Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served multiple Republican presidents before helping President George W. Bush lead the country into the global war on terror, died Monday, his family said.
Mr. Cheney, 84, laid claim to being one of the most powerful vice presidents in American history.
He was also a deeply polarizing figure, with his critics — and some admirers — viewing him as the power behind the Bush White House, pushing the aggressive retaliations that became the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and engulfed much of the Middle East.
More recently, he split with the party that had once embraced him as a congressman, a Defense Department secretary and running mate to Mr. Bush, decrying the ascendance of President Trump and siding with his daughter, Liz Cheney, in her losing battle for the soul of the GOP.
The break was so extreme that Mr. Cheney pointedly announced last year that he would vote for the Democrats’ nominee, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, instead of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cheney’s family said he died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
PHOTOS: Celebrity deaths in 2025: The famous faces we've lost
“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 said in a statement Tuesday announcing the death. 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.”
Mr. Cheney was chief of staff to President Ford then won a seat in Congress from Wyoming in the late 1970s, where he served until taking the job as Pentagon chief for President George H.W. Bush, where he oversaw the first war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
He pondered his own run for president in the 1996 election but decided against it.
Mr. Cheney emerged again in 2000 as a critical adviser to Mr. Bush, leading the search committee to select a vice president before ultimately becoming the pick himself.
In office, he was an unusual figure for a vice president, expressing no ambition to succeed the president and instead claiming a large portfolio for himself. He said the arrangement was Mr. Bush’s own wish.
But the deal faltered in the second term, as Afghanistan reconstruction stalled and the insurgency in Iraq grew worse, costing more American lives, and the debate over the engagements turned politically sour in Washington.
Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, would go on to be convicted of lying and obstructing justice in the outing of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush would later have a falling out over the president’s decision to commute the sentence but not pardon Mr. Libby.
Mr. Cheney also was one of the first prominent Republicans to embrace an openness to same-sex marriage, breaking with Mr. Bush’s position in the 2004 reelection campaign.
Mr. Cheney’s other daughter, Mary, was in a same-sex relationship, and he said, “People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want.”
But it was the war on terror that came to define Mr. Cheney and, to a large extent, the Bush presidency.
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack, Mr. Cheney’s whereabouts were closely guarded and he was said to be at an “undisclosed location.” That became the subject of intense comedic interest, even featuring in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
He became seen as the most prominent defender of harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding that were used on terrorism suspects.
Years after he left office and after the government had renounced some of those tactics, Mr. Cheney was still defending them — though saying he didn’t consider them to cross the line into “torture.”
“I’d do it again in a minute,” he said in a 2014 interview with NBC, in which he revealed just how searing the 2001 terrorist attack was for him.
Torture, he said, “is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”
Mr. Cheney also made unfortunate headlines in 2006 when, while on a quail hunting trip in Texas, he shot a fellow hunter, 78-year-old Harry Whittington.
By the time Mr. Trump emerged as the GOP’s undisputed leader after the 2016 election, Mr. Cheney was a man without a political home.
Liz Cheney would win a seat in Congress in 2016, continuing the family’s political role, but she would be drummed out of the GOP’s congressional leadership over disagreements with Mr. Trump and eventually surrendered her seat.
Mr. Cheney’s endorsement last year of Ms. Harris was met with derision on both the right and the left, where some Democrats cringed at having the support of a man they’d derided as torturer-in-chief.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who worked with Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush to rescue the war effort in Iraq in the second term, called the former vice president “one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.
“He had a unique ability to handle criticism from all corners of the political spectrum,” Mr. Graham said. “This is best explained by his tremendous sense of confidence in who he was and what he believed. When that self-confidence clashed with members of both parties, he was unshaken.”
Sen. John Barrasso hailed his fellow Wyomingite Tuesday as a “towering figure.”
“His unflinching leadership shaped many of the biggest moments in domestic and U.S. foreign policy for decades,” the Republican senator said.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also said it considered Mr. Cheney a partner.
“Dick Cheney was a dedicated public servant, businessman, and steadfast champion of American free enterprise,” said Suzanne Clark, the chamber’s president. “Throughout his distinguished career — from the private sector to the highest levels of government — he understood that economic strength underpins a strong nation.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.