Dick Cheney obituary: One of the most powerful and polarising politicians of his generation

Mr Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Mr Bush’s presidency.

He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant.

Mr Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.

Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Mr Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the January 6 2021 riot at the Capitol.

In a television advert for his daughter, Mr Cheney said: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election 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 said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Mr Trump.

A survivor of five heart attacks, Mr Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 that he awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day”, an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.

His vice presidency was defined by the age of terrorism and Mr Cheney disclosed that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear that terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.

In his time in office, the vice presidency was no longer merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Mr Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.

Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile – detractors called it a smirk – Mr Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.

A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Mr Cheney was proved wrong time after time in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.

He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and pre-war Iraq that didn’t exist. He said US troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t. He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 US service 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 George W Bush’s second term, Mr 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 treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by the president.

Mr Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from George W Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.

With the president out of town on that fateful day, Mr Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect.

From the beginning, Mr Cheney and George W Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Mr Bush, Mr Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.

That bargain largely held up.

Mr Cheney’s penchant for secrecy and backstage manoeuvring 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 2006, 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 quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Mr Whittington died in 2023.

When George W Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Mr Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business, to find a vice presidential candidate.

Mr Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.

Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 post-election battle before they could claim victory. 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.

Mr Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped to give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time.

Jokes abounded about how Mr Cheney was the real number one in town; George W Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Mr Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.

Mr Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney, a few years later, bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in 2016.

The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Mr Trump’s favourite targets.

Mr Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defence in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating what happened on January 6 with trying to get re-elected in deeply conservative Wyoming.

Politics first lured Mr Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protege of Republican Donald Rumsfeld, 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 aged 34.

Mr Cheney held the post for 14 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, Mr Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to joke that he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney”. He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.

In 1989, he became defence secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait.

Between the two Bush administrations, Mr Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp, a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry. Mr Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a long-time 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 1964.

He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.