Dick Cheney, the steely conservative powerhouse who reshaped the modern vice presidency and pushed America toward war in Iraq, has died at 84.Cheney passed away Monday from complications related to pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said Tuesday.
“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the family said. “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.”
A dominant force inside two Bush administrations, Cheney was the quiet but unrelenting hand behind key national security decisions — from leading the Pentagon during the Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush to driving post-9/11 policy as vice president under George W. Bush.
He effectively operated as the second Bush administration’s chief executive, shaping intelligence, defense and executive-power decisions while battling a decades-long heart condition that eventually required a transplant.
Cheney never apologized for the tough tactics adopted after Sept. 11, defending aggressive surveillance, detention and interrogation programs. Former President George W. Bush called him a “decent, honorable man” and said his passing was “a loss to the nation.”
“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 he held,” Bush said.
But in the Trump era, Cheney became a lightning rod for the right he once helped define. His daughter Liz Cheney, a staunch critic of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, drew her father back into political combat — and into open conflict with the former president.
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 3: Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the National Press Club, December 3, 2013 in Washington, DC
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for Liz Cheney. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a political twist unimaginable two decades ago, Cheney said he backed Democrat Kamala Harris for president last year over Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney often acknowledged his borrowed time, once saying he woke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day.”
He also understood the mystique that followed him — the half-smile critics branded a smirk, the shadow-boss reputation inside the West Wing.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he once quipped. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
