In his final days at the White House, Dick Cheney proposed an epitaph. His, he suggested, had been “a consequential vice presidency.” It was an understatement, and characteristically oblique. Consequential might describe Lincoln or Lenin, Gandhi or Genghis Khan. Cheney was speaking of influence, and for once he acknowledged his own. He knew he had changed the nation’s course, and he professed to have no regrets. After all this time, I’m still not sure whether to believe that.
I have argued elsewhere that his work as principal architect of the Iraq War and the War on Terror did ruinous damage to America’s national interests and moral standing. That is no small censure, but it does not suffice to represent the man in full.
What I learned from archival research, hundreds of interviews, and many hours of watching Cheney at close quarters during his Pentagon years, is simply not compatible with his caricature on the left as a villain. Vice, the vicious satire that the director and screenwriter Adam McKay claimed to base heavily on my book about Cheney, mimicked a documentary but strayed miles from a faithful portrait. Cheney’s legacy is far more complex, beginning with the motives and singular personal code that guided him.
Save for the Obama years, when Cheney left government to run Halliburton, he devoted his whole adult life to public service without a hint of personal corruption. He was widely counted among the finest defense secretaries of his era, conducting deft diplomacy and guiding the U.S. military with stunning success through the challenges of the Gulf War. He was a patriot of deep and immoderate convictions, driven by vivid perceptions of national peril. He inspired great loyalty among subordinates and friends.
In his two terms as vice president, Cheney displayed the characteristic flaws of a man who was certain he knew better than the citizens he served what was good for them—indeed, what they urgently required. He gave himself license, accordingly, to break rules, stretch the law, and conceal much of his work.
Cheney played a dominant role in populating the early George W. Bush administration with committed conservatives, many loyal to him personally, following the 1980s Republican precept that “personnel is policy.” He placed allies in key institutions such as the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which issues binding interpretations of law across the executive branch. He emphasized traditional right-wing priorities such as military spending increases, deep tax cuts, and energy deregulation.
Yet he was an outlier within the GOP for his reluctance to exploit social fissures for partisan advantage. In 2004, long before most national Democrats, Cheney endorsed gay marriage—at a moment when Bush was preparing to center his reelection campaign on a same-sex-marriage ban. “Freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney said, noting that his daughter Mary is gay.
Cheney was fundamentally honest about who he was and what he stood for, but he told significant lies when he thought them imperative to promote a greater good. U.S. intelligence and United Nations inspectors legitimately believed, for example, that Iraq was hiding biological- and chemical-weapons capabilities, but Cheney went far beyond that in his public case for the war. Bush and other officials joined him, but Cheney was the leading voice for the proposition that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted” a nuclear-weapons program and represented a grave threat to the American homeland. He was a close student of intelligence and knew those claims to have virtually no support, but he believed that fear of a mushroom cloud was the likeliest path to public acceptance of the war.
Behind closed doors his narrative grew even darker. When then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey opposed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in 2002, Cheney overcame his old friend’s resistance with a private, top-secret briefing. Cheney looked Armey in the eye and told him U.S. analysts had discovered that Iraq was well on the way to developing a miniaturized, human-portable nuclear warhead—and that al-Qaeda was “working with Saddam Hussein and members of his family,” potentially to acquire the weapon.
Those were extraordinary, terrifying claims in the aftermath of 9/11. No U.S. intelligence report gave credit to those allegations. Iraq possessed no fissile materials and no working warhead design, still less an ultracompact one. Hussein had no link to Osama bin Laden. “I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be bullshitted by him,” Armey told me years later.
It is notable, I think, that Cheney did not mislead for personal advantage. He did so because he feared that Congress and his fellow citizens would otherwise make the wrong choices. He thought the stakes were life-and-death.
Do not misread me: I justify none of this. Deliberately breaking faith with the public is incompatible with democratic self-government, notwithstanding Churchill’s old saw that secrets must be protected by “a bodyguard of lies.” But the pattern of Cheney’s public messaging offers some insight into how he thought about his duty to his fellow citizens. When he concealed things he thought the public would take the wrong way, he believed he was doing it for us. There was, I think, a moral code at work, however contestable.
Cheney was the nearest thing to an anti-politician to find his way to elected office. He did not care at all about public opinion, except insofar as he thought it might misguide his less stalwart commander in chief. When a dispute about warrantless domestic surveillance brought the whole Justice Department leadership to the brink of resignation, Cheney counseled Bush—at the risk of political ruin—to say good riddance to them. He judged the president irresolute when Bush bowed to their legal objections. Near the end of the second term, ABC’s Martha Raddatz told Cheney the country had turned against the Iraq War. He responded with a single word: “So?” By his understanding of democracy, the people had chosen their leaders and ought to let them lead, much as patients hire surgeons without telling them where to cut.
The vice president believed to his core that the world was fraught with far more danger than the public or most politicians understood. He regarded himself as a ruthless fiduciary—doing dark things on the dark side to protect a naive nation from threats it did not grasp or refused to face. In this he resembled a sotto voce counterpart to Jack Nicholson’s Marine colonel in A Few Good Men: “My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall!”
Stealth became Cheney’s mode of choice. As vice president, he disregarded norms and processes of policy making that he had previously enforced as Ford’s chief of staff, concealing his work from the ostensibly responsible Cabinet and agency officials. He was like a coach who won games by default because the other teams did not know where or when to show up. Lawyers could not quibble about documents they never saw. Congress could not vote against operations left undisclosed. Cheney made a joke of his methods, skirting close to the truth. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked a group of journalists. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
Cheney possessed two defining traits, very seldom seen together, that made him all but nonpareil among U.S. power brokers of the past half century. On the one hand, he had few peers as an operator: willful, decisive, deeply informed, tactically creative, broadly networked, and well-schooled in the lesser-known levers of government machinery. On the other hand, Cheney was—and I use the word mindfully—a zealot. He held radical and uncompromising beliefs and an ardent urgency to carry them out.
Zealots do not tend to be masters of political intrigue. Among many examples in American politics, as varied as Eugene Debs and Barry Goldwater, I know of no other who came close to amassing substantial authority. The handful of power brokers who played at Cheney’s level—Henry Kissinger, Robert Strauss, James A. Baker III, and not many more—were invariably pragmatists. Like Cheney, they could be ruthless infighters, but at heart they were deal-makers who knew how to win a negotiation.
A man like Cheney, certain of his convictions and unusually good at getting his way, was bound to move the needle on history.
For many years his ideological zeal stayed out of public view, camouflaged behind a steady, modest affect and quiet humor. He was a loyal subordinate to the moderate Republican presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and accordingly mistaken for a moderate himself. When those presidents rejected his sometimes aggressive advice—to veto the Freedom of Information Act, or to isolate Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union—he stood by their decisions and gave no public hint of dissent. That fealty, combined with sheer competence in getting things done, sped his ascent to youngest-ever White House chief of staff, then second-ranking House Republican leader, and secretary of defense.
Many observers wondered what happened to the amiable moderate they thought they had known after Cheney became vice president and began to acquire his Darth Vader image. Three things accounted for the apparent transformation.
First, as the elected vice president, Cheney viewed himself as “an independent constitutional officer,” the only federal executive the president could not fire. For the first time, he felt free to push his own agenda instead of simply accommodating a boss. Second, although Bush was indeed “the decider” when he wanted to be, he found policy details tiresome and was often content, especially in his first term, to issue broad guidance for subordinates to carry out. Cheney thrived in the ensuing competition to control the operational terrain where policy is really made, usually outmaneuvering the likes of Colin Powell at the State Department and Paul O’Neill at Treasury. And third, the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001, redoubled Cheney’s long-standing conviction that hangovers from Vietnam and Watergate had dangerously weakened the presidency and the potency of the United States on the world stage. Shoring up those weaknesses, in Cheney’s view, had become an existential emergency.
The War on Terror owed its name to President Bush, but Cheney was the one who launched it on 9/11 from a bunker beneath the White House East Wing while the Secret Service kept the president aloft on Air Force One. As Bush criss-crossed the country from air base to air base, Cheney set about transforming the national-security landscape.
The intensity of dread in the early aftermath of 9/11 is easy to forget. Everyone expected another devastating attack. It would be churlish to deny that Cheney played a major role in the U.S. government’s successful mobilization to prevent a second or third large-scale terrorist atrocity.
And yet. Cheney’s singular initiatives—torture, black-site prisons, permanent detention without charge, and the transformation of Guantánamo Bay into the legal equivalent of outer space, ostensibly beyond either domestic or international law—were betrayals of core American values and did considerable damage to U.S. prestige and alliances. They shocked the conscience, and some turned out, when finally tested in court, to be unlawful.
There is a school of critics who press the argument that torture does not work. I never liked that emphasis. Ineffectiveness is not the reason to abhor torture, and it probably isn’t entirely true. Torture produces a torrent of false confessions from subjects desperate to make their suffering stop, but let’s suppose it extracts a verifiable answer when the question is something like “Where is the safe house?” The heart of the issue is whether we are the kind of nation that is willing to mete out agony upon a helpless human being, provided that it serves a useful purpose. When the facts about “enhanced interrogation” emerged, our collective answer was no. Cheney never retreated a millimeter. Speaking of waterboarding in 2008, years after the practice was shut down, he said, “I’d do exactly the same thing.”
Cheney was certainly not the Iraq War’s sole author, but he held the pen more often than most. Dan Bartlett, a top Bush adviser, told me Cheney was “pushing on an open door” with his advice to the president. For Bush, the war was an opportunity to unseat a tyrant who had tried to kill his father, and to bring democracy to the Middle East. Cheney doubted the latter, and had another motive entirely.
The nation had suffered a devastating blow. Cheney believed that the United States had to deliver an even more devastating response, for the same reason Voltaire offered for public executions: “to encourage the others.” Anything less than brutal retribution would be understood as weakness by other potential adversaries. Afghanistan was too sparse a setting to stage a true display of shock and awe, and Osama bin Laden was proving elusive. Cheney looked elsewhere for a “demonstration effect,” his adviser Aaron Friedberg later told me, “not just to be a tough guy but to reestablish deterrence” with America’s foes writ large.
With nudges from Paul Wolfowitz and other like-minded “Vulcans,” as some of them called themselves, Cheney settled on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was not because the vice president really believed, as he said publicly, that Iraq was the true nexus of “grave and gathering threats” that terrorists would acquire a weapon of mass destruction. A far more obvious nexus, for instance, was Pakistan, which had actual nuclear weapons and a military intelligence service that allied itself with al-Qaeda. But other U.S. interests counseled against making war there. Baghdad fit the bill, with a hostile, expendable dictator and unfinished business from the first Gulf War.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lost American troops, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. The strategic results included the birth of ISIS, a grave blow to U.S. credibility about WMDs, and a sizable boost for Iranian regional hegemony. It almost beggars belief that anyone would willingly have chosen to topple Saddam Hussein if they had known the eventual price. I have often wondered whether Cheney had private doubts, but he never stopped insisting he would do it all again.
Some have said, since Cheney’s death, that his views of executive supremacy “paved the way” for President Donald Trump’s lawless assertions of virtually unlimited power. I suppose the comparison holds in the limited sense that a spoonful of ice cream paves the way for a gallon, but there are profound differences between Cheney’s understanding of presidential authority and Trump’s.
Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, did advance a very muscular view of presidential authority. The Constitution, they believed, gave the president exclusive control of the executive branch in its entirety. Cheney became the strongest proponent of the doctrine of a “unitary executive,” which dated in its modern form to the Reagan administration and held that every executive official, regardless of agency, was subject to direction and firing by the president. He did not, however, advocate a program of summary mass termination of inspectors general and career officials who might question his policies. Democrats remained in place throughout the Bush-Cheney years, for example, in dozens of independent agencies and commissions that Congress structured to maintain partisan balance.
In the broad sphere of national security especially, Cheney believed that the president’s exclusive, or “plenary,” powers were sometimes beyond even the power of Congress to restrict. That is not legally controversial until you say more about “sometimes.” At Addington’s insistence, the White House frequently appended “signing statements” to legislation that Bush signed, attempting to reserve exclusive powers more broadly.
In a 2008 interview with Fox News, Cheney offered a non sequitur in defense of the proposition that Congress “has the ability to write statutes” but the president, as commander in chief, need not always obey. Given that the president needs nobody’s permission to start a nuclear war, Cheney said, it must be true as a “general proposition” that any lesser use of force is entirely up to him. “He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen,” Cheney said. “He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.”
Cheney and Addington recruited constitutional lawyers such as John Yoo, a tenured Berkeley law professor, who supported their maximalist beliefs with arguments that defined the outermost edge of scholarly debate. Once they were subject to further review, several of Yoo’s legal positions were persuasively rejected by his Justice Department successor or found to be erroneous in court. But the Cheney-sponsored arguments, extreme as they were, were not obviously pretextual or made in bad faith.
Cheney never called for disobeying a court order, never tried to discredit a judge with partisan attacks, and never purported to wield authority that the Constitution plainly reserved for the states or another branch of the federal government. When a court in one jurisdiction found the government’s conduct unlawful, Cheney did not maneuver to repeat the same unlawful conduct, again and again, in other districts where courts had not yet ruled. He looked aggressively for interpretations of law that would expand the president’s authority. Sometimes the courts ruled that he had gone too far, but he did not disregard settled law.
Cheney had controversial views of the Constitution, but he felt bound by it. More than that: He revered it, in his own way.
A lifelong Republican, and no admirer of the Democratic presidential nominees, Cheney voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. He did not like or respect the man. He approved, as his party always had, of Trump’s tax-cutting and deregulation agenda, but he was appalled by Trump’s tilt toward Russia and contempt for European allies, among other sins.
Cheney remained a loyal member of his tribe, and he held his tongue for years. But after January 6, 2021, he broke his silence. Cheney might not hold the electorate in especially high esteem, but elections were sacred to him. Trump, he believed, had attempted nothing less than an overthrow of the constitutional order. The Cheneys, père et fille, went to war.
Liz Cheney, then the third-ranking House Republican, voted for impeachment and then helped lead a special committee that gathered evidence in support of Trump’s criminal indictment. Her father, in declining health, filmed a television ad for her doomed reelection campaign.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney declared, cowboy-hatted and speaking direct to camera. “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. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”
Never one for halfway measures, Cheney committed a final apostasy two years later, shortly before the 2024 presidential election. He endorsed Kamala Harris, a candidate whose platform amounted to a mathematical repudiation of his own. He did it for country over party, setting aside the partisan beliefs of a lifetime in favor of a more fundamental value. One last time he rose to confront what he viewed as an existential threat.
Richard Bruce Cheney showed his true colors that day, no less than he had during the wretched excesses of his response to 9/11. It was the same man, animated by the same stubborn convictions, who left behind competing legacies of national regret and national pride.
