Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a force in Republican politics for over 30 years and one of the most powerful people to hold the second-highest office in the U.S., has died. He was 84.
In a statement, Cheney’s family said he died Monday night of complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, surrounded by his wife of 61 years, Lynne, daughters Liz and Mary and other family members.
Before becoming vice president in the George W. Bush administration, Cheney served as defense secretary, White House chief of staff and a Wyoming congressman.
In the statement, his family called Cheney “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 to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
In 2000, Cheney was asked by Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush to help pick his running mate. In the end, it was Cheney’s own name that topped the list. He would, it was believed, provide gravitas and broad Washington experience for the younger Texas governor.
“He really wanted me to come on board because he thought I could help govern, be part of his team, and that he wanted me involved in everything,” Cheney told CBS’ “60 Minutes II.”
He was viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history; at the same time, he became a lightning rod for those who opposed the war in Iraq and the expansion of presidential powers.
In recent years, he saw his daughter Liz Cheney achieve political prominence as a Wyoming GOP representative in Congress known for her open criticism of President Trump. She lost her position as the top Republican woman in the House over her fight with Mr. Trump about his baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. She went on to serve as vice chair of the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and continued to warn of the danger that she said Mr. Trump posed to democracy, even campaigning for his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in 2024.
Dick Cheney cut an ad for his daughter’s failed 2022 reelection campaign backing her position, arguing that in U.S. history “there has never been an individual that was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Cheney shaped Republican Party politics for a generation, but he cast his final presidential ballot in 2024 for a Democrat. In a statement, he said Mr. Trump “can never be trusted with power again. As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”
Early life and rise to power
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and grew up in Wyoming. He attended Yale but dropped out after two years and instead finished his college education at the University of Wyoming. Cheney married his high-school sweetheart Lynne, with whom he had two daughters.
He then moved to Washington, D.C., to begin his career, having avoided the draft and the Vietnam War with deferments beginning in early 1966 because it took him six years to finish college, he later testified before Congress at a confirmation hearing.
By age 34, he was White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, the youngest person ever to hold the job.
In 1978, he ran for Congress and won the first of six terms in the House, representing Wyoming. In 1989, he was chosen to be secretary of defense in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, he oversaw the U.S. victory in the first Gulf War, when Iraqi forces were driven out of Kuwait. For years afterwards, he defended the decision not to invade Baghdad.
“If we had gone on to Baghdad, if we had sort of accepted the responsibility for occupying the country, governing Iraq, putting a new government in place, running Saddam to ground, I think there would have been significant additional U.S. casualties,” Cheney said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” in 1992. “I can’t say how many, but the proposition is how many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And my answer to that question is, not very darn many.”
In 1995, Cheney became chairman and CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil field services company, his first corporate job. His salary and stock options made him a multimillionaire. But in 2000 he left the company to join the Republican ticket.
“This election is about real choices — we are talking about the future of our nation,” Cheney said at a 2000 post-debate rally in Kentucky.
The presidential campaign was bitterly contested and its outcome was undecided on election night, with Florida too close to call, though Bush had a slight lead. Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, asked for recounts in four counties, as Bush sued to stop the recounts. The race was ultimately decided five weeks after the election by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court.
A turning point in history
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States proved to be the defining moment for the new administration — particularly, it seemed, for Cheney. Even as the U.S. struck al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan, Cheney warned of a larger web of U.S. enemies, urging military action against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2002.
Baghdad fell only three weeks after the U.S. invasion in 2003. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found, and American forces began a long, deadly occupation.
Even so, the Bush-Cheney team made national security the centerpiece of the 2004 presidential campaign.
“If we make the wrong choice, the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” Cheney said at a town hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa.
The president and Cheney were returned to office in a close election.
But as the situation in Iraq disintegrated and U.S. casualties mounted, public opinion turned against the conflict and the administration.
In November 2006, Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress, swept in primarily by anti-war sentiment.
To his many detractors, Cheney was a man obsessed with secrecy, the threat of terrorism and strengthening presidential power.
Cheney and Bush ignored the critics.
But in his second term, the president broke with Cheney on the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the offer of talks to North Korea, and the refusal of a pardon for Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of lying to a grand jury but ultimately pardoned by President Trump in 2018.
At the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, Cheney appeared in a wheelchair because of a back injury. But the former vice president proved to be as pugnacious as ever in frequent attacks on the new president and his administration. “I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,” Cheney said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010.
Heart transplant brings “a new day”
Cheney’s cardiovascular health was a problem throughout his life. He suffered a total of five heart attacks, his first at age 37 during his run for Congress.
In 2010, after his fifth, doctors implanted a battery-powered device to help his heart pump blood throughout his body. That bought Cheney time while he awaited a heart transplant, which he received in 2012.
“You wake up every morning with a smile on your face,” he told 60 Minutes in 2013, “because you’ve got a new day you never expected to have.”