Dick Cheney

Richard Bruce Cheney was born on 30 January 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Marjorie Lorraine (née Dickey) and Richard Herbert Cheney. His father was a soil conservation agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother had been a softball star in the 1930s. He was one of three children and was of predominantly English ancestry, with Welsh, Irish and French Huguenot roots. He attended Calvert Elementary School in Lincoln before the family moved to Casper, Wyoming, where he went to Natrona County High School. There he met Lynne Vincent, his high school sweetheart.

In November 1962, at 21, he was convicted of driving while intoxicated, and he was arrested for the same offence again in 1963. He later said the arrests made him "think about where I was and where I was headed. I was headed down a bad road if I continued on that course." During the Vietnam War he received five draft deferments, later saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

Cheney enrolled at Yale University, but by his own account had trouble adjusting and dropped out. He credited the Yale political scientist H. Bradford Westerfield with shaping his approach to foreign policy. After a spell at Casper College he enrolled at the University of Wyoming, earning a Bachelor of Arts and then a Master of Arts in political science while working as a lineman. He began doctoral studies in political science at the University of Wisconsin to Madison, where he was a student for several semesters but did not complete a dissertation. In 1966 he left the program to work as a staff aide for Wisconsin Governor Warren P. Knowles, and in 1968 he won an American Political Science Association congressional fellowship that took him to Washington, D.C. In 2007 Brigham Young University awarded him an honorary doctorate of public service.

Early government work. Cheney's Washington career began in 1969 as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger. He then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity and held a series of posts in the Nixon administration, including White House staff assistant and assistant director of the Cost of Living Council. Under President Gerald Ford he was deputy chief of staff from December 1974 and became White House chief of staff in November 1975, succeeding Rumsfeld. He managed Ford's 1976 presidential campaign.

Congress. In 1978 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Wyoming's at-large district, defeating Democrat Bill Bagley, and was re-elected five times. He chaired the Republican Policy Committee from 1981 to 1987, was ranking member of the House select committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, became chairman of the House Republican Conference in 1987 and was elected House minority whip in 1989. With his wife Lynne he wrote Kings of the Hill (1983), a book about power in the House.

Secretary of Defense. After the Senate rejected John Tower, President George H. W. Bush nominated Cheney, who was confirmed 92 to 0 and served from March 1989 to January 1993. He directed the December 1989 invasion of Panama that removed Manuel Noriega, persuaded Saudi Arabia to accept U.S. troops after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and with General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf oversaw Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. The air campaign began on 17 January 1991, the ground war on 24 February, and Kuwait was liberated within 100 hours. He also reduced the defense budget and cut total military personnel by about 19 percent as the Cold War ended, and in 1992 sent the first U.S. troops to Somalia.

Private sector. During the Clinton administration he joined the American Enterprise Institute and served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1 October 1995 to 25 July 2000 he was chairman and chief executive of Halliburton, leaving with a severance package reported at about 33.7 million dollars.

Vice President. In 2000 he led George W. Bush's search for a running mate and was chosen himself. Bush and Cheney won the 2000 election against Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and the 2004 election against John Kerry and John Edwards. After the September 11 attacks he played a leading role in the response and the war on terror, made repeated public claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaeda, and visited CIA headquarters to question analysts. He chaired the Energy Task Force, promoted the unitary executive theory, and backed NSA warrantless surveillance and enhanced interrogation techniques. He served as acting president on 29 June 2002 and 21 July 2007 while Bush underwent medical procedures. A Pulitzer Prize-winning 2007 Washington Post series, principally written by Barton Gellman, described his unusually broad influence over policy.

Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his high school sweetheart from Casper, in 1964. Lynne Cheney later chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1996 and became an author and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. They had two daughters. Liz Cheney, born in 1966, served as a Wyoming congresswoman and chair of the House Republican Conference and is married to Philip Perry. Mary Cheney, a former campaign aide, lives in Great Falls, Virginia, with her wife Heather Poe. The couple had seven grandchildren. His brother, Bob Cheney, worked for the Bureau of Land Management.

Cheney was a member of the United Methodist Church. He kept a home in Teton County, Wyoming, from 1993 and lived for many years in McLean, Virginia. A passionate fly fisherman, especially on the Snake River, he owned about a hundred books on fishing, and his Secret Service code name was "Angler".

Health. A heavy smoker for nearly 20 years, he had his first heart attack in 1978 at 37, followed by others in 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2010. He had quadruple bypass surgery in 1988, stents, an implanted defibrillator in 2001 and, in July 2010, a left ventricular assist device that kept him alive without a pulse for many months. On 24 March 2012 he received a heart transplant at Inova Fairfax Hospital after more than 20 months on the waiting list.

Cheney was a lifelong conservative Republican and a proponent of a strong national defense and of expanded presidential power, which he believed had been eroded after Vietnam and Watergate. He argued for the unitary executive theory and defended NSA surveillance and the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, saying in 2010, "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program." He opposed unilateral economic sanctions, saying they "almost never work".

On social issues he parted from many in his party. In 2004 he said same-sex marriage should be left to the states, and in 2009 he told the National Press Club that "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish". He endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 but broke with him after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, calling him a "coward" in a 2022 ad for his daughter Liz. In September 2024 he said he would vote for Kamala Harris, stating that "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump".

Cheney is widely described as the most powerful vice president in American history. The New York Times called him President Bush's "most influential White House adviser in an era of terrorism, war and economic change", USA Today called him the "chief architect of the war in Iraq", and the BBC described him as "the ultimate Washington insider". He transformed the vice presidency from a largely ceremonial post into a centre of policy power, with his own national security staff and offices across the Capitol.

His legacy remains deeply divisive. Supporters credit his decades of public service and his role in the Gulf War and in protecting the country after 9/11. Critics point to the Iraq War, launched on claims about weapons of mass destruction that proved false, to his defence of interrogation methods widely condemned as torture, and to his secrecy. Le Monde called him the "father" of the Iraq invasion who "embodied the excesses of the war on terror". His peak approval rating of 68 percent after September 2001 fell to 13 percent by the end of his term. In his final years his stand against Trump won him unexpected respect from many former opponents.

Cheney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and the same year the Jefferson Awards' U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official. Brigham Young University awarded him an honorary doctorate of public service in 2007. The Dick Cheney Federal Building in Casper, Wyoming, bears his name.

Cheney co-wrote Kings of the Hill (1983) with his wife Lynne, the memoir In My Time (2011) with his daughter Liz, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey (2013) with his cardiologist Jonathan Reiner and Liz Cheney, and Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America (2015) with Liz. He was the subject of the 2013 Showtime documentary The World According to Dick Cheney and of Barton Gellman's book Angler.

On screen he was played by Richard Dreyfuss in Oliver Stone's W. (2008) and by Christian Bale in Adam McKay's Vice (2018), a role that won Bale a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. Eminem referred to his heart problems in the 2002 song "Without Me", and critics' comparison of him to Darth Vader was later adopted with humour by Cheney and his family.

Cheney's career drew sustained controversy. His promotion of claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and an operational relationship with al-Qaeda, neither of which was substantiated, made him the face of the case for the 2003 invasion. His support for enhanced interrogation led some officials and advocacy groups to call for his prosecution. His office refused to release Energy Task Force records and resisted oversight by the National Archives, prompting talk of a "fourth branch of government". His former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted in 2007 in connection with the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. Halliburton's large government contracts in Iraq raised conflict of interest questions, and in March 2008, asked about polls showing Americans had lost confidence in the Iraq War, he replied simply, "So?" On 11 February 2006 he accidentally shot 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington during a quail hunt in Texas.

Cheney died at his home in McLean, Virginia, on the evening of Monday 3 November 2025, at the age of 84. His family announced the next morning that he had died of complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, and that his wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary and other family members were with him. "We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man," they said.

George W. Bush called him "among the finest public servants of his generation", and statements came from former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and former vice presidents Dan Quayle, Al Gore, Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. Flags at the White House were lowered. His funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral on 20 November 2025, only the second funeral for a vice president there. Bush, Liz Cheney, three of his grandchildren, former NBC correspondent Pete Williams and his cardiologist Jonathan Reiner gave eulogies, and the cathedral's dean, Randolph Hollerith, preached. Mourners included Joe and Jill Biden, Laura Bush, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and several Supreme Court justices. Liz Cheney said her father "knew that bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans". His burial place has not been made public.