Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice-president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.
The 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was for decades a towering and polarising Washington power player. In his final years, however, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, nevertheless became largely ostracised from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump whom he branded a “coward” and the greatest-ever threat to the republic.
In an ironic coda to a storied political career, he cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat, and fellow member of the vice-president’s club, Kamala Harris, in a reflection of how the populist GOP had turned against his traditional conservatism.
Cheney was plagued by cardiovascular disease for most of his adult life, surviving a series of heart attacks, to lead a full, vigorous life and lived many years in retirement after a heart transplant in 2012 that he hailed in a 2014 interview as “the gift of life itself.”
Cheney, a sardonic former Wyoming representative, White House chief of staff and defense secretary, was enjoying a lucrative career in the corporate world when he was charged by George W. Bush with vetting potential vice-presidential nominees. The quest ended with Cheney himself taking the oath of office as a worldly number two to a callow new president who arrived in the Oval Office after a disputed election.
While caricatures of Cheney as the real president do not accurately capture the true dynamics of Bush’s inner circle, he relished the enormous influence that he wielded from behind the scenes.
Cheney was in the White House, with the president out of town on the crisp, clear morning of September 11, 2001. In the split second of horror when a second hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, he said he became a changed man, determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks and to enforce US power throughout the Middle East with a neo-conservative doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive war.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act. This was a terrorist act,” he recalled of that day in an interview with CNN’s John King in 2002. (CNN)
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