WASHINGTON: Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who turned one of the crucial highly effective and polarising vice presidents in United States historical past and a number one advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.
Cheney died on Monday (Nov 3) evening resulting from problems of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness, in line with a press release from household spokesman Jeremy Adler.
The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents, main the armed forces as defence chief throughout the Persian Gulf Warfare beneath President George HW Bush earlier than returning to public life as vp beneath Bush’s son, George W Bush.
Cheney was, in impact, the chief working officer of the youthful Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, usually a commanding one, in implementing selections most necessary to the president and a few of surpassing curiosity to himself – all whereas residing with many years of coronary heart illness and, post-administration, a coronary heart transplant.
Cheney constantly defended the extraordinary instruments of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist assaults of Sep 11, 2001.
Years after leaving workplace, he turned a goal of President Donald Trump, particularly after his daughter Liz Cheney turned the main Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s determined makes an attempt to remain in energy after his election defeat and his actions within the Jan 6, 2021, riot on the US Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year historical past, there has by no means been a person who was a higher menace to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney mentioned in a tv advert for his daughter. “He tried to steal the final election utilizing lies and violence to maintain himself in energy after the voters had rejected him. He’s a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his period might by no means have imagined, Dick Cheney mentioned final yr he was voting for his or her candidate, Kamala Harris, for president towards Trump.
A survivor of 5 coronary heart assaults, Cheney lengthy thought he was residing on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke every morning “with a smile on my face, grateful for the present of one other day”, an odd picture for a determine who at all times gave the impression to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency outlined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that he had had the wi-fi operate of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of concern that terrorists would remotely ship his coronary heart a deadly shock.
In his time in workplace, now not was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. As a substitute, Cheney made it a community of again channels from which to affect coverage on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, vitality and different cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fastened with a seemingly everlasting half-smile – detractors known as it a smirk – Cheney joked about his outsize popularity as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius within the nook that no one ever sees come out of his gap?” he requested. “It is a good option to function, truly.”
A hardliner on Iraq who was more and more remoted as different hawks left authorities, Cheney was confirmed incorrect on level after level within the Iraq Warfare, with out ever shedding the conviction that he was primarily proper.
He alleged hyperlinks between the 2001 assaults towards america and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He mentioned US troops could be welcomed as liberators – they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its final throes in Could 2005, again when 1,661 US service members had been killed, not even half the toll by struggle’s finish.
For admirers, he saved the religion in a shaky time, resolute even because the nation turned towards the struggle and the leaders waging it.
However effectively into Bush’s second time period, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts dominated towards efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord particular harsh remedy to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea weren’t absolutely embraced by Bush.
Cheney operated a lot of the time from undisclosed places within the months after the 2001 assaults, saved aside from Bush to make sure one or the opposite would survive any follow-up assault on the nation’s management.
With Bush out of city on that fateful day, Cheney was a gradual presence within the White Home, at the very least till Secret Service brokers lifted him off his ft and carried him away, in a scene the vp later described to comical impact.
From the start, Cheney and Bush struck an odd cut price, unstated however effectively understood. Shelving any ambitions he might need needed to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded energy comparable in some methods to the presidency itself.
That cut price largely held up.
“He’s constituted in a option to be the final word No 2 man,” Dave Gribbin, a good friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and labored with him in Washington, as soon as mentioned. “He’s congenitally discreet. He’s remarkably loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “I made the choice after I signed on with the president that the one agenda I’d have could be his agenda, that I used to be not going to be like most vice presidents – and that was angling, making an attempt to determine how I used to be going to be elected president when his time period was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage manoeuvring had a worth. He got here to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq struggle. And when he shot a looking companion within the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie have been gradual to reveal that extraordinary flip of occasions.
The vp known as it “one of many worst days of my life”. The sufferer, his good friend Harry Whittington, recovered and shortly forgave him. Comedians have been relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush started his presidential quest, he sought assist from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil enterprise. Cheney led the staff to discover a vice presidential candidate.
Bush determined your best option was the person picked to assist with the selecting.
Collectively, the pair confronted a protracted 2000 post-election battle earlier than they might declare victory. A collection of recounts and courtroom challenges – a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest courtroom – left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took cost of the presidential transition earlier than victory was clear and helped give the administration a clean launch regardless of the misplaced time. In workplace, disputes amongst departments vying for an even bigger piece of Bush’s constrained price range got here to his desk and sometimes have been settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s packages in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No 2 Republican Home chief.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the actual No 1 on the town; Bush did not appear to thoughts and cracked a couple of himself. However such feedback turned much less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly got here into his personal.
Cheney retired to Jackson Gap, not removed from the place Liz Cheney a couple of years later purchased a house, establishing Wyoming residency earlier than she received his outdated Home seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew nearer, too, because the Cheney household turned one in every of Trump’s favorite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defence in 2022 as she juggled her lead position on the committee investigating Jan 6 with making an attempt to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the rebellion earned her reward from many Democrats and political observers outdoors Congress. However that reward and her father’s assist didn’t hold her from shedding badly within the Republican major, a dramatic fall after her fast rise to the No 3 job within the Home GOP management.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He turned a protege of Consultant Donald Rumsfeld, a Republican from Illinois, serving beneath him in two companies and in Gerald Ford’s White Home earlier than he was elevated to chief of workers, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the publish for 14 months, then returned to Casper, the place he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.
In that first race for the Home, Cheney suffered a light coronary heart assault, prompting him to crack that he was forming a gaggle known as “Cardiacs for Cheney”. He nonetheless managed a decisive victory and went on to win 5 extra phrases.
In 1989, Cheney turned defence secretary beneath the primary President Bush and led the Pentagon throughout the 1990 to 1991 Persian Gulf Warfare that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the 2 Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton, a big engineering and development firm for the oil trade.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a long-time Agriculture Division employee. Senior class president and soccer co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a yr however left with failing grades.
He moved again to Wyoming, ultimately enrolled on the College of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with highschool sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He’s survived by his spouse, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
