Dick Cheney, Who Drove US Response to 9/11, Dies at 84

(Bloomberg) — Dick Cheney, whose campaign for a military response to the 9/11 terror attacks cleared the path for an unpopular war in Iraq and established his reputation as one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history, has died. He was 84.

“The former vice president died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease,” according to a family statement released early Tuesday. His wife, Lynne, and daughters Liz and Mary as well as other relatives were with him when he died on Monday night, the family said.

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As George W. Bush’s vice president from 2001 to 2009, Cheney embodied the single-minded determination to do whatever was necessary to prevent further acts of terrorism on US soil. A veteran of three previous presidential administrations, including a stint as secretary of defense for Bush’s father, he was given wide berth and deference on the military issues that dominated Bush’s tenure, accumulating influence rarely seen in a vice president.

Cheney had come to office intent on reinvigorating the US presidency, which he believed had been weakened by the War Powers Act and other legislation in the 1970s inspired by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The Sept. 11, 2001, attack by al-Qaeda, which killed about 3,000 people, infused his longstanding political goal with a new focus on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who committed his nation’s troops to the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote in his memoir. “So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”

On Sept. 11, Cheney was at the White House, while Bush visited a school in Florida, when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists used hijacked passenger airplanes to attack the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia.

He was hustled by Secret Service agents to the underground command center, where he guided the government’s initial response, including authorizing the military to shoot down, if necessary, other suspicious civilian aircraft. (The shoot-down order didn’t reach military pilots in the skies over Washington and New York, who, regardless, were too late to encounter any of the hijacked planes, according to the national 9/11 commission’s final report.)

Cheney gave a “calm, commanding performance,” Jane Mayer wrote in , her 2008 book that took a critical look at how the war on terror changed America. She took the title from Cheney’s early, blunt assessment of how the US would have to respond to being attacked. Speaking on NBC’s the first Sunday after attacks, he said:

“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’re gonna spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.”

‘Secure Locations’

After a false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001, raised fears that a radioactive, chemical or biological attack had taken place, Cheney began spending less time there and more at what came to be called “undisclosed secure locations” — usually, the vice presidential residence in Washington, Cheney’s own home in Wyoming, or the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains.

With his chief counsel, David Addington, Cheney took the lead in crafting the policies that guided the administration’s approach to terrorism. Secretly, with minimal congressional involvement, they asserted broad new powers to monitor Americans at home and to use methods that many considered torture — including the drowning simulation called waterboarding — to interrogate military prisoners overseas.

“Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint,” Barton Gellman wrote in , his 2008 book on the vice president.

In a statement on Tuesday, Bush said of Cheney, “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.”

Mass Destruction

Cheney played a similarly central role in turning US terrorism fears into a case for preemptive military action against Iraq. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002, seven months before the US-led invasion. “There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

His reputation suffered when no such stockpiles were found, the American military became ensnarled in sectarian fighting and public support for the war evaporated.

He rarely conceded mistakes in strategy or planning. In May 2005, he said of Iraqi fighters, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” In an interview for , a 2013 Showtime documentary, he said, “The ones who spend all their time trying to be loved by everybody probably aren’t doing much.”

Cheney’s eldest daughter, Liz Cheney, was elected to the US House in 2016, representing Wyoming, and showed her own resolve in the face of public criticism.

Though staunchly conservative on most issues, she ran afoul of the Republican Party for voting to impeach President Donald Trump over his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes confirming Joe Biden’s election victory. Putting her own political future in jeopardy, she agreed to help lead the Democrat-dominated House committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6.

Her father, true to form, didn’t mince words in backing her. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” the former vice president said in a campaign ad for his daughter in August 2022, shortly before she was defeated by a Trump supporter in the Republican primary for her House seat.

Cheney and his daughter both crossed party lines and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, over Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Richard Bruce Cheney was born on Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the first of three children in a family of New Deal Democrats. His father, also Richard, worked for the federal Soil Conservation Service, a program created under President Franklin Roosevelt. His mother, Marjorie, was an avid angler and former competitive softball player.

The family moved to Casper, Wyoming, when Cheney was 13, and he was senior-class president and co-captain of his high school football team. He also dated the homecoming Mustang Queen, Lynne Vincent, whom he would marry in 1964, and who would go on to become a conservative scholar and serve as a chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Yale Dropout

On a scholarship arranged by a local businessman, Cheney went east to attend Yale University. His poor grades led him to drop out in his second year, and he returned to Wyoming to work laying power lines. Twice in a nine-month span, in 1962 and 1963, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated. He returned to college, got married and earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.

From 1959 to 1967, he requested and received five deferments from the military draft that could have sent him to Vietnam — four for being a student, one for being a new father.

While studying for a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison — where anti-war protests he viewed as distasteful solidified his conservative views — Cheney was selected for a fellowship with the American Political Science Association and spent a year in Washington working for Representative William Steiger, a Wisconsin Republican.

In 1969, he was hired by Donald Rumsfeld, then director of the Office of Economic Opportunity under President Richard Nixon. He became a staff assistant at the White House, then assistant director of the Cost of Living Council.

He left government after Nixon’s 1972 reelection and before the Watergate scandal brought down his presidency. After Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford replaced him, Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff and brought Cheney back as his deputy. When Rumsfeld became defense secretary, Cheney, at 34, became chief of staff.

Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election prompted a move back to Wyoming, where Cheney worked for a bank, then ran a successful campaign for Congress. He served from 1979 to 1989 as Wyoming’s sole member of the House of Representatives and again rose quickly, joining the Republican House leadership in his second term and becoming minority whip, the No. 2 post, in 1988.

Reaganesque Record

Long viewed as a political centrist in Ford’s image, Cheney used his decade in the House to build a record appealing to supporters of President Ronald Reagan. Cheney, like Reagan, believed that “government had gotten too large” and “American defenses were too weak and the nation’s resolve too dubious,” the Almanac of American Politics wrote in 1984.

Cheney was the top-ranking House Republican on the congressional committee that in 1987 investigated the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan White House’s secret effort to aid anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua with money raised from arms sales to Iran. Cheney helped produce a minority report that said the administration’s mistakes didn’t justify new limits on presidential authority. In his memoir, Cheney said it was “crucial to defend the presidency itself against congressional attempts to encroach on its power.”

President George H.W. Bush selected Cheney to be secretary of defense in 1989 after the Senate voted not to confirm his first choice, John Tower. During his four years in charge at the Pentagon, Cheney helped direct the US invasion of Panama to capture its then-president, Manuel Noriega, as well as the rout of Iraqi forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

Out of power when Bill Clinton, a Democrat, assumed the presidency in 1993, Cheney joined oil field services provider Halliburton Co. as chief executive in 1995 and became chairman the next year. For 2000, his final year at the company, he reported income of $36.1 million.

The younger Bush was governor of Texas and on his way to the Republican presidential nomination in April 2000 when he asked Cheney to head his search for a vice presidential running mate. Bush later said he had Cheney in mind for the job the whole time.

Cheney’s extensive resume bolstered the ticket, easing concerns that Bush lacked the experience required to manage the federal government. While the results of the election were being contested in court, Cheney got to work assembling the administration as head of Bush’s transition — choosing, among others, his old friend, Rumsfeld, as defense secretary.

Over the course of his life, Cheney suffered five heart attacks starting in 1978, and had the fourth one in November 2000, as Bush’s election hinged on a recount in Florida. A defibrillator was implanted in his chest in June 2001 to control episodes of rapid heartbeats. He revealed in his memoir that, two months after taking office, he “took the extraordinary step of writing a letter of resignation as vice president,” to be delivered should he become medically incapacitated. In March 2012, following 20 months on a waiting list, he received a heart transplant.

Cheney helped shape the Bush administration’s agenda on early priorities such as tax cuts and energy policy, often steering the White House toward textbook conservative principles rather than the more centrist “compassionate conservative” idea that Bush had campaigned on. In 2003, according to Gellman, Cheney worked discreetly with Republican allies in Congress to implement a capital gains tax cut that Bush had intentionally omitted from his tax legislation.

Cheney provided ample fodder to critics. In 2004, he swore at a Democrat on the Senate floor. In 2006, he accidentally shot and wounded a hunting companion. A subsidiary of Halliburton became the largest military contractor in Iraq, often receiving contracts outside the competitive-bidding process.

A Friend’s View

Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser during the 1991 Gulf War, told the New Yorker magazine in 2005 that he had trouble recognizing the Cheney of the post-9/11 world.

“I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for 30 years,” Scowcroft said. “But Dick Cheney I don’t know any more.”

While he became a favorite among conservatives, Cheney didn’t sign onto the religious right’s campaign against gay rights, including the right to marry — a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that his youngest daughter, Mary, was openly gay.

So pervasive was the public impression of an all-powerful vice president that Bush spent a few weeks considering Cheney’s offer to step aside before Bush’s 2004 reelection bid.

“He was seen as dark and heartless — the Darth Vader of the administration,” Bush wrote in “Decision Points,” his 2010 memoir.

In the end, Bush decided Cheney was too important to lose: “He accepted any assignment I asked. He gave me his unvarnished opinions. He understood that I made the final decisions. When we disagreed, he kept our differences private. Most important, I trusted Dick.”

(Updates with Bush statement in 13th paragraph.)

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