Dick Cheney, who was generally regarded as one of the most powerful vice presidents ever in the history of the United States (US), died on Monday at the age of 84, his family stated in a statement.
According to the statement, the cause of the death of Cheney was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement read.
“We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
There was little in Cheney’s early life to foreshadow the immensely influential role he would one day play at the highest levels of American politics.
Born the son of a government conservation worker in Lincoln, Neb., in 1941, he would flunk out of Yale University and work as a lineman for a power company in his new home state of Wyoming; toss in a pair of drunken-driving convictions, and it’s an inauspicious young adulthood.
But turn it around Cheney did: marriage to his high school sweetheart, Lynn; two children; a college degree at the University of Wyoming; graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.
While Cheney was turning his life around, the US was caught in the throes of the Vietnam War. Cheney supported the war but never fought in it.
He received five military deferments. Critics would seize upon this decades later, as Cheney helped lead the U.S. into another controversial war — the one in Iraq.
Ordinary To Extraordinary
Dick Cheney, the future vice president, began his political career as a congressional intern in 1969. That same year he went to work for a future partner in the Bush administration — Donald Rumsfeld, who ran an economics office in the Nixon White House.
Cheney left the White House before Nixon’s resignation, but in 1974 he was back working for the new president, Gerald Ford. Cheney moved up quickly, becoming Ford’s chief of staff at the age of 34.
It was then that Cheney began to develop a philosophy that would come to full flower in the White House of George W. Bush.
His belief was that the power of the presidency must be not only protected, but also restored.
In the 1970s, he watched as Congress enacted reforms in response to Watergate and to Vietnam.
“We’ve seen the War Powers Act, an anti-impoundment control act, and time after time after time, administrations have traded away the authority of the president to do his job,” Cheney said in a 2002 interview on Fox News.
“We’re not going to do that in this administration. The president is bound and determined to defend those principles and to pass on this office, his and mine, to future generations in better shape than we found it.”
War, A Recurring Theme
In 1978, Cheney ran for Congress in Wyoming and won. That was also the year he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks.
He served in Congress for a decade and finally gave up his seat to become Secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush.
The job brought Cheney’s first confrontation with Saddam Hussein, when he directed Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. The war ended quickly after Iraqi troops were evicted from Kuwait.
At the time, there were some who felt the US should continue all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam’s regime. President Bush declined.
In 1994, Cheney defended that decision: “The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we’d have to do once we got there,” he said.
“You’d probably have to put some new government in place. It’s not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you’d have to stay.
“For the US to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who’s going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire.”
Cheney left the Pentagon when the first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Two years later, he flirted with a presidential run of his own but instead headed to the private sector, joining the giant energy services company, Halliburton.
Changing The Vice Presidency — And Foreign Policy
The job made Cheney a wealthy man, but he stayed involved in conservative politics. In 2000, he was asked by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to lead the search for a running mate. Bush later made a surprise announcement that he had chosen none other than Cheney.
In office, Cheney became a lightning rod for critics of the administration. Cheney also redefined the office of the vice president. He became President Bush’s closest adviser and a dominant player in policy shaping.
Critics alleged that Cheney was really the man in charge at the White House. The events of September 11, 2001, only reinforced this notion.
While Bush was in Florida that day, Cheney was at the White House. He was literally carried by Secret Service agents to an underground bunker.
In an interview years later on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cheney said it was he who told Bush not to return to the White House.
“I said, ‘Delay your return. We don’t know what’s going on here but it looks like, you know, we’ve been targeted,’ ” Cheney said, adding, “things that we did later on that day tied directly to guaranteeing presidential succession.”
After the September 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action.
No longer would the US wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.
On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.
“I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” Cheney said.
As the war dragged on, Democrats seized that statement as evidence of how Cheney’s determination to go to war had clouded his judgment. There was talk that he had changed from his earlier days in politics.
Cheney And His Controversies
And while Cheney’s disposition was never particularly sunny, critics assailed the vice president as a relentlessly grim figure.
Late-night comics called him Darth Vader. Even President Bush had fun with his vice president’s image on Halloween one year.
“This morning I was with the vice president,” Bush told reporters. “I was asking him what costume he was planning. He said, ‘Well I’m already wearing it,’ and then he mumbled something about the dark side of the force.”
There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration’s popularity plummeted in its second term.
In 2007, his Chief of Staff and top adviser, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.
Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, Attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.
Even in a strange story like this, some of the classic Cheney traits, such as secrecy, were on display. The story didn’t come out for two days, and when it finally did, Cheney himself took days longer to speak about it, finally doing an interview with Fox News.
On Cheney’s final day in office, he sat in a wheelchair, the result of an accident, bundled up against the frigid cold, and watched as President Obama was sworn in.
Now Cheney has died, leaving a legacy in government service, foreign policy and the balance of power between the branches of government, and leaving a personal stamp on a presidency greater than any vice president before him.
Source: npr.org
