Dick Cheney, America’s 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, has passed away at the age of 84.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” reads the family statement announcing the news.
Dick Cheney has passed away at the age of 84
Image credits: Tom Benitez – Pool/Getty Images
The former vice president passed away from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said.
Cheney was a chief architect and central figure of the 2003 “war on terror,” and played a leading role in taking the US into the Iraq War.
In his final years, the conservative figure became largely ostracized from the Republican party over his criticism of President Donald Trump, whom he labeled a “coward.”
Cheney cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat, and fellow vice president, Kamala Harris, as per CNN.
The politician struggled with cardiovascular disease for most of his adult life, surviving five heart attacks and undergoing a heart transplant in 2012, which he hailed as “the gift of life itself.”
Cheney said he was profoundly changed by the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 and became determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated horror, asserting US power throughout the Middle East.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act,” he told CNN in 2002.
The vice president under President George W. Bush passed away from complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease
In the family statement, the former vice president was described as 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.”
The statement concluded, “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.”
A former businessman, Cheney also served as secretary of defense under George Bush Snr between 1989 and 1993.
Before that, he acted as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff in the 1970s, before spending a decade in the House of Representatives.
The Republican, one of the most polarizing vice presidents in US history, criticized Donald Trump’s actions surrounding the January 6 insurrection 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,” he said. “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 return, Trump called Cheney “irrelevant RINO,” an acronym which stands for “Republican in name only.”
The former VP’s daughter, Liz Cheney, a former Republican lawmaker, had also endorsed Kamala Harris. She was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after the incident.
Cheney was a key architect of the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks
Cheney’s warnings about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and supposed ties to al Qaeda played a major role in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“The fact is we know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were heavily involved with terror,” he said in 2006.
However, subsequent congressional investigations and other post-war inquiries concluded that Cheney and other administration officials exaggerated or misrepresented faulty intelligence about the weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The politician insisted in 2005 that he and other officials were acting on “the best available intelligence” at the time and that any claim that the data was “distorted, hyped, or fabricated” was “utterly false.”
Image credits: Associated Press
Cheney expressed no regrets, maintaining that his actions were necessary in response to the unprecedented attack on US soil that took the lives of nearly 2,800 people.
“I would do it again in a minute,” he said when confronted with a 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report that concluded “enhanced interrogation” methods had damaged the United States’ standing in the eyes of the world.
Of the Iraq war, Cheney said in 2015, “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now.”
People reflected on Dick Cheney’s long and controversial political career
