against Mr. Trump, voting in favor of his second impeachment.

Indeed, Ms. Cheney served as vice chair of the House special committee on the events of Jan. 6,
and was scathing in her condemnation of Mr. Trump’s role in fomenting the uprising. In retaliation,
House Republicans stripped her of her leadership role. Ultimately, voters had the final nay-say,
as she lost her House seat in a G.O.P. primary.

On the first anniversary of the insurrection, Mr. Cheney joined his daughter at remembrance
events at the Capitol. No Republicans showed up, but Democrats in the House, including the
Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were effervescent.

After 13 years in retirement and of all-but-unimaginable changes in American life wrought by the
rise and fall of President Trump, Mr. Cheney and Liz Cheney were engulfed by a parade of
Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the former vice president a war criminal.
The Democrats shook Mr. Cheney’s hand, and some embraced Ms. Cheney, who introduced him
to her erstwhile colleagues, saying: “This is my father. This is Dad.” It was a stunning moment
and an emblem of how much had changed in the Trump era.

Mr. Cheney’s second daughter, Mary Claire Cheney, was her father’s 2004 campaign coordinator.
She wrote “Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life” (2006).
During Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign in 2013, a feud between the sisters developed after
Mary Cheney, a lesbian who married her longtime partner in 2012, criticized Liz Cheney’s
opposition to same-sex marriage.
(Liz Cheney later said she had been wrong and embraced same-sex marriage.)

Besides his wife and daughters, Mr. Cheney is survived by seven grandchildren.



Westerner in Washington


Richard Bruce Cheney, who used his given name mostly on brass plates and letterheads, was
born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, the eldest of three children of Richard Herbert and
Marjorie Lorraine (Dickey) Cheney. When Dick was 13, his father, a soil conservation agent
for the Department of Agriculture, moved the family to Casper, Wyo., a city of 25,000 on the
banks of the North Platte River, steeped in conservatism and surrounded by bleak oil and gas fields.

In the 1950s, Friday nights in Casper meant football games, a dance and a trip to the root beer
stand. At Natrona County High School, Dick was captain of the football team and president of
his senior class, but not a top student. His yearbook picture shows a beefy teenager with a crew
cut and a tight smile. His girlfriend was the homecoming queen, Lynne Vincent,
whom he would marry in 1964.

After graduation, he went to Yale, but his grades were poor; he flunked out twice and left
after three semesters. He traveled around the West, at one point laying lines for a power
company, and was arrested twice for drunken driving before settling down at the University
of Wyoming in Laramie, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in 1966,
both in political science. America was at war in Vietnam, but Mr. Cheney never served in the
military, winning four deferments as a student and one as a married parent.





President Gerald Ford introduced his chief of staff, Dick Cheney and chairman of his
election committee, Jim Baker, in Vail, Colorado, in August 1976.



He intended to teach, but an internship in the Wyoming Legislature in 1964 whetted his taste
for politics. A prizewinning 60-page report he wrote on the legislature propelled him to a 1966
internship in the office of Gov. Warren P. Knowles of Wisconsin, a Republican. In Madison,
he also enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin, but never finished.

Instead, he went to work in Washington in 1968 at the office of Representative William A. Steiger,
Republican of Wisconsin. Mr. Cheney was 27 and thrived in the cauldron of politics on Capitol Hill.
He learned fast, was a deft report writer and impressed Mr. Steiger and other House members,
including Mr. Rumsfeld, who at the time represented a district in Illinois.

When President Nixon appointed Mr. Rumsfeld to lead the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969,
Mr. Cheney sent Mr. Rumsfeld a 12-page memorandum on how to run the agency. Struck by his
ideas and audacity, Mr. Rumsfeld hired him as his executive assistant and liaison to Congress.

In the 1970s, Mr. Cheney hitched onto Mr. Rumsfeld’s rising star. When Mr. Nixon chose Mr. Rumsfeld
to direct the Cost of Living Council in 1971, Mr. Cheney went along as deputy.
When President Gerald R. Ford named Mr. Rumsfeld the White House chief of staff in 1974,
Mr. Cheney became deputy chief of staff. And when Mr. Ford appointed Mr. Rumsfeld
secretary of defense in 1975, Mr. Cheney moved up to become chief of the White House staff — the
youngest, at 34, ever to hold the post.

He also made connections — with the elder George Bush, Mr. Ford’s C.I.A. director, who became
a lifelong ally; with Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Mr. Ford and later to Mr. Bush;
and with James A. Baker III, President Ford’s 1976 campaign manager and Mr. Bush’s secretary of state.

After Mr. Ford’s defeat in 1976, Mr. Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he loved to hunt, fish,
ski and backpack in the Tetons. He worked in banking, but hankered for a return to public life and
ran for Congress in 1978. Wyoming, then as now, had only one representative. His first heart attack
interrupted his campaign, but his wife stood in for him on the stump, and he won in a landslide.

Entering Congress in 1979, Mr. Cheney was one of a new breed of Western Republicans anticipating
the dawn of the Reagan era — bully advocates of smaller government, lower taxes, cuts for
everything but the military and a tough revival of anti-communism. In a decade on Capitol Hill,
he voted a solid conservative line and was re-elected five times by voters who liked his folksy
ways and his record.

Mr. Cheney voted for prayer in public schools, restrictions on abortions and virtually all of
President Ronald Reagan’s agenda. He voted against gun controls, AIDS research, organized
labor, welfare programs, busing for school desegregation and spending for education. But to
many colleagues, he was more than his voting record. He was known as a skilled negotiator,
able to work with both parties.

During Mr. Cheney’s tenure, Democrats controlled the House, and many of his votes were cast
in losing causes. Moreover, he was not responsible for any major legislation. But he was seen
as a leader, and in his final term was chosen as the Republican whip, No. 2 in the party’s hierarchy.



Ascent to the World Stage


In March 1989, President George H.W. Bush named Mr. Cheney secretary of defense, and the
two men, who sometimes wore cowboy boots with their pinstriped suits (born into wealth in
Connecticut, Mr. Bush had made Texas his adopted state), became friends. Mr. Bush relied on
him for advice on national security and legislative matters and valued his loyalty and discretion,
as his son would years later.

While Mr. Cheney never served in uniform, he helped redefine military policy after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. His Pentagon stewardship earned wide respect
among commanders, troops and civilian military experts. Mr. Cheney orchestrated a 25 percent
reduction in the armed forces in the early 1990s, canceling major weapons systems and closing
many military bases.

He also helped resolve several foreign problems for Mr. Bush. He coordinated a 1989 invasion of
Panama, whose dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega, was whisked away to Miami, convicted of
racketeering and imprisoned. Mr. Cheney also directed missions in Haiti and Somalia.

But what sealed the bond between the president and Mr. Cheney was the Persian Gulf war.
Mr. Bush regarded it as the triumph of his political life. When Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait in
August 1990, Mr. Cheney persuaded King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to let America deploy troops
to his country, and in 1991 he helped plan and execute the war that ousted the Iraqis.

While Mr. Cheney was overshadowed by two high-profile subordinates — General Powell, then
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the field
commander — Mr. Bush, who had a 90 percent approval rating in some polls after the war,
felt most indebted to his defense secretary and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation’s highest civilian honor.

When Mr. Bush left office, Mr. Cheney returned to private life for the first time since the 1970s.
In 1993 and 1994, he flirted with the idea of entering a presidential race, visiting 47 states to
assess his chances. But by 1995, he had decided against it and joined Halliburton, which he
helped build over the next five years into the world’s largest oil services company.

In 1999, as George W. Bush assembled a team for a presidential race, Mr. Cheney got involved
early, helping him choose foreign policy advisers. In 2000, after Mr. Bush locked up the nomination,
he asked Mr. Cheney if he wanted to be considered as a running mate. Mr. Cheney said no,
but agreed to help select one. He surveyed a dozen candidates, including Senator McCain and
General Powell.





Mr. Cheney developed an image as a Machiavellian paterfamilias that,
though not fully accurate, was never quite dispelled.


But it was Mr. Cheney who got the job, his selection undoubtedly influenced by his long
association with the Bush family. Mr. Bush, whose only government service had been not
quite six years as the governor of Texas, saw in Mr. Cheney much that he lacked: savvy
in foreign policy, national security and the intricacies of Washington. Mr. Cheney also lent
maturity to the ticket, and seemed especially qualified to serve as president if necessary.

The Democrats, led by their nominee, Vice President Gore, and his running mate,
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, attacked Mr. Cheney’s voting record and
his Halliburton ties, but Mr. Cheney deflected the critics and pledged to forfeit $3.9 million
in stock options. There were questions about his ability to withstand a punishing campaign,
but doctors found him up to the task. He was 59, not especially old for the ticket,
and only five years older than Mr. Bush, though he seemed older. By autumn,
he was attacking the Democrats with gusto.

After Election Day, as the contest dissolved into bickering and a recount in Florida,
Mr. Cheney assumed the role he would later take on in the White House, consulting
on all major decisions. The Supreme Court finally halted the recount, effectively
handing the election to Mr. Bush.

Mr. Cheney, who led the Bush transition team and seeded the new government’s upper
echelons with many of his political allies, took office as the nation’s 46th vice president
on Jan. 20, 2001, and immediately began to redefine the scope of the role.