'A loss to the nation': Former US vice president Dick Cheney dies aged 84
Former US vice president Dick Cheney. File picture: AP Photo/Bill Haber
The former White House chief of staff, congressman, secretary of defense and US vice president Dick Cheney has died, his family has said. He was 84.
Mr Cheney was one of the country’s most powerful vice presidents, widely reported to wield great influence over the less experienced George W Bush, the president under whom he served.
He died on Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said in a statement.
“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defence, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honour, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country.
“And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
A Yale dropout who avoided service in Vietnam, Mr Cheney nonetheless became a giant of Republican politics.
He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White House chief of staff, to Gerald Ford; a member of the US congress under Ronald Reagan; secretary of defense to George HW Bush, and vice president to George W Bush.
When the younger Bush plucked him from the Halliburton corporation to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, Mr Cheney had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to mishap: once, while vice president, he shot a hunting partner in the face.
Mr Cheney was in office on September 11, 2001, during the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While Mr Bush was hurried to safety, Mr Cheney worked with the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to assume policy control. Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al Qaeda.
But Mr Cheney’s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq. He had been defense secretary during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and 1991, but now Mr Cheney and Mr Bush’s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al Qaeda and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge, and both were soon proved false.
Although Mr Cheney sought international cooperation, he also thought, he later wrote, that the Bush administration “had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America”.
The death toll was high. According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001 “at least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan”.
The treatment of prisoners taken by the US in its “war on terror” also proved hugely controversial. Out of office, Mr Cheney continued to defend the use of torture against detainees after 9/11.
Mr Bush called Mr Cheney a “decent, honourable man” and said his death was “a loss to the nation”.
“History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held,” Mr Bush said in a statement.
Mr Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, followed him into Republican politics as a US House representative from Wyoming in the same seat her father had held while a congressman, but she was censured by the party after strongly criticising Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection.
The elder Cheney also attended an event to mark the first anniversary of the attack alongside his daughter, where he expressed “deep disappointment” in Republican party leadership, saying: “It’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks that I knew when I was here for 10 years” and that “you can’t overestimate how important [January 6] is”.
Mr Cheney announced in 2024 that he would vote for Kamala Harris rather than the Republican nominee Mr Trump, saying that “in our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and that he felt a duty to “put country above partisanship to defend our constitution”.
Speaking to in 2018, on the release of , a darkly comic biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: “There has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. In comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader.
"I don’t think there’ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.”
- Guardian
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
