The Sundarban
Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one in all the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. historical past and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at 84.
Mr. Cheney died Monday attributable to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said Tuesday in a statement.
The quietly forceful Mr. Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as protection chief at some stage within the Persian Gulf War below President George H.W. Bush before returning to public existence as vice president below Mr. Bush’s son George W. Bush.
Mr. Cheney was, in carry out, the manager operating officer of the youthful Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, repeatedly a commanding one, in enforcing choices most important to the president and some of surpassing passion to himself — all while dwelling with decades of heart disease and, put up-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary instruments of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed according to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
President Bush called Mr. Cheney a “decent, honorable man” and said his death was “a loss to the nation.”
“History will bear in mind him as among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who introduced integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of cause to every dwelling he held,” Mr. Bush said in a statement.
Years after leaving administrative center, Mr. 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 historical past, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Mr. Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election the usage of lies and violence to sustain himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He’s a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his era may perhaps never have imagined, Mr. Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Mr. Cheney long thought he was dwelling 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, Mr. Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence coverage on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, power and other conservative cornerstones.
Fixed with a reputedly permanent half-smile – detractors called it a smirk – Mr. Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the despicable genius within the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his gap?” he asked. “It be a nice way to operate, actually.”
The Iraq War
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Mr. 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 President Bush’s second term, Mr. 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. Mr. Bush did not fully embrace his hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea.
Cheney’s relationship with Bush
From the starting, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush struck an irregular bargain, unspoken but properly understood. Shelving any ambitions he may perhaps have had to prevail Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.
That bargain largely held up.
As Mr. Cheney assign it: “I made the resolution when I signed on with the president that among the most practical agenda I would have may perhaps be his agenda, that I was no longer going to be adore most vice presidents — and that was angling, attempting to resolve out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a trace. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq War. And when he shot a searching companion within the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie have been gradual to narrate that episode.
It was “one in all the worst days of my existence,” Mr. Cheney said. The sufferer, his pal Harry Whittington, recovered and hasty forgave him. Comedians have been relentless about it for months.
When Mr. Bush began his presidential quest, he sought succor from Mr. Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil industry. Mr. Cheney led the team to catch a vice presidential candidate.
Mr. Bush determined among the most practical resolution was the man picked to succor with the deciding on.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they may perhaps claim victory.
