Dick Cheney dies aged 84

Dick Cheney, the divisive US vice-president under George W Bush who helped lead the country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, died on Monday, his family has said. He was 84.

Cheney at various times held the roles of member of Congress, White House chief of staff and secretary of defense, but it was as one of the country’s most powerful vice-presidents that he had the biggest impact, wielding great influence over the less experienced Bush.

Cheney was in office on 11 September 2001 during the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While Bush was hurried to safety, Cheney worked with the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to assume policy control. Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al-Qaida.

But Cheney’s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq. He had been defense secretary during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and 1991, but now Cheney and Bush’s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaida and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge, and both were soon proved false. 

Although Cheney sought international cooperation, he also thought, he later wrote, that the Bush administration “had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America”.

The death toll was high. According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001 “at least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan”.

The treatment of prisoners taken by the US in its “war on terror” also proved hugely controversial. Out of office, Cheney continued to defend the use of torture against detainees after 9/11.

A Yale dropout who avoided service in Vietnam, Cheney nonetheless became a giant of Republican politics.

He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White House chief of staff, to Gerald Ford; a member of Congress under Ronald Reagan; secretary of defense to George HW Bush, and vice-president to George W Bush.

When the younger Bush plucked him from the Halliburton corporation to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, Cheney had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to mishap: once, while vice-president, he shot a hunting partner in the face.

Cheney underwent a successful heart transplant in 2012, after suffering premature heart disease, but was an “incredibly easy” patient to deal with, his long-term physician Jonathan Reiner told CNN.

The former-vice president was “never concerned about what people knew about his heart disease. He was very open about it,” Reiner said. “He was the easiest patient, unbelievably compliant. And I think that’s one of the reasons why he was able to live such a long and full life.”

Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, followed him into Republican politics as a US House representative from Wyoming in the same seat her father had held while a congressman, but she was censured by the party after strongly criticising Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection.

The elder Cheney also attended an event to mark the first anniversary of the attack alongside his daughter, where he expressed “deep disappointment” in Republican party leadership, saying: “It’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks that I knew when I was here for 10 years” and that “you can’t overestimate how important [January 6] is”.

Cheney announced in 2024 that he would vote for Kamala Harris rather than the Republican nominee Trump, saying that “in our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and that he felt a duty to “put country above partisanship to defend our constitution”.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, on the release of Vice, a darkly comic biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: “There has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. In comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader. I don’t think there’ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.”