{"id":243276,"date":"2025-11-04T12:34:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/243276\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T12:34:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:34:06","slug":"dick-cheney-vice-president-and-giant-of-republican-politics-dies-aged-84-dick-cheney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/243276\/","title":{"rendered":"Dick Cheney, vice-president and giant of Republican politics, dies aged 84 | Dick Cheney"},"content":{"rendered":"

The former White House chief of staff, member of Congress, secretary of defense and US vice-president Dick Cheney<\/a> has died, his family has said. He was 84.<\/p>\n

Cheney was one of the country\u2019s most powerful vice-presidents, widely reported to wield great influence over the less experienced George W Bush, the president under whom he served.<\/p>\n

Cheney was in office on 11 September 2001 during the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While Bush was hurried to safety, Cheney worked with the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to assume policy control<\/a>. Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al-Qaida.<\/p>\n

But Cheney\u2019s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq<\/a>. He had been defense secretary during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and 1991, but now Cheney and Bush\u2019s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaida and thus 9\/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge, and both were soon proved false. <\/p>\n

Although Cheney sought international cooperation, he also thought, he later wrote<\/a>, that the Bush administration \u201chad an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America\u201d.<\/p>\n

George W Bush and Cheney embrace following President Bush’s acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden during the final night of the Republican national convention in 2004. Photograph: Charles Dharapak\/AP<\/p>\n

The death toll was high. According<\/a> to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001 \u201cat least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan\u201d.<\/p>\n

The treatment of prisoners taken by the US in its \u201cwar on terror\u201d also proved hugely controversial<\/a>. Out of office, Cheney continued to defend<\/a> the use of torture against detainees after 9\/11.<\/p>\n

A Yale dropout who avoided service in Vietnam, Cheney nonetheless became a giant of Republican politics.<\/p>\n

He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White House chief of staff, to Gerald Ford; a member of Congress under Ronald Reagan; secretary of defense to George HW Bush<\/a>, and vice-president to George W Bush.<\/p>\n

When the younger Bush plucked him from the Halliburton corporation<\/a> to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, Cheney had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to mishap: once, while vice-president, he shot a hunting partner<\/a> in the face.<\/p>\n

Cheney\u2019s daughter, Liz Cheney, followed him into Republican politics as a US House representative from Wyoming in the same seat her father had held while a congressman, but she was censured by the party after strongly criticising Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection.<\/p>\n

Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz arrive to vote at the Teton county library, Wyoming, during the Republican primary election in August 2022. Photograph: Jabin Botsford\/AP<\/p>\n

The elder Cheney also attended an event to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack alongside his daughter, where he expressed \u201cdeep disappointment\u201d in Republican party leadership, saying: \u201cIt\u2019s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks that I knew when I was here for 10 years\u201d and that \u201cyou can\u2019t overestimate how important [January 6] is\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cheney announced in 2024 that he would vote for Kamala Harris rather than the Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying that \u201cin our nation\u2019s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump\u201d and that he felt a duty to \u201cput country above partisanship to defend our constitution\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, on the release of Vice, a darkly comic biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: \u201cThere has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. In comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader. I don\u2019t think there\u2019ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former White House chief of staff, member of Congress, secretary of defense and US vice-president Dick Cheney…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-243276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}