By Calvin Woodward, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at 84.
George W. Bush’s vice president died Monday from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said Tuesday in a statement.
In Cheney’s hands, the vice presidency became a nexus of influence and manipulation — no longer the timid office whose occupants had tended their boss’s ambitions, gone to endless banquets and often waited in the wings for their own shot at the prize.
When he bunkered in secure undisclosed locations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, that was less an inconvenience for Cheney than a metaphor for a life of power that he exercised to maximum effect from the shadows.
He was the small man operating big levers as if from Oz. Machiavelli with a sardonic grin. “The Darth Vader of the administration,” as Bush described the public’s view.
No one seemed more amused at that perception than Cheney himself. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
The force was with him.
Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life under his son.
Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
“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 Tuesday.
Cheney spoke at Washington and Lee University during the Mock Convention in 2016. MockCon is a student-run, simulated presidential nomination held every four years to predict the presidential nominee of the political party out of power, according to the Mock Convention website.
“At W&L, you get to focus on a real choice that really matters, and give it your best, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m here to tell you that the nominee of the Republican Party will be the next President of the United States,” Cheney said in his address to W&L students.
Just a few months later, the Republican Party nominee Donald Trump was elected.
Years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his 2020 election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“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 his daughter. “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 twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
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Associated Press writers Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Ali Abdul-Hassan in Baghdad, and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.