Dick Cheney

Vice president of the United States (2001–09)

• Born: January 30, 1941
• Place of Birth: Lincoln, Nebraska

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney, forty-sixth vice president of the United States between 2001 and 2009, had a career in government that lasted more than three decades. Formerly a US representative and secretary of state, many saw Cheney as the ideal running mate for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election.

Early Life & Education

Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, the son of Marjorie and Richard H. Cheney. He was raised in Casper, Wyoming, where his father worked as a soil conservationist for the Department of Agriculture. After graduating from high school, Cheney earned a scholarship and traveled east to attend Yale University in Connecticut. However, he dropped out of Yale during his second year due to his poor academic performance and returned to Wyoming. Cheney went to work for a brief time before returning to school, first at Casper College and later at the University of Wyoming. In 1964, he married his high school sweetheart, Lynn Anne Vincent. Cheney graduated two years later with a master's degree in political science.

Early Career

After graduation, Cheney received an educational deferment to avoid military service during the Vietnam War, a time during which young men in America were required to enroll in the military draft. He enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin. Cheney's career in politics began in 1968, when he went to Washington, DC, to work for Wisconsin Representative William Steiger of the Republican Party. Cheney worked as a congressional fellow. He was soon recruited by Representative Donald Rumsfeld, the head of President Richard Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity, to work as his assistant.

Throughout the early 1970s, Cheney continued to work alongside Rumsfeld, who had become a mentor to the young political hopeful. He served as deputy White House counsel, assistant director of the Cost of Living Council, and deputy chief of staff for President Gerald Ford. During this time, Cheney also served as vice president of the investment group Bradley, Woods, & Co.

Cheney's big break came in 1975, when he replaced his mentor as White House chief of staff after Rumsfeld was appointed as secretary of defense. At the age of thirty-four, Cheney was among the youngest men ever to hold this position, which he held until 1976. During this time, he firmly established his reputation as a prominent figure in the Republican Party.

Political Career

Beginning in 1979, Cheney served six terms in the US House of Representatives as a Republican representative from Wyoming. Before his election to the House, he suffered a heart attack, the first of several such episodes that he would endure throughout his life.

As chair of the Republican House Policy Committee for most of his tenure, Cheney was known as a conservative, and voted strictly along party lines. When Republican Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, Cheney and his conservative House colleagues were steadfast supporters of the new White House agenda. In addition to his vocal support for the "Star Wars" missile defense system, Cheney was in favor of US military backing for the "Contra" rebels in Nicaragua, as well as for rebel fighters in Afghanistan and Angola. In the late 1980s, when he sat on the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Deals with Iran during the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney defended the controversial actions of the Reagan administration and his fellow Republicans.

On the domestic issue front, Cheney was opposed to gun control and abortion and in favor of prayer in public schools. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment and re-funding the Clean Water Act. As a result of his loyalty to the party, Cheney became minority whip, the second-most influential position in the House, in 1988. His wife, meanwhile, served as the chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986–93.

Under Reagan's successor, US president George H. W. Bush, Cheney served as secretary of defense, and played a key role in directing the nation's military during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The popular success of the operation in the public's eyes elevated Cheney to national prominence, and toward the end of US president Bill Clinton's first term in 1995, there were rumors that Cheney would seek the Republican presidential nomination in the next election. Instead, he withdrew from politics and became the chief executive of Halliburton Company, a Texas-based oil field services business.

2000 Vice Presidential Candidate

After five years at Halliburton, Cheney resigned in 2000 to help Texas governor and Republican Party presidential nominee George W. Bush search for a running mate. That summer, Cheney himself accepted the party's nomination as the vice presidential candidate. The choice surprised many observers, since Cheney had resisted running for higher office on several previous occasions. He was only five years older than Bush, but his wealth of political experience, as well as his greater "gravity" and seriousness, were seen as assets to the Republican campaign.

Liberals began raising questions about Cheney's extremely conservative voting record, and supporters worried that his views would alienate moderate voters. Critics also questioned Cheney's medical background and health, and his fitness to serve out a full term as vice president. In addition to his frequent heart trouble, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1988. The Bush campaign, however, investigated Cheney's health, and got a statement from his physician saying that he was "up to the task of the most sensitive public office." Bush and Cheney faced Democratic Party opponents Al Gore, for vice president, and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in the general election.

The Vice Presidency

The 2000 US presidential election proved to be one of the closest elections in American history. Although election night brought calls from various media outlets declaring victory for each party, it was eventually determined in the days following the election that the majority of Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency would be decided by the winner of the state of Florida. A month-long legal and political dispute over voting irregularities and recounts in Florida ensued. The battle over which candidate would lay claim to Florida's twenty-five electoral votes, and thus the presidency, eventually reached the Supreme Court. The court ruled in a 5–4 decision to officially end all recounts of the Florida presidential ballots. The decision made official previous vote counts that determined the Bush/Cheney ticket as the winner in Florida and served to officially and legally determine them as the winners of the presidential election. Critics of Bush and supporters of the Gore/Lieberman ticket were bitter about the Supreme Court ruling and noted the fact that Bush/Cheney had lost the popular vote. In addition, many critics of the election outcome were critical of the role that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader played in the election, stating that Nader votes in Florida resulted in a decrease in votes for Gore, who publicly conceded the election in a speech to the nation that occurred on December 13, 2000.

In March 2001, not long after being inaugurated as vice president, Cheney complained of chest pains and was admitted to the hospital. Many feared that his history of coronary artery disease would interfere with his ability to serve as vice president. However, after a procedure to reopen a partially blocked artery, Cheney was once again declared fit to return to his duties. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, Cheney was instrumental in organizing the US military offensive against terrorist targets in Afghanistan. His experience as secretary of defense made him uniquely suited to the task.

Scandal

Early in 2002, Cheney found himself at the center of an investigation into the bankruptcy of the energy trading Enron Corp. The previous year, Cheney headed a presidential task force to draft a proposal for a national energy plan. In a series of discussions, several cabinet members met with representatives from the energy industry, as well as labor, consumer, and environmental groups, in an effort to form a coherent energy policy for the Bush administration.

During the course of the meetings, executives from Enron, at the time one of the largest energy traders in the world, as well as a financial supporter of the Republican Party and the Bush/Cheney campaign, met personally with the vice president. When the company went bankrupt as a result of accounting fraud, questions began to arise regarding Enron's possible influence on the Bush administration's energy recommendations, or whether the White House had any advance knowledge of the company's financial difficulties. Thousands of people lost their jobs as a result of the bankruptcy.

In January 2002, the collapse of Enron was being probed by a number of government agencies, trying to determine what led to the company's collapse. The US General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative branch of Congress, asked Cheney for his notes from the energy task force meetings, hoping they would shed some light on the relationship between the administration and Enron. Cheney refused, however, and legal action regarding the documents ensued.

Beginning in 2002, the Bush administration began to turn its attention to the nation of Iraq, led at the time by dictator Saddam Hussein. For over a year, President Bush and administration officials presented pieces of evidence it claimed proved that Hussein was developing and producing biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, also known as weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Vice President Cheney played a significant role in stressing the importance of ridding Iraq and the Hussein regime of such weapons.

The Bush administration's accusations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) resulted in a series of United Nations resolutions aimed at establishing a rigorous schedule of weapons inspections in the country. However, Saddam Hussein continued to wrangle with inspections, eventually rejecting their entry into the country, and continued to deny the existence of WMD.

In February 2003, US secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council, presenting the Bush administration's evidence of WMD in Iraq and urging the organization to support a US-led invasion. Powell's request was not approved by a majority of the council, and UN Security approval of military action against Iraq was not granted. The governments of France and Germany publicly stated their opposition to any unsanctioned military invasion of Iraq.

Nonetheless, a US-led full scale military invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003. Hussein was captured by US forces in December of 2003, and subsequently executed by the newly established Iraqi government after being convicted of war crimes.

Although the Hussein government was swiftly toppled, the invasion of Iraq resulted in a power vacuum in the country that pitted Sunni Muslim militias against Shiite militias. In addition, forces loyal to the Hussein government implemented numerous guerilla warfare tactics against US and coalition forces. Over four thousand American troops and hundreds of coalition forces were killed in Iraq. Military activity in the country and the subsequent civil strife that followed resulted in the deaths of forty thousand Iraqi civilians and resulted in the exile of hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled the violence.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney were re-elected in 2004, defeating Democratic Party candidate Senator John Kerry. Unlike the 2000 presidential election, the Bush/Cheney ticket won 3.5 million more popular votes than his opposing candidate.

During its second term, the Bush administration would come under intense political pressure and national and international scrutiny resulting from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever uncovered in Iraq. In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and stated that the United States received faulty intelligence regarding Iraq's possession of WMD. Powell resigned the same year and was replaced by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The Bush administration sustained further political damage as a result of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which involved internationally published photographs of US military personnel abusing Iraqi inmates at prison facilities in Iraq. This scandal, combined with the raging civil violence that occurred in Iraq in the years following the invasion, resulted in the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in December of 2006. Vice President Cheney continued to defend the decision to invade Iraq, stating that it served to prevent further terrorist attacks on the United States.

In January 2007, President Bush ordered an additional twenty thousand US troops to Iraq in an effort to quell the widespread violence in the country. The so-called "Troop Surge" was aimed at putting an end to the ongoing military conflict taking place against various sectarian militias. As a result of the troop surge, and an increased effort on the part of US officials to make diplomatic arrangements with various militia groups, violence in Iraq and in major Iraqi cities began to subside from previous levels in the later months of 2007 and early months of 2008. Although improvements on the ground in Iraq resulted in few civilian and military deaths, the controversial nature of the planning and execution of the Iraq war remained.

Vice President Cheney's nationwide approval ratings would begin to decrease in the years following his re-election, as a result of the ongoing problems in Iraq. The Bush administration also began to come under intense criticism as the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States slowly evolved into the global financial crisis of 2008. The subprime mortgage crisis came about after US financial organizations began to realize they had granted housing loans to customers that could not meet the terms of their mortgages. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners nationwide began to default, or fail to make payments on, their mortgages. Subsequently, evidence that major banking institutions had made risky bets on extremely complex financial products began to be uncovered. Critics of the Bush administration cited the White House's history of deregulating the financial industry as one of the causes of this problem. For the first time in decades, the federal government had to take major steps to bail out some of the nation's largest financial institutions to prevent them from collapsing, which would have destroyed the US economy.

US vice president Dick Cheney's second term in office ended in January of 2009. Few doubt that his support of the controversial initiation and execution of the Iraq War and the 2008 global financial crisis will remain the most significant and influential legacies of his vice presidency.

After leaving the White House with one of the lowest approval ratings of any vice president in the country's history, Cheney remained politically vocal, criticizing the policies of the Barack Obama administration and becoming a supporter of same-sex marriage. He released his memoir In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir broaching subjects such as 9/11 and the war in Iraq in 2011. Continuing to struggle with health issues, he underwent a successful heart transplant surgery in 2012. When, in 2014, the Senate released a report on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture during the Bush administration, Cheney controversially spoke out adamantly in defense of the agency's actions and discredited the document, claiming that such interrogation tactics were necessary to find those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The following year, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, which he coauthored, was published. A biopic, Vice, that was directed by Adam McKay and stars Christian Bale as Cheney, was released to theaters in 2018 to mixed reviews.

In early January 2021, after incumbent president Donald Trump had refused to concede his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election and continued to publicly make claims of widespread voter fraud despite a lack of evidence, Cheney joined nine other people still living who had held the position of defense secretary in signing an opinion piece published in the Washington Post calling for an end to the questioning of the election results.

Trump supporters converged on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress was in joint session to certify the election results. Cheney's daughter, Representative Liz Cheney, was among the legislators hustled out of the chamber to safety when rioters breached the building. Dick Cheney stood behind his daughter when she joined the committee that investigated the insurrection. When she ran for re-election in 2022, he campaigned for her, appearing in advertisements in which he called Trump a threat to the country and said the former president had used violence to try to remain in power after Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeated him. Trump and his supporters trashed the younger Cheney in the press, and she lost.

Father and daughter continued to speak out against Trump, who ran for the presidency again in 2024. In September, both Cheneys said they were voting for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bibliography

Baker, Peter. Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Print.

Baker, Peter. "The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage." New York Times. New York Times, 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 6 Jan. 2015.

Chait, Jonathan. "Dick Cheney's 6-Step Torture Denial." New York. New York Media, 15 Dec. 2014. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.

Cheney, Dick. In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. New York: Threshold Editions, 2011. Print.

Scott, A. O. "'Vice' Review: Dick Cheney and the Negative Great Man Theory of History." The New York Times, 17 Dec. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/movies/vice-review.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2021.

Stracqualursi, Veronica, and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn. "Dick Cheney Says He's Voting for Harris in November and Trump 'Can Never Be Trusted with Power Again.'" CNN, 6 Sept. 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/09/06/politics/dick-cheney-kamala-harris-president/index.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.