Former VP Dick Cheney Dies at 84       11/04 06:17

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

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became 
one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. 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, his family said in a statement.

   "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 said. ""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 his 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.

   His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that 
he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier 
out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.

   In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial 
afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to 
influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other 
cornerstones of a conservative agenda.

   Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile -- detractors called it a smirk 
-- Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.

   "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his 
hole?" he asked. "It's a nice way to operate, actually."

   A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left 
government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, 
without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.

   He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and 
prewar Iraq that didn't exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as 
liberators; they weren't.

   He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 
1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war's end.

   For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation 
turned against the war and the leaders waging it.

   But well into Bush's second term, Cheney's clout waned, checked by courts or 
shifting political realities.

   Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority 
and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish 
positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.

   Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months 
after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would 
survive any follow-up assault on the country's leadership.

   With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in 
the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet 
and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical 
effect.

   From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well 
understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney 
was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.

   That bargain largely held up.

   "He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy," Dave Gribbin, a 
friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in 
Washington, once said. "He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal."

   As Cheney put it: "I made the decision when I signed on with the president 
that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to 
be like most vice presidents -- and that was angling, trying to figure out how 
I was going to be elected president when his term was over with."

   His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to 
be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to 
criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, 
neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were 
slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.

   The vice president called it "one of the worst days of my life." The victim, 
his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were 
relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.

   When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a 
Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team 
to find a vice presidential candidate.

   Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.

   Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they 
could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges -- a tempest 
that brewed from Florida to the nation's highest court -- left the nation in 
limbo for weeks.

   Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear 
and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In 
office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush's 
constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.

   On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president's programs in halls he had 
walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican 
House leader.

   Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn't seem 
to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in 
Bush's presidency as he clearly came into his own.

   Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few years 
later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old 
House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the 
Cheney family became one of Trump's favorite targets.

   Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter's defense in 2022 as she juggled her 
lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to get reelected in 
deeply conservative Wyoming.

   Liz Cheney's vote for Trump's impeachment after the insurrection earned her 
praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that 
praise and her father's support didn't keep her from losing badly in the 
Republican primary, a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in 
the House GOP leadership.

   Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a 
congressional fellow. He became a protg of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill,, 
serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford's White House before he 
was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.

   Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had 
been raised, and ran for the state's single congressional seat.

   In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, 
prompting him to crack he was forming a group called "Cardiacs for Cheney." He 
still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.

   In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and 
led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq's troops 
from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based 
Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil 
industry.

   Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture 
Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he 
went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.

   He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming 
and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, 
marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second 
daughter, Mary.