Former Vice President Dick Cheney, the controversial 46th Vice President of the United States and one of the most powerful figures in American politics in the last century, died Monday.
“Richard B. Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, died last night, November 3, 2025. He was 84 years old,” Cheney’s family said in a statement released Tuesday morning.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed. The former Vice President died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.”
Cheney served as vice president during former President George W. Bush’s administration from 2001-09. He is considered one of the most influential vice presidents in modern U.S. history, having helped lead the country’s “war on terror” crafting the argument for the United States to enter the Iraq War following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He and other Bush administration officials faced fierce criticism following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 over false claims the country possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney served as Defense secretary in former President George H.W. Bush’s administration from 1989-93. His influence also reached beyond the realm of national security. His vast knowledge of federal government minutiae made him a formidable power in creating and pushing tax, energy and environmental policy.
In 1978, Cheney was elected to represent Wyoming in the House of Representatives, going on to serve as House Republican Conference chair and House minority whip. Prior to his tenure in the House, Cheney was former President Ford’s chief of staff.
To some, Cheney stands as the most important architect of the modern American presidency, but to others he was a man who trampled the Constitution and embroiled the United States in a Middle East conflict that it is still reeling from decades later.
Cheney, by his own account, touted himself as a leader willing to make tough calls and personal sacrifices to defend the American homeland.Despite his status as a hawkish conservative, Cheney was a vocal critic of President Trump and backed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Democratic presidential bid last year.
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” Cheney said at the time. “That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Cheney’s daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), was also an outspoken Trump critic, breaking with the president following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. 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,” the former vice president said in a television ad for his daughter. “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.”
Cheney remade the vice presidency, transforming the role from a ceremonial post to one with considerable influence over policy on terrorism, executive authority, Iraq and other key issues for conservatives.
He made numerous allegations about the Iraq War that did not pan out as expected: He claimed there were ties between the 9/11 attacks and prewar Iraq that did not exist, and he claimed U.S. troops would be treated as liberators in Iraq, but they were not.
He never lost his conviction about the war, even as many in the country turned against the anti-terror campaign and the leaders in charge of it.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, Wyo., near where Liz Cheney would buy a home. She was elected to the House a few years later, in 2016.
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, one of three children of Richard Herbert Cheney, an Agriculture Department soil conservation, and the former Marjorie Lorraine Dickey. He grew up in Sumner, Neb., and Casper, Wyo.
He attended Natrona County High School in Casper, where he began dating his future wife, Lynne Ann Vincent, and graduated in 1959. He started at Yale University the following fall but dropped out, returning to Wyoming and began a job as a power lineworker.
It was during this period that he was arrested and convicted of driving while intoxicated, once in November 1962 at the age of 21, and again in 1963.
He changed course over the next several years, graduating from the University of Wyoming in 1966, then starting, but never finishing, doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Through a graduate fellowship in 1969, Cheney found himself in Washington, working as an intern for then-Rep. William Steiger (R-Wis.), before joining the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was heading the Office of Economic Opportunity at the time.
During the Nixon administration, Cheney quickly climbed the White House ranks, rising from a lower-level staff assistant to deputy assistant to the president.
When President Ford took office, Cheney rose to become the youngest ever White House chief of staff after Rumsfeld was named Defense secretary in 1975.
After Democrat Jimmy Carter took the White House in 1976, Cheney returned to Wyoming and launched a campaign to win the state’s sole House seat. In 1978, during the primary, he suffered his first heart attack.
Cheney went on to win that election — and the five after it, eventually becoming House minority whip. Along the way, he suffered two additional heart attacks, in 1984 and 1988, and underwent a quadruple bypass surgery.
In 1989, he left Congress to become President George H. W. Bush’s Defense secretary.
While serving as Pentagon chief, Cheney presided over a military downsizing after the end of the Cold War.
Though the military shrank under his watch, Cheney did oversee Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when the U.S. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait after Saddam Hussein had occupied the country.
But the U.S. stopped at Iraq’s border, deciding not to try to topple Hussein. In a foreshadowing of his own future, Cheney said the U.S. chose to stay out because “a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long, drawn-out conflict.”“There was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim that we hadn’t talked to anybody about. That you hadn’t gotten Congress to approve, hadn’t talked to the American people about,” he added.
For his leadership, Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Cheney later said that out of all his roles in public service, heading the Pentagon was “the one that stands out.”
After Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton, Cheney was once again pushed into the private sector. After several years, Cheney took the reins at Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil field service companies.While at the company, Cheney remarked the United States was “always going to have to be involved” in the Middle East, while reflecting on the Gulf War.
“Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle East. It never has, and isn’t likely to in my lifetime.”
Then in 2000, George W. Bush came calling.The then-Republican presidential candidate courted Cheney to run on his ticket as vice president, an offer he initially refused. Cheney instead headed Bush’s vice presidential search committee before accepting, retiring from Halliburton.
Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack shortly after the 2000 presidential election, but he entered the White House with a strong resolve.
It became apparent early on in his vice presidency that he would take a larger role in policymaking than his predecessors. In the first month in his new role, he was provided an office in the Capitol just off the House floor, in addition to his Senate offices.
At the White House, the staff organization gave Cheney’s office more influence than previous vice presidents, with his people interwoven with Bush’s. The president’s Cabinet was also filled with Cheney allies, including his old boss Rumsfeld, who was named Defense secretary.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney became the main architect of the administration’s war on terror. He pressed for the U.S. to enter another war in Iraq, publicly claiming that Baghdad’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction” and its support of terrorism made the move necessary.
He also questioned the findings of numerous intelligence and national security organizations that found no cooperation between the Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist group that carried out the U.S. attacks.
After the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cheney was criticized for failing to estimate the risks and costs of the entering the conflict, which stretched nearly nine years, past his time in office, into the end of 2011.
He also shuttled and signed off on the most controversial elements of the war on terror, such as monitoring private communications without a warrant, extraordinary rendition and `extreme interrogation methods such as waterboarding.
Outside of national security, he flexed considerable power in matters of energy, environment, tax and budget policy. He was accused of granting access, secretively, to business groups with substantial stakes in government policy and refusing to hand over government documents traditionally made public, notably keeping three full-sized safes in his office.
Cheney came under particular scrutiny over his former company, Halliburton, for its close relationship with the administration. The company had received a $7 billion, no-bid contract in the run-up to the Iraq War. And in 2004, the company was given a $1.2 billion contract to reconstruct Iraq’s southern oil fields, another deal that was not opened to competitive bidding.
The move drew the ire of Senate Democrats, including Patrick Leahy. The Vermont senator approached Cheney on the chamber floor, where the two reportedly argued about the vice president’s ties to Halliburton, prompting a “f‑‑‑ yourself” from Cheney.
In addition, Cheney pushed an expansion of the presidential powers. Publicly, he called it “a restoration, if you will, of the power and authority of the president” when the Bush administration challenged executive branch oversight laws, including the Presidential Records Act, Freedom of Information Act, War Powers Resolution, and Foreign Intelligence Oversight Act.
Later into his term, his office become the center of the 2005 Valerie Plame CIA scandal, surrounding the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, was one of the several people under investigation. It was during the investigation that Libby, before a grand jury, stated that his higher-ups, including Cheney, had authorized him to disclose classified information to the media on intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Libby was eventually convicted in 2007 on four felony counts, a conviction Cheney lobbied Bush hard to overturn with a full presidential pardon. Bush did commute Libby’s 30-month prison term sentence but let the conviction stand. Cheney reportedly pushed for a full pardon up until Bush’s final hours in the White House in January 2009 but was unsuccessful.
The disagreement reportedly divided the two men in their final days working together.
He also managed to make headlines outside the White House. In February 2006 he accidentally shot 78-year-old Texas attorney Harry Whittington while participating in a quail hunt. Cheney popularity took a hit in the polls after the incident, with his approval rating dropping 5 percentage points.
After the Bush administration ended, he maintained a visible public profile, publishing a memoir recounting his time in the White House, and another that criticized the national security policy and decisions made under former President Obama.
But his health was declining. After his fifth heart attack in 2010, he underwent surgery for a battery-powered implant to help his heart pump enough blood to keep him alive and working while he awaited a transplant, which came in 2012.
In the face of his detractors, Cheney remained steadfast in defending his more disputed decisions and actions made during the Bush administration, which he saw as necessary to protect American lives.
That mindset was reflected in a July 2007 letter written to his grandchildren while Bush underwent a colonoscopy and Cheney assumed the role of acting president for several hours. In it, he urged that they “always strive in your lives to do what is right.”
“As I write this, our nation is engaged in a war with terrorists of global reach. My principal focus as Vice President has been to protect the American people in our way of life. . . . As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations, and you will assume the important responsibilities of citizens in our society.”
Cheney is survived by Lynne Cheney, whom he married in 1964, along with their daughters, Mary Cheney and Liz Cheney Perry, as well as seven grandchildren.
- The HILL