Dick Cheney, who enjoyed a 40-year career at the centre of power in Washington, culminating in eight years as the most influential vice-president in the nation’s history, died on Monday at the age of 84.
His two terms serving under President George W Bush define his legacy. The generally pragmatic, team-playing conservative of his earlier years appeared transformed, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, into an apostle of unilateralism, unwilling to co-operate with American allies, and equally intent on vesting ever more authority in the office of the presidency.
He was the strongest voice urging that the US invade Iraq, as it did in 2003, on the grounds, later proven suspect, that Saddam Hussein was acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
He placed his acolytes throughout government, notably in the state and justice departments, with far-reaching consequences for policy, not least in the controversial writing of memoranda authorising the use of torture against suspected terrorists.
He appeared in public relatively infrequently, the joke being that he was always in “an undisclosed location”, but, when he did, he seemed to relish his role as a ruthless operator contemptuous of those who disagreed with him (he once swore at a Democratic senator on the floor of the chamber).
He continued in the same vein after Barack Obama became president, regularly accusing the Democrat of being weak and feckless, unwilling to face the realities of a dangerous world.
But he was effective because he knew the ways of Washington intimately, unlike the man under whom he served. He deployed a hard-driving ideological personal staff so well that his office, rather than the National Security Council or other cabinet departments, became the true centre of power in government.
And, until the last two years of his service, he always had Bush’s ear whenever he wanted it, and not only during their regular weekly lunches.
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30 1941. His father, a soil conservation expert with the agriculture department, moved the family to Casper, Wyoming, an oil and coal town, where the son attended high school, captained the football team and met his wife-to-be, Lynne Ann Vincent, who was to become an outspoken conservative in her own right (and occasional novelist). They had two daughters.
He won a scholarship to Yale, but dropped out in his second year because of poor grades and returned home, as he would do several times in his career. He eventually graduated with a degree in political science from the University of Wyoming. He obtained several educational exemptions from military service during the Vietnam war, which was to prove controversial, given his willingness to send young Americans into conflict.
In 1968, he was awarded a one-year fellowship in the Washington office of a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Thriving on politics, he then worked in the Nixon White House, among other posts, and in 1974 was picked as deputy chief of staff under Donald Rumsfeld.
When his boss became secretary of defence, Cheney moved up. A quarter of a century later, Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon, the first Republican to do so since his former protégé.
Out of government after the defeat of President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, Cheney went back to Wyoming to run for Congress, which he did, successfully, two years later. This was a year of Republican political revival, a harbinger of the 1980 election. Newt Gingrich, later Speaker of the House, also won that year, but Cheney’s record marked him out as a rising star.
His western conservatism in the House was unbreakable. He voted against virtually all environmental regulations, opposed gun control, supported increased defence spending, including President Ronald Reagan’s “star wars” initiative and, in 1986, opposed sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa and backed the financing of the Nicaraguan contras.
His voting record was offset by more moderate rhetoric and an inclination to compromise on some issues with the Democratic party. He rose seamlessly through his party’s ranks, to the point he was considered, as a senior whip, the logical heir apparent as Republican minority leader, far more so at the time than the firebrand Gingrich.
But when President George HW Bush offered him the defence department in 1989, he did not think twice. The high point of his tenure was the successful Gulf war in 1991 but he was also admired for his knowledge of defence issues and procurement. Not every new weapons programme met his approval, including the controversial Osprey aircraft, which he tried unavailingly to kill (it only finally died in 2009).
His reputation was also grounded in the smoothness of his co-operation with other senior members of the administration: James Baker, the secretary of state, Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Bush himself.
Cheney disagreed with the decision not to order US troops into Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein, but did not go public with his dissent at the time.
He did not return to Wyoming for long after Bush’s 1992 election defeat, first joining a conservative think-tank in Washington and, in 1995, becoming chief executive of Halliburton, the Dallas-based oil services company.
He briefly contemplated running for president in the 1996 election but decided not to. In the meantime, his foreign policy conservatism acquired a harder ideological edge in his years out of the nation’s capital.
One reason for his reluctance to run for the highest office was probably his health. He suffered his first heart attack in 1978 while running for his Wyoming seat and underwent quadruple bypass surgery 10 years later. He once said he did not want his medical reports spread all over the front pages of the newspapers.
But his health became an issue before the 2000 election and immediately afterwards, as he was twice hospitalised for recurring heart problems. He had been asked by the Bush campaign to chair the group reviewing vice-presidential choices, but with possible candidates, including Powell, ruling themselves, or being ruled, out, his own name emerged at the top of the list. Former President Bush was a strong supporter.
Controversy surrounded the disposition of millions of dollars in Halliburton stock options acquired during his corporate years, and he took mostly a subsidiary role in the campaign against Al Gore. But he acquitted himself well enough in the debate with Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democratic running mate.
When the new administration took over in January 2001, his role appeared central. He was perhaps the most experienced member of the team, with only the arguable exceptions of Powell, secretary of state, and Rumsfeld, again back at the Pentagon.
He was given no specific portfolio, unlike many vice-presidents, but was free to range throughout the policy arena, including relations with Congress, then under narrow Republican control.
If George W Bush was chief executive, his apparent unfamiliarity with many issues left the vice-president very much the chief operating officer, and Cheney’s influence was immediately felt. Another medical scare prompted black humour that it was Bush, not Cheney, who was a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon transformed the nation.
Afterwards, Cheney insisted there was evidence of collaboration between Saddam’s agents and al-Qaeda — although the 9/11 Commission later found there was no “collaborative relationship” between the two.
He relied for much of his information on Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who had ingratiated himself with neoconservative circles in Washington.
Cheney did not think that the approval of either Congress or the UN was necessary as a prelude to war, but pressed the CIA to produce “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction, which formed the basis for Powell’s UN speech that resulted in Security Council authorisation for the use of force.
Along with Rumsfeld, he marginalised Powell and the state department in critical policy decisions, while the NSC, under Condoleezza Rice, was passive.
He proved fallible, however, in his predictions that US troops would be welcomed “as liberators” by Iraqis.
But he never brooked dissent, refining, almost as he went along, his long-held belief in the “unitary executive”, which holds that the law is what the president says it is.
Cheney had, of course, lived through Watergate and thought the balance of power had swung too far away from the president in favour of Congress and even the courts.
That helps explain why he was instrumental in justice department policy memoranda exempting the US from the Geneva Conventions covering torture, and authorising domestic electronic surveillance on a scale far exceeding past practice and bypassing extant legal controls.
In the last two years of his tenure, his influence over his president finally showed signs of weakening.
He could not prevent the removal of Rumsfeld, his closest ally, from the defence department in November 2006, just after the midterm elections. The general tenor of US policy became more multilateral. But at least he had the satisfaction of seeing a “surge” of US troops in Iraq achieve a measure of success.
His criticisms of Obama apart, he faded into the political background for the rest of his life, except when the Cheney name was in the news. That was the case when his daughter Liz, occupying his old seat in Congress from Wyoming and, to all intents and purposes, just as much a conventional conservative, broke with President Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
The violent storming of Congress on January 6 2021, encouraged by Trump, persuaded Liz Cheney not merely to serve on the committee impeaching him but to become, as its vice-chair, one of its leading and most articulate prosecutors.
That cost her a place in the Republican party and Trump’s raging wrath, but her father came out staunchly behind her. Then, when Trump geared up to run again in 2024, Dick Cheney took to denouncing him as a threat to American democracy. He voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s election.
By then, not many people were listening to him — and certainly not in a party in thrall to Trump — but it was a last hurrah of principle, a reminder, if you like, that he was a man of substance in Washington’s corridors of power.
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