WASHINGTON: Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarising vice-presidents in US history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.
Cheney died Monday night (Nov 4) due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.
"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, honour, 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."
Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defence chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning 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 interrogation 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 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."
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 office, the vice presidency was no longer merely ceremonial. 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, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, but never lost the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said US 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 US service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
But well into Bush's second term, Cheney's clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
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.
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, but Bush decided the best choice was Cheney himself.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 post-election 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.
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.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter's defence in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating Jan 6 with trying to get re-elected in Wyoming.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep Donald Rumsfeld, 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.
In 1989, Cheney became defence secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 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.
He is survived by his wife, Lynne, and daughters Liz and Mary. - AP
