The triumph and tragedy of Dick Cheney

Former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Tuesday. He had one of the most consequential political careers in American history marked by spectacular achievements and enormous setbacks.

Cheney’s career really began with his association with Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a young Republican go-getter who had served in Congress and quickly made his way into administrative positions with the Nixon White House. Cheney conceived ways to impress Rumsfeld and caught a trip on the rising politician’s rocket. By the time of the Ford administration in the mid-1970s, Cheney found himself in the position of White House Chief of Staff at the extraordinary age of 34, meaning Cheney held one of the most consequential and stressful positions in the White House in his early 30s. Not long after, he would have the first of five heart attacks.

After Ford’s defeat, Cheney would go on to win the sole Wyoming seat in Congress and hold it for a decade. With George H.W. Bush’s victory in 1988 (essentially a third Reagan term), Cheney became the secretary of defense, a position in which he would experience his greatest success. When the United States convincingly defeated Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army to liberate Kuwait, Cheney’s boss Bush enjoyed some of the highest approval ratings any American president has ever achieved. Later, Cheney would explore his own presidential run but found that his leadership skills did not translate well to national retail politics.

His lack of charisma is part of what made it puzzling when the fast-ascending Texas governor George W. Bush turned to Cheney to run with him as candidate for vice president in 2000. Cheney had been tapped to find a running mate for Bush, not to be the running mate. Typically, the second position on the ticket is chosen to add some kind of electoral advantage. Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson and the famous “Boston to Austin” connection is the classic example. Cheney brought little help with Wyoming’s tiny population, but what he did have that Bush lacked was experience in national government. At the time, the word the media used was gravitas. The failure to choose a running mate from a populous state nearly cost Bush when the 2000 race ended with one of the closest margins ever.

Cheney went on to become arguably the most powerful vice president in American history. This time, he would bring Donald Rumsfeld along in his wake rather than the other way around, with the elderly Rumsfeld becoming the oldest and youngest person ever to serve as secretary of defense when he won Senate confirmation. (Rumsfeld had held the office during the Ford administration, as well.) The team of Cheney and Rumsfeld enjoyed star treatment as the U.S. government began its response to the tragic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which led to the overthrow of the long rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and his execution.

As the war dragged on, losses mounted, and disgraces such as those that occurred at the Abu Graib prison were exposed. Americans tired of the expense (counted in trillions of dollars) and human toll the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took. In 2006, the frustration boiled over as Republicans suffered one of the worst years in their history. The change in the composition of Congress would later add to President Obama’s strength upon his election in 2008.

After 2006, Cheney experienced substantial reversals as Donald Rumsfeld submitted his resignation at the Department of Defense and the vice president’s chief of staff Scooter Libby became embroiled in the Valerie Plame scandal. He would later express frustration when Bush refused to pardon Libby after his conviction. Donald Trump ultimately gave Libby such a pardon in 2018.

Trump’s action did not result in any apparent gratitude from Cheney, who went all the way to the length of declaring his support for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. As unusual as it was for Cheney to emerge from his role as the man tasked with finding a running mate for Bush as the man tapped to be the running mate, his decision to defect from the Republican Party to vote for Kamala Harris, one of the most liberal candidates for the presidency of all time, was even more strange. He reasoned that Trump presented a massive threat to American democracy. But the choice was hard to square with Cheney’s status as a free-market conservative and advocate of federalism given the transformative ambitions of California progressives such as Harris. Cheney’s daughter Liz saw her career in Congress implode when Wyoming voters rejected her as she aligned herself against Trump.

Dick Cheney is one of those Americans who proved that in our country one can rise from ordinary beginnings to reach the pinnacle of power and influence. Middle East victory that took him to a Presidential Medal of Freedom under the first President Bush would later be paired with quagmires under the second Bush that would drag both him and his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, down. Like so many outsize American politicians, Cheney found both triumph and tragedy waiting for him at the top.