Dick Cheney

Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and grew up in Casper, Wyoming. He attended Yale briefly before dropping out and eventually earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wyoming. He began his career as a congressional intern and political staffer, rising to become White House Chief of Staff under President Gerald Ford at just 34 years old — the youngest in history at the time. He represented Wyoming in Congress from 1979 to 1989, serving six terms and rising to the position of House majority Whip. When George H.W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in 1989, Cheney oversaw a period of profound transformation: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the successful prosecution of the 1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq under General Norman Schwarzkopf.

After the Clinton years, during which Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton, George W. Bush selected him as his running mate in 2000. The selection of a deeply experienced Washington insider was widely seen as compensating for Bush's relative lack of foreign policy credentials. The two won the presidency in the disputed Florida recount, ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. After the September 11 attacks, Cheney became the defining figure of the administration's response: he championed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the Patriot Act, warrantless NSA surveillance, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the use of enhanced interrogation techniques — including waterboarding — which critics called torture. He was the primary advocate within the administration for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, built on intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction that proved false.

Cheney's approval rating peaked above 70% in the days after 9/11. By the time he left office in January 2009, it had fallen to roughly 13% — the lowest for a departing VP in recorded polling history. His post-vice presidential years were defined by continued outspoken defense of Bush-era national security policies, five heart attacks across his career, a dramatic 2012 heart transplant at age 71, and — in a remarkable late-career reversal — becoming one of the most prominent Republican critics of Donald Trump. He voted for Biden in 2020 and endorsed Kamala Harris in October 2024.

Dick Cheney redefined the American vice presidency. Where previous VPs had been largely ceremonial figures, Cheney built a parallel national security and policymaking apparatus that operated with unusual independence and secrecy. He attended virtually every significant meeting, controlled information flow to the president, and drove decisions on the most consequential issues of the era. Scholars who study the presidency routinely rank him as the most influential vice president in American history — a designation that is not uniformly complimentary.

His daughter Liz Cheney, a Wyoming congresswoman, became one of the most prominent Republican critics of Donald Trump, serving as vice chair of the House January 6 committee and voting to impeach Trump in 2021. She lost her primary in 2022 by 37 points. Dick Cheney's own public repudiation of Trump — including his endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 — illustrated how completely the Republican Party of Bush-era hawks and internationalists had been displaced by MAGA nationalism. The Iraq War's failure, which Cheney emblematizes more than any other figure, is widely cited by analysts as a key cause of the erosion of trust in American institutions that helped produce the Trump phenomenon.