Dick Cheney, powerful vice president during war on terrorism, dies at 84

Democracy Dies in Darkness ¹Dick Cheney, powerful vice president during war on terrorism, dies at 84 ²After 9/11, he used his role as President George W. Bush’s chief strategist to approve the use of torture and steer U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. ³Updated 52 minutes ago ⁴By Barton Gellman and Marc Fisher ⁵Former vice president Dick Cheney, who recast an understudy’s job into an engine of White House power, becoming chief architect of a post-9/11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died Nov. 3. He was 84. ⁶The cause was complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. ⁷They did not say where he died. ⁸Heart disease had shadowed Mr. Cheney most of his adult life and was a particular concern during his two terms as next-in-line to President George W. Bush. ⁹He suffered the first of five heart attacks at 37 and had eight “cardiac events” between the 2000 and 2008 elections. ¹⁰

After the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, took on the role of primary strategist in all-out military deployments in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. ¹¹As part of this multitrillion-dollar campaign, intelligence officers were dispatched to use “any means at our disposal,” as Mr. Cheney put it, to find and kill terrorists and those who aided them. ¹²Mr. Cheney and his senior lieutenants, Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and legal counsel David Addington, worked in strict secrecy to circumvent or reinterpret legal prohibitions against torture, domestic espionage and clandestine imprisonment without charge. ¹³Mr. Cheney said in 2008 that “it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation.” ¹⁴A 9/11-style attack, he said, “wasn’t going to happen again on our watch.” ¹⁵Before joining Bush’s ticket in 2000, Mr. Cheney amassed unsurpassed credentials, having served as White House chief of staff, defense secretary and minority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, the second-ranking Republican leadership position in a House then controlled by Democrats. ¹⁶

During Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, Mr. Cheney presided over Halliburton, a Fortune 500 oil field services company, as chairman and chief executive, joining the ranks of America’s moneyed corporate elite. ¹⁷Under the far less experienced Bush, Mr. Cheney acquired a portfolio so broad that former vice president Dan Quayle, among other observers, saw him functioning in “a sort of co-presidency.” Mr. Cheney also acquired a reputation as a gifted and sometimes ruthless operator. White House contemporaries said Bush proved to be “the decider,” as he described himself in 2006, but no one did more than Mr. Cheney to set his agenda. ²⁰Mr. Cheney’s core beliefs – in unfettered markets and expansive presidential authority – defined Bush’s first-term action plan on taxes, spending, personnel appointments, freedom of information, environmental regulation and ballistic missile defense. ²¹He also pushed for an aggressive new stance against Iran, Syria, North Korea and the Palestinian Authority – in addition to shaping the global war on terror. ²²“He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power,” James A. Baker III a former secretary of state and treasury secretary, said of Mr. Cheney in 2007, looking back on more than 30 years of friendship and rivalry. ²³Mr. Cheney’s role as the Bush administration’s leading advocate of an expansive, aggressive war on terrorism reflected his conviction that the 9/11 attack was a grave threat to the United States and his long-held belief that the power of the presidency was paramount and needed to be reasserted after decades of diminution by Congress and other forces in American society. ²⁴

But in his later years, in defense of his daughter Liz, then a congresswoman from Wyoming who was one of only two Republicans on a House committee investigating President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Cheney spoke out against the abuse of presidential power by Trump when he pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election. ²⁵“In our nation’s 246-year history,” Mr. Cheney said in an August 2022 TV ad for his daughter’s reelection campaign, “there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election, using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He is a coward.” ²⁶Liz Cheney, who had voted to impeach Trump, lost her seat in the Republican primary that month, falling to a Trump-supported opponent. ²⁷Then, in 2024, when Trump was his party’s nominee for president for the third consecutive time, Mr. Cheney broke with a lifetime of devotion to a particularly muscular brand of Republican conservatism and announced he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris “to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.” ²⁸

Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Cheney, without the knowledge of many of Bush’s top advisers, conceived and supervised a wide-ranging new program of warrantless domestic surveillance, code-named Stellar Wind, that circumvented legislative prohibitions and the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. ²⁹Acting through proxies, Mr. Cheney also orchestrated Bush’s decision to strip terrorist suspects of the right under the Geneva Conventions to be protected from “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment. ³⁰He advocated what he called “robust interrogation,” using methods that U.S. allies and previous U.S. governments defined as torture. ³¹To Mr. Cheney, the war on terror was a new kind of conflict demanding new rules appropriate to what he called “the dark side.” ³²Asked once by a radio host whether he could justify “a dunk in the water” to save lives a reference to waterboarding, a nonlethal technique that simulates the agony of drowning Mr. Cheney said, “It’s a no-brainer for me.” ³³“The techniques were reasonable,” he said in 2008. “And I think it produced the desired result, [preventing] further attacks against the homeland for $7\frac{1}{2}$ years.” ³⁴The vice president had concluded that 9/11 revealed a grave new danger. ³⁵Hostile states armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons knew that they could not attack the United States directly without suffering terrible retribution. ³⁶But the threat of retaliation was less of a deterrent to a non-state actor such as al-Qaeda, the Islamist extremist group that Osama bin Laden founded in 1998 and that carried out the 9/11 attacks. ³⁷Terrorists might not be able to develop such weapons, but they could deliver them if supplied by a government willing to provide clandestine help. ³⁸

“The greatest threat we face,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in 2007, was “a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities.” ³⁹Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces launched a massive strike on Afghanistan, designed to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that hosted it. ⁴⁰Mr. Cheney became a leading public spokesman for the decision to go to war, and the intervention initially won wide support at home. ⁴¹Seventeen months later, when U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Cheney again led the rhetorical push to justify the war, arguing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and, as the vice president put it, “long-standing, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations.” ⁴²But this time, the move to military action was far more politically divisive. ⁴³Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his nuclear weapons program, M services had working ties to al-Qaeda. ⁴⁴In these and other state intelligence reports but went well beyond the knowledge and analysts. ⁴⁵

As war approached, Mr. Cheney professed confidence of an easy victory in Iraq, predicting that U.S. troops “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” 46Later, after years of bloody insurgency, he said the opposition was “in its last throes.” 47

Time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong. Iraq had no active programs producing weapons of mass destruction, and postwar analysis found no operational links to al-Qaeda. 48Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and executed, but the Iraq War continued until 2011, and U.S. troops remained in the country for another decade, seeking to stabilize the country and push back against Islamic State extremists. 49Nearly 5,000 Americans were killed in the war. 50The conflict in Afghanistan continued until 2021, when President Joe Biden withdrew the last U.S. troops, ending a war in which more than 2,300 U.S. service members died and allowing the Taliban to retake control of the country. 51Among the sharpest of Mr. Cheney’s critics was Dick Armey (R-Texas), the House majority leader during the run-up to the war. 52Armey said Mr. Cheney gave him a private prewar briefing all miniature nuclear warhead and that members of Hussein’s fa 53 the Sept. 11 attack. Armey learned later that neither assertion 54

“I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be [lied to] by him,” Armey said in a 2008 interview, using a bit of vulgar “Texas vernacular,” as he put it, to describe Mr. Cheney’s conduct. ⁵⁵Mr. Cheney fashioned himself as an anti-politician, frankly indifferent to popular approval. ⁵⁶When a “Good Morning America” interviewer noted in 2008 that two-thirds of the public opposed the Iraq War, he replied with a single word: “So?” ⁵⁷Asked to elaborate, he said, “You cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the opinion polls.” ⁵⁸Around the midpoint of his presidency, Bush began to see the costs of that approach, according to Bush confidants, including the White House communications director, Dan Bartlett. ⁵⁹

A growing backlash against Mr. Cheney’s signature policies, at home and abroad, persuaded the more pragmatic president to trim his course. 60A policy of strict isolation gave way to diplomatic overtures toward Iran and North Korea, despite the vice president’s continuing belief that they were ripe for “regime change.” 61Bush put an end to waterboarding, secret CIA prisons, and electronic surveillance without authority of Congress and the courts. 62By the time he left office, with the lowest approval rating on record for a vice president, Mr. Cheney had confounded old friends and, by some accounts, had spent down a reputation built over decades. 63Former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who worked closely with him under previous presidents, echoed other longtime colleagues in an interview with the New Yorker. 64″Dick Cheney, I don’t know anymore,” he said. 65Former president Gerald Ford expressed similar sentiments in an interview with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. 66

“He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,” Ford said. “But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious.” 67He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s statement that Mr. Cheney had developed a “fever” about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. 68″I think that’s probably true,” Ford said. 69

Mr. Cheney, for his part, told CNN in 2006, “I don’t think I’ve changed any.” ⁷⁰“I think I have been very consistent over time,” he said. ⁷¹“I think, partly, it’s important to remember how significant 9/11 was…. We need to be able to go after and capture or kill those people who are trying to kill Americans.” ⁷²He described himself more than once in later years as a “consequential” vice president who took essential steps in the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of protecting the country. ⁷³History, he said, would credit him and Bush with success. ⁷⁴Although he remained to many Democrats and Republicans alike a symbol of the seemingly endless and eventually highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Cheney managed to win back a measure of respect from some Democrats more than a decade later, when he broke with most Republican leaders to condemn Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. ⁷⁵

Mr. Cheney had reluctantly endorsed Trump in 2016, after nearly all other Republican candidates for president had dropped out of the race for the nomination. ⁷⁶He occasionally criticized Trump’s personality and foreign policy during Trump’s term in the White House. ⁷⁷And in 2022 — along with his daughter Liz, who followed in his footsteps as Wyoming’s lone representative in the House — he joined Democrats in a ceremony of remembrance in the House chamber on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. ⁷⁸More than two dozen Democrats had moved, unsuccessfully, to impeach Mr. Cheney in 2007 over his role in launching the Iraq War. ⁷⁹But now, in the wake of the insurrection, Democrats queued up to shake the hand of the man they had spent years denouncing as a power-mad violator of political and legal norms. ⁸⁰The Cheneys, father and daughter, remained pointedly conservative across a range of issues, but they broke with Trump and his followers, arguing that as president and ex-president, Trump had pushed the party away from policies favoring big-business, internationalism and a muscular military and toward a platform built around fealty to Trump, nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. ⁸¹“You can’t overestimate how important it is” to mark the threat to democracy posed by the attack, Mr. Cheney said on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault. ⁸²“I’m deeply disappointed we don’t have better leadership in the Republican Party to restore the Constitution.” ⁸³

Hometown hero

Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Jan. 30, 1941, and was the oldest of three children in a family of Democrats. ⁸⁴His father, Richard Herbert Cheney, aloof and laconic, owed his federal job as a soil conservation agent to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. ⁸⁵His mother, the former Marjorie Dickey, who had played for a nationally ranked softball team, taught the boy to throw. ⁸⁶

When Dick Cheney was 13, the family moved to Casper, Wyoming, then a prosperous town of 17,000. ⁸⁷He headed east five years later as Natrona County High School’s hometown hero, the class president and football captain who had squired the homecoming queen. ⁸⁸But his journey was painfully interrupted the next fall, when poor grades cost him his full scholarship to Yale. ⁸⁹Mr. Cheney was suspended for a semester and flunked out in his sophomore year. ⁹⁰He drifted back west, finding work as a lineman for a power company. ⁹¹He drank too much and was arrested twice — in 1962, when he was jailed briefly for “operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, and drunkenness,” according to the arrest report, and in 1963 for drunken driving. ⁹²As commencement speaker at Natrona County High in 2006, Mr. Cheney told the graduating class: “I won’t go into a lot of detail. Let’s just say I did not distinguish myself in those first years after graduation.” ⁹³

By various accounts, including his own, Mr. Cheney pulled out of his dive when Lynne Vincent, the homecoming queen of his high school romance, informed him that she had no intention of wedding a drunken dropout. ⁹⁴An honor student and state baton-twirling champion, she was much the more ambitious of the two. ⁹⁵She talked Mr. Cheney back into school, first at Casper’s community college and then at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. ⁹⁶They married in 1964. Mr. Cheney received his degree in 1965, and he and Lynne Cheney had their first child, Elizabeth, in 1966. ⁹⁷With newfound discipline, Mr. Cheney completed a master’s degree in political science at Wyoming and began work toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, where his wife had joined a doctoral program in British literature. ⁹⁸He published a well-regarded article in the American Political Science Review, using statistical techniques to analyze House and Senate voting patterns. ⁹⁹Later, with Lynne Cheney, he wrote “Kings of the Hill,” a history of influential speakers of the House. ¹⁰⁰Meanwhile, Mr. Cheney obtained five student and parental draft deferments during the Vietnam War. ¹⁰¹“I had other priorities in the … ’60s than military service,” he told reporters as he arrived at the Pentagon as defense secretary in 1989. ¹⁰²Lynne and Dick Cheney began imagining an academic life, at a university where they could teach side by side. ¹⁰³But one of Mr. Cheney’s professors offered a detour, steering him to a one-year fellowship in the office of Rep. William A. Steiger (R-Wisconsin). ¹⁰⁴

In 1968, Mr. Cheney set aside his dissertation, never to complete it, and brought his family to Washington, where his second daughter, Mary, was born the next year. 105It was in 1969 that Mr. Cheney met his most important patron. 106Donald H. Rumsfeld, freshly appointed to lead President Richard M. Nixon’s anti-poverty office, sought advice from Steiger. 107

The congressman pitched the assignment to his 28-year-old intern. An impressive memo won Mr. Cheney a meeting with Rumsfeld and then a job as his special assistant. 108The fast-rising Rumsfeld brought Mr. Cheney along as his right-hand man when he served as White House counselor in 1970 and as director of the Cost of Living Council in 1971. The two men parted for 18 months when Rumsfeld left for Brussels as U.S. ambassador to NATO. 109Mr. Cheney spent the interlude at Bradley Woods, an investment research firm, advising private investors about Congress. 110The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 returned Rumsfeld to the White House as chief of staff to Ford. 111Once again, Rumsfeld chose Mr. Cheney as his No. 2. In November 1975, Ford dispatched Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as secretary of defense, and Mr. Cheney moved up. 112Barely six years had passed since Mr. Cheney’s arrival as an intern in Washington. 113At 34, he became the youngest-ever White House chief of staff. 114“I knew that I could ask Cheney to step into Rumsfeld’s shoes and that the White House would function just as efficiently,” Ford wrote in his memoir. 115

Skillful operative

After the irascible, domineering Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney won admirers across party lines with his calm competence, willingness to listen and avoidance of the spotlight. ¹¹⁶He had a dry wit and a Westerner’s distrust of people with airs. ¹¹⁷Mr. Cheney shunned some of the prerogatives of rank, dialing his own phone calls and driving his 10-year-old Volkswagen to work. ¹¹⁸Then, as later, his inscrutable affect and loyalty to a pragmatic boss were mistaken for moderation of outlook. ¹¹⁹Memoirs and records made public in the meantime, show him as holding edge-of-the-envelope views on government secrecy and the supremacy of the president over Congress, especially in matters of national security. ¹²⁰Mr. Cheney believed that Watergate, the fall of Nixon and the Vietnam War had emboldened Congress to overreach, bringing about “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,” he later said. ¹²¹He tried and failed to persuade Ford to push back against congressional efforts to rein in executive power, including the War Powers Act, the Presidential Records Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, expansion of the Freedom of Information Act and legislative restrictions on covert action. ¹²²

Although subtler than Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney displayed no less will to power. ¹²³At an academic conference in 2000, he said he sought control over “things like personnel, process, schedule, speechwriting, legislative relations,” because they allowed a chief of staff to “control and preside over the White House.” ¹²⁴After quiet battles to impose the same discipline on Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, a conflict Mr. Cheney later described as “total hostility,” he helped persuade Ford to drop Rockefeller, a former New York governor, as his running mate in 1976. ¹²⁵The prevailing metaphor in the Ford White House was that the president was the hub of the wheel, supported by many spokes. ¹²⁶But it was Mr. Cheney who oversaw access to the Oval Office. ¹²⁷At Mr. Cheney’s goodbye party, colleague David Gergen wrote in a 2001 memoir, Ford’s top advisers presented Mr. Cheney with “a gnarled bicycle wheel, rim twisted, its spokes broken and bent.” ¹²⁸Jimmy Carter had defeated Ford in 1976, and Mr. Cheney decided to run for Congress two years later. ¹²⁹He made deft use of humor after suffering a heart attack during the hotly contested Republican primary campaign, forming a fictitious Cardiacs for Cheney support group and explaining his decision to stay in the race with a two-page letter to Wyoming Republicans. ¹³⁰

He won Wyoming’s House seat handily and began another striking ascent in Washington. ¹³¹In the seniority-conscious House, it took him a single term to reach a GOP leadership post. ¹³²Soft-spoken and collegial, with a disarming habit of listening more than he spoke, Mr. Cheney once again enjoyed a centrist image. ¹³³His voting record, in fact, was among the most conservative in the House. ¹³⁴Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. ¹³⁵He likewise opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund program for toxic-waste cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. ¹³⁶Although social “wedge issues” were not his main interest, Mr. Cheney cast votes against affirmative action and for prayer in school. ¹³⁷He sought to ban abortion without exception for rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life. ¹³⁸But on gay rights, Mr. Cheney departed from orthodox conservative tenets, breaking with Bush in 2004 to endorse the legalization of same-sex marriage. ¹³⁹Mr. Cheney’s daughter Mary is married to a woman, Heather Poe. ¹⁴⁰By 1988, with his uncontested election as House minority whip, Mr. Cheney was positioned to succeed Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois as head of the Republican caucus. ¹⁴¹Many colleagues expected to see him become speaker of the House. ¹⁴²

But Mr. Cheney’s career took a sudden shift in 1989 when scandal sunk the nomination of former senator John G. Tower (R-Texas) as defense secretary. 143

President George H.W. Bush turned to Mr. Cheney as a no-drama second choice. The Senate confirmed him unanimously. 144An old friend and Pentagon aide, David Gribbin, said Mr. Cheney believed in “the demonstrative use of power” — a sharp blow, now and then, to establish his authority. 145At the Pentagon, Mr. Cheney gave a blunt public reprimand to the Air Force chief of staff for “freelancing” in budget talks with Congress. 146He fired the service’s next chief of staff for impolitic remarks about U.S. war plans in Iraq. 147He canceled the Navy’s top-priority weapons system, the A-12 stealth fighter, after concluding that the admirals in charge had lied about its progress. 148In 1989, when it came time to choose a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Cheney elevated Army Gen. Colin L. Powell over dozens of more senior flag officers, making Powell the first African American to hold the position. 149The two men proved a potent team, leading the armed forces and the nation through two conflicts — the invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War — and a dramatic reduction in forces as the Cold War came to an abrupt halt. 150

A committed anti-communist, Mr. Cheney was among the leading skeptics of accommodation with the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. 151Mr. Cheney drew two lasting lessons from Moscow’s unraveling, one about U.S. intelligence, the other about regime change in hostile states, said Aaron Friedberg, a foreign policy adviser during Mr. Cheney’s vice-presidential years. 152“The collapse of the Soviet Union was really a profound experience,” Friedberg said. 153“For one thing, the standard experts will tell you things are going to be tomorrow the way they are today.” 154Even as the Soviet government was collapsing in 1991, Mr. Cheney saw CIA assessments touting the resilience and stability of the regime. 155Mr. Cheney came to disdain what Friedberg called “the conventional idea that the way to improve relations with the Soviet Union was by convergence and negotiations.” 156Mr. Cheney believed that “you had to have a fundamental change of regime” and that trade and diplomacy did little but “delay the collapse of the regime.” 157Mr. Cheney made his strongest public impression as the unflappable voice of news briefings during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which was launched to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. 158

With that mission accomplished, Mr. Cheney supported George H.W. Bush’s decision to leave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in power. 159Conquest and occupation of Baghdad would have been “a quagmire,” Mr. Cheney said in 1994, adding: “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.” 160

On other questions, Mr. Cheney pressed unsuccessfully for a harder line. ¹⁶¹He privately urged Bush to take advantage of Russia’s weakness by recognizing an anti-Moscow Lithuanian government and by inviting former Warsaw Pact nations swiftly into NATO. ¹⁶²He opposed decisions to seek authority from Congress and the U.N. Security Council for the war with Iraq, arguing that the decision to use force rested solely with the commander in chief. ¹⁶³Baker and Scowcroft, the secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively, consistently won those debates. ¹⁶⁴“Sometimes Bush sided with Baker, sometimes he sided with Scowcroft,” said historian Timothy Naftali, who explored the declassified archives. ¹⁶⁵“There was never an instance where Cheney had an outlying opinion and the president sided with Cheney.” ¹⁶⁶

Halliburton bonanza

After Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992, the Cheney family packed a U-Haul truck and headed back west. ¹⁶⁷Mr. Cheney briefly explored a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1996 but found that he lacked stomach for the race. ¹⁶⁸“I didn’t want to do those things I’d have to do to get elected,” he told The Washington Post in 2004. ¹⁶⁹

A more detailed explanation, which Mr. Cheney offered in 1995, provided a glimpse of his lifelong disdain for courting an emotional, ill-informed public. ¹⁷⁰“I don’t tend to pound on the podium and drool,” he said. ¹⁷¹Mr. Cheney also worried that a national campaign would focus unwelcome attention on his daughter Mary, who had not yet publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation. ¹⁷²Mary came out to her parents during high school and later wrote in a memoir that her father was supportive. ¹⁷³“You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy,” he told her, according to the book. ¹⁷⁴Long after her public coming-out, allusions to Mary’s private life were the only reliable way to pierce Mr. Cheney’s cool. ¹⁷⁵“You’re out of line with that question,” he snapped at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when the anchorman referred in 2007 to GOP critics of Mary’s decision to raise a child with her partner. ¹⁷⁶

Mr. Cheney spent most of the Clinton years at Halliburton, where he made a series of major acquisitions, most prominently of Dresser Industries for $5.4 billion in 1998. He built the world’s largest oil field services firm, but the Dresser deal proved ruinous because of liabilities that emerged in asbestos lawsuits. 177Tens of millions of dollars in compensation brought Mr. Cheney and his family, previously of modest means, to a rarefied plateau that included vacation homes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Annapolis. 178He told friends that he was finished with government. 179

But then, in early 2000, George W. Bush — the eldest son of George H.W. Bush — locked up the GOP nomination and asked Mr. Cheney to lead the search for a running mate. 180Mr. Cheney vetted at least 11 possible vice-presidential candidates, but did not interview any of them before Bush halted the process and chose Mr. Cheney himself. 181“If you ever get asked to head up an important search committee,” Mr. Cheney jokingly advised that high school graduation audience in 2006, “say yes.” 182

Bush-Cheney partnership

Before Mr. Cheney accepted Bush’s offer, he negotiated a partnership unique in the history of the White House. 183After he took office, Quayle paid a visit to give some advice, one vice president to another. 184Mr. Cheney would spend the bulk of his time, Quayle said, on political and ceremonial chores the president did not want to do. 185

“You’ll be going to the funerals,” Quayle told Mr. Cheney. “We’ve all done it.” 186

Mr. Cheney’s mouth curled into his trademark crooked grin. “I have a different understanding with the president,” he said. 187By then he had filled the role, in fact if not in name, of transition chief. 188A strong believer in the idea that “personnel is policy,” Mr. Cheney oversaw nominations for Cabinet and key subcabinet posts, placing allies in senior positions. 189Bush agreed that Mr. Cheney was “welcome at every table and at every meeting” and could intercede in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” said Joshua Bolten, who served in the Bush White House as budget director and chief of staff. 190

Few major decisions, especially in the first term, lacked a Cheney imprimatur, though his fingerprints were seldom apparent. ¹⁹¹In keeping with his Secret Service code name, Angler, he pursued his objectives obliquely. ¹⁹²His own favored metaphor was putting “an oar in the water” on policy choices, steering quietly from astern. ¹⁹³After Mr. Cheney’s long career as a subordinate, the vice presidency now presented what he saw as an obligation to advance his own views. ¹⁹⁴Although he styled himself as only an adviser to Bush, Mr. Cheney noted that he did not serve at the pleasure of the president and had sworn an independent oath of office. ¹⁹⁵“I’m not a staffer, I’m the vice president, a constitutional officer, elected same as he is,” Mr. Cheney told his authorized biographer, Stephen F. Hayes. ¹⁹⁶

The defining moment for Mr. Cheney came on a sunny September morning in 2001, when hijacked airliners smashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 197A Secret Service detail, believing the White House to be a target, burst into Mr. Cheney’s office and frog-marched him by his belt and shoulders to an underground bunker. 198As Bush flew to safety that morning, from base to base, aboard Air Force One, avoiding an expected follow-on attack, Mr. Cheney took command in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. 199

Although he later claimed prior authority from the president, documentary evidence suggested that Mr. Cheney, not Bush, was the first to authorize Air Force fighters to shoot down a passenger jet believed to be under terrorist control. 200“It wasn’t a close call,” Mr. Cheney later said of the order to down the civilian plane, which was not carried out because the plane had already crashed in Pennsylvania. 201“I think a lot of people emotionally look at that and say … ‘My gosh, you just shot down a planeload of Americans.’ On the other hand, you maybe saved thousands of lives. And so it was a matter that required a decision, that required action. It was the right call.” 202Before the day ended, Mr. Cheney turned to Addington, his lawyer, and asked him to start thinking about what extraordinary new powers the president would need to respond to al-Qaeda’s attack. 203

Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, compared the vice president to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who wrote that “all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” 204The vice president brought Bush a draft of his first military order of the new war, a directive removing terrorist suspects from the jurisdiction of any court, foreign or domestic, and ordering that they be tried — if at all — by newly formed “military commissions.” 205The president signed the order without change, though most of his national security team had never seen it. 206

“What the hell just happened?” Powell asked an aide when he saw a report about the order on CNN. 207

Alienated allies

Especially in Bush’s second term, a long list of comrades fell out with Mr. Cheney on matters ranging from war and peace to tax and budget policy. ²⁰⁸Disputes over the environment were particularly puzzling to some Cheney critics. ²⁰⁹He was an avid outdoorsman, who relaxed, when he could not fish, with catalogues of lures. ²¹⁰But his campaign to bypass water-use regulations in the Klamath River valley — an intervention on behalf of drought-stricken Oregon farmers — produced the largest human-caused fish kill on record. ²¹¹

One by one, Cheney adversaries were pushed out of the government or resigned, among them Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, Environmental Protection Agency director Christine Todd Whitman, CIA Director George J. Tenet, Secretary of State Powell and Powell’s deputy, Richard L. Armitage. ²¹²But allies also left the administration, most notably his old friend Rumsfeld, whom Bush fired as defense secretary in 2006, and Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice the following year. ²¹³Libby’s case arose from the vice president’s ire at a vocal critic of the Iraq War, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who accused Mr. Cheney of deliberate public deceit. ²¹⁴Attempts to discredit Wilson led to the exposure of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a clandestine CIA officer. ²¹⁵A federal jury found that Libby lied about his role in the leak. ²¹⁶Armitage and longtime Bush adviser Karl Rove acknowledged their participation and avoided perjury charges. ²¹⁷

Evidence introduced during Libby’s trial showed that Mr. Cheney was the first of this group to learn of Plame’s CIA employment and the first to suggest that she could be used to discredit her husband. 218

(Plame had suggested Wilson for a diplomatic mission to check on reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.) Libby testified twice before a grand jury that he could not remember whether Mr. Cheney directed him to leak Plame’s identity to reporters, but he said, “It’s possible.” 219“There is a cloud over what the vice president did,” prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in his summation, suggesting that Libby had obstructed justice to protect his boss. 220In a 2004 interview with federal investigators, Mr. Cheney said 72 times that he could not recall details of his role in the Plame matter. 221Mr. Cheney refused to answer other questions from prosecutors and FBI agents, saying that he was not permitted to divulge details of discussions he’d had with the president. 222

Bush’s anger about the case, and Mr. Cheney’s equally stubborn defense, opened a breach between them. 223The president commuted Libby’s sentence, in part, but refused Mr. Cheney’s insistent requests for a pardon. 224In 2009, Mr. Cheney spoke openly of his anger that Bush had failed to correct a “serious miscarriage of justice.” 225In 2018, Trump pardoned Libby, saying, “I don’t know Mr. Libby, but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.” 226Mr. Cheney’s lowest moment came in February 2006, when he accidentally shot a 78-year-old friend in the face during a quail-hunting expedition. 227It was a moment of horror that swiftly became a comic metaphor for the ferocious image Mr. Cheney sometimes cultivated for himself. 228

(He dressed his black Labrador as Darth Vader one Halloween.) 229The political damage was heightened by the habitual secrecy that kept the incident under wraps for a full day, and by victim Harry Whittington’s disconcerting apology for embarrassing the vice president. 230

Loss of influence

The Cheney imprint on law and policy, which peaked in the first term, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. ²³¹One episode, above all others, cooled their relationship. ²³²

In 2004, when senior government lawyers rose up in protest against the domestic surveillance program that Mr. Cheney had advocated, Bush did not learn of the dispute until the top leadership of the FBI and main Justice Department reached the brink of mass resignation. ²³³Mr. Cheney’s unyielding drive could pose serious political problems for the president, aides said. ²³⁴Bush also grew prickly about accounts that cast Mr. Cheney as the administration’s puppet master. ²³⁵“I think I’m wiser than that — than to be pigeonholed or, you know, get cornered by a wily adviser,” Bush replied in 2007 when a Fox News reporter asked about perceptions that Mr. Cheney ran the show. ²³⁶“The thing about Vice President Cheney is, he is predictable in many ways, because he brings a set of beliefs. And, uh, they’re firm beliefs.” ²³⁷Bush aides argued that the president, before making major decisions, had to weigh a far broader array of concerns than those of special interest to Mr. Cheney. ²³⁸Mr. Cheney “thinks of the national security interest or the prerogatives of the executive,” said Bartlett, a Bush confidant since Texas days. ²³⁹“The president has other considerations he has to take into account. The political fallout of certain reactions — he’s just going to calculate [differently] than Cheney does. He grew accustomed to that.” ²⁴⁰

Soon after leaving office, Mr. Cheney began work on a memoir, which he wrote with his daughter Liz and which was published in 2012 as “In My Time.” 241In addition to his wife and two daughters, survivors include seven grandchildren. 242Despite an ailing heart and reduced mobility, the former vice president retained a prodigious capacity for work. 243

He rose early and read voraciously. After suffering his fifth heart attack in 2010, he had a heart transplant in 2012. He wrote a book, “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey” (2013) with his cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, and Liz Cheney. 244He allowed himself indulgences, such as a morning drive to Starbucks and attendance at his grandchildren’s soccer and softball games. 245But in his later years, much of his time was passed above the garage at his new house in McLean, Virginia, filling legal pads with his slashing longhand. 246In 2015, he published “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” also written with his daughter Liz. 247“When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Mr. Cheney told his biographer Hayes. 248“Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. … And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.” 249Barton Gellman is a former Post reporter and the author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.” 250