Dick Cheney, the former U.S. vice president who wielded vast influence over American foreign and defense policy during the George W. Bush administration, has died at the age of 84, his family announced Tuesday.
Cheney passed away Monday night due to complications from pneumonia and long-standing cardiac and vascular disease, his family said in a statement.
A veteran Republican power broker, Cheney served as vice president from 2001 to 2009 and was widely regarded as one of the most influential figures to ever hold the office. Before joining the Bush ticket in 2000, he had already built a formidable Washington résumé, serving as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, a six-term congressman from Wyoming, and defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush.
As vice president, Cheney was a driving force behind the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, pressing the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction — a claim later proven false. He argued that removing Hussein was essential to U.S. security, predicting that American troops would be “greeted as liberators” and the conflict would end swiftly. Instead, the war stretched on for years, costing thousands of lives and reshaping U.S. foreign policy.
Cheney’s tenure was marked by controversy over the expansion of executive power and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorism suspects, which human rights groups and U.S. Senate investigators later condemned as torture. He often clashed with senior officials, including Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, over America’s post-9/11 response.
Despite his reputation as a hardliner, Cheney occasionally broke with his party. He supported same-sex marriage, influenced by his daughter Mary, who is openly gay, and later endorsed his other daughter Liz Cheney’s criticism of Donald Trump. Liz Cheney lost her congressional seat after voting to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot — a stance her father publicly backed. “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney declared in a 2022 statement.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, Cheney grew up in Wyoming, where he began his political career. Known for his conservative convictions and blunt manner, he embraced his public image as a political villain, once jokingly accepting comparisons to “Star Wars” antagonist Darth Vader.
Plagued by heart problems for decades, Cheney underwent multiple heart surgeries and received a transplant in 2012. Even in retirement, he remained a polarizing and formidable figure — admired by some as a steadfast patriot and criticized by others as the embodiment of Washington’s most hawkish instincts.
