Ahmed Kamel – Egypt Daily News
Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful and polarizing figures in modern American politics, a vice president who reshaped U.S. national security policy after the September 11 attacks and helped lead the nation into two decades of war, has died at the age of 84.
According to a statement from his family, Cheney died surrounded by his wife of 61 years, Lynne, and their daughters, Liz and Mary, following complications from pneumonia and long-standing cardiac and vascular disease. “We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country,” the family said. “And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
As the 46th vice president, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, Cheney transformed the office into a command center of unprecedented influence. A veteran of Washington’s corridors of power, from the Ford and Nixon administrations to his tenure as defense secretary under George H.W. Bush, Cheney became synonymous with the aggressive U.S. response to global terrorism that defined the early 21st century.
Former President Bush paid tribute to his longtime partner in office, calling him “a decent, honorable man” and “among the finest public servants of his generation.” Other former presidents, including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, praised Cheney’s decades of service, even as they acknowledged the deep controversies surrounding his legacy.
A Life in Power
Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and raised in Casper, Wyoming. A scholarship student at Yale University, he struggled academically and left before graduating, returning home to work on power lines. After two drunk-driving arrests, he credited his future wife, Lynne Vincent, with steering him toward ambition and discipline. “She made it clear she wasn’t going to marry a lineman for the county,” he later said. “So I buckled down.” He went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.
Cheney rose swiftly in Washington. As an aide in the Nixon White House and later chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, he became known for his sharp intellect and calm under pressure. In Congress, representing Wyoming from 1979 to 1989, he earned a reputation as a pragmatic conservative with deep respect for executive power. As defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney oversaw the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Gulf War, operations widely praised for their military precision and swift execution.
After leaving government, Cheney served as CEO of the energy firm Halliburton Co., building both fortune and influence. When George W. Bush sought the presidency in 2000, Cheney was tapped to lead the search for a running mate, and ultimately chose himself. “During the process, I came to the conclusion that the selector was the best person to be selected,” Bush later joked.
The Vice President in Command
Cheney’s vice presidency redefined the boundaries of the role. Operating largely behind the scenes, he became a central architect of the administration’s war on terror. On September 11, 2001, as hijacked planes struck New York and Washington, Cheney directed the government’s initial response from a secure bunker beneath the White House. It was he who issued the extraordinary order authorizing the military to shoot down civilian airliners if they were deemed threats, a decision emblematic of his readiness to act decisively and unilaterally in moments of crisis.
In the years that followed, Cheney championed a doctrine of preemptive war and expansive executive power. He argued that the United States must confront threats before they materialized, a conviction that led directly to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Alongside Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials, he advanced claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. Both assertions were later discredited, and no such weapons were ever found.
The invasion plunged Iraq into years of bloodshed and instability. Various studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during the conflict, while millions were displaced. Independent researchers and humanitarian organizations have placed the number of war-related deaths between 200,000 and 600,000, with some later analyses suggesting even higher figures.
But the suffering of Iraq’s civilian population had already begun years earlier. During the 1990s, international sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War devastated the country’s infrastructure and public health system. United Nations reports estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children died due to malnutrition and disease linked to those sanctions, a figure famously cited during a 1996 60 Minutes interview with then–U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright. When asked whether the deaths were “worth it,” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it,” a statement she later said she regretted deeply.
The 2003 invasion, driven in large part by Cheney’s worldview, compounded that earlier tragedy. The war toppled Saddam Hussein but unleashed sectarian violence and instability that reshaped the Middle East and claimed countless additional civilian lives, including many children.
The Shadow Presidency
Cheney’s influence reached every corner of national security policy. He defended warrantless surveillance, the indefinite detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, and the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding, methods widely condemned as torture. To the end, Cheney insisted those measures were legal, moral, and necessary. “I would do it again in a minute,” he said in 2014 after a Senate report denounced the interrogation program as brutal and ineffective.
By the time he left office in 2009, Cheney had become one of the most divisive figures in U.S. politics. His approval rating stood at 31 percent, but he expressed no regrets. “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now,” he said in 2015.
Rift With His Party
In his final years, after receiving a heart transplant in 2012 that he called “the gift of life itself,” Cheney found himself increasingly estranged from the party he once helped to define. He condemned Donald Trump as “a coward” and “the greatest threat to our republic in its 246-year history.” His daughter, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, likewise sacrificed her political career to oppose Trump following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In 2024, the elder Cheney reportedly cast his final presidential vote for Democrat Kamala Harris, an extraordinary gesture from one of the Republican Party’s most enduring figures.
A Complex Legacy
Cheney’s life embodied the paradox of power in modern America: ruthless pragmatism combined with a deep conviction that security demanded strength. To supporters, he was a patriot who acted decisively in defense of the nation. To critics, he was an architect of overreach, responsible for policies that inflicted immense suffering abroad and undermined civil liberties at home.
He is survived by his wife, Lynne; his daughters, Liz and Mary Cheney; and seven grandchildren.
