Former Vice President Dick Cheney dies at 84 : NPR

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the facility of the presidency, died Monday on the age of 84, his household mentioned in a press release.

The trigger was issues of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness, the assertion mentioned. Cheney had handled a historical past of coronary heart issues.

“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 assertion mentioned. “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.”

In a press release, former President George W. Bush, who picked Cheney as his vice chairman, mentioned the loss of life “is a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends. Laura and I will remember Dick Cheney for the decent, honorable man that he was.”

Bush added that Cheney “was a calm and steady presence in the White House amid great national challenges. I counted on him for his honest, forthright counsel, and he never failed to give his best.”

An inauspicious starting

There was little in Cheney’s formative years to foreshadow the immensely influential function he would in the future play on the highest ranges of American politics. Born the son of a authorities conservation employee in Lincoln, Neb., in 1941, he would flunk out of Yale University and work as a lineman for an influence firm in his new residence state of Wyoming. Toss in a pair of drunken-driving convictions, and it is an inauspicious younger maturity.

But flip it round Cheney did: marriage to his highschool sweetheart, Lynn; two kids; a university diploma on the University of Wyoming; graduate college on the University of Wisconsin.

While Cheney was turning his life round, the U.S. was caught within the throes of the Vietnam War. Cheney supported that battle however by no means fought in it. He obtained 5 army deferments. Critics would seize upon this many years later, as Cheney helped lead the U.S. into one other controversial battle — this one in Iraq.

Ordinary to extraordinary

The future vice chairman started his political profession as a congressional intern in 1969. That similar 12 months he went to work for a future companion within the Bush administration — Donald Rumsfeld, who ran an economics workplace within the Nixon White House.

Cheney left the White House earlier than Nixon’s resignation, however in 1974 he was again working for the brand new president, Gerald Ford. Cheney moved up rapidly, changing into Ford’s chief of employees on the age of 34.

It was then that he started to develop a philosophy that might come to full flower within the White House of George W. Bush. His perception was that the facility of the presidency should be not solely protected, but additionally restored. In the Seventies, 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,” he mentioned 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 received. That was additionally the 12 months he suffered the primary of a sequence of coronary heart assaults. He served in Congress for a decade and at last gave up his seat to grow to be secretary of protection for President George H.W. Bush.

This job introduced Cheney’s first confrontation with Saddam Hussein, when he directed Operation Desert Storm within the Middle East. The battle ended rapidly after Iraqi troops had been evicted from Kuwait. At the time, there have been some who felt the U.S. ought to proceed all the best way to Baghdad and topple Saddam’s regime. President Bush declined; in 1994, Cheney defended that call.

“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 mentioned. “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 U.S. 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 primary President Bush misplaced to Bill Clinton. Two years later, he flirted with a presidential run of his personal however as a substitute headed to the non-public sector, becoming a member of the enormous power companies firm Halliburton.

Changing the vice presidency — and overseas coverage

The job made Cheney a rich man, however he stayed concerned in conservative politics. In 2000, he was requested by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to guide the seek for a operating mate. Bush later made a shock announcement that he had chosen none aside from Cheney.

In workplace, Cheney grew to become a lightning rod for critics of the administration. Cheney additionally redefined the workplace of the vice chairman. He grew to become President Bush’s closest adviser and a dominant participant in shaping coverage. Critics alleged that Cheney was actually the person in cost on the White House.

The occasions of Sept. 11, 2001, solely strengthened this notion. While Bush was in Florida that day, Cheney was on the White House. He was actually carried by Secret Service brokers to an underground bunker. In an interview years in a while NBC’s Meet the Press, Cheney mentioned it was he who informed Bush to not 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 mentioned, including that “things that we did later on that day tied directly to guaranteeing presidential succession.”

After the Sept. 11 assaults, Cheney advocated an aggressive new overseas coverage during which potential threats can be met with swift, preemptive motion. No longer would the U.S. watch for an enemy to strike first. He helped promote the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American individuals. At the identical time, he famously predicted that the mission itself can be comparatively simple.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the present, requested Cheney if the American individuals had been prepared for an extended, 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 mentioned.

As the battle dragged on, Democrats seized that assertion as proof of how Cheney’s willpower to go to battle had clouded his judgment. There was discuss that his views had modified from his earlier days in politics.

Controversy follows Cheney

While Cheney’s disposition was by no means significantly sunny, critics assailed the vice chairman as a relentlessly grim determine. Late-night comics referred to as him Darth Vader. Even President Bush had enjoyable together with his vice chairman’s picture on Halloween one 12 months.

“This morning I was with the vice president,” Bush informed 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 had been different controversies that dogged Cheney because the Bush administration’s recognition plummeted in its second time period. In 2007, his chief of employees and high adviser, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the title of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated within the case legally, however he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of many more strange incidents involving somebody as high-ranking an official as Cheney, he by chance shot and wounded a buddy, lawyer Harry Whittington, within the face and chest with birdshot pellets throughout a 2006 weekend quail-hunting journey at a Texas ranch.

Even in an odd story like this, a number of the traditional Cheney traits, akin to secrecy, had been on show. The story did not come out for 2 days, and when it lastly did, Cheney himself took days longer to discuss it, lastly doing an interview with Fox News.

On Cheney’s last day in workplace, he sat in a wheelchair, the results of an accident, bundled up towards the frigid chilly, and watched as President Barack Obama was sworn in.

Out of workplace, he emerged as a frequent and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, even accusing the president of not understanding that the U.S. was at battle.

In February 2010 he made a shock look at CPAC, the conservative political motion convention in Washington. The crowd erupted.

It was one of many final moments of huge public adulation for Cheney. With the rise of Donald Trump, Cheney’s model of politics and his interventionist overseas coverage fell out of favor within the occasion. Trump would usually lambaste Cheney for launching what he referred to as “forever wars.”

It carried into the subsequent era as Trump attacked Cheney’s daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), when she voted for Trump’s impeachment after a riot on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

Now Cheney has died, leaving a legacy in authorities service, overseas coverage and the steadiness of energy between the branches of presidency, and leaving a private stamp on a presidency better than any vice chairman earlier than him.