Dick Cheney, Powerful Vice President ...

[IceWizard]

In a memoir, Mr. Bush wrote that Mr. Cheney had offered to withdraw
from the ticket for the 2004 presidential election, having become
“the Darth Vader of the administration.”



The case had a corrosive effect on Mr. Cheney’s political stature, creating a rift between the
president and the vice president, which both acknowledged after leaving office, though the
White House initially denied it, saying Mr. Cheney was still Mr. Bush’s closest adviser. But
even then, some Republican aides acknowledged that the president had been upset, and
that Mr. Cheney had become less of an avuncular mentor to him.

Mr. Bush, in his memoir, said Mr. Cheney had lashed out at him in their final days in office for
his refusal to grant Mr. Libby a presidential pardon. “I can’t believe you’re going to leave a
soldier on the battlefield,” Mr. Cheney told him heatedly, according to Mr. Bush. The former
president wrote: “The comment stung. In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this,
or even close to this.”

In 2018, President Trump granted a full pardon to Mr. Libby. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,”
Mr. Trump said, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.” The pardon
amounted to a dramatic coda to a case that had once gripped Washington and came to
embody divisions over the Iraq war.

Mr. Cheney issued a public statement thanking Mr. Trump for the pardon, but it was a rare
grace note in an otherwise rocky relationship with the president. Months after the pardon,
Mr. Cheney, visiting Mexico, said Mr. Trump had been “wrong” during his presidential
campaign to say that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,
they’re rapists.”

In another slap at candidate Trump, Mr. Cheney spoke out against his proposal to ban
Muslims from entering the United States. “I think this whole notion that somehow we
can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we
stand for and believe in,” Mr. Cheney said.

And in 2019, Mr. Cheney, in an off-the-record exchange with Vice President Mike Pence
at an American Enterprise Institute forum, complained of Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter
diplomacy, which was often done without consulting aides or the intelligence community.
Mr. Cheney warned that the United States was “getting into a situation when our friends
and allies around the world that we depend upon are going to lack confidence in us.”

Donald Trump Jr., a close adviser to his father, hit back. “Isn’t it fitting,” he said, “that
Cheney is the one mad that Trump is ending his reckless and endless wars? I never
knew peace could be so unpopular.”





Mr. Cheney, at left, listened to Mr. Bush during a news conference in the Rose Garden
at the White House in April 2007. The vice president’s influence declined during
the president’s second term.



In the first term of Bush-Cheney, their days often began together in the Oval Office with a
review of the agenda. Mr. Cheney was there when Mr. Bush saw cabinet officials, took policy
briefings and met foreign leaders. But in the second term, Mr. Cheney increasingly lost
influence to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley,
the national security adviser.

Mr. Cheney had lost allies. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Libby were gone, and others had resigned:
Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary
of defense. Mr. Cheney was virtually the last of the inner circle.

Mr. Bush had also grown less reliant on him. On Capitol Hill, where he had easily had his way
in the first term, Mr. Cheney faced strained relationships, even with old allies. In retrospect,
White House aides said, the vice president’s power appeared to have peaked in 2003 and 2004.

But he was still the point man on national security in his second term. He defended the handling
of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, dismissing reports that detainees, who were held for years
without charges or trials, had been tortured or abused. He said they were well fed, well treated
and “living in the tropics,” adding, “They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

After The Times  disclosed in December 2005 that Mr. Bush had for years authorized the
National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on Americans and others in the
United States, the Justice Department investigated what it called a leak of classified
information. Mr. Cheney said The Times had jeopardized national security.

In Congress, Mr. Cheney defended domestic spying against charges that it might be
unconstitutional and in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which
governs intelligence gathering in the United States. Not only was it legal, but it had also
worked, Mr. Cheney contended, noting that there had been no terrorist attacks in
America since 2001.

Over Mr. Cheney’s objections, the Senate adopted a proposal by Mr. McCain, once a
prisoner of war in Vietnam, to ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees.
Outrage over Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where naked prisoners had been photographed
stacked in human pyramids and cowering before dogs, and reports of other abuses had led
to bipartisan pressure for the ban.

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the administration another setback, ruling
that it had violated the Geneva Conventions and American law by creating military commissions
to try terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial process. The court said Congress
had not authorized such tribunals. Critics of the Bush-Cheney drive to expand presidential
powers hailed the ruling.

But within months, Congress, still controlled by Republicans, gave the administration a
comeback victory, passing legislation shaped by Mr. Cheney that authorized the military
commissions, renewed Mr. Bush’s power to designate detainees “unlawful enemy combatants”
and allowed the government to imprison, interrogate and try them without judicial review indefinitely.


Architect of Foreign Policy

Mr. Cheney was candid about his efforts to strengthen the powers of the presidency, which
he said had been unduly eroded by Congress in the years after the Vietnam War and the
Watergate scandal that drove Richard M. Nixon out of the White House. The age of terrorism
warranted broad executive powers, he told reporters aboard Air Force Two on a trip to the
Iraq war zone in 2005.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,”
Mr. Cheney said. “I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the
threats we face, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers
unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security.”

Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was the paradigm of Mr. Cheney’s foreign policy influence,
as his aggressive stance prevailed over the protracted caution of Mr. Bush’s first secretary of
state, Colin L. Powell. In the spring of 2002, a year before the war, Mr. Cheney went to Britain
and the Middle East to enlist allies. He did not secure Arab support, but Britain became
America’s closest ally.

And it was Mr. Cheney, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in
Nashville on Aug. 26, 2002, who enunciated the rationale for war. Citing unnamed intelligence
sources, he said Iraq already had biological and chemical weapons and would “fairly soon”
have nuclear weapons.




Mr. Cheney with Jim Goldsmith, commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars,
in 2002. In a speech laying out the rationale for war with Iraq, Mr. Cheney said that
Iraq already had biological and chemical weapons and would “fairly soon” have
nuclear weapons.



“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,”
Mr. Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against
our allies and against us.”

White House officials said Mr. Cheney had mirrored Mr. Bush’s views. The talk alarmed
America’s allies, but it laid the groundwork for the invasion seven months later.

Mr. Cheney was portrayed in Mr. Bush’s memoir as a steamrollering force for military
intervention in Iraq. He wrote that his vice president “had gotten out in front of my position”
in his Nashville speech, when he simply dismissed the prospect of further weapons inspections.

Mr. Cheney, who traveled to more than 30 countries to promote the administration’s policies,
also adopted hard lines against Iran and North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions prompted
Mr. Bush early in his presidency to label them, along with Iraq, as an “axis of evil.” But in
his last year in office, Mr. Bush made concessions to Iran and North Korea, siding with
Ms. Rice, not Mr. Cheney, resolving the administration’s internal tugs of war but not the nuclear perils.

In 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, but in 2007 it agreed to disable its nuclear
facilities in exchange for $400 million in fuel oil and aid from South Korea, China and the
United States. Ms. Rice finessed the deal, circumventing Mr. Cheney, who, after years of
shunning Pyongyang, said it amounted to rewarding a miscreant.

North Korea began dismantling its reactor, but amid disagreements over inspections, the
deal seemed about to collapse until Mr. Bush, late in 2008, removed Pyongyang from a
blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for inspections “based on mutual consent”
to verify a nuclear shutdown. Critics voiced doubts that the arrangement would work,
and it didn’t. North Korea remained a nuclear peril.

Iran said its uranium-enrichment program had peaceful aims. A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate
said that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but that it had continued
to enrich uranium. International sanctions and warnings of military action reflected widespread
skepticism over Iran’s intentions. The Bush administration finally agreed to talks, but there
were no breakthroughs, and North Korea did go on to successfully develop nuclear weapons.

Driving a Domestic Agenda
On domestic matters, Mr. Cheney was a strong advocate for Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees:
John G. Roberts Jr., as chief justice in 2005, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2006 (though Mr. Cheney
had originally urged the president to pick the federal judge J. Michael Luttig rather than Mr. Roberts).
Steve Schmidt, a senior Cheney adviser, rode herd on the Senate confirmations, and the court
moved further toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Cheney was also a forceful exponent of Mr. Bush’s economic plans and tax cuts, which
favored businesses and the wealthy, and he pushed energy and environmental policies that
opened federal lands to oil, gas and mining exploitation.

On Capitol Hill, especially in the first term, Mr. Cheney was the administration’s chief ambassador
and enforcer. Republican lawmakers and even many Democrats regarded him as Mr. Bush’s
surrogate and a member of their club, a wily horse-trader who knew the game, the odds and
all of the players. He often played a critical role, forging compromises and, as president of the
Senate, sometimes casting deciding votes.

Mr. Cheney’s views on taxes were, in a historical way, quite radical. He favored a flat tax or a
national sales tax to replace progressive income taxes that had put the heaviest burdens on
the rich since President Woodrow Wilson’s time. No such taxes were adopted.

But the administration, arguing that taxation stifles investment, won cuts to income and
estate taxes in 2001 and to capital gains and dividends taxes in 2003 — a total of $1.7 trillion
that signaled breaks with the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
Great Society of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the bases of domestic policy for generations.

To conservatives like Mr. Cheney, the tax cuts were crucial to an agenda for shaping America’s
future. Most were set to expire in later years (“sunset” provisions let supporters claim they cost less).
But they were conceived of as “permanent” — renewable by future Congresses, stimulating the
economy for years to come and forcing deficit-ridden administrations to pare the government’s
role in health, education, welfare and other social programs.

The tax cuts, along with soaring war costs and other spending as well as temporary economic
downturns, swung the budget from a projected $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years to deficits
that some economists put at $5 trillion to $9 trillion over a decade.

By many measures, the economy was relatively healthy in most of the Bush-Cheney years,
growing about 3 percent a year, with low inflation and millions of new jobs. The administration
credited its tax cuts for the performance, but many analysts said a housing boom and other
factors were more important. As conservatives had been for decades, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney
were proponents of free markets and the deregulation of business and financial institutions.

In that environment, housing prices soared to unrealistic levels, and mountains of risky mortgages
were written and sold in lucrative packages. Many of the packages were interconnected through
an obscure kind of debt insurance that spread the obligations across the financial community
and around the world. A giant financial bubble grew as subtly as a cancer.





Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were proponents of free markets and the
deregulation of business and financial institutions.




Then, in 2007 and 2008, the economy fell into a swoon, dragged down by subprime mortgage
defaults, a sharp decline in housing prices and a wide erosion of credit and consumer confidence.
Congress passed taxpayer rebates to stimulate the economy, but they were not nearly enough.
Banks and brokerages failed. As credit markets collapsed and America drifted into recession,
Congress enacted a $700 billion rescue package proposed by the Bush administration to buy
troubled securities.

But panic spread around the world in the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression.
For an administration that had prided itself in fostering a robust economy, the collapse
represented an enormous failure. Critics said Republican deregulation, anti-tax and free-market
policies were responsible. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney accepted no blame.

Another controversy swirled around Mr. Cheney over national energy policy. After taking office
in 2001, he quietly assembled a task force that developed energy proposals for the administration.
Democrats maintained that oil companies and lobbyists had been allowed to write America’s
energy policies, and a lawsuit was filed to pry open the records. A federal judge authorized a
look. But Mr. Cheney, who refused to identify those consulted, argued in an appeal to the
Supreme Court that the judicial inquiry into affairs of the executive branch violated the
Constitution’s separation of powers clause.

When it was reported that Justice Antonin Scalia had gone hunting with Mr. Cheney while the
case was pending, there were calls for the justice to recuse himself. He declined. With his assent,
Justice Scalia joined a comfortable majority in sending the case back to a lower court, which
sided with Mr. Cheney in saying that the administration was not obligated to identify its
consultants. A list of them was leaked to the news media in 2007; virtually all the major oil
and energy companies, many of them contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaigns, were on it.


Polarizing and Idolized

The task-force case reinforced the aura of secrecy and inscrutability around the vice president,
whose character was endlessly debated. Democrats portrayed Mr. Cheney, the former chief
executive of the oil services and engineering company Halliburton, as one of the most polarizing
figures in politics, a manipulator who personified militarism, corporate corruption, government
secrecy and environmental degradation.

But to Republicans who idolized him, Mr. Cheney was a fundamentalist’s rock star — a cultural
and political icon, the lifeblood of the conservative movement and the president’s firm right hand.
To the faithful, he was also, like Mr. Bush, a man of God.

The truth lay somewhere in between and was more complex, according to White House associates,
lawmakers and others familiar with Mr. Cheney’s activities, many of which were carried out behind
the scenes. Only participants in those activities got glimpses of the nuances and the leverage at work.

Mr. Cheney was a quick study and a good listener, aides said, absorbing large volumes of information
for use in policy decisions. He steeped himself in briefings and literature about anthrax, smallpox,
the Ebola virus and other chemical and biological agents, and then helped draft a program to
combat biological terrorism.

He was not a powerful campaigner. An overweight, laconic and rather wooden grandfatherly figure
with a nimbus of white hair and eyeglasses that caught the light, Mr. Cheney looked like a man
on his way to the dentist. He was affable, but had no flair on the stump. He did not kiss babies
or wade into crowds.

He preferred informality — a mixer to a reception line, a round table to a lectern. His voice was
a low-key monotone, and his unwinding reel of facts and figures struck voters as authoritative
but uninspiring. He made scores of campaign appearances in 2000 and 2004, but many were
fund-raisers for wealthy contributors and speeches to Republican audiences.

His troubled medical history virtually ruled out a future run for the presidency. Mr. Cheney,
who discussed his cardiac problems in “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey,” a 2013 book
written with Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, his cardiologist, took medications to lower his blood pressure
and cholesterol, and aspirin to prevent blood clots. He watched his diet, rode a stationary
bike daily and had frequent medical checkups. In 2005, doctors repaired aneurysms in arteries
behind both knees, and in 2007 they treated him for a blood clot in his left leg after he spent
65 hours in nine days traveling by plane. In 2007 and again in 2008, he was treated with
electric shocks for an irregular heartbeat.





As Mr. Bush’s most trusted and valued counselor, Mr. Cheney foraged at will over
fields of international and domestic policy.



But all that meant he did not have to shoulder the handicap of earlier vice presidents, including
Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Walter F. Mondale and Nixon, who had found it necessary to play
two subtly conflicting roles — promoting a president and his programs while trying to burnish
his own image for a presidential race later. Mr. Cheney had only President Bush to worry about.

And the vice presidency suited him well. He counseled Mr. Bush with the assurance that his advice
was valued, took up policy questions as he saw the need, marshaled facts and arguments free
of pressure to justify his actions to voters, and insulated himself from attacks by ignoring them.

He did not respond to many questions about his work at Texas-based Halliburton, from
1995 to 2000, when he was paid more than $40 million. But he denied pulling strings for the
company to win lucrative contracts for supplying troops in the Middle East and rebuilding Iraq
after the invasion.

After decades in the capital, much about his personal life remained obscure to the public. He even
kept secret the names of people who visited his official residence on the grounds of the
Naval Observatory in Washington.

The Cheneys vacationed often at their mountain home in a gated community in Jackson and
in 2005 bought a $2.6 million waterfront residence on nine acres in St. Michaels, Md., on the
Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, near the weekend home of his old friend Mr. Rumsfeld.
In 2008, the Cheneys built a new primary residence in McLean, in Northern Virginia, to be closer
to their daughters and grandchildren.

Mr. Cheney sometimes slipped away to hunt in Pennsylvania or Arkansas. One of his trips, an
outing to bag quail in Texas on Feb. 11, 2006, turned into a fiasco. Aiming for a bird, the
vice president shot Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Austin lawyer. The pellet wounds were
not fatal, but Mr. Bush got an incomplete report and was annoyed. The White House’s daylong
delay in disclosing the news caused an uproar, and Mr. Cheney was silent for four days.
He then defended his actions, but the episode exposed some rarely seen tensions between
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.




In 2006, Mr. Cheney was involved in a hunting accident where he shot
Harry Whittington, 78, while hunting in Texas.



It also provided a glimpse through the cocoon that Mr. Cheney had woven about himself in the
White House, where he had a power center of his own, with a small version of the
National Security Council, his own domestic policy staff and his own communications
personnel — a team, led by David S. Addington, his chief of staff, whose debates and decisions
sometimes ran parallel to those of the presidential circle.

Mr. Cheney had regular working lunches with Mr. Bush at the White House and with lawmakers
on Capitol Hill, but associates said he almost never spoke — not even off the record to members
of his own staff — about those private conversations. For security reasons, he did not travel
with Mr. Bush. But he also rarely socialized with the president and was not a regular at
Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Unlike Mr. Bush, an early-to-bed teetotaler, Mr. Cheney occasionally attended dinner parties
with the powerful in Washington, but hosts said indiscretion never crossed his plate.
Critics accused him of violating the openness and accountability of public officials in a
democracy, but he typically responded with an enigmatic smile and no comment.

His wife, Lynne Cheney, an author, conservative scholar and talk show host, wrote more
than a dozen books and many journal articles, lectured at George Washington University
and the University of Wyoming, and was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities from 1986 to 1993.

Mr. Cheney’s elder daughter, Elizabeth Perry, known as Liz, served in the State Department
as deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs from 2002 to 2003, and as principal
deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs from 2005 to 2006. She worked on her
father’s re-election campaign in 2004. In 2013, with her father’s support, she ran for the
United States Senate from Wyoming but withdrew from the race in early 2014.






After the presidency of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Cheney and Representative Liz Cheney
were engulfed by a parade of Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the
former vice president a war criminal.



In 2016, Ms. Cheney ran for and won the House seat from Wyoming, which her father had held
for a decade, and proved to be popular. She was re-elected in 2018 and 2020 by overwhelming
margins. She supported Mr. Trump’s positions on nearly 93 percent of her House votes. But after
he refused to accept defeat in his bid for re-election and roused a mob that attacked the
Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she turned against Mr. Trump, voting in favor of his second impeachment.

Indeed, Ms. Cheney served as vice chair of the House special committee on the events of Jan. 6,
and was scathing in her condemnation of Mr. Trump’s role in fomenting the uprising. In retaliation,
House Republicans stripped her of her leadership role. Ultimately, voters had the final nay-say,
as she lost her House seat in a G.O.P. primary.

On the first anniversary of the insurrection, Mr. Cheney joined his daughter at remembrance
events at the Capitol. No Republicans showed up, but Democrats in the House, including the
Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were effervescent.

After 13 years in retirement and of all-but-unimaginable changes in American life wrought by the
rise and fall of President Trump, Mr. Cheney and Liz Cheney were engulfed by a parade of
Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the former vice president a war criminal.
The Democrats shook Mr. Cheney’s hand, and some embraced Ms. Cheney, who introduced him
to her erstwhile colleagues, saying: “This is my father. This is Dad.” It was a stunning moment
and an emblem of how much had changed in the Trump era.

Mr. Cheney’s second daughter, Mary Claire Cheney, was her father’s 2004 campaign coordinator.
She wrote “Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life” (2006).
During Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign in 2013, a feud between the sisters developed after
Mary Cheney, a lesbian who married her longtime partner in 2012, criticized Liz Cheney’s
opposition to same-sex marriage.
(Liz Cheney later said she had been wrong and embraced same-sex marriage.)

Besides his wife and daughters, Mr. Cheney is survived by seven grandchildren.



Westerner in Washington


Richard Bruce Cheney, who used his given name mostly on brass plates and letterheads, was
born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, the eldest of three children of Richard Herbert and
Marjorie Lorraine (Dickey) Cheney. When Dick was 13, his father, a soil conservation agent
for the Department of Agriculture, moved the family to Casper, Wyo., a city of 25,000 on the
banks of the North Platte River, steeped in conservatism and surrounded by bleak oil and gas fields.

In the 1950s, Friday nights in Casper meant football games, a dance and a trip to the root beer
stand. At Natrona County High School, Dick was captain of the football team and president of
his senior class, but not a top student. His yearbook picture shows a beefy teenager with a crew
cut and a tight smile. His girlfriend was the homecoming queen, Lynne Vincent,
whom he would marry in 1964.

After graduation, he went to Yale, but his grades were poor; he flunked out twice and left
after three semesters. He traveled around the West, at one point laying lines for a power
company, and was arrested twice for drunken driving before settling down at the University
of Wyoming in Laramie, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in 1966,
both in political science. America was at war in Vietnam, but Mr. Cheney never served in the
military, winning four deferments as a student and one as a married parent.





President Gerald Ford introduced his chief of staff, Dick Cheney and chairman of his
election committee, Jim Baker, in Vail, Colorado, in August 1976.



He intended to teach, but an internship in the Wyoming Legislature in 1964 whetted his taste
for politics. A prizewinning 60-page report he wrote on the legislature propelled him to a 1966
internship in the office of Gov. Warren P. Knowles of Wisconsin, a Republican. In Madison,
he also enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin, but never finished.

Instead, he went to work in Washington in 1968 at the office of Representative William A. Steiger,
Republican of Wisconsin. Mr. Cheney was 27 and thrived in the cauldron of politics on Capitol Hill.
He learned fast, was a deft report writer and impressed Mr. Steiger and other House members,
including Mr. Rumsfeld, who at the time represented a district in Illinois.

When President Nixon appointed Mr. Rumsfeld to lead the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969,
Mr. Cheney sent Mr. Rumsfeld a 12-page memorandum on how to run the agency. Struck by his
ideas and audacity, Mr. Rumsfeld hired him as his executive assistant and liaison to Congress.

In the 1970s, Mr. Cheney hitched onto Mr. Rumsfeld’s rising star. When Mr. Nixon chose Mr. Rumsfeld
to direct the Cost of Living Council in 1971, Mr. Cheney went along as deputy.
When President Gerald R. Ford named Mr. Rumsfeld the White House chief of staff in 1974,
Mr. Cheney became deputy chief of staff. And when Mr. Ford appointed Mr. Rumsfeld
secretary of defense in 1975, Mr. Cheney moved up to become chief of the White House staff — the
youngest, at 34, ever to hold the post.

He also made connections — with the elder George Bush, Mr. Ford’s C.I.A. director, who became
a lifelong ally; with Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Mr. Ford and later to Mr. Bush;
and with James A. Baker III, President Ford’s 1976 campaign manager and Mr. Bush’s secretary of state.

After Mr. Ford’s defeat in 1976, Mr. Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he loved to hunt, fish,
ski and backpack in the Tetons. He worked in banking, but hankered for a return to public life and
ran for Congress in 1978. Wyoming, then as now, had only one representative. His first heart attack
interrupted his campaign, but his wife stood in for him on the stump, and he won in a landslide.

Entering Congress in 1979, Mr. Cheney was one of a new breed of Western Republicans anticipating
the dawn of the Reagan era — bully advocates of smaller government, lower taxes, cuts for
everything but the military and a tough revival of anti-communism. In a decade on Capitol Hill,
he voted a solid conservative line and was re-elected five times by voters who liked his folksy
ways and his record.

Mr. Cheney voted for prayer in public schools, restrictions on abortions and virtually all of
President Ronald Reagan’s agenda. He voted against gun controls, AIDS research, organized
labor, welfare programs, busing for school desegregation and spending for education. But to
many colleagues, he was more than his voting record. He was known as a skilled negotiator,
able to work with both parties.

During Mr. Cheney’s tenure, Democrats controlled the House, and many of his votes were cast
in losing causes. Moreover, he was not responsible for any major legislation. But he was seen
as a leader, and in his final term was chosen as the Republican whip, No. 2 in the party’s hierarchy.



Ascent to the World Stage


In March 1989, President George H.W. Bush named Mr. Cheney secretary of defense, and the
two men, who sometimes wore cowboy boots with their pinstriped suits (born into wealth in
Connecticut, Mr. Bush had made Texas his adopted state), became friends. Mr. Bush relied on
him for advice on national security and legislative matters and valued his loyalty and discretion,
as his son would years later.

While Mr. Cheney never served in uniform, he helped redefine military policy after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. His Pentagon stewardship earned wide respect
among commanders, troops and civilian military experts. Mr. Cheney orchestrated a 25 percent
reduction in the armed forces in the early 1990s, canceling major weapons systems and closing
many military bases.

He also helped resolve several foreign problems for Mr. Bush. He coordinated a 1989 invasion of
Panama, whose dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega, was whisked away to Miami, convicted of
racketeering and imprisoned. Mr. Cheney also directed missions in Haiti and Somalia.

But what sealed the bond between the president and Mr. Cheney was the Persian Gulf war.
Mr. Bush regarded it as the triumph of his political life. When Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait in
August 1990, Mr. Cheney persuaded King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to let America deploy troops
to his country, and in 1991 he helped plan and execute the war that ousted the Iraqis.

While Mr. Cheney was overshadowed by two high-profile subordinates — General Powell, then
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the field
commander — Mr. Bush, who had a 90 percent approval rating in some polls after the war,
felt most indebted to his defense secretary and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation’s highest civilian honor.

When Mr. Bush left office, Mr. Cheney returned to private life for the first time since the 1970s.
In 1993 and 1994, he flirted with the idea of entering a presidential race, visiting 47 states to
assess his chances. But by 1995, he had decided against it and joined Halliburton, which he
helped build over the next five years into the world’s largest oil services company.

In 1999, as George W. Bush assembled a team for a presidential race, Mr. Cheney got involved
early, helping him choose foreign policy advisers. In 2000, after Mr. Bush locked up the nomination,
he asked Mr. Cheney if he wanted to be considered as a running mate. Mr. Cheney said no,
but agreed to help select one. He surveyed a dozen candidates, including Senator McCain and
General Powell.





Mr. Cheney developed an image as a Machiavellian paterfamilias that,
though not fully accurate, was never quite dispelled.


But it was Mr. Cheney who got the job, his selection undoubtedly influenced by his long
association with the Bush family. Mr. Bush, whose only government service had been not
quite six years as the governor of Texas, saw in Mr. Cheney much that he lacked: savvy
in foreign policy, national security and the intricacies of Washington. Mr. Cheney also lent
maturity to the ticket, and seemed especially qualified to serve as president if necessary.

The Democrats, led by their nominee, Vice President Gore, and his running mate,
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, attacked Mr. Cheney’s voting record and
his Halliburton ties, but Mr. Cheney deflected the critics and pledged to forfeit $3.9 million
in stock options. There were questions about his ability to withstand a punishing campaign,
but doctors found him up to the task. He was 59, not especially old for the ticket,
and only five years older than Mr. Bush, though he seemed older. By autumn,
he was attacking the Democrats with gusto.

After Election Day, as the contest dissolved into bickering and a recount in Florida,
Mr. Cheney assumed the role he would later take on in the White House, consulting
on all major decisions. The Supreme Court finally halted the recount, effectively
handing the election to Mr. Bush.

Mr. Cheney, who led the Bush transition team and seeded the new government’s upper
echelons with many of his political allies, took office as the nation’s 46th vice president
on Jan. 20, 2001, and immediately began to redefine the scope of the role.