Dick Cheney, the powerful and polarizing former vice president of the United States who reshaped global geopolitics after 9/11 and left an indelible mark on the modern Republican Party, has died at the age of 84, according to a statement released by his family.
A leading figure in Washington for nearly half a century, Cheney served as the 46th vice president under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. He was widely regarded as the most influential member of the vice presidential office in American history — a man whose ideas, authority and will helped steer the United States into two decades of war.
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His death brings to a close a remarkable, often controversial career that spanned the Cold War, the Gulf War, the “War on Terror” and the populist upheavals that later reshaped the Republican Party he once helped define.
Who was Dick Cheney – and how did he rise to power?
Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska and raised in Casper, Wyoming. His journey from the rural American West to the center of global power was neither straightforward nor predetermined.
After struggling academically at Yale, Cheney dropped out and worked on a power line before returning to the University of Wyoming to complete a bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science. In 1964, he married his high school sweetheart, Lynne Vincent – a union that anchored his life and ambitions.
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Cheney’s political rise began in earnest during the Nixon and Ford administrations. A protégé of Donald Rumsfeld, he served as White House Chief of Staff at just 34 years old, becoming one of the youngest to hold the position. His calm, disciplined temperament and talent for navigating bureaucracy earned him a reputation as a consummate insider.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney represented Wyoming’s only congressional district for six terms, rising to House Minority Whip and establishing himself as a staunch conservative voice in national politics.
In 1989, President George HW Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense, where Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm, the rapid US-led campaign that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991. The success of this operation cemented his reputation as a formidable strategic thinker and trusted steward of American military power.
Why was Cheney considered America’s most powerful vice president?
After leaving government to run Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services giant, Cheney was drawn back into politics in 2000 when George W. Bush asked him to lead the search for a vice presidential nominee. In a fateful twist, Cheney recommended himself.
As Bush’s running mate—and later his vice president—Cheney became the architect of the administration’s most consequential policies. Restrained, methodical and deeply versed in matters of national security, he was described by colleagues as “the steady hand behind the presidency”.
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On the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney was in the White House when hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center. From a secure bunker under the West Wing, he took command of the immediate crisis and reportedly authorized the downing of more hijacked planes to protect Washington.
“At that point, you knew it was a deliberate act. It was a terrorist act,” Cheney later recalled in a 2002 interview with CNN’s John King.
That day changed him—and by extension, the nation. Cheney became the chief proponent of a new, aggressive security posture that would define the next two decades: the “war on terror.”
How did Cheney shape the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq?
Nowhere was Cheney’s influence more evident than in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Convinced that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a serious and imminent threat, he repeatedly warned about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda.
Those claims—later discredited by intelligence reviews and congressional investigations—laid the groundwork for a war that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and reshape America’s standing in the world.
Cheney claimed that he and his colleagues were acting on “the best available intelligence” at the time. “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I still believe it now,” he told CNN in 2015.
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Even as public disillusionment with the Iraq War grew, Cheney never called off. “Any claim that the data has been distorted, hyped or fabricated,” he said in 2005, “is absolutely false.”
His staunch defense of policies that included “enhanced interrogation techniques” — internationally condemned as torture — and the indefinite detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay deepened his image as both a patriot and a villain. “I would do it again in a heartbeat,” Cheney said in response to a 2014 Senate report that condemned such practices as brutal and ineffective.
Did Cheney regret his legacy?
Cheney’s tenure ended with a slump in popularity and deep public skepticism about the wars he helped start. Still, he expressed a little regret. To the end, he saw himself as a man who had done what history required.
“I did what I thought necessary to defend the country,” he once said. “And I can live with that.
He left office in 2009 reviled by Democrats, distrusted by moderates and celebrated by a dwindling faction of hawkish conservatives who saw him as the last guardian of muscular American exceptionalism.
How has his relationship with Donald Trump changed his last years?
In a surprising twist of fate, Cheney — who for decades embodied Republican orthodoxy — has become one of the party’s fiercest critics under Donald Trump. He initially supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, but after the uprising on January 6, 2021, Cheney broke, denouncing Trump as a “coward” and a “threat to the Republic”.
“In the 246-year history of our nation, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney declared in 2022. “He’s a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost the election and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and I think most Republicans know it deep down.”
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His daughter Liz Cheney has become a central figure in the effort to hold Trump accountable — sacrificing her political career in the process. Elder Cheney stood by her side unrepentant as the group turned on them both.
In what many saw as an act of political defiance, Cheney cast his final presidential vote in 2024 for Democrat Kamala Harris, citing his “duty to put the country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”
What were Cheney’s later years like?
Despite lifelong ill health, Cheney remained intellectually vigorous in retirement. After surviving five heart attacks, he received a heart transplant in 2012, which he described as “the gift of life itself”.
He has chronicled his experiences in two memoirs — In My Time (2011) and Heart: An American Medical Odyssey (2013) — and is co-authoring a third book with his daughter Liz. Although Cheney is rarely seen in public, he has remained a powerful figure in conservative debates, warning against isolationism and the erosion of constitutional norms.
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In January 2021, the first anniversary of the Capitol riots, Cheney returned to Congress with Liz. Democrats lined up to shake his hand. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi embraced him — a scene unthinkable two decades earlier, symbolizing how the turbulence of the Trump years has reversed political loyalties.
“It’s not a leadership unlike any of the people I’ve known when I’ve been here 10 years,” he lamented about the modern GOP in 2022.
How will history remember Dick Cheney?
Few American leaders have inspired such enduring fascination and debate. To his admirers, Cheney was a statesman of rare decisiveness, a man who acted decisively in a moment of existential threat. To his critics, he epitomized the overreaching and moral compromises that followed 9/11—the dark face of American power.
Either way, his influence was profound. Cheney’s legacy lives on in the machinery of national security, the redefinition of executive power, and the ever-simmering conflicts born of his worldview.
He is survived by his wife Lynne, daughters Liz and Mary Cheney and seven grandchildren.
