He Got the Job Done: Dick Cheney (1941-2025)

Richard Bruce Cheney was arguably the most consequential vice president in American history. He was also one of the most successful defense secretaries, a respected congressional leader, a congressman for twelve years, the youngest-ever White House chief of staff, a corporate leader and a champion of conservative principles. In the wake of 9/11, when many feared and no one knew what might befall the U.S., he helped lead a shell-shocked nation through those dark days, harden the country, steeling its resolve to confront terror and prevent further attacks on American soil.

In an era that cherishes rags-to-success tales of talent and grit, Dick Cheney’s hardscrabble and rocky start goes surprisingly unremarked. His grandfathers worked as a railroad cook and a schoolteacher; His parents moved to Wyoming for an Agriculture Department job, living for a while in an unfinished basement. Cheney became president of his high school class and a co-captain of the football team with his coach recalling that the young man “ran like a fencepost,” which can be taken to mean that he was hard to knock down—a trait that spoke to his focus, toughness and resilience.

Admitted on scholarship to Yale, Cheney ended up with a wild crowd and flunked out fairly spectacularly— “twice,” as he liked to say. Not for him the rarefied airs of establishment academia. Instead, he gravitated toward union jobs and, less productively, bars. One particularly hungover 1963 morning he decided to turn his life around, encouraged by his high-school girlfriend, Lynne Vincent, whom he married the next year. Cheney was then a telephone lineman, living in a tent in the southern Wyoming wilderness. While reading Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II by lantern light at night.

During his stint at the Pentagon twenty-five years later, Cheney’s reading material had expanded to two walls full of history books. Conscious of history’s importance both as reference and precedent, he would plunge into detailed after-action reports from earlier wars while also levelling to understand strategic contexts. A chronic workaholic, he regularly held Saturday morning sessions with experts on the tottering Soviet empire and led the George H.W. Bush team’s revised thinking about Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian independence and Central Europe’s new democracies. He upended arms control, directing historic unilateral cuts that the Soviets mimicked and won acceptance of a radically new regional defense strategy that long influenced American strategic thinking.

During the Gulf War, Cheney displayed considerable diplomatic aplomb in ensuring Arab support and Israeli restraint alongside Bush’s masterly Secretary of State James Baker, and his international appeals raised $52 billion to cover its not inconsiderable costs. He guided planning for the famous “left hook” that sped victory over the world’s fourth-largest army—and later for one of America’s most successful postwar force reductions.

In 2000, George W. Bush sprang a surprise on both the chattering classes and the media by choosing Cheney, a strong conservative with bipartisan respect, as his running mate. In turn, while neither a charismatic speaker nor a particularly emotive campaigner, Cheney’s measured, dignified debate with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman lifted Bush’s campaign and set a standard for such encounters.

After the awful trauma of 9/11, Cheney forthrightly warned Americans of a yearslong global struggle against terrorism, but his quiet strength and experience reassured an anxious nation. He saw that the threat ran far beyond Afghanistan and al Qaeda, that terrorists planned more attacks on America, and they might someday involve weapons of mass destruction, never tiring of cautioning against waiting for the day a mushroom cloud could rise above an American city. Heavily influenced by his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and machinations, the administration introduced new homeland-security measures and pursued terrorists with diplomatic, financial and military means to prevent attacks before they happened.

A bipartisan and international consensus had long decried the gathering threat of Saddam Hussein’s aggression and defiance of United Nations restraints. Congress approved the use of military force against Saddam by a wider margin than it had in 1990. While his threat passed with his regime, yet insurgents and foreign terrorists scourged Iraq and inflicted heavy costs on U.S. forces for several years until Bush, urged on by Cheney, changed course with the surge that may have turned the tide.

Most controversially he spearheaded a strategy to avoid terrorist organizations striking at the U.S. homeland by drawing them into open conflict with the army in Iraq, the results of which will remain controversial for the foreseeable future. Billions of dollars, thousands of American lives (possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) lost and a grueling, grinding twilight struggle which lasted from 2003-2011 ensued. In the cold light of the realpolitik, he practiced Cheney calculated that it was worth such an action to preserve the safety of the homeland and he, like President Bush, neither flinched nor wavered from that decision. That the administration may have lied (or at the least, exaggerated) the threat from Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction is also something that will add to Cheney’s legacy.

After 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency’s director said that Cheney, once briefed on a critical topic, knew CIA reports better than its analysts did. The bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission later praised his probing approach and criticized the CIA’s faulty reporting on Iraq. Although leading Democrats had credited these CIA assessments and post-invasion discoveries confirmed Saddam’s ambitions, the Bush administration, including Cheney, took a political and reputational hit for the lack of weapons of mass destruction.

Administration efforts to protect America incurred other political costs. Caught flat-footed by 9/11, the CIA requested new authorities as the only way to catch up to the threat. After lawyers approved their legality, Bush, Cheney, and bipartisan congressional leaders supported measures that CIA officials later attested helped stop attacks, including “enhanced intelligence techniques” such as waterboarding which fell afoul of internationally accepted torture statutes.

Much like Ronald Reagan and George Shultz, Cheney believed in free markets and America’s founding principles, and he strove to deflect crises that could endanger them. He could often be found, pen and yellow pad in hand, contemplating the nation’s challenges, considering goals to pursue, and developing a strategy for attaining them. He contended that America needs leaders focused on “the larger cause of the country,” not simply what the public wants to hear.

As a result, he often bucked the fashionable intellectual tide. He did so in the late 1980s, when experts asserted Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika would resurrect the Soviet economy; in the early 1990s, when many deemed unstoppable a bureaucratized restructuring of the U.S. health sector; in 2002, when policy elites embraced Yasser Arafat as a key to Middle East peace; in 2006, when respected leaders declared the war in Iraq lost and the surge hopeless; and in later years, when he defended America’s interests and principles from those he believed were threatening them.

Why did he never reach for the brass ring? While he did briefly flirt with the idea, Cheney was a realist and came to realize that he did not have the traditional gladhanding nature or the performing qualities necessary to be a successful presidential candidate. Indeed, his long career has taught him valuable lessons about being a key person, oftentimes the key player in the background, close to the power centers and having the kind of freedom to operate only anonymity and a low profile could provide.

Was he really a kind of ‘co-president’ as some have claimed? The thing about power is that for someone to take it, another has to cede it and George W. Bush had no issue with being the big-picture CEO whilst Cheney essentially did the daily work. A more apt analogy might be that he was the administration’s prime minister, taking care of executing Bush’s policies while pulling on the levers of government to ensure that his agenda was implemented). As for those who criticized his actions as taking liberties to step outside his brief, or accumulating too much power, like all cabinet appointments he served at the president’s pleasure and it suited Bush just fine to have someone do the nitty-gritty work to ensure that the government ran according to their mutually held conservative beliefs.

There was a Faustian bargain to Cheney’s power, a highly personal one in fact. He suffered from heart disease for much of his adult life (five heart attacks, stents, a pacemaker, quadruple bypass surgery) a burden he bore with equanimity and trademark stoicism. He drew on his loving family, in which he took great pride, even to the extent of coming out in support for his gay daughter. His characteristic calm bolstered him in the bunker on 9/11 and whenever it seemed, as he would say, that “the wheels are about to come off.”

Winston Churchill observed that it is easier to be a nation’s leader than its No. 2. Despite popular myth, Cheney often lost policy debates—though sometimes events vindicated his view. Historians will debate his strategies that America pursued and his proposals that others rejected. He would have enjoyed those rhetorical and intellectual fights.

Cheney's Secret Service codename was Angler, for his well-known love of fishing. Indeed, one harbors the suspicion that he would rather have preferred to be wading knee-deep in Wyoming’s Snake River, his fly-line curled perfectly behind him, the sound of running water in his ears, echoing through the pines and snow-covered mountains than in the Washington he served for so long. When all is said and done, Cheney knew when to get off the stage, content to let history make its judgments.