Dick Cheney, powerful and polarizing US vice president, dies at 84

Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.

Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.

“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement says. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. 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.”

The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under president George H.W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under Bush’s son, George W. Bush.

Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger 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. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “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 Trump.

A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now 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.