Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents of US history, dies at 84

WASHINGTON AP Dick Cheney the hard-charging conservative who became one of the the majority powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U S history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq has died at age Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness according to a declaration from his family For decades Dick Cheney served our nation including as White House Chief of Staff Wyoming s Congressman Secretary of Defense and Vice President of the United States the declaration stated 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 We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country And we are lucky beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H W Bush before returning to constituents life as vice president under Bush s son George W Bush Cheney was in effect the chief operating officer of the younger Bush s presidency He had a hand often a commanding one in implementing decisions the greater part vital to the president and particular of surpassing interest to himself all while living with decades of heart sickness and post-administration a heart transplant Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept Years after leaving office he became a target of President Donald Trump especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump s desperate attempts to stay in power after his voting process defeat and his actions in the Jan riot at the Capitol In our nation s -year history there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump Cheney stated in a television ad for his daughter He tried to steal the last polling using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him He is a coward In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined Dick Cheney announced last year he was voting for their candidate Kamala Harris for president against Trump A survivor of five heart attacks Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in he now awoke each morning with a smile on my face thankful for the gift of another day an odd image for a figure who invariably seemed to be manning the ramparts His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism Cheney disclosed that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock In his time in office no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought Instead Cheney made it a setup of back channels from which to influence procedures on Iraq terrorism presidential powers vigor and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile detractors called it a smirk Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole he inquired It s a nice way to operate in fact A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left regime Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right He alleged links between the attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn t exist He noted U S troops would be welcomed as liberators they weren t He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May back when U S arrangement members had been killed not even half the toll by war s end For admirers he kept the faith in a shaky time resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it But well into Bush s second term Cheney s clout waned checked by courts or shifting political realities Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh recovery to suspected terrorists His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the attacks kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country s leadership With Bush out of town on that fateful day Cheney was a steady presence in the White House at least until Secret System agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect From the beginning Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain unspoken but well understood Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush Cheney was accorded power comparable in particular approaches to the presidency itself That bargain largely held up He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No guy Dave Gribbin a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper Wyoming and worked with him in Washington once mentioned He is congenitally discreet He is remarkably loyal As Cheney put it I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda that I was not going to be like bulk vice presidents and that was angling trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events The vice president called it one of the worst days of my life The victim his friend Harry Whittington recovered and promptly forgave him Comedians were relentless about it for months Whittington died in When Bush began his presidential quest he sought help from Cheney a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business Cheney led the group to find a vice presidential candidate Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing Together the pair faced a protracted postelection battle before they could claim preeminence A series of recounts and court challenges a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation s highest court left the nation in limbo for weeks Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before triumph was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time In office disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there On Capitol Hill Cheney lobbied for the president s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No Republican House leader Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No in town Bush didn t seem to mind and cracked a inadequate himself But such comments became less apt later in Bush s presidency as he clearly came into his own Cheney retired to Jackson Hole not far from where Liz Cheney a sparse years later bought a home establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in The fates of father and daughter grew closer too as the Cheney family became one of Trump s favorite targets Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter s defense in as she juggled her lead role on the committee examining Jan with trying to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming Liz Cheney s vote for Trump s impeachment after the insurrection earned her praise from countless Democrats and political observers outside Congress But that praise and her father s backing didn t keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No job in the House GOP leadership Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in when he was a congressional fellow He became a prot g of Rep Donald Rumsfeld R-Ill serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff the youngest ever at age Cheney held the post for months then returned to Casper where he had been raised and ran for the state s single congressional seat In that first race for the House Cheney suffered a mild heart attack prompting him to crack he was forming a group called Cardiacs for Cheney He still managed a decisive preeminence and went on to win five more terms In Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the - Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq s troops from Kuwait Between the two Bush administrations Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry Cheney was born in Lincoln Nebraska son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades He moved back to Wyoming eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent marrying her in He is survived by his wife by Liz and by a second daughter Mary