Few political figures over the past 50 years paved the way for the country’s current crisis more than former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on Monday at the age of 84.
As George W. Bush’s vice president from 2001 to 2009, Cheney promoted the unitary executive theory to consolidate power in the presidency, advocated for abuses of international and U.S. law in the global war on terror, including the use of torture on detainees, and pushed a unilateral foreign policy to invade Iraq that sidelined allies and ultimately upended the entire global order.
Cheney lived long enough to see his vision fulfilled, with a unitary executive operating above and outside of the law and a U.S. foreign policy unconstrained by alliances and humanitarian laws coming to fruition in the form of President Donald Trump’s second administration. In the end, Cheney came to oppose the monster he created. After endorsing Trump in 2016, Cheney turned away from him after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024.
This end-of-life reconsideration, however, does not undo his life’s work.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, Cheney lived there until his teens when his family moved to Caspar, Wyoming. After briefly attending Yale University and dropping out, Cheney moved back to Wyoming where he attended the University of Wyoming and married his high school sweetheart, Lynne (Vincent) Cheney. Despite being of age for military service, Cheney received five deferments to avoid the Vietnam War draft. “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” he would later say. Instead, he went to Washington as an up-and-coming Republican operative, taking a job as a congressional intern in 1969 before moving to the Nixon White House to work under Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney would leave for the private sector after Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
Nixon’s second term featured a major change in his approach to the presidency, one that would impact Cheney’s political career. Instead of working with a Congress heavily controlled by Democrats, Nixon sought to act unilaterally through the administrative state to counter the liberal policies of Congress. He centralized power in the White House, impounded funds appropriated by Congress, redirected agency priorities away from those designated by Congress and aimed to pursue foreign policy without Congress.
But the paranoia that underlay Nixon’s pursuit of unilateral power ultimately became his downfall. The bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices at The Watergate Hotel during the 1972 presidential campaign led to impeachment proceedings and his resignation. Congress also responded to Nixon’s abuses by passing reforms to constrain the presidency.
When Vice President Gerald Ford took over in 1974, Cheney returned to the White House as deputy chief of staff under Rumsfeld.
Both Cheney and Rumsfeld, who became Ford’s secretary of defense, held on to Nixon’s vision of a powerful presidency uninhibited by Congress, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Cheney believed that Congress had gone too far with the passage of laws like the War Powers Resolution and the Freedom of Information Act that were meant to rein in the president, force him to share power with Congress and provide information to the public. He also vigorously opposed Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union.
So both Cheney and Rumsfeld went about secretly undermining all of this. In 1975, they orchestrated the “Halloween Massacre,” forcing the resignation of the CIA director and Kissinger from his White House perch as national security advisor and the elevation of Rumsfeld to secretary of defense and Cheney to White House chief of staff. There, they undermined Kissinger’s negotiations with the Soviets and pushed Ford to adopt their more aggressive foreign policy priorities.
One result of the Halloween Massacre was the elevation of George H.W. Bush to CIA director. Bush appointed a “Team B” to draft an alternative assessment of the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The alternative assessment, staffed with hardcore conservatives and hawks — including Rumsfeld’s personal emissary, a young Paul Wolfowitz — used cherry-picked intelligence to paint a picture of a growing Soviet threat. Ford and Kissinger aimed to bury the Team B report, but its incorrect conclusions that the Soviet Union was engaged in a massive weapons buildup that needed to be countered would be reflected in Ronald Reagan’s hawkish stance when he took office.
After Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter, Cheney ran for Congress in Wyoming, winning a seat in a Republican wave in 1978. There he became a leading conservative voice and the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, where he worked to undermine congressional oversight of the Reagan administration. This included running defense for the Reagan administration when it faced congressional scrutiny over the Iran-Contra Scandal.
When George H.W. Bush won the presidency in 1988, Cheney was appointed secretary of defense. In that position he worked to undermine Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the lead-up to the first Gulf War. Repeating the Team B playbook, Cheney had Wolfowitz and his aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby draw up alternative plans for the invasion of Iraq. Cheney also pushed Bush to sideline Congress by invading Iraq without congressional authorization. Bush ignored both of Cheney’s requests.
Bush lost reelection to Bill Clinton in 1992, and Cheney moved back to the private sector. He was named CEO of the oil services company Halliburton in 1995 and remained there until 2001 when he became vice president. He did not abandon political activism during this period, though. In 1997, he was a key signatory of the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think tank that advocated for the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the use of American military power to unilaterally reshape the world.
When George W. Bush won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, he appointed Cheney to lead the search for his vice president. Cheney ultimately chose himself. Barely eking out a win thanks to an infamous Supreme Court decision, the Bush administration appeared at first to be one of those accidental presidencies doomed to a single term. But events have a curious way of altering history.
On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth was crashed by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania.
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush said on Sept. 20, 2001. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
From his work on Team B to his defense of Iran-Contra to his efforts to seize control of the first Gulf War, Cheney had prepared for this moment. Centralizing power in his office, Cheney became the architect of the war on terror, pursuing a secretive policy that saw the White House as a unitary actor and international laws as mere pieces of paper.
“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert on Sept. 16, 2001. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”
And so the country would go to the dark side.
After the capture of alleged al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a “high-level detainee,” a characterization later deemed dubious, the administration raced to extract information from him. At CIA black site prisons, American and foreign interrogators tortured Zubaydah in March and April 2002. These interrogations led the Department of Justice to retroactively approve torture techniques through the issuance of legal opinions known as the Torture Memos.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said in a 2008 interview.
CIA interrogators waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times, subjected him to sleep and sensory deprivation, stripped him of his clothing, confined him to a box, held him in stress positions, beat and kicked him, pulled him by a collar around his neck, exposed him to cold temperatures for extended periods of time and denied him food. The FBI interrogators who interviewed Zubaydah prior to his torture reported that he had already given up all actionable intelligence he had before he was tortured.
What he did say after being tortured was that al Qaeda and Hussein were working together. The Bush administration had asked interrogators to find such links. This “intelligence” would make its way into the administration’s case for war against Iraq.
The case for invading Iraq would be buttressed by Rumsfeld, who was serving his second stint as secretary of defense. As in the Ford administration, Rumsfeld created a Team B in the form of the Office of Special Plans designed to undermine the CIA’s intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and connections to al Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans stovepiped raw intelligence gathered from a fabulist appropriately nicknamed “Curveball” and other high-ranking officials linking Hussein to al Qaeda.
But it was another fabricated allegation that helped the administration make the case for war that would ultimately lead to Cheney’s loss of power.
In his 2003 State of the Union speech to Congress, Bush made the infamous claim that, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This intelligence, originating from an Italian intelligence service, was, however, based on forged documents. It was also undercut by the CIA’s own investigation.
After hearing the allegation, the CIA sent Joe Wilson, a former ambassador to Iraq and Niger, to investigate it in Niger. Wilson found that there “was nothing to the story.” After Bush’s speech, Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times revealing that the “uranium from Africa” assertion was not true.
One week later, conservative columnist Robert Novak sought to undermine Wilson’s story and the CIA’s findings by citing “two senior administration officials” to make the claim that Wilson was chosen for the assignment at the behest of his wife, deep-cover CIA employee Valerie Plame. As a CIA operative, Plame’s identity was classified. The CIA demanded the Department of Justice investigate who leaked her identity.
The subsequent leak investigation would center on Cheney’s office. A grand jury investigation revealed that Cheney told his top aide, Scooter Libby, about Plame’s employment at the CIA and that Libby then told six other Bush administration officials, which included Novak’s sources, Karl Rove and Richard Armitage, and two other reporters, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper. Cheney reportedly discussed leaking Plame’s identity to the press with Libby on a flight on Air Force Two. In 2007, a jury convicted Libby on four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and giving false statements. His actions were largely viewed as an attempt to cover up Cheney’s involvement.
Bush would sideline Cheney after this episode, but his influential vision of the presidency remained. He fought internecine bureaucratic battles against the deep state in pursuit of unitary presidential power, advocated for savage policies in open defiance of international and U.S. law, aimed to neuter congressional oversight, pursued a war based on lies that spurned allies and rejected intelligence and viewed it as necessary to go over to the dark side.
Much of this originated in Cheney’s opposition to Congress’ treatment of Nixon in his early political career, but it soon became the strongest strain in the Republican Party.
Trump’s first term in office exemplified all of these strains. He sought unitary control, ran his administration on a series of increasingly absurd lies, ignored congressional oversight and broke or advocated for breaking numerous international or U.S. laws. His second term has taken things further with a full-blown attempt at autocratic consolidation through the exercise of unitary executive power and an all-out assault on civil liberties. Cheney’s war on terror toolkit has been turned inwards, with immigrants treated as terrorists, detained and rendered to foreign prisons, and the political opposition labeled as “domestic terrorists.” International law is set aside as Trump bombs alleged drug boats with no intelligence offered to justify them. Congressional oversight under Republicans is nonexistent.
It was Cheney who created the model for Trump. Whether or not he came to regret creating this monster doesn’t matter at this point. Even in death, Cheney’s vision lives on as Trump’s autocratic creep continues to spread across the country.