Former US Vice President Dick Chenney
Dick Cheney, the most powerful American vice president of the modern era and the main architect of the “war on terror” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war based on flawed assumptions, has died, aged 84.
He died Dick Cheneythe 46th vice president of the United States, due to complications from pneumonia and heart and vascular diseases, his family announced in a statement.
“Dick Cheney foi a big 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,” the family said.
“We are immensely grateful for everything Dick Cheney did for our country. And we feel immensely blessed to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man”, adds the statement, cited by .
Chenney, who served alongside the Republican president George W. Bush during two terms between 2001 and 2009, it was for decades a imposing figure and polarizing power in Washington.
In his later years, however, Cheney, still a hardline conservativeended up staying largely ostracized from his party due to its intense criticism of President Donald Trump, whom he dubbed a “coward” and the greatest threat to the republic ever.
In an ironic epilogue to a remarkable political career, he cast his last vote in a presidential election in 2024, in a liberal democratand fellow member of the Vice Presidents’ Club, Kamala Harrisreflecting how the populist Republican Party had turned against its traditional conservatism.
Cheney was plagued by cardiovascular diseases for most of his adult life, surviving a series of heart attacksto lead a full and vigorous life and lived many years in retirement after a heart transplant in 2012 that he hailed in a 2014 interview as “the very gift of life”.
Former Wyoming representative, White House chief of staff and secretary of Defense, was enjoying a profitable career in the business world when was it commissioned by George W. Bush to vet potential vice presidential candidates.
The search ended with Cheney himself to be sworn in as an experienced number two to an immature, novice president who arrived in the Oval Office after a contested election.
Although the caricatures of Cheney as the real president don’t accurately capture the true dynamics of Bush’s inner circle, he reveled in the enormous influence he wielded behind the scenes.
Cheney was at the White House, with the president out of town on the crisp, clear morning of September 11, 2001.
Already split second of horrorwhen a second hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center, said that if became a transformed mandetermined to avenge the attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda and to impose American power throughout the Middle East with a neoconservative doctrine of regime change and preventive war.
“At that moment, you knew that IThis was a deliberate act. This was a terrorist act,” he recalled of that day in an interview with CNN’s John King in 2002.
From a bunker deep inside the White Housethe vice-president entered crisis modedirecting the response of a nation wracked by pain and suddenly at war.
Gave the order extraordinary decision to authorize the shooting down of any other planes diverted to the White House or the US Capitol.
Cheney reflected in later years on how the attacks left him with a overwhelming feeling of responsibility to ensure that such an attack on national territory would never happen again. Perceptions, however, that it was the only driving force behind the war to terror and American adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are misleading.
Contemporary and historical accounts of the administration show that Bush was the his own self-proclaimed “The Decision Maker”.
Cheney became a symbol of the excesses of anti-terrorism campaigns and the fatally false premises and poor planning that turned the initially successful invasion of Iraq into a bloody quagmire.
According to the Pew Research Center, he left his position detested by democrats and with a rate of 31% approval.
