Longtime McLean resident and former vice president Dick Cheney has died, leaving behind a legacy largely defined by his advocacy for the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and expansion of the surveillance state that followed 9/11.
Cheney died Monday due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said Tuesday in a statement.
The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under Bush’s son George W. Bush.
Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush called Cheney a “decent, honorable 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,” Bush said in a statement.
Years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his 2020 election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was 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 keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 that he awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other conservative cornerstones.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
The Iraq War
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 9/11 attacks and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. Bush did not fully embrace his hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea.
Cheney’s political rise
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, Wyoming, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s lone congressional seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, which drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but failed out.
He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964.
While they continued to maintain residences in Wyoming, where they often vacationed, the Cheney family has lived off and on in McLean since the late 1980s, when they purchased a townhouse in the Madison of McLean neighborhood for $450,000.
Dick and Lynne Cheney then sold that home for $690,000 in 2001 to George W. Bush’s incoming head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Joe Allbaugh, after buying a property in McLean on Chain Bridge Road for $1.3 million on Jan. 12, 2000, according to Fairfax County property records.
After staying at the vice president’s official residence in D.C. during the younger Bush’s administration, the couple retired to the Chain Bridge Road estate in 2008. Some McLean residents reportedly saw the Cheneys inspecting their 4-bedroom, 6-bathroom home while it was under construction, and Dick Cheney attended Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009 in a wheelchair after pulling a back muscle while helping with the move.
He is survived by Lynne, Liz and a second daughter, Mary.
Associated Press writers Calvin Woodward and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.
