Former US vice-president Dick Cheney – architect of ‘war on terror’ – dies at 84

WASHINGTON – Mr Dick Cheney, whose campaign for a military response to the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks cleared the path for an unpopular war in Iraq and sealed his reputation as one of the most powerful and polarising vice-presidents in US history, has died. He was 84.

Mr Cheney – who served under Republican president George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009 – died late on Nov 3 “due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease”, his family said in a statement.

“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed.”

Mr Cheney had been plagued by coronary problems nearly all his adult life, suffering five heart attacks from 1978 to 2010. He had worn a device to regulate his heartbeat since 2001.

Mr Bush hailed his former vice-president as “among the finest public servants of his generation”, saying he was “a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence and seriousness of purpose to every position he held”.

Mr Cheney worked for nearly four decades in Washington. He was the youngest White House chief of staff under president Gerald Ford. He represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives, where he worked with president Ronald Reagan, and was defence secretary under president George H.W. Bush.

He had been enjoying a lucrative corporate career as chief executive of energy company Halliburton when the younger Mr Bush charged him with vetting potential vice-presidential nominees.

That search ended with Mr Cheney himself taking the oath of office as the No. 2 to a new president who arrived in the Oval Office after a disputed election in 2000.

Mr Cheney was in the White House, with Mr Bush out of town visiting a school, when Al-Qaeda terrorists used hijacked passenger planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, on Sept 11, 2001. He quickly took charge while the president was out.

“When the president came on the line, I told him that the Pentagon had been hit and urged him to stay away from Washington,” Mr Cheney recalled in his memoir, In My Time.

“The city was under attack, and the White House was a target. I understood that he didn’t want to appear to be on the run, but he shouldn’t be here until we knew more about what was going on,” he said.

‘Super-Cabinet official’

Mr Cheney was an architect and executor of Mr Bush’s major initiatives: deploying military power to advance the cause of democracy abroad, and championing tax cuts and a robust economy at home.

He also sought to strengthen the powers of a presidency that, as he and Mr Bush saw it, had been unjustifiably restrained by Congress and the courts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

As Mr Bush’s most trusted and valued adviser, Mr Cheney foraged at will over fields of international and domestic policy.

Like a super-Cabinet official with an unlimited portfolio, he used his authority to make the case for war, propose or kill legislation, recommend Supreme Court candidates and tip the balance for a tax cut as well as promote the interests of allies and parry opponents.

But it was the national security arena where he had the most profound impact.

As defence secretary, he helped engineer the Gulf War that successfully evicted Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991, then took a leading role a decade later in responding to the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.

To prevent future attacks, he advocated aggressive policies, including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention and brutal interrogation tactics, and he pushed for the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, completing the unfinished job of his previous stint in power but leading to years of bloody warfare.

Early in Mr Bush’s first term, many Democrats, and even some Republicans, questioned whether Mr Cheney was the real power behind an inexperienced president whose qualifications had been doubted.

Although Mr Bush eventually asserted his authority and Mr Cheney’s influence waned by the second term, the image of Mr Cheney as a Machiavellian father figure never fully faded.

Mr Bush himself acknowledged those perceptions in his 2010 memoir, Decision Points.

He wrote that Mr Cheney offered to step down from the 2004 ticket after becoming known as “the Darth Vader of the administration”.

Mr Bush said he considered the offer, noting that accepting it “would be one way to demonstrate that I was in charge”.

In the end, he kept Mr Cheney on the ticket, citing his steadiness and loyalty.

Most recently, Mr Cheney startled Americans of both parties by announcing that he would vote for then Vice-President Kamala Harris
, a Democrat, in the 2024 election, denouncing her Republican opponent, former president Donald J. Trump, as unfit for the Oval Office and a grave threat to American democracy.

“We have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” Mr Cheney said.

New Deal Democrats

Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to Ms Marjorie Lorraine (nee Dickey) and Mr Richard Herbert Cheney on Jan 30, 1941, the day then President Franklin Roosevelt turned 59.

His mother was a waitress turned softball player, his father a federal worker with the Soil Conservation Service.

Both sides of the family were staunch New Deal Democrats, he wrote in his memoir.

Convinced that the president would want to know that he shared a birthday with the newborn, Mr Cheney’s grandfather urged Marjorie and Richard to share the news by telegram with the White House.

In his family, he “was the first Republican probably since my great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War on the Union side”, he told the PBS documentary Dick Cheney: A Heartbeat Away.

He moved as a boy to Wyoming with his family, before attending Yale University.

“I was a mediocre student, at best,” he said. He dropped out.

Back in Wyoming in 1962, he worked on building electrical transmission lines and coal-fired power stations, before eventually earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.

Of that time, he recalled a visit by then President John F. Kennedy, who addressed students on the importance of using what they were learning to build a better nation and a better world.

“He had inspired us all, and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described,” Mr Cheney wrote in his memoir. REUTERS, BLOOMBERG, NYTIMES