Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history, died Monday.
As Vice President from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush, Cheney played a leading role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Despite his staunchly conservative views on most issues, Cheney broke with President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, calling him a threat to democracy and announcing in 2024 that he would vote for Kamala Harris.
Trump ordered flags to be lowered to half-mast in Cheney’s honor but has not issued a public statement regarding his death.
Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice, who served as Secretary of State in the Bush administration, called Cheney a mentor and friend. “He was indefatigable in his determination to defend this country and patriotic to his core,” she wrote in a statement on X. “I am grateful for having had him in my life.”
Bush similarly described Cheney as “a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held” in a statement.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle offered tributes to Cheney. Former President Bill Clinton praised Cheney’s “dedication to our country and unwavering sense of duty.”
Cheney will be remembered as “an incredibly transformative vice president,” according to international relations lecturer Robert Rakove ’99 M.A. ’00. “Vice presidents before him … had expanded the office, but Cheney developed it almost into another branch of government,” Rakove said.
Cheney’s three decades in public service began in 1974, when he became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, succeeding his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, who would eventually serve as Bush’s defense secretary and another leading proponent of invading Iraq. At 34 years old, Cheney was one of the youngest chiefs of staff in history and already a “rising star,” according to Hoover Senior Fellow and political science professor Larry Diamond ’74 M.A. ’78 Ph.D. ’80.
Rakove said that Cheney, having first entered politics during the Ford administration, saw a need to restore power to an executive branch that had lost influence and trust after the Vietnam War and Watergate. As such, Cheney sometimes embodied “what was seen as pushing a very unilateral and hardline approach to things,” Diamond said. He described Cheney as “always a conservative, but quite principled, with a streak of pragmatism.”
Cheney went on to represent Wyoming in the House of Representatives for ten terms, eventually serving as the second-ranking House Republican before becoming Secretary of Defense in 1989, where he oversaw the First Gulf War. Bush hired Cheney to chair his 2000 vice presidential search campaign, but ultimately tapped Cheney himself. Cheney provided political experience and policy knowledge that Bush lacked, having served just one full term as governor of Texas before running for president.
Throughout his career, Cheney applied a Cold War mentality to foreign policy. “His view of the world was that it’s a dangerous, very hostile environment, [and] that the United States needs to be willing to act, at times fairly aggressively, to head off threats,” Rakove said. He stated that this mentality motivated Cheney to “incline Bush toward a more militant war on terror, toward invading Iraq.”
Rakove said that one of Cheney’s most controversial legacies besides the Iraq War is his support of “enhanced interrogation,” or torture, of suspected terrorists. “Cheney had a conviction that [torture] … would yield actionable intelligence, and I don’t think it’s been vindicated,” he said.
Diamond considers Cheney’s most polarizing legacy to be his support of “questionable, if not creepy, use of government power for domestic surveillance in the wake of 9/11.” Cheney supported the provisions of the October 2001 PATRIOT Act, to, among other provisions, authorize the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap US citizens’ communications to detect suspected terrorists.
By expanding the power of the vice presidency and exercising aggressive foreign policy, Cheney “in a lot of ways reflects Cold War and post-Cold War America quite well,” Rakove said.
While the consequences of the Iraq War continue to reverberate into the present, Cheney has demonstrated his pragmatism and principle since leaving office, said Diamond.
Through his four decades in public service, Cheney had “a quite long and impressive political career alternating between being controversial and polarizing at some points and then being a pragmatist and defending institutions,” Diamond said. Given Cheney’s break with Trump in 2020 and endorsement of Harris in 2024, Diamond concluded that “he ended his career and his life on the side of defending democracy.”