CNN
CNN
By Stephen Collinson, Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
(CNN) — Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the family said, adding that he died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
“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,” the family added.
“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.”
The 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was for decades a towering and polarizing Washington power player.
Bush described Cheney in a statement Tuesday as a “decent, honorable man.” “History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation – a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position,” Bush said.
In his final years, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, nevertheless became largely ostracized from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump whom he branded a “coward” and the greatest-ever threat to the republic.
In an ironic coda to a storied political career, he cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat, and fellow member of the vice president’s club, Kamala Harris, in a reflection of how the populist GOP had turned against his traditional conservatism.
Cheney was plagued by cardiovascular disease for most of his adult life, surviving a series of heart attacks, to lead a full, vigorous life and lived many years in retirement after a heart transplant in 2012 that he hailed in a 2014 interview as “the gift of life itself.”
Cheney, a sardonic former Wyoming representative, White House chief of staff and defense secretary, was enjoying a lucrative career in the corporate world when he was charged by George W. Bush with vetting potential vice-presidential nominees. The quest ended with Cheney himself taking the oath of office as a worldly number two to a callow new president who arrived in the Oval Office after a disputed election.
While caricatures of Cheney as the real president do not accurately capture the true dynamics of Bush’s inner circle, he relished the enormous influence that he wielded from behind the scenes.
Cheney was in the White House, with the president out of town on the crisp, clear morning of September 11, 2001. In the split second of horror when a second hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, he said he became a changed man, determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks and to enforce US power throughout the Middle East with a neo-conservative doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive war.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act. This was a terrorist act,” he recalled of that day in an interview with CNN’s John King in 2002.
Cheney reflected in later years on how the attacks left him with overwhelming sense of responsibility to ensure such an assault on the homeland never happened again. Perceptions however that he was the sole driving force behind the war on terror and US ventures into Iraq and Afghanistan are misleading.
Contemporary and historic accounts of the administration show that Bush was his own self-styled “The Decider.”
Multiple former presidents paid tribute to Cheney on Tuesday, with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden highlighting the former vice president’s “public service.”
A changed man
From a bunker deep below the White House, Cheney went into crisis mode, directing the response of a grief-stricken nation suddenly at war. He gave the extraordinary order to authorize the shooting down of any more hijacked airliners in the event they were headed to the White House or the US Capitol building. For many, his frequent departures to “undisclosed” locations outside Washington to preserve the presidential chain of succession reinforced his image as an omnipotent figure waging covert war from the shadows. His hawkishness and alarmist view of a nation facing grave threats was not an outlier at the time – especially during a traumatic period that included anthrax mailings and sniper shootings around Washington, DC, that exacerbated a sense of public fear even though they were unrelated to 9/11.
The September 11 attacks unleashed the US war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda, though the terror group’s leader Osama bin Laden escaped. Soon, Cheney was agitating for widening the US assault to Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, whose forces he had helped to eject from Kuwait in the first Gulf War as President George H.W. Bush’s Pentagon chief.
The vice president’s aggressive warnings about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction programs, alleged links to al Qaeda and intent to furnish terrorists with deadly weapons to attack the United States played a huge role in laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Congressional reports and other post-war inquiries later showed that Cheney and other administration officials exaggerated, misrepresented or did not properly portray faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction programs that Iraq turned out not to possess. One of Cheney’s most infamous claims, that the chief 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, was never substantiated, including by the independent commission into the September 11 attacks.
But Cheney insisted in 2005 that he and other top officials were acting on “the best available intelligence,” at the time.
While admitting that the flaws in the intelligence were plain in hindsight, he insisted that any claim that the data was “distorted, hyped, or fabricated” was “utterly false.”
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan also led the US down a dark legal and moral path including “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects that critics blasted as torture. But Cheney – who was at the center of every facet of the global war on terrorism – insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable. Cheney was also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a practice that critics at home and abroad branded an affront to core American values.
No regrets
Cheney became a symbol of the excesses of the anti-terror campaigns and the fatally false premises and poor planning that turned the initially successful invasion of Iraq into a bloody quagmire. He left office reviled by Democrats and with an approval rating of 31%, according to the Pew Research Center.
To the end of his life, Cheney expressed no regrets, certain he had merely done what was necessary to respond to an unprecedented attack on the US mainland that killed nearly 3,000 people and led to nearly two decades of foreign wars that divided the nation and transformed its politics.
“I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said, when confronted by a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2014 that concluded enhanced interrogation methods as brutal and ineffective and responsible for damaging US standing in the eyes of the world.
Of the Iraq war, he told CNN in 2015: “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now.”
‘He’s a coward’
Cheney’s aggressive anti-terror policies fit into a personal doctrine that justified extraordinary presidential powers with limited congressional oversight. That was in line with his belief that the authority of the executive branch had been mistakenly eroded in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of his first presidential boss, President Richard Nixon.
Yet in his final years, Cheney emerged as a fierce critic of a man who had an even more expansive view of the powers of the presidency than he did – Trump. Cheney had supported Trump in 2016 despite his criticism of Bush-Cheney foreign policies and his transformation of the party of Reagan into a populist, nationalist GOP. But the ending of the president’s first term, when his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat led to the January 6 insurrection, caused Cheney to speak out, in a rare, public manner.
The former vice president’s daughter, then-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, sacrificed a promising career in the GOP to oppose Trump after his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. In an ad for his daughter’s unsuccessful campaign to fight off a pro-Trump candidate’s primary challenge in 2022, Dick Cheney – who was, by then, rarely seen in public – looked directly into the camera from under a wide brimmed cowboy hat and delivered an extraordinary direct message.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said.
“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”
Early days out West
Richard Bruce Cheney was born January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska. While living in the small mountain town of Casper, Wyoming, he met his high school sweetheart and future wife Lynne Vincent. Cheney was accepted to Yale University on a scholarship, but he struggled to fit in and maintain his grades. By his own admission, he was kicked out.
He returned West to work on power lines and was twice arrested for driving under the influence. In a turning point for Cheney, he was given an ultimatum from Lynne, who had “made it clear she wasn’t interested in marrying a lineman for the county,” he told The New Yorker. “I buckled down and applied myself. Decided it was time to make something of myself,” he told the magazine.
Cheney went back to school and earned a bachelor’s and master’s in political science from University of Wyoming. The couple was married in 1964.
Cheney is survived by Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary Cheney and seven grandchildren.
A veteran Washington power broker
Cheney began honing his inside power game – at which he became a master – as an aide to Nixon.
He was later picked by Donald Rumsfeld as his deputy White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford and then succeeded his mentor and close friend in the job in 1975 when Rumsfeld departed to become defense secretary. Cheney was instrumental in reviving their partnership in 2001 when he recalled Rumsfeld from the political wilderness to return to the Pentagon.
The pair formed an extraordinary backroom alliance in the Bush administration throughout the war on terror and the Iraq war – much to the frustration of more moderate members of the administration including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – who took over from Powell in the second term.
While Democratic President Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Cheney decided to run for Congress and was elected to Wyoming’s sole US House seat in 1978. Cheney served six terms, rising to become House minority whip, and racked up a very conservative voting record.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush, who had served with Cheney in the Ford administration, tapped him to serve as his defense secretary, calling him a “trusted friend, adviser.” He was confirmed by the Senate in a 92-0 vote.
As Pentagon chief, Cheney showed considerable skill in directing the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to push Iraq’s troops out of Kuwait. Following his stint as defense secretary, Cheney briefly explored a run for president in the 1996 election cycle but decided against it.
During Clinton’s presidency, Cheney joined Dallas-based Halliburton Co. serving as its chief executive officer.
It wouldn’t be until the younger Bush decided to run for office that Cheney was chosen to lead the Republican candidate’s search for a running mate and, after initially turning down the job, ended up being added to the GOP ticket.
“During the process, I came to the conclusion that the selector was the best person to be selected,” Bush said in the 2020 CNN film “President in Waiting.”
Cheney brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to areas where critics complained Bush was weak. As a former Texas governor, Bush had no elected experience in Washington and little military and foreign policy background compared with Cheney.
Early in Bush’s presidency, Cheney led a task force to develop the administration’s energy policy and sought to keep its records secret in a fight that lasted Bush’s first term and went all the way to the US Supreme Court.
He was, however, at odds with Bush over the issue of same-sex marriage, saying that it should be left to the states to decide. In a 2004 town hall, he noted his daughter Mary’s sexual orientation reportedly for the first time publicly, according to The Washington Post. “With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone.People … ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to,” he said, the Post reported.
His relationship with Bush was complicated in later years, including by Bush’s refusal to pardon Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2007 after a probe into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative. Libby was eventually pardoned by Trump in 2018.
In one of the most notorious moments in his personal life, which added to his grizzled legend in 2006, Cheney accidentally shot a hunting partner in the face with birdshot, causing relatively minor wounds.
Health issues
Cheney’s health issues began in 1978, when he had his first heart attack at age 37 while running for Congress. Three more followed in 1984, 1988 and November 2000, just a few days into the Florida presidential ballot recount that resulted in a Bush-Cheney win.
Cheney at the time said that he’d be the “the first to step down” if he learned he’d be unable to do the job and had a resignation letter in case he was deemed incapacitated.Cheney completed both terms under Bush, attending Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 in a wheelchair.
A year after a fifth heart attack in 2010, Cheney received a heart pump that kept the organ running until his transplant in 2012.
Life after the White House
After leaving office, Cheney returned to private life, penning two memoirs — one about his personal and political career and the other about his struggles with heart disease as well as a book with his daughter, Liz. He became one of the most strident GOP critics of President Barack Obama, who had based his election campaign on promises to end the wars and other changes from what he called failed policies of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Years later, Cheney was decrying his own party — especially its leadership’s response to the attack on the Capitol — when he returned to the US Capitol with then-Rep. Liz Cheney on the one-year anniversary of January 6, 2021.
“I am deeply disappointed at the failure of many members of my party to recognize the grave nature of the January 6 attacks and the ongoing threat to our nation,” he said in a statement.
In a remarkable moment, Democrats lined up to greet the former Republican vice president and shake his hand. Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugged Cheney. The former vice president slammed Republican leaders in Congress, saying they do not resemble the leaders he remembered from his time in the body.
It was a scene that would have been unthinkable two decades earlier and an illustration of how the extraordinary changes in American politics wrought by Trump had made former bitter political foes find common cause in the fight for democracy.
“It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” Cheney said at the Capitol in 2022.
Cheney continued his criticism of Trump in the following years and went as far as to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat and Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential campaign. He said he would vote for Harris because of the “duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.” Cheney emphasized his disdain for Trump at the time and warned that he “can never be trusted with power again,” though Trump would go on to win the presidency a couple of months later.
CNN’s Jamie Gangel and Shania Shelton contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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