Former vice president, secretary of defense, White House chief of staff and congressman from Wyoming Richard Bruce Cheney has died of complications from pneumonia, his family announced early on Tuesday. Cheney was 84 years old.
One of the more controversial and powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, Cheney served under George W. Bush from 2001-2009 — a period during which America came under attack on September 11, 2001 and launched into two decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout the younger Bush’s administration, Cheney was seen as having at times out-sized influence for an office former occupant Harry S. Truman once compared to a “warm bucket of spit.”
A congressman during the Richard Nixon administration, Cheney quickly rose to one of the most powerful jobs in Washington as successor Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. He enjoyed a close relationship then and later, with former two-time secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld that was portrayed in the 2018 film “Vice.”
Cheney served as secretary of defense to President George H.W. Bush during a period that included the first Gulf war, when the U.S. invaded Iraq to compel its authoritarian leader Saddam Hussein to withdraw from the oil-rich state of Kuwait, which he had annexed in 1991. That experience, many conjectured, helped form his response to the 9/11 attacks, a key aspect of which was a second, 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Between these wars, Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton, an oil services company which won billion dollar contracts in the second Iraq war. Together with Rumsfeld, national security advisor and later secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and others, Cheney was one of the principal “neo-conservatives” who defined the Bush presidency in its interventionist foreign policy.
On a hunting trip in 2006, Vice President Cheney accidentally shot his friend, Texas lawyer Henry Whittington, in the face with birdshot. Whittington survived and later apologized for having gotten in the way. That anecdote illustrated what had come to be seen as a Washington maxim: don’t mess with Cheney.
Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth later took his seat in Congress and became an outspoken critic of Donald Trump during his first administration and co-chaired the inquiry into January 6. Ironically her father, a lifelong Republican, cast his last vote in 2024 for Kamala Harris as president.
Cheney is survived by two daughters — Liz and Mary — and his widow, Lynne.
