Born in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II and fundamentally transformed its relationship with the wider world, Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney parlayed connections and conviction into a meteoric rise to the epicenter of U.S. political life by the time he reached his mid-30s. He remained there for nearly four decades. Cheney died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease on Nov. 3, at age 84.
Soft-spoken and supremely confident in his own judgment, Cheney’s career epitomized the transformational possibilities—and crippling anxieties—of his country’s ever-evolving role in the world. He balked at the post-Vietnam restraints placed on the deployment of U.S. forces overseas, initially questioned and then shared the triumphalism of the United States’ Cold War and Gulf War victories at the outset of the 1990s, embodied Washington’s fearful and aggressive reaction to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and ultimately, in pursuit of perfect security in a chaotic world, helped orchestrate the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq that surely ranks among the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.
By the time he formally left public office in 2009, his counsel was largely ignored, and his country was poorer, weaker, more divided, and less globally popular than when he had begun. It also had not suffered another 9/11-like attack on the U.S. homeland.
Dick Cheney listens to others speak
Deputy Chief of Staff Cheney listens in the Cabinet room of the White House in Washington during the Mayaguez crisis on April 18, 1975. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Reared in Nebraska and Wyoming, Cheney’s youth revealed the intelligence required to succeed in public life but not the discipline. Twice dismissed from Yale University after spending too much time with classmates who “shared my belief that beer was one of the essentials of life,” he returned home to a construction job and an uncertain future. “I was headed down a bad road after I had been kicked out of Yale. I was arrested twice for DUI when I was 22 years old,” Cheney recalled in 2015, using the acronym for driving under the influence. “I was in jail … and that was a wake-up call.” Equally motivating was an ultimatum from his high school sweetheart, Lynn Vincent, whom he later explained “made it clear eventually that she had no interest in marrying a lineman for the county.”
At the same time, Cheney had no interest in involving himself in the U.S. military’s quagmire in Vietnam. He received five family and academic draft deferments. “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” he said decades later, including graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where Lynn studied literature and he pursued a doctorate in political science that he never finished. Once he had aged out of eligibility for military conscription, Cheney eagerly accepted a congressional fellowship that offered him a chance to engage in politics, not merely study it.
“I flunked the interview,” he explained of his first meeting with Donald Rumsfeld, then a young Illinois representative. Fellows had to find congressional sponsors, and, having failed to impress Rumsfeld enough to gain a place on his staff, Cheney initially settled into the office of U.S. Rep. William Steiger of Wisconsin. Rumsfeld nonetheless hired Cheney later to work for him at President Richard Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Rumsfeld and Cheney remained politically and personally entwined for decades. When President Gerald Ford asked Rumsfeld to lead his White House staff in 1974, Cheney became his principal assistant at the age of 33.
Dick Cheney talks with Donald Rumsfeld and Betty Ford.
First lady Betty Ford chats with White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld (left) and his deputy, Cheney, in an unidentified office of the West Wing on Nov. 16, 1974. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Cheney’s astounding ascent from congressional fellow to presidential adviser in a mere five years proved the power of proximity and personal connections but also of perseverance. He overcame his initial poor impression on Rumsfeld by volunteering an unsolicited reorganization plan for the OEO, and he proved himself loyal, reliable, and available as Rumsfeld rose to national prominence. “When you gave something to Dick,” another OEO staffer explained, “it happened. It got done.”
Ford took notice. When a broad reorganization took Rumsfeld to the top spot at the Department of Defense in 1975, the president elevated Cheney to chief of staff. At age 34, he was the youngest White House chief of staff in history and became the no-nonsense functionary that Ford’s troubled administration required. “Dick is great,” Ford said, “he comes in, he’s got 10 items to cover, he covers them and he leaves.”
Dick Cheney talks on a couch
As Ford’s newly designated chief of staff, Cheney is pictured in his office at the White House on Nov. 5, 1975. UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
He also proved to be an effective hatchet-man. “My method was direct,” Cheney subsequently explained of his growing facility with, and reputation for, firing others. “No hints, cold shoulders or slow agonizing departures. Those were not good for anyone—neither the president nor the person being fired.” He had only one constituent as chief of staff, and ultimately cared for one opinion alone. “Anyone failing to serve the president’s interests,” he explained, “intentionally or not, simply needed to move along.”
Dick Cheney leans over to talk with President Gerald Ford.
Chief of Staff Cheney and President Gerald R. Ford look over documents in the living room of the Aspen Lodge during a weekend trip to Camp David in Maryland on Aug. 7, 1976. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Cheney’s blunt prioritization of his superior’s agenda bolstered his job security even as it obscured his political leanings. This was intentional. His only agenda was Ford’s, an unelected president elevated in the wake of the Watergate political scandal and Nixon’s resignation. He was “absolutely loyal to me,” the politically-moderate Ford concluded, even though another aide thought Cheney “somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld, or for that matter, Genghis Khan.”
Cheney’s early White House stint shaped his approach to bureaucratic politics and fueled his innate disdain for constraints on presidential power. In that respect, he was bucking the conventional wisdom that the presidency had grown too omnipotent in foreign affairs over the course of incessant security crises in the 20th century. It was too “imperial,” as historian Arthur Schlesinger argued in 1973. Quagmire and defeat in Southeast Asia were symptoms of a larger problem of unrestrained executive power, this line of reasoning ran, which demanded constitutional rebalancing.
Cheney disagreed. Presidential restraints only eroded U.S. power, he argued, particularly its military effectiveness. Foreign policy often required hard choices not always best served by sunlight and scrutiny. Sometimes the commander in chief—much like an effective chief of staff—would have to conceal his real methods and motivations in pursuit of national priorities. “A lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam … served to erode the [president’s] authority,” he explained years later.
Dick Cheney rides in a bumper car.
Cheney takes a spin on the bumper cars during a campaign swing with Ford through Dallas on Oct. 9, 1976. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
The real constitutional issue, Cheney reasoned, was that the modern world was far speedier and more interconnected than the Constitution’s authors could ever have imagined. “Especially in the day and age we live in,” he said in 2005, though similar sentiments can be found from every decade of his political life, “the nature of the threats we face … the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired.” The real lesson of Vietnam wasn’t that unabashed force didn’t work, Cheney concluded. It was that force had been overly constrained.
“Consumed with the trauma of Watergate and Vietnam, we have tampered with the relationship between the executive branch and the Congress in ways designed primarily to avoid future abuses of power, similar to those that are alleged to have happened in the past,” he told a forum at the American Enterprise Institute at the outset of the 1980s. “We in the United States are likely to find that sometime during the decade of the 1980s we will have to resort to force someplace in the world,” Cheney warned. To prepare for that inevitable day of reckoning, “we must reduce the trend of the last few years, or we will have undermined presidential authority.”
Dick Cheney listens to Ronald Reagan.
President Ronald Reagan meets with Republican leaders, including Wyoming Rep. Cheney, to discuss the 1984 budget impasse on May 17, 1983. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Ford lost the 1976 election, leaving Cheney untethered. Embracing his independence, he ran for Wyoming’s sole seat in the House of Representatives, winning handily in 1978. Yet a cloud hung over him. While campaigning, Cheney had suffered a frightening heart attack, the first of a series of cardiac incidents he would face in the coming years. Chastened by the experience, he quit his three-packs-a-day cigarette habit and limited his coffee intake. But he did not, despite the advice of family and friends, quit politics. “The smart thing that some prudent person would do is quit this crazy life you’re leading,” he said, explaining the thinking of those close to him. “You had a heart attack. Just bag it, go home, take it easy. You can’t live your life like this and expect to survive with family obligations.”
He returned instead to the political fray and rocketed up the Republican ranks. The youngest congressman elected to be chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, he cultivated a reputation for reconciliation over ideological rigidity, despite amassing—in line with his constituents’ leanings—one of the most consistently conservative voting records in Congress. He once lambasted a reporter in a late-night phone call for having dared refer to him in print as a “moderate,” yet became known as a Capitol Hill dealmaker and a man of his word.
None of which changed his unshakable faith in presidential authority. “I just basically disagree with those who think we need additional restrictions on the president’s conduct of foreign policy,” he wrote at the close of President Ronald Reagan’s first term. “We do not need further restrictions … we need a president who is free to successfully use the tools at his command” and liberated from the fear of being second-guessed by ill-informed legislators. Unusually for a legislator, especially in this era, he promoted executive authority, praising its efficiency, flexibility, and ability to forcefully solve problems while others merely dithered. “If [the president] makes a mistake, obviously we pay a price for it,” he said in 1983. “But we have to trust him to make certain decisions. To keep coming back to the notion that every set of circumstances in which military force might be used lends itself to consultation and legal arguments is nice, but the world doesn’t work that way.”
The Reagan White House’s frequent disregard for legislative input did not help Cheney’s case. Revelations of unsanctioned and illegal foreign policy maneuvers grew during Reagan’s second term, coalescing into the broader Iran-Contra scandal. Still, Cheney was unimpressed by the critics. Presidents needed protectors, too, he reasoned when leading the minority report on the formal investigation into the administration’s malfeasance. “I took it as my responsibility as the senior Republican on the House side to do everything I could to support and defend” Reagan’s choices. However wrong, they’d been made by smart men with the nation’s security in mind, Cheney argued, and should thus be evaluated leniently after the fact or, better yet, not at all.
Dick Cheney listens to soldiers.
As secretary of defense, Cheney is briefed on the capabilities of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Kirch-Gons, West Germany, on Oct. 26, 1989. Bettmann/Getty Images
As the second-ranking Republican in the House in early 1989, Cheney eyed the speaker’s gavel, yet he remained interested in returning to the White House. And fate, coupled with connections, intervened once more. President George H.W. Bush’s first choice for defense secretary, fellow Texan John Tower, was rejected by the Senate that year. Bush turned to Cheney, largely on the advice of his secretary of state, James Baker, and national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Each had worked with Cheney during Ford’s presidency. Each praised his competence, trusted his judgment, and perhaps most importantly at that moment, felt confident he’d quickly win confirmation. They also knew first-hand Cheney’s enthusiasm for presidential power. When Baker turned to Cheney for advice in 1980 after being named Reagan’s White House chief of staff, the first thing Wyoming’s lone congressman advised was “restore power and authority to the executive branch.”
It was a heady and daunting time to be secretary of defense. Superpower relations appeared in flux as the Cold War neared its end, with ripple effects throughout the world. One such ripple occurred in the Middle East. Cheney was a principal orchestrator of the war—led by the United States and sanctioned by the United Nations—to reverse Iraq’s attempted conquest of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. Yet he was not among the war’s early proponents. “The rest of the world badly needs oil,” Cheney told the president and his National Security Council during their first emergency meeting after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion. “They have little interest in poor Kuwait.” Neither, Cheney argued, should the United States. Kuwait’s oil was all that really mattered.
He applied a similar cold calculus to Soviet reforms and the prospect of a new, more peaceful era in superpower relations. Whereas others applauded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s promises to democratize, Cheney remained among the skeptics within the administration’s highest ranks about the sincerity and even the advisability of Gorbachev’s proposed reforms. “There are those who want to declare the Cold War ended,” Cheney publicly argued soon after taking over at the Pentagon in 1989. “They perceive a significantly lessened threat and want to believe that we can reduce our level of vigilance accordingly. But I believe caution is in order.” Those words frightened Gorbachev, who called British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to complain that Bush was too influenced by those like Cheney who believe “the success of our perestroika, the development of a new image of the Soviet Union, is not beneficial to the West.”
Dick Cheney talks with President George H.W. Bush.
President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Cheney discuss the run-up to Operation Desert Storm as they walk near the Rose Garden at the White House circa 1991. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Gorbachev would have been even more worried if he’d heard what Cheney really thought. “We have every reason to hope that people now subjected to dictatorial rule may be given a breath of freedom,” he wrote during his first summer at the Pentagon. “Hopes, however, cannot rule defense policy. We cannot be certain what the outcome of glasnost and perestroika will be, nor can we be certain that a more modern Soviet economy means a less threatening Soviet military.” Therefore, Cheney reasoned, “it would be dangerous—extremely dangerous—to believe we should abandon a policy that works [to contain and counter Soviet power], just because we have some reason to hope.”
The mere possibility that Gorbachev might be faking, or that his success might lead to a newly resurgent Soviet bear, was reason enough for Cheney to advise keeping his country’s defenses up. Still, Cheney’s belief in presidential authority included unwavering fealty to his boss. Told that his views were out of line with Bush’s thinking, Cheney immediately hewed to the administration’s line, both on the Soviet Union and Kuwait. To his way of thinking, anyone who worked for the president had only one true customer and constituent, who happened to be the most powerful man in the world.
Dick Cheney and Colin Powell appear under a large American flag.
Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, address U.S. military personnel in a hangar at a secret F-11 base somewhere in Saudi Arabia in 1991. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
It fell to Cheney and Colin Powell, at the time chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to develop and then execute a war plan for Kuwait, and the pair did not hesitate to ask for all the military power they could. This wouldn’t be another Vietnam. This time, there would be “no excuse possible for anybody in the military to say that the civilian side of the house had not supported them,” Cheney recalled.
“You got it,” Bush said, standing up from the table and exiting the room following the request from Cheney and Powell. “Let me know if you need more.” Cheney was shocked but also pleased. “Does he know what he just authorized?” he asked aloud, more for confirmation than out of disbelief. Bush had given his war managers free rein to make the most of American power, leeway that had been unavailable to their Vietnam era predecessors.
The largest U.S. overseas military expedition in a generation ensued, and it worked. Cheney and Powell advised, however, that Bush should end the fighting once Kuwait’s liberation was assured and avoid any step that might result in a long-term occupation of Iraq. Surprised by the speed of their victory, Bush asked whether it was really time to end the war after a mere 100 hours of ground combat. “The unanimous view of those of us who were there, civilian and military, was yes,” Cheney later said. “Our objective was to liberate Kuwait.”
That objective achieved, it was time to declare victory and collect the accolades of thankful allies while reaping the respect of those around the world who trembled at the vivid display of U.S. military might. “The United States clearly emerges from all this as the one real superpower in the world,” Cheney crowed. The spectral detritus of Vietnam was at long last exorcised. “The capacity of the United States for leadership,” he said, “has been demonstrated once again.” No other nation on earth could match its speed, wealth, or lethality.
Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf celebrate.
Cheney, Powell, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf appear at the Gulf War Victory Parade on Broadway in New York on June 10, 1991. Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images
The key to this success was that the United States had not been sucked into another quagmire, particularly one ill-suited to its military and technological advantages. American forces owned the air, the night, and the region’s wide desert expanse. It couldn’t say the same for cities, or for controlling civilians, a point Cheney emphasized to any who might listen, and in particular to his president. Had the United States captured Hussein and toppled his government, “then the question is what do you put in its place,” he explained in 1992. “You then have accepted responsibility for governing Iraq.” Moreover, “the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth … and the answer is not very damned many.” Cheney thought the same in 2000. “I still think we made the right decision there,” he told an oral history only unsealed after his vice presidency. “I don’t think we should have gone to Baghdad” in 1991.
The irony of those words is unlikely to lessen no matter how long U.S. history is studied and taught. Cheney championed just such an occupation 10 years later, and a generation of U.S. and allied troops—and millions of Iraqis—paid in blood to prove his initial assessment correct. What changed in the interim was Hussein’s surprising survival, a persistent sore that Cheney, like many post-Cold War triumphalists, considered a dangerous rebuke of U.S. leadership, and thus an impediment to U.S. hegemony.
Dick Cheney points and George W. Bush laughs.
Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush (right) and his running-mate Cheney look out at the crowd during their first trip in Casper, Wyoming, on July 26, 2000. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
Hussein barely survived in 1991, yet he thumbed his nose at international sanctions and U.S. pressure for the remainder of the decade. Back in the halls of power after a razor-thin Republican victory in the 2000 campaign, Cheney was determined to finish the job. “Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?” he provocatively asked George W. Bush when the president debated new diplomatic measures in the lead-up to the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq. Diplomacy, Cheney thought, would not fully demonstrate U.S. strength, nor the awesome power at the president’s disposal.
Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney walk away from the White House.
Cheney and his wife, Lynne, depart the White House after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Dick Cheney sits on an airplane.
Cheney appears onboard Marine Two en route to Camp David. David Bohrer/U.S. National Archives Photos
Dick Cheney talks with George W. Bush.
Cheney and Bush discuss the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. David Bohrer/U.S. National Archives
Fear prompted the change. A consistent advocate of executive authority throughout his career, what changed his mind about Iraq—and the need to topple Hussein even given the responsibility of occupation—was the fear generated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Ensconced in the White House bunker far below street level as hijacked planes streaked towards Washington, Cheney for the first time felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of violence and power. It was traumatic yet clarifying. Flying over a smoldering Pentagon at the end of that unforgettable day, he recalled later, “I started thinking about how we should respond, how we can bring to bear the power and influence of the United States.”
Cheney had been brought onto the Republican national ticket the previous year (he also ran the selection process) to lend both gravitas and experience to a nominee with little foreign policy experience. Now he became a catalyst for a maximally aggressive response to the new terrorist threat. Working with his old partner Rumsfeld, who was reprising his role as secretary of defense, Cheney helped center the U.S. response at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency rather than at the State Department. He was focused on using hard U.S. military power instead of its softer resources of influence and prestige. The celebration of interconnectivity, democratic peace, and globalism led by the United States had brought death and destruction to his nation’s homeland. Force protected better.
Dick Cheney talks with Donald Rumsfeld.
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld confer in Washington on Oct. 6, 2001, the day before the U.S. unleashed retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
“As I saw it, the State Department had it backwards,” Cheney wrote of its culturally-ingrained penchant for negotiation before action. Diplomacy took time and, to Cheney’s thinking, its proponents simply failed to appreciate how much the world had changed that September morning. “Rather than compromising on policies that were in our national interest out of concern that we would offend other nations,” he argued, “we should do what served our security best, while undertaking diplomatic efforts to bring our allies and partners along.”
Cheney’s message at the time was clear, blunt, and full of warning. “If you provide sanctuary to terrorists, you face the full wrath of the United States of America,” he publicly warned days after the 9/11 attacks, adding that this would not be a clean conflict one might cheer at the movies. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.” Americans would have to “work sort of the dark side,” he said. Within days, his office helped craft guidelines for a new kind of war, one waged against a concept as much as an enemy, in which previously unthinkable tools and tactics, including torture, took on new purchase.
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Not everyone agreed. “If we do some of these things,” then-FBI Director Robert Mueller cautioned Bush, “it may impair our ability to prosecute” terrorist perpetrators. Powell, now serving as secretary of state, also feared that too bellicose a global response might ultimately erode the international goodwill generated by the smoke and rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. “Nous sommes tous Américains,” French for “We are all Americans,” a headline in Le Monde proclaimed. “If we want to go it alone, and say we know what’s best, and lose the support of the world,” Powell told reporters, “then I think we will have made a strategic mistake.”
Cheney considered world opinion nice but not necessary when it came to protecting the homeland from another terrorist strike, and much like congressional oversight over presidential action in the 1970s, potentially constraining. We must “not allow our mission to be determined by others,” he told colleagues. “We had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America, and we needed coalition partners who would sign on for that.” But such a coalition must never hinder Washington’s ability to act, and “the mission” of homeland security “should define the coalition, not the other way around,” he said.
Dick Cheney waves to the troops.
Cheney waves to military and family at a troop rally in Fort Riley, Kansas, on April 18, 2006. Larry W. Smith/Getty Images
Cheney spearheaded Bush’s response, especially its more sensitive (read: potentially illegal) aspects, including the administration’s authorization to capture or eliminate suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world, the indefinite detainment of captured suspected fighters and their supporters, and aggressive pursuit—including through the use of torture—of any useful information they might potentially offer. “Extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation,” Bush and Cheney’s lawyers called their new programs, which were justified less by new legislation than aggressive interpretation of existing laws and open-ended authorizations. “We could have gone to Congress … and gotten any statutory change we wanted,” a federal judge involved in implementing the new policies explained. But this White House “wanted to demonstrate that the president’s power was supreme.”
Bush’s violations of international laws and norms, exemplified by the Kafkaesque quality of indeterminate detention in public view at places like the U.S. military compound at Guantanamo Bay, and then more crudely in violent images produced in places like the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq, ultimately harmed the United States’ reputation. International support for the U.S. assault on global terrorism waned, as did a more fundamental trust of American leadership, especially among longtime allies. Seventy-eight percent of Germans polled in 2000 held a favorable view of the United States. By 2007 that number had fallen to 30 percent. In Britain, the numbers were 83 percent when the Bush administration took office, and 53 percent when it left. French public support nearly halved. Fewer than one in 10 Turks polled viewed the United States favorably by 2007. Among global powers, only the Russians thought more of the United States by the close of Bush’s time in office than they had in 2001.
Once more, Cheney was unmoved. Public opinion didn’t make policy—nor did foreigners vote in U.S. elections—and strict legality was a philosophical question posed by those too timid to do what was necessary to keep the American people safe or those so far from actual responsibility as to make their opinions meaningless. “Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?” he rhetorically asked. “Or are you going to do your job, do what’s required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens?”
A man holds his hand to his face while another holds up a newspaper.
A relative of an Iraqi prisoner being held by U.S. authorities at the Abu Ghraib prison reacts to photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners inside the detention center on May 8, 2004. ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
After-the-fact critics, including congressional investigators, called administration practices “torture.” Cheney preferred “enhanced interrogation techniques” and made the case that “all of the techniques that were authorized by the president were, in effect, blessed by the Justice Department.” Besides, he argued more vehemently, quibbling over words and definitions missed the point of U.S. policy, which was to keep its citizens safe. “Given the choice between doing what we did, or backing off and saying, ‘We know you know that there’s a terrorist attack against the United States, but we’re not going to force you to tell us what it is because it might create a bad image for us,’” he continued, “well, that’s not a close call for me.”
Cheney’s faith in torture was misguided, or at least disputed, by the overwhelming majority of experts who doubt and discount—if not absolutely disregard—any information gleaned under obvious duress. People in pain will say whatever they must to convince their torturers to stop. Still, Cheney believed otherwise. Torture worked, he claimed, and in the War on Terror, the Bush administration had no choice but to favor necessity over international niceties. 9/11 had been bad. It could have been worse. The next terrorist strike—and another one seemed certain—might prove unfathomable.
Cheney developed what chronicler Ron Suskind dubbed the “the one percent doctrine,” referring to the most basic way risk assessments were calculated by plotting the likelihood of an event against its potential consequence. Given that the next attack might be nuclear or biological, and thus with unfathomably horrible effects, even the slightest risk was unacceptable. “If there is a one percent chance” of a threat being real, Cheney repeatedly warned Bush’s national security team, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”
On that basis, the United States led a military coalition to remove Hussein from power and eliminate his alleged active weapons of mass destruction program that had, in fact, been shuttered years before. Cheney was the administration’s cheerleader, stating unequivocally what others in the intelligence and national security communities did not conclude from the available evidence. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he publicly warned by early 2002, even as fighting still raged in Afghanistan against those who had designed and supported the 9/11 attacks. “There is no doubt [Hussein] is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us,” he said.
There was similarly no doubt, Cheney proclaimed with the cool certainty that had long become his trademark, that the Middle East and indeed the entire world would be better off without the Iraqi despot. “Things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people,” he explained days before the start of the same U.S.-led occupation he had once counseled against, “my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
Dick Cheney walks next to troops.
Cheney meets with U.S. troops stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq on March 18, 2008. PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images
Neither the war in Iraq nor the global war on terror played out as Cheney foretold. He and his immediate subordinates marshalled the evidence and arguments against Hussein recklessly, contemporary observers and subsequent scholars agree. We might expect such criticism from Democrats, but belief that the Bush administration, and Cheney in particular, were hell-bent on going to war in Iraq no matter the quality of the intelligence transcends traditional partisan lines.
Republican stalwarts such as former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and (briefly) Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, for example, questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq before the shooting commenced. They had experience on their side but not the inside vantage point of Bush’s one-time press secretary, who in 2008 noted the White House’s “lack of candor and honesty in making the case for war.” Other critics abound. Even if few influential voices were willing to bare their skepticism at the time, a generation after the war began, policymakers and pundits willing to praise the invasion remain few and far between. “Knowing what we know now,” presidential brother and presidential candidate Jeb Bush admitted in 2016, “I would not have gone into Iraq.”
Stronger charges ensued. “They lied,” presidential candidate Donald Trump declared in 2016. Both Cheney and Bush “said there were weapons of mass destruction, and there were none.” More importantly, Trump continued, “they knew there were none.” Trump, by any measure, is an unreliable barometer of either truth or historical accuracy. But by assigning not merely incompetence but malfeasance to Bush, Cheney, and other pro-invasion hawks, he was tapping a vein of popular discontent and distrust among the American electorate on the issue: A little more than half of those polled in early 2004 believed the administration “exaggerated or lied about prewar intelligence.” Flash-forward 15 years and fully two-thirds of those polled, including 64 percent of U.S. military veterans, considered the military crusade begun after 9/11, and catalyzed by the Iraq invasion in 2003, “not worth fighting.”
Future historians will wonder, and no doubt debate, whether Cheney erred in believing Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program or knowingly cherry-picked disparate data points to make it appear so. That debate will no doubt make careers, reputations, and tenure decisions. Some things are already indisputable: Cheney advocated for the war. Cheney publicly and confidently stated not only that Hussein possessed WMDs at that moment and desired more, but also that he might secretly give them to terrorists to use against the United States. Cheney assuredly promised the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq would be welcome and relatively easy. And ultimately, Cheney’s counsel mattered in Bush’s decision to approve what will go down in history as perhaps the single worst strategic decision in the history of U.S. foreign and military affairs.
Defeat in Iraq, as with Watergate and Vietnam a generation before, dissolved U.S. public confidence in the government. This defeat did not directly cause what some today consider the deepest political crisis in our nation’s history since the Civil War, with partisanship soaring and memory of the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the U.S. Capitol still fresh. But defeat exacerbated fissures. Trillions of dollars spent, tens of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers, weakened U.S. standing in the world, and a loss of faith by Americans in their institutions continue to scar U.S. society years after Cheney left office in 2009.
Dick Cheney holds his hands to his face.
Cheney participates in a discussion on the Sept. 11 attacks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Sept. 9, 2011. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
To the end of his days, Cheney defended himself, in part, by arguing that real life demands that political leaders make hard choices with imperfect information. “I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.” Such a view invalidated inaction. Invading and occupying Iraq was “the right thing to do,” he maintained in 2018, and given the same information, he’d advise so again. “We looked at [the intelligence] in 47 different ways, and in the end, I’m convinced that we did the right thing that needed to be done.” Results matter, he insisted. “I think the world is a better place without Saddam in it. I think the president had all the justification he needed” back in 2003, he said. Ultimately, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war on terror after 9/11, “we did what needed to be done.”
Cheney lived a remarkable life. Yet his impressive Washington resume and decades of service will ultimately fade into the background, as will his track record as a principled conservative. His primary legacy will instead be his consistent—and ultimately damaging—exertion of executive authority.
When assessing how much weight to afford the Iraq quagmire, the war he left unfinished in Afghanistan, or the United States’ damaged international standing and empty treasury when considering Cheney’s legacy, recall his words from 1983: The real world demands certainty, and men and women willing to make decisions that would quake most souls. If a president, aided by his or her top advisors, “makes a mistake, obviously we pay a price for it,” but “we have to trust [the president] to make certain decisions.”
Cheney and Bush left office with record low public approval ratings. The economy faced its steepest downturn since the Great Depression, war continued with little positive end in sight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s global reputation was profoundly damaged. Yet Cheney felt validated, touting above all else, and with characteristic confidence, the absence of a second major terrorist strike on his country’s homeland in the wake of 9/11. “It worked,” he said in 2009 of the comprehensive national security strategy he helped design. “If it was my call, I’d do it again.”
Others, including the president in whose administration he served for two full terms, had long since stopped listening. Bush, an early convert and conveyer of Cheney’s anxious threat estimates, largely ignored his counsel by the end of his second term. Pressed by Cheney to strike Iran’s budding nuclear program in 2007 and vexed by Cheney’s repeated assertion that his administration needed to “take care of” Iran’s weapons of mass destruction potential before he left office, Bush rejected the advice. “Does anyone else here agree with the vice president?” Bush asked his principal advisors after his vice president pushed for an immediate military strike. As Cheney later recalled, “not a single hand went up around the room.”
