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The 46th Vice President of the United States, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms from 2001 to 2009, was a significant and often divisive figure in Washington’s political landscape.
Despite his steadfast conservative views, Cheney found himself increasingly alienated from his party towards the end of his career due to his vehement criticisms of President Donald Trump, whom he labeled as a “coward” and the most significant threat to the republic’s well-being.
In a twist of political fate, Cheney cast his final presidential vote in 2024 for Kamala Harris, a liberal Democrat and fellow former vice president, highlighting the shift within the GOP away from his brand of traditional conservatism.
Throughout his life, Cheney battled cardiovascular disease, enduring multiple heart attacks yet managing to live a lively life. He enjoyed many retirement years after a heart transplant in 2012, which he described in a 2014 interview as “the gift of life itself.”
Before his vice presidency, Cheney, a wry former representative from Wyoming, served as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense. He was thriving in the corporate sector when George W. Bush tasked him with evaluating possible vice-presidential candidates, a process that concluded with Cheney himself assuming the role, providing worldly experience to a new president who entered office after a contentious 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.
Cheney reflected in later years on how the attacks left him with overwhelming sense of responsibility to ensure such an assault on the homeland never happened again. Perceptions however that he was the sole driving force behind the war on terror and US ventures into Iraq and Afghanistan are misleading.
Contemporary and historic accounts of the administration show that Bush was his own self-styled “The Decider”.
From a bunker deep below the White House, Cheney went into crisis mode, directing the response of a grief-stricken nation suddenly at war. He gave the extraordinary order to authorise the shooting down of any more hijacked airliners in the event they were headed to the White House or the US Capitol building.
For many, his frequent departures to “undisclosed” locations outside Washington to preserve the presidential chain of succession reinforced his image as an omnipotent figure waging covert war from the shadows. His hawkishness and alarmist view of a nation facing grave threats was not an outlier at the time – especially during a traumatic period that included anthrax mailings and sniper shootings around Washington, DC, that exacerbated a sense of public fear even though they were unrelated to 9/11.
The September 11 attacks unleashed the US war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which was harbouring al-Qaeda, though the terror group’s leader Osama bin Laden escaped. Soon, Cheney was agitating for widening the US assault to Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, whose forces he had helped to eject from Kuwait in the first Gulf War as President George HW Bush’s Pentagon chief.
The vice president’s aggressive warnings about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction programs, alleged links to al-Qaeda and intent to furnish terrorists with deadly weapons to attack the United States played a huge role in laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Congressional reports and other post-war inquiries later showed that Cheney and other administration officials exaggerated, misrepresented or did not properly portray faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction programs that Iraq turned out not to possess. One of Cheney’s most infamous claims, that the chief 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, was never substantiated, including by the independent commission into the September 11 attacks.
But Cheney insisted in 2005 that he and other top officials were acting on “the best available intelligence” at the time. While admitting that the flaws in the intelligence were plain in hindsight, he insisted that any claim that the data was “distorted, hyped, or fabricated” was “utterly false”.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan also led the US down a dark legal and moral path including “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects that critics blasted as torture. But Cheney – who was at the centre of every facet of the global war on terrorism – insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable.
Cheney was also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a practice that critics at home and abroad branded an affront to core American values.
To the end of his life, Cheney expressed no regrets, certain he had merely done what was necessary to respond to an unprecedented attack on the US mainland that killed nearly 2800 people and led to nearly two decades of foreign wars that divided the nation and transformed its politics.
Of the Iraq war, he told CNN in 2015: “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now.”
Cheney’s aggressive anti-terror policies fit into a personal doctrine that justified extraordinary presidential powers with limited congressional oversight. That was in line with his belief that the authority of the executive branch had been mistakenly eroded in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of his first presidential boss, President Richard Nixon.
Yet in his final years, Cheney emerged as a fierce critic of a man who had an even more expansive view of the powers of the presidency than he did – Trump.
Cheney had supported Trump in 2016 despite his criticism of Bush-Cheney foreign policies and his transformation of the party of Reagan into a populist, nationalist GOP. But the ending of the president’s first term, when his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat led to the January 6 insurrection, caused Cheney to speak out, in a rare, public manner.
The former vice president’s daughter, then-Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, meanwhile, sacrificed a promising career in the GOP to oppose Trump after his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said.
“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”