By Ephraim Agbo
Former Vice-President Richard B. “Dick” Cheney died on Nov. 3, 2025, at age 84, his family said. The statement cited complications from pneumonia and longstanding cardiac and vascular disease. Cheney’s death closes a life that stretched from the corridors of Congress and the Pentagon to the boardroom of the energy industry — and that left the United States and the Middle East transformed, often painfully so.
From policy operator to the most powerful vice president in modern memory
Cheney arrived in the White House in January 2001 as a Washington veteran: former White House chief of staff to Gerald Ford, a decade in the House of Representatives, and secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush. He brought to the vice presidency an impatience with ceremony and a belief in concentrated executive power. Within months of the 9/11 attacks, he had helped reshape the vice presidency into a policy engine — an office that would drive decisions on intelligence, surveillance, detention and war. For many observers, that concentration of influence — exercised largely out of public view — made Cheney the most powerful vice president in American history.
The immediate response to 9/11: command, continuity — and a new doctrine
On Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney cut a public and private figure who thrived in crisis management: decisive, remote, and assertive. The administration that followed set a new operational posture for U.S. power — aggressive preventive action, expanded domestic surveillance, and legal rationales that stretched long-standing limits on executive authority. Cheney was one of the principal architects of that posture: he pressed for broad authorities to detain suspects, widen intelligence collection and, crucially, to use military force abroad in ways that upended previous post–Cold War assumptions.
Iraq: policy, intelligence and the politics of conviction
Cheney’s signature policy legacy is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was an early and persistent advocate for toppling Saddam Hussein, and he spoke forcefully about the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction — a threat the post-war record later showed to have been badly assessed. The failure to find the presumed stockpiles discredited much of the administration’s public case and made Cheney, more than almost any other official, the focal point for accusations that the White House overstated or misread intelligence. Critics argued that rhetoric and policy crossed a line from vigorous statecraft to reckless intervention; defenders say Cheney acted from a sincere conviction that the risks were existential and that U.S. credibility demanded action. The result was a war that removed a dictator but plunged Iraq into years of chaos, costing enormous human and institutional tolls across the region.
The legal and moral controversies: detainees, interrogation and the “dark side”
Under Cheney’s watch the U.S. system for handling terrorism suspects also changed in ways that continue to provoke legal and moral debate. He backed the expansion of interrogation techniques, supported the use of “enhanced” procedures including waterboarding, and defended extraordinary rendition and the use of Guantánamo Bay as an offshore detention and interrogation site. To supporters, those steps were harsh but necessary adaptations to an unprecedented threat; to critics, they were violations of international law and American principle. Cheney remained unapologetic — a posture that hardened public divisions about the tradeoffs between security and civil liberties.
Business ties and the charge of self-interest
Cheney’s private-sector career — most notably his tenure as CEO of Halliburton — shadowed his public life. Halliburton’s contracts and opportunities in Iraq during and after the invasion became a persistent line of attack for critics who argued that Cheney’s corporate ties created conflicts of interest or the appearance of profiteering from war. Cheney contended he had complied with disclosure rules and divested day-to-day control upon entering government; opponents argued that appearance and timing mattered in maintaining public trust.
Health, family and unexpected human notes
Cheney’s personal story — fractured health and private affections — offered counterpoints to his public image. He survived multiple heart attacks over decades and received a heart transplant in 2012; his longtime battle with cardiac disease shaped the later chapters of his life and finally contributed to his death. On matters of family he could surprise: he publicly supported his daughter Mary Cheney and later defended his daughter Liz Cheney in her break with the contemporary Republican fold. In his last years Cheney also broke with other conservatives by denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic — a choice that underscored his remaining willingness to put principle, as he saw it, over party.
How history will remember him: architect, villain, or both?
Cheney’s legacy will not settle into a single label. For conservatives who feared American decline and preferred muscular statecraft, he was a necessary corrective to what they saw as post-Cold War complacency. For those who judge political actors by outcomes and costs, he is a figure whose policies precipitated long wars, human suffering and troubled legal precedents. Internationally, voices from Iraq and the broader Middle East often view him through the prism of rupture and loss; within the U.S., historians and lawyers will argue for decades over whether his expansion of executive power was temporary wartime exigency or a permanent reconfiguration. Already, commentators emphasise that whatever one’s view, Cheney changed the expectations for what a vice president can be — and that change is the clearest part of his inheritance.
Final reckoning: a polarising statesman at the centre of a nation’s trauma
Cheney’s death arrives at a moment when the questions his career raised — about the limits of force, the oversight of intelligence, the balance between security and liberty, and the ties between government and industry — remain urgent. In memory and in policy, he is both emblem and mirror: a man who pursued a decisive view of American power and forced the country to confront what it costs to wield that power without wide consensus. History will write the technical accounts, but politics will be left to argue over whether the price paid under Cheney’s logic was necessary, reckless, or some of both.
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