Cheney died Monday (November 3, 2025) night time resulting from issues of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness, based on a press release from his household.
“For many years, Dick Cheney served our nation, together with as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice-President of the United States,” the assertion stated. “Dick Cheney was an incredible and good man who taught his kids and grandchildren to like our nation, and to dwell lives of braveness, honour, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful past measure for all Dick Cheney did for our nation. And we’re blessed past measure to have liked and been liked by this noble large of a person.”
The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son Presidents, main the armed forces as Defence Chief through the Persian Gulf War below President George H.W. Bush earlier than returning to public life as Vice-President below Bush’s son, George W. Bush.
Cheney was, in impact, the chief working officer of the youthful Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, usually a commanding one, in implementing choices most vital to the President and a few of surpassing curiosity to himself — all whereas dwelling with many years of coronary heart illness and, post-administration, a coronary heart transplant. Cheney constantly defended the extraordinary instruments of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001.
Years after leaving workplace, he turned a goal of President Donald Trump, particularly after daughter Liz Cheney turned the main Republican critic and examiner of Mr. Trump’s determined makes an attempt to remain in energy after his election defeat and his actions within the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year historical past, there has by no means been a person who was a higher menace to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney stated in a tv advert for his daughter. “He tried to steal the final election utilizing lies and violence to maintain himself in energy after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his period may by no means have imagined, Dick Cheney stated final 12 months he was voting for his or her candidate, Kamala Harris, for President towards Mr. Trump.
A survivor of 5 coronary heart assaults, Cheney lengthy thought he was dwelling on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke every morning “with a smile on my face, grateful for the present of one other day,” an odd picture for a determine who all the time appeared to be manning the ramparts.
His vice-presidency was outlined by the age of terrorism. Cheney disclosed that he had had the wi-fi perform of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of worry terrorists would remotely ship his coronary heart a deadly shock.
In his time in workplace, not was the vice-presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a community of again channels from which to affect coverage on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, power and different cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly everlasting half-smile — detractors referred to as it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize repute as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius within the nook that no person ever sees come out of his gap?” he requested. “It’s a pleasant option to function, truly.”
A tough-liner on Iraq who was more and more remoted as different hawks left authorities, Cheney was proved improper on level after level within the Iraq War, with out ever shedding the conviction that he was primarily proper.
He alleged hyperlinks between the 2001 assaults towards the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He stated U.S. troops can be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its final throes in May 2005, again when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by warfare’s finish.
For admirers, he stored the religion in a shaky time, resolute even because the nation turned towards the warfare and the leaders waging it.
But nicely into Bush’s second time period, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts dominated towards efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord particular harsh remedy to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea weren’t absolutely embraced by Bush.
Cheney operated a lot of the time from undisclosed places within the months after the 2001 assaults, stored aside from Bush to make sure one or the opposite would survive any follow-up assault on the nation’s management.
With Bush out of city on that fateful day, Cheney was a gradual presence within the White House, not less than till Secret Service brokers lifted him off his toes and carried him away, in a scene the Vice-President later described to comical impact.
From the start, Cheney and Bush struck an odd cut price, unstated however nicely understood. Shelving any ambitions he might need needed to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded energy comparable in some methods to the presidency itself.
That cut price largely held up.
“He is constituted in a option to be the last word No. 2 man,” Dave Gribbin, a buddy who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and labored with him in Washington, as soon as stated. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “I made the choice after I signed on with the President that the one agenda I might have can be his agenda, that I used to be not going to be like most Vice-Presidents — and that was angling, attempting to determine how I used to be going to be elected President when his time period was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage manoeuvring had a worth. He got here to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq warfare. And when he shot a looking companion within the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie have been sluggish to reveal that extraordinary flip of occasions.
The Vice-President referred to as it “one of many worst days of my life.” The sufferer, his buddy Harry Whittington, recovered and shortly forgave him. Comedians have been relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush started his presidential quest, he sought assist from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil enterprise. Cheney led the staff to discover a vice-presidential candidate.
Bush determined your best option was the person picked to assist with the selecting.
Together, the pair confronted a protracted 2000 postelection battle earlier than they might declare victory. A sequence of recounts and court docket challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court docket — left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took cost of the presidential transition earlier than victory was clear and helped give the administration a easy launch regardless of the misplaced time. In workplace, disputes amongst departments vying for a much bigger piece of Bush’s constrained funds got here to his desk and infrequently have been settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the President’s packages in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House chief.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the actual No. 1 on the town; Bush didn’t appear to thoughts and cracked just a few himself. But such feedback turned much less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly got here into his personal.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not removed from the place Liz Cheney just a few years later purchased a house, establishing Wyoming residency earlier than she received his previous House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew nearer, too, because the Cheney household turned one among Mr. Trump’s favorite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defence in 2022 as she juggled her lead function on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with attempting to get re-elected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney’s vote for Mr. Trump’s impeachment after the riot earned her reward from many Democrats and political observers exterior Congress. But that reward and her father’s assist didn’t preserve her from shedding badly within the Republican main, a dramatic fall after her fast rise to the No. 3 job within the House GOP management.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He turned a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill, serving below him in two businesses and in Gerald Ford’s White House earlier than he was elevated to chief of workers, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the publish for 14 months, then returned to Casper, the place he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a light coronary heart assault, prompting him to crack he was forming a gaggle referred to as “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He nonetheless managed a decisive victory and went on to win 5 extra phrases.
In 1989, Cheney turned Defence Secretary below the primary President Bush and led the Pentagon through the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the 2 Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a big engineering and development firm for the oil business.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department employee. Senior class President and soccer co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a 12 months however left with failing grades.
He moved again to Wyoming, ultimately enrolled on the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with highschool sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his spouse, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
