“The most powerful vice-president in US history”
The office of vice-president is often regarded as a marginal role, said The Guardian. Yet Dick Cheney, who has died aged 84, held so much influence, as VP to George W. Bush, that he was often referred to as “the real president”. Bush has pushed back against that idea, yet there can be little denying that Cheney – the leading figure of a group of neocons that included Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – “found the laidback president pliable on a whole raft of policy decisions”, including the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Cheney was not single-handedly responsible for the Iraq War. Wolfowitz had discussed the possibility of military action to protect US interests in the region before 9/11; and Bush had come to office, in 2001, with a feeling that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was business left unfinished by his father, George H. W. Bush. But Cheney was a driving force behind US foreign policy post 9/11, said The Times, having been profoundly affected by the attacks. “If terrorists armed merely with box cutters could wreak such havoc, what could they do if they acquired nuclear or chemical weapons, he asked.” He had already pushed for the US invasion of Afghanistan. Saddam – who’d supposedly stockpiled weapons of mass destruction – “had to go”. And if, to ensure US security, suspected al-Qa’ida militants had to be subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, such as waterboarding, and locked up without trial at Guantánamo Bay, then “so be it”. Congress later decided that those methods amounted to torture; the war is widely believed to have left the world a less stable place. Yet this “taciturn”, inscrutable figure never expressed any regret about it. “In the fight against terrorism there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed,” he said. He would note that there had been no repeats of 9/11 in the US.
Richard Cheney was born in 1941, and brought up in Wyoming, where his father worked for the department of agriculture. As a star player in his high-school football team, he dated Lynne Vincent, a cheerleader who became his wife, and later a public figure in her own right as a conservative talk-show host. They had two daughters: Mary, whose sexuality prompted Cheney into his only liberal position – supporting same-sex marriage – and Liz, who went into Republican politics herself and is today best known as an outspoken Trump critic.
After leaving the University of Wisconsin, he got a job working for a Republican congressman in Washington. Having managed to avoid the Vietnam draft, he became a protégé of Rumsfeld, who secured him government jobs. Aged 34, he became President Ford’s chief of staff, the youngest person ever to hold that office. On the campaign trail in 1978, he had the first of five heart attacks. Nevertheless, he pressed on, and was elected to the House of Representatives. He held a host of right-wing positions – from opposing abortion rights to backing the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. As Bush Snr’s defence secretary, he masterminded Operation Desert Storm, launched in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Back then, he supported the decision not to topple Saddam, citing the chaos it could unleash.
Cheney made millions working for Halliburton during the Clinton years, and then, in 2000, he suggested himself as Bush Jr’s running mate. A Washington insider working for an inexperienced president, he was able quickly to accrue power, said The New York Times. Indeed, he is often described as having been the most powerful VP in US history. However, by the end of Bush’s first term, he had, he said, become the “Darth Vader of the administration” and offered not to run in 2004. Bush did not take him up on that, but he relied on Cheney less during his second term. Appalled, like his daughter Liz, by the 2020 Capitol riots, this staunch Republican announced in 2024 that he would be voting for Kamala Harris in that year’s election.
