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Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/us/politics/dick-cheney-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk8.NOlZ.4tpWfG2DMuX9&smid=url-share

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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 Monday. He was 84.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.

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 the cause of democracy abroad, championing tax cuts and a robust economy 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 gulf war that successfully evicted Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991, 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 bloody warfare.

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. 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.

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 nearly 4,500 American lives and cost more than $2 trillion, according to some estimates.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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, Wyo., 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, Va., 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.

t 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.

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.

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.

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.

 

Edited by safe sex

Everyone can now get a little practice in on his grave.  That way we'll be prepared when (if) this next piece of shit ever gasps his last breath.

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GIF by Giphy QA

MAGA hates the Republican old guard (while being completely oblivious that they're still being manipulated by the same power brokers that they always have been), correct? So I'm guessing he's not going to get the Charlie Kirk treatment in death?

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6 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

So I'm guessing he's not going to get the Charlie Kirk treatment in death?

No, J.D. Vance is not going to fuck Lynne Cheney.

How they kept that dude alive this long is a mystery. He had to eat statins 3x a day after 5 heart attacks.

7 minutes ago, DaysOff said:

How they kept that dude alive this long is a mystery. He had to eat statins 3x a day after 5 heart attacks.

Miracles GIF by Tony Awards

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12 minutes ago, DaysOff said:

How they kept that dude alive this long is a mystery. He had to eat statins 3x a day after 5 heart attacks.

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Deficits Death don't matter.

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Cheney is like the Oscar Robertson of pieces of shit.  At one point he was easily in the conversation for top 5 pieces of shit of all time, and nobody would scoff if somebody brought forth that he was the biggest POS in history.  But then a group of guys came along that completely revolutionized the piece of shit game, and now he’s so far down the list of pieces of shit that nobody even brings him up, even though he was an enormous piece of shit in his time.  That’s more a testament to just how shitty these current pieces of shit really are.  If you can make Dick Cheney a forgotten (or even redeemable) figure in the piece of shit game, you’re truly a transcendent piece of shit.

(ETA: Oscar Robertson AVERAGED a triple double in the 61-62 season.)

Edited by Snake Diggity

2 minutes ago, Snake Diggity said:

(ETA: Oscar Robertson AVERAGED a triple double in the 61-62 season.)

How many U.S. troops did Oscar Robertson get unnecessarily killed.

arrivederci,cocksucker.

see you in hell.  

The piece of shit Cheney was one of Trump's harshest critic. That's how batshit crazy the Republican party is now.

2025 still has two months to redeem itself, and this is a good start.

The piece of shit Cheney was one of Trump's harshest critic. That's how batshit crazy the Republican party is now.

Dick Cheney voted for Kamala Harris. At least he had the spine to speak out about it cough cough W.
9 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

Having 5 heart attacks and living to 84 seems uncommon. 

I don't know how much he was "living" after the first 2 or 3.

"At least he voted for" doesn't fucking cover for being a goddamned corrupt war criminal. Holy shit. Like a lot of supremely evil assholes he died decades too late.  

 

I feel like he's the most responsible person for the Republican Party being what it is today.  He along with Karl Rove pulled the South Carolina stunt on McCain appealing to the base of the Party they we see today.   Did he know that entire base would then turn against him and all his friends and all lies?  Never saw it coming.   Does it matter?  No because he got rich off the Iraq War for three lifetimes. 

1 minute ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

"At least he voted for" doesn't fucking cover for being a goddamned corrupt war criminal. Holy shit. Like a lot of supremely evil assholes he died decades too late.  

 

Right.  I'm glad he voted for Kamala, but he still killed 600k civilians in the wrong country so he could profit from rebuilding it.

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It's not even close to the kind of justice he truly deserved, but damn I do enjoy knowing his last piece of civic engagement was voting for a Democrat. 

Chicken hawk. Exercised every ploy he could to avoid service during Viet Nam. I wouldn't care about that if he wasn't determined to kill as many American soldiers as he could in a similar boondoggle. Slaughtered plenty of Iraq civilians as well. 

Haliburton man. Haliburton made fortunes in Iraq. That's not to mention the pallets of cash sent to Iraq with no accounting. The "firm" hired to account operated from the mailbox of a residence in San Diego.

I say we strap his rotting body to President Poopy Pants until that pustule passes on.

Edited by RomaVicta

13 minutes ago, Red Five said:


Dick Cheney voted for Kamala Harris. At least he had the spine to speak out about it cough cough W.

Thanks for the vote, Dick. Now fuck off you piece of shit. Your punishment shall be to remain locked in an eternal 69 with Saddam Hussein.

He managed to live long enough to not be the least likeable vice president in history.

 

Quote

Future generations trying to understand the grip Cheney had on the instruments of government power in the post-9/11 years need only know this: When then-Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old Texas lawyer in a 2006 hunting accident, the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot in the face.

 

1 hour ago, South Austin said:

How many U.S. troops did Oscar Robertson get unnecessarily killed.

He probably distracted a few GIs in 'Nam who got picked off by the VC

2 hours ago, DaysOff said:

How they kept that dude alive this long is a mystery. He had to eat statins 3x a day after 5 heart attacks.

No kidding.  Anytime a person says, "Doctors can't cure anything!" the answer should be "Dick Fucking Cheney."  That dude's heart was nothin but a bundle of wires and stents, likely held together with strong ties of pure malevolence.  I heard Dr. Seuss based the Grinch on him.   

 

2 hours ago, South Austin said:

No, J.D. Vance is not going to fuck Lynne Cheney.

You don't know that.  

I cannot wait until Trump honors this death. I'm sure it will be dignified and respectful.

3 hours ago, Native Horn said:

21-shotgun salute?

Okay, I’ll shotgun 21 beers in celebration.

2 hours ago, South Austin said:

How many U.S. troops did Oscar Robertson get unnecessarily killed.

How many lucrative no-bid contracts did he dole out to Haliburton?

2 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

No kidding.  Anytime a person says, "Doctors can't cure anything!" the answer should be "Dick Fucking Cheney."  That dude's heart was nothin but a bundle of wires and stents, likely held together with strong ties of pure malevolence.  I heard Dr. Seuss based the Grinch on him.   

Didn't Cheney get a baboon heart transplant way back in the day?

3 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Chicken hawk. Exercised every ploy he could to avoid service during Viet Nam. I wouldn't care about that if he wasn't determined to kill as many American soldiers as he could in a similar boondoggle. Slaughtered plenty of Iraq civilians as well. 

Haliburton man. Haliburton made fortunes in Iraq. That's not to mention the pallets of cash sent to Iraq with no accounting. The "firm" hired to account operated from the mailbox of a residence in San Diego.

I say we strap his rotting body to President Poopy Pants until that pustule passes on.

Don't hate the player...

Wonder if Bush will actually make the funeral. He and Cheney broke up over Bush not pardoning Scooter Libby after Libby was convicted. As a reminder, while the was on WH staff, he leaked information to the press about a CIA agent.

Bush ultimately commuted the sentence so Libby never went to prison but Bush left the $200K fine and supervised release. Trump later fully pardoned Libby.

 

55 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Didn't Cheney get a baboon heart transplant way back in the day?

Probably why it was two sizes too small.

  • Author

Been waiting for my boy Spencer Ackerman to drop his Cheney obituary: His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies

Quote

The week before Dick Cheney died, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, one of the bureaucratic venues through which the most powerful vice president in US history disfigured the country, informed Congress that it would have no say over Donald Trump’s rapidly coalescing military aggression against an oil-rich country.

While self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted over social media about treating the Caribbean fishermen that he insists without evidence are drug smugglers “exactly like Al Qaeda,” Office of Legal Counsel chief T. Elliot Gaiser told a group of legislators that the administration would not be bothering with congressional authorization for an escalating set of strikes carried out as part of a massive US naval buildup. In Gaiser’s sophistry, because the fishermen are unarmed, US personnel are in no danger, so there is no war that fits the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution; it thus follows, in this backward-spooling reasoning, that there are simply no authorities that Congress—the body authorized by the Constitution to declare war—can exercise. Our national legislature, controlled by Republicans loyal to Trump and backfilled with Democrats who seek not the end of the US bloodshed but its constitutionally proper congressional authorization, now faces complete irrelevance as the president pursues a policy of regime change in Venezuela and perhaps a wider campaign of regional destabilization emanating from it.

Cheney, 84, picked an appropriate time to die. His decades-long struggle to consolidate the unparalleled might of US warmaking within the White House has succeeded. “In Cheney’s view,” wrote his biographer Barton Gellman, “the president’s authority was close to absolute within his rightful sphere.” Cheney defined that sphere expansively and fought for his definitions aggressively. When Patrick Leahy accused the former Halliburton CEO of rigging gigantic no-bid contracts for the company in Iraq, Cheney responded, “Fuck yourself.” He later called the exchange “the best thing I ever did.”

The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy, and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in 21st-century America.

No hell is hot enough or eternal enough for Dick Cheney. Any discussion of his works must begin with the 2021 assessment of Brown University’s Costs of War Project that found, conservatively, that the War on Terror killed between 897,000 and 929,000 people across five of its battlefields. Codirector Neda Crawford called that assessment “a vast undercount,” since it doesn’t take into account the downstream casualties caused by the epidemiological effects of destroying the infrastructure of the countries Cheney helped bomb, invade, and occupy. Cheney shares the blame for what is surely the deaths of more than a million people with many others, especially George W. Bush, the president he served. But while Bush was the self-styled “decider,” Cheney was the most crucial architect the War on Terror had, shaping the decisions Bush made.

Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.”

When Cheney infamously contended after 9/11 that the United States would have to “spend time in the shadows,” he was not only talking about intelligence work. Cheney accomplished his own agenda as a surrogate chief executive in the bureaucratic shadows. He operated through what former White House attorney Brad Berenson termed a “triumvirate” of lawyers, most notably his legal counsel David Addington, along with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Gonzales’s deputy, Tim Flanigan. They extended their influence into the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel through Cheney-aligned attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and Internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.

Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist No. 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the unitary executive theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime—a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror—presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trump uses it to murder fishermen in the Caribbean, but, like his Bush administration colleagues, takes no responsibility for authoring the authoritarian usurpations of power that he now bemoans.

Under Cheney, the consolidation of power within the presidency turned out to also be a consolidation of power within the vice presidency. Many understood Cheney, particularly after 9/11, to be effectively a copresident, dominating the unprepared and incurious Bush. Cheney was never one content to let events unfold on their own terms. As chairman of Bush’s vice-presidential search committee, he nominated himself, and pushed Bush to litigate the disputed 2000 election until five right-wing Supreme Court justices put them in office. To create the public conditions for invading Iraq, Cheney strong-armed the CIA into delivering baseless analytical assessments usefully inflating the danger from Saddam Hussein, who turned out to be helpless. In his public remarks, Cheney outdid even the manipulated CIA product, lying profligately about invented connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda. After Cheney got the war he wanted, he continued to lie that the bloody insurgency it provoked was on its “last throes” years before it reached its nadir.

That was the other legacy of Dick Cheney: fiasco. The wars he wanted did not showcase American power. They put on display American weakness, avarice, futility, and manic resource extraction. The economic agenda of unrestrained capital accumulation that Cheney championed led to the 2008 financial disaster that nearly wiped out the global economy. The pain and bitterness emerging from both conditions would be exploited by Trump, who empowered the nativist political currents galvanized by the War on Terror but, during Cheney’s time, did not enjoy respectability. They also enabled Trump to dismiss the respectable architects of the War on Terror, like Cheney, as sybaritic, incompetent elites, even as Trump builds upon their legacy of violence and deceit. For all his claims to foresight, Cheney never expected to be displaced by what he empowered. He surely did not expect to die on a day when New Yorkers are poised to elect a Muslim socialist mayor in a repudiation of his legacy.

Trump and Cheney were more characterologically alike than either man would prefer to admit. While Trump is charismatic and Cheney was anything but, they both ruled through fear, cruelty, and domination. Not even Trump has gotten his own friend to apologize after shooting him in the face. The impunity Trump enjoys is another aftereffect of Obama’s decision to forgo accountability for the War on Terror and its many institutional crimes. (All it earned the Democrats was an endorsement from Cheney of Kamala Harris that she seemed not to understand was grotesque and self-discrediting.) As Trump prepares an assault on a South American field of resource extraction and deploys federal forces to terrorize American cities, Cheney can eternally look up from his well-earned spot in the afterlife at the fruits of his labor.

 

Edited by safe sex

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I will give Dick Cheney credit for this one, singular thing: after leaving office he demonstrated more personal integrity than any living male member of the Bush family.
 

As catastrophic as the consequences of his actions have been, his was not the final say. That belonged to President Bush, who despite leading the world into calamity has enjoyed a reputational rehabilitation he does not deserve. While Bush, his brother and his nephew remained silent on the existential threat to the Republic represented by Trump and Trumpism, Cheney and his daughter rang the alarm bells. America is in terminal decline in part because of his career,  but I’ll give him that much credit. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova

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