Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in
US history, dies at 84
[November 04, 2025]
By CALVIN WOODWARD
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 age 84.
Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac
and vascular disease, his family said in a statement.
“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 statement 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. 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.”
The quietly forceful 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 as vice
president under Bush's son George W. Bush.
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 terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.
Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald
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 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, Dick
Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris,
for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on
borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning "with a
smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image
for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed
that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off
years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a
fatal shock.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a
ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back
channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential
powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile -- detractors called it a
smirk -- Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy
manipulator.
"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."
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left
government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq
War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and
prewar Iraq that didn't exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as
liberators; they weren't.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back
when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll
by war’s end.
For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the
nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But well into Bush's second term, Cheney's clout waned, checked by
courts or shifting political realities.
Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential
authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists.
His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by
Bush.
Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the
months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the
other would survive any follow-up assault on the country's leadership.
With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence
in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off
his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later
described to comical effect.
From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but
well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed
Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the
presidency itself.
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney watches he attends a primary
Election Night gathering for his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.,
Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022, in Jackson, Wyo. Cheney lost to challenger
Harriet Hageman in the primary. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, file)
That bargain largely held up.
"He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy," Dave
Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and
worked with him in Washington, once said. "He is congenitally
discreet. He is remarkably loyal."
As Cheney put it: "I made the decision when I signed on with the
president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda,
that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was
angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected
president when his term was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He
came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a
bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a
hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun
blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that
extraordinary turn of events.
The vice president called it "one of the worst days of my life.” The
victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave
him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died
in 2023.
When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney,
a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney
led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.
Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the
choosing.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle
before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court
challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation's
highest court — left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was
clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the
lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger
piece of Bush's constrained budget came to his desk and often were
settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president's programs in
halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and
the No. 2 Republican House leader.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush
didn't seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments
became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into
his own.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few
years later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she
won his old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter
grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Trump's
favorite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter's defense in 2022 as she juggled
her lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to
get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney's vote for Trump's impeachment after the insurrection
earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers
outside Congress. But that praise and her father's support didn't
keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic
fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in the House GOP
leadership.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was
a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld,
R-Ill,, serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White
House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever,
at age 34.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where
he had been raised, and ran for the state's single congressional
seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart
attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called "Cardiacs
for Cheney." He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win
five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President
Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that
drove Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush
administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large
engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture
Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in
Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left
with failing grades.
He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of
Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne
Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by
Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
___
Associated Press writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming,
contributed to this report.
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