A Quiet Life, A Stormy Legacy: Remembering Richard B. Cheney
Richard “Dick” Cheney died last night at 84, his family said, succumbing to complications of pneumonia and longstanding cardiac and vascular disease. The short statement that accompanied the news captured a private tenderness that often sat oddly beside the public ferocity of his years in power: “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.”
It is a final image that feels quintessentially Cheney — an angler’s calm, a family vignette — set against a public life that reshaped the American presidency and altered the course of the early 21st century.
From Plains to Power: The Making of a Vice President
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, Cheney’s life was a long arc from the wide skies of the American West to the narrow corridors of Washington. He moved to Wyoming as a child, worked with his hands on power lines and coal plants in his twenties, and returned to school at the University of Wyoming to finish degrees in political science. Even his return to politics had the feel of a Western tale — practical, stubborn, uncompromising.
“He had the plainspoken look of someone who’d spent winters in a wind and summers in a trout stream,” said a long-time neighbor from Jackson Hole. “But that didn’t make him any less formidable in a room.”
Cheney’s résumé reads like a map of modern Republican governance: congressional staffer, White House operative under Nixon and Ford, member of the House for a decade, Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush, CEO of Halliburton, and then — the decision that cemented his place in history — George W. Bush’s choice as running mate in 2000. He served as the 46th vice president from 2001 to 2009, guiding a vice-presidential office that many argue was transformed into a second center of power.
The Power of the Office
Cheney believed the presidency had been diminished after Watergate and made it a mission to rebuild executive strength. He assembled an inner national security team that often operated as a government within the government, a configuration that thrilled some allies and alarmed many critics.
“He wasn’t interested in ceremonial roles,” said a former administration official. “He wanted an engine. He wanted to run the engine.”
That engine revved fastest after September 11, 2001. In the months and years that followed, Cheney became one of the administration’s most ardent voices for preemption and for aggressive counterterrorism measures. His advocacy fed decisions that would reverberate across the globe and for generations of Americans.
Iraq, Intelligence and Controversy
Perhaps nothing illustrates Cheney’s imprint more starkly than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was an unrelenting advocate for war, arguing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a direct threat to the United States. History now records that the WMDs were not there; intelligence assessments that had been used to justify the invasion were later found to be flawed.
“He truly believed the intelligence he was given,” said an academic who has studied the era. “Even when the facts on the ground didn’t match the premises, he stayed resolute.”
The human cost of that conflict is measured in complex, contested numbers: more than 4,400 U.S. service members killed, thousands more wounded, and civilian toll estimates that range widely, with some studies suggesting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from violence and the wider collapse of infrastructure.
Cheney’s tenure is also closely linked to a darker debate about methods. The administration authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions — measures that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and many international human-rights bodies later described as torture. Supporters said they were necessary for national security; opponents called them a moral and legal breach that damaged America’s standing in the world.
“We were at war and we did what we had to do,” Cheney told an interviewer years later. “History will judge.”
Industry, Influence and the Personal
Between stints in government, Cheney spent five years at Halliburton and left with a retirement package reported at roughly $35 million. Halliburton subsequently became a major contractor in Iraq, a fact critics seized on as proof of cronyism and tangled motives. Supporters countered that Cheney’s decisions were driven by national security concerns, not private gain.
Politics, however, was never divorced from the personal. Cheney’s family life — his long marriage to Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary — often attracted as much attention as policy memos. Liz Cheney emerged as a hawkish Republican congresswoman, eventually breaking with her party’s dominant faction to oppose Donald Trump — a move that cost her politically but reinforced a public image of principled contrarianism.
“He taught us to reason from principle,” said Liz Cheney in a speech in the wake of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. “Even if the price is high.”
That price was real. Her political fortunes suffered after she voted to impeach Trump, and the father-daughter alignment on certain issues — including Cheney’s later public denunciations of Trump’s threat to democratic norms — made their household a flashpoint in modern conservative politics.
Health, Humor and the Public Image
Cheney’s body had often betrayed him. He suffered his first heart attack at 37, battled chronic cardiac problems throughout his life, and in 2012 received a heart transplant. He became, in his later years, an unmistakable public figure: bald, blunt, frequently mocked by late-night comedians who compared him to Darth Vader — a comparison Cheney sometimes laughed off. Once, he even wore the villain’s mask on a talk-show stage as a piece of theatrical self-mockery.
“If people want to call me Darth Vader, that’s fine,” he quipped once. “I’ll take the dark suit.”
He had lighter infamy too: the hunting accident in 2006 when he accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington — a story that became a staple of late-night jokes and political cartoons.
How Should We Remember Him?
There are two converging images in the obituary of Dick Cheney: the quiet fisherman who loved fly fishing and family dinners, and the hulking architect of a more muscular — and more controversial — executive power. Both are true, and both are inadequate on their own.
What do we do with leaders whose actions were consequential but deeply contested? How do societies balance national security and human rights, vigilance and restraint? These are not academic questions but living arguments that play out in parliaments and courtrooms, in veterans’ hospitals and in the surveillance of everyday life.
“He changed how people think about power in the presidency,” said a historian of American politics. “Whether that change is judged wise or ruinous depends on what you value most.”
As the global community takes measure of Cheney’s life and legacy, it is worth pausing not only to tally policies and casualties, but to remember the human contradictions: the man who loved his country and his grandchildren, who championed a robust defense and endorsed tactics others called torture, who could be tender about fly rods and merciless in meetings.
In the end, his family asked that memories be of courage, honor and kindness. The public will have its own ledger. For readers around the world — many of whom felt the reverberations of Washington’s decisions in their own streets — the question remains: how will history balance the private and the political, the creeks where he fished and the deserts where soldiers fought?
