Dick Cheney, one of America’s most powerful and polarizing vice presidents, has died at the age of 84

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Dick Cheney, the hardline conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history and the main advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at the age of 84.

Cheney died Monday night due to complications from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease, according to a statement from his family.

“For decades, Dick Cheney has served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement read. “Dick Cheney was a great, good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, to live a life of courage, honor, love, kindness and fly fishing. We are beyond grateful for everything Dick Cheney did for our country. We are so lucky to have loved and been loved by this gentle giant of a man.”

A quiet force, Cheney has served presidents both father and son, leading the armed forces as secretary of defense during the Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under George W. Bush, Bush’s son.

Cheney was, in fact, the director of operations during Bush’s presidency. He played a leadership role, often in implementing the decisions that were most important to the president and some that were beyond his concern for himself – all while living with decades of heart disease and after a heart transplant. Cheney has consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, arrest, and search that were used in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter, Liz Cheney, became the leading Republican critic and investigator of Trump’s desperate attempts to remain in power after his electoral defeat and actions in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

“In the 246-year history of our nation, no person has posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to stay in power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”

In a development that Democrats in his era could not have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year that he would vote for their nominee, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.

Cheney, who has survived five heart attacks, had long believed he was living on borrowed time, declaring in 2013 that he now woke up every morning “with a smile on my face, grateful for the gift of another day,” an uncanny image of someone who always seemed to be guarding the fences.

Cheney, his vice president who was introduced to the era of terrorism, revealed that he turned off the wireless function of his pacemaker years ago for fear that terrorists would remotely deliver a fatal shock to his heart.

During his time in office, the vice presidency was no longer just a ceremonial idea. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels through which he could influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy, and other cornerstones of the conservative agenda.

With a seemingly permanent half-smile — which critics described as a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsized reputation as a secret manipulator.

“Am I the evil genius in the corner that no one saw coming out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a great way to actually work.”

Cheney, a hardliner on Iraq who has become increasingly isolated as other hawks have left the government, has been proven wrong on point after point in the Iraq war, without losing his conviction that he was fundamentally right.

He claimed that links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and pre-war Iraq did not exist. He said that American forces would be welcomed as liberators. They weren’t.

The Iraqi insurgency was declared in its final throes in May 2005, when 1,661 American soldiers were killed, a number not even half the number killed by the end of the war.

For fans, he maintained faith in a fragile time, and was resolute even when the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.

But long after Bush’s second term, Cheney’s influence waned, censored by the courts or changing political realities.

Courts have ruled against efforts he championed to expand presidential power and treat suspected terrorists harshly. Bush did not fully accept his hard-line positions on Iran and North Korea.

Cheney operated mostly from undisclosed positions in the months following the 2001 attacks, staying away from Bush to ensure that one or the other survived any subsequent attack on the country’s leadership.

As Bush left town on that fateful day, Cheney was a constant presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described as having comedic effect.

From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck a strange deal, unspoken but well understood. Far from any ambitions he may have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was granted power in some ways similar to the presidency itself.

That deal has largely held up.

“He’s built in such a way that he’ll end up being the No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He’s naturally reserved. He’s remarkably loyal.”

As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed with the president that the only agenda I was going to follow was going to be his agenda, and that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was bluffing, trying to figure out how I was going to get elected president when his term was up.”

His penchant for secrecy and behind-the-scenes maneuvering had its price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavellian orchestrating failed responses to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting buddy in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his cohorts were slow to uncover this unusual turn of events.

The vice president described it as “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and soon forgave him. Comedians have been relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.

When Bush began his presidential bid, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated into the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.

Bush decided that the best choice was the man chosen to assist in the selection.

Together the pair faced a long battle after the 2000 elections before they were able to achieve victory. A series of recounts and court challenges — a storm that has raged from Florida to the nation’s highest court — has left the country in limbo for weeks.

Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory became clear and helped give the administration a smooth start despite the lost time. During his time in office, disputes between administrations competing for a larger portion of Bush’s constrained budget came to his office and were often settled there.

On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s platforms in the halls he walked as an ultra-conservative congressman and the No. 2 Republican leader in the House.

There were jokes about how Cheney was the real number one guy in town; Bush didn’t seem to mind and hit some himself. But such comments became less appropriate later in Bush’s presidency, as it became clear that he had reached the presidency.

Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney bought a house a few years later and established his residence in Wyoming before winning his old House seat in 2016. The father-daughter fate also drew closer, as the Cheneys became one of Trump’s favorite targets.

Dick Cheney rushed to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she juggled her leadership role on the Jan. 6 inquiry with a re-election bid in deeply conservative Wyoming.

Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection was praised by many Democrats and political observers outside of Congress. But this praise and her father’s support did not prevent her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a significant decline after her rapid rise to third place in the House GOP leadership.

Politics first attracted Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressman. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, Republican of Illinois, and served under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before being promoted to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at 34.

Cheney held the position for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he grew up, and ran for the state’s only congressional seat.

In his first House race, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to announce the formation of a group called “Cardiologists for Cheney.” He achieved a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.

In 1989, Cheney became Secretary of Defense under President Bush I and led the Pentagon during the Gulf War (1990-1991), which drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney headed Dallas-based Halliburton, a large engineering and construction firm for the oil industry.

Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a longtime Department of Agriculture worker. Senior class president and co-captain of Casper’s football team, he went to Yale on a full-year scholarship but left with failing grades.

He returned to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and rekindled his relationship with his high school sweetheart, Lynn Ann Vincent, whom he married in 1964. He is survived by his wife, Liz, and his second daughter, Mary.

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Associated Press writer Meade Grover in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.