Fate decreed that on the Tuesday morning that September when the aeroplanes struck the Twin Towers in New York and, soon afterwards, the perimeter of the Pentagon, president George W Bush was speaking with schoolchildren in a Florida classroom while his vice-president, Dick Cheney, was in the White House.
In the awful, addled hours afterwards, the locations of both men cemented the reputation that has underpinned the obituaries for Cheney following the announcement of his death, on Monday, at the age of 84. He was, quite simply, the most influential and consequential vice-president in living memory and arguably in US history.
He served as defence secretary to George Herbert Bush before standing with George W Bush as his running mate in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. It was during that decade, facilitated by the exceptional latitude afforded him by Bush the Younger, that Cheney defined his legacy as the architect-in-chief of America’s “war on terror”, which led to complex navigations during the morning-show tributes on Monday.
It was Cheney who handled on-the-ground operations during the immediate hours following the 9/11 attacks - one of his first acts was to call Bush to tell him not to return to Washington. Cheney was one of the strongest advocates – and trenchant defenders - of the controversial USA Patriot Act, ushered in just weeks after 9/11 to deepen the government’s rights to use surveillance and detention. Along with defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney shaped the intelligence reaching Bush on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction as he pushed for a removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
RM Block
It was reported that Cheney personally visited the CIA’s headquarters to push for ever-stronger reports on Hussein’s ties to al-Qaeda. By the following October, Congress had passed a joint resolution permitting the Bush administration to use military force in Iraq.
In an appearance on Meet the Press shortly after 9/11, Cheney laid out the framework for how the administration would operate in its response to the attack.
“We’re going 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 discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objectives.”
The words followed him, as spoken evidence of an essentially secretive approach to governance.
The consequences of the war on terror had a profound and disastrous influence. What was conceived as a sharp, limited military operation in Iraq became mired in a nine-year occupation during which 4,500 Americans lost their lives.
The financial cost of the war was estimated at $2 trillion. More broadly, a 2023 Brown University study outlined the consequences of the “Post 9/11 Wars” undertaken by the United States in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, with estimated indirect deaths of 3.8 million people and 408,000 direct deaths.
A little under eight million children under the age of five suffer from severe malnutrition there. That Halliburton, the energy company in which Cheney served as chief executive from 1995 to 2000, profited greatly from the Iraq War further compromised Cheney’s image and legacy in the eyes of the public.
During the Democratic primary elections for the 2008 presidency, Barack Obama’s refusal to back the invasion of Iraq became a vital advantage in his debates with Hillary Clinton, who had supported the invasion.
Long after he retired from government, Cheney was vilified and mocked for his relentlessly hawkish foreign policy reputation, as three headlines in the satirical Borowitz Report in the New Yorker illustrate: Cheney’s Book Features Foreword by Satan (2012); Cheney Marks Tenth Anniversary of Pretending there was a Reason For the Invasion of Iraq (2013); Cheney: “No Fair” That Obama Gets To Bomb Syria. “I’m envious as hell. That was on my bucket list.” (2015).
By then, even George Bush snr had begun to overtly criticise Cheney’s role in shaping US foreign policy, memorably describing his former confidante as “just iron-ass” in an interview he gave to historian Jon Meacham for his book on Bush the Younger.
“I don’t know, he just became very hardline and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with. The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.”
The decade since has done little to soften the public image of Cheney, whose steely demeanour belied a protracted health battle and five heart attacks. Throughout his many decades as a Washington insider, he remained a largely inscrutable figure. One of his most surprising political acts of recent years was to endorse Kamala Harris as he emerged as one of the old-guard Republicans’ most outspoken critics of Donald Trump after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
It was in that same building that Republicans gathered, in December 2015, for what in retrospect looks like one of the last stands of the GOP before it was repurposed by Trump. The occasion was the unveiling of the official marble bust of Cheney – an honour conferred on all vice-presidents since 1885. Dubya broke the ice by telling the guests that his father had given him the instruction, “Send my regards to old Iron Ass”.
As Peter Baker’s report in the New York Times from that evening outlines, Democrats were in scant attendance, pleading caucus meetings and other business.
But one of the very few Democrats who did take the time to be there was then vice-president Joe Biden.
“I actually like Dick Cheney,” Biden said that evening.
“I have nothing but inordinate respect for you, Dick, and I mean that sincerely. Dick and I can argue like hell about everything from foreign policy to domestic policy. But if we went at each other in personal ways, questioning motives, there would be no possibility of reaching resolution.”
On Tuesday, the White House flags were lowered in remembrance of the Republican while the Senate majority leader John Thune remembered Cheney as “a lifelong public servant who believed very deeply in our country”.
By mid-morning, president Trump had yet to comment on the death of one of the most significant and polarising political figures of the century to date.
