He was the embodiment of America-first ideals before Donald Trump and his Maga movement hijacked the phrase.
The principle of a strong president empowered to push through the agenda was core to his view of how US politics should function.
Yet long before his death on Tuesday, Dick Cheney was deeply estranged from the Republican party that had been his life’s work and the person, Trump himself, who had single-handedly reshaped it in his own image.
Along with his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former vice-president who was once synonymous with rightwing Republican neo-conservatism – became so disenchanted with the modern GOP and alarmed by the threat he believed Trump posed, that he endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris for president in 2024.
He had earlier appeared with Liz (then a member of Congress and now one of Trump’s sworn enemies) on the steps of the US Capitol on the first anniversary of the January 6 riot by Trump supporters trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. The occasion, at which no other Republicans were present, produced the remarkable spectacle of Democrats warmly shaking his hand.
The memories will inevitably soften the image Democrats are apt to have of him. Yet they are hard to reconcile with the picture his legions of critics held of Cheney in his prime.
For an entire generation, Cheney was viewed unambiguously – and not inaccurately – as the driving force and architect behind the US invasions of Afghanistan following the September 11 terror attacks, and in 2003, of Iraq, on the fallacious grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destructions and had ties to al-Qaida.
As vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney was an emphatic propagator of both theories – and unapologetic when they were proven wrong.
Both campaigns resulted in long, bloody occupations, that spawned bitter internal resistance, and cost hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives – as well as those of US and allied service personnel. The cost in national resources was immense.
That Cheney was able to play such a defining role in America’s early 21st century foreign policy was down to the relative inexperience in international affairs of Bush, who consequently gave his vice-president broad – many said unprecedented – latitude, knowing that he had served as defense secretary under his father, George HW Bush.
His influence in the second Bush administration was profound in other ways, being a key driving force to its unfolding “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks and resulted, within weeks, in the USA Patriot Act. The legislation paved the way for a whole panoply of actions designed to counteract terrorism and prevent repeat attacks.
The result was an anti-terrorism infrastructure that included the now notorious detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, secret rendition flights of suspects detained overseas, and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that human rights groups and others denounced as torture.
Cheney may not have designed all of it – or been the sole instigator. But he was closely identified with it in a way that exceeded any other administration figure, barring perhaps Bush himself.
Far from minding, the hawkish vice-president lapped it all up. He relished his publicly assigned role of being the administration’s “Darth Vader,” joking that his wife, Lynn, said it “humanized” him.
Against that dark aura, the ironies of Cheney’s parting of ways with Trump and modern day Republicans are numerous.
His forceful personality and willingness to push his own agenda in the Bush White House brought about the “forever wars” that Trump later denounced and promised his support base would be avoided under his presidency.
Yet so much of what Cheney believed and fought for created the ground for Trump’s excesses.
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The USA Patriot Act, for instance, may be now be used to justify the current administration’s actions against Venezuela, whose president, Nicolas Maduro, and leading officials have been designated by Trump as “narco-terrorists” potentially subject to the same lethal actions that befell al-Qaida figures like Osama bin Laden.
Cheney was also an advocate of appointing some of the most rightwing figures to the US supreme court, including the current chief justice, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.
As chief-of-staff to Gerald Ford in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Cheney became deeply critical of the limitations placed on the presidency in reactions to the abuses that had occurred under Richard Nixon, believing it rendered the office holder impotent in many ways.
He clamoured for a more assertive executive, which he helped to implement – and exercise – during Bush’s presidency.
Yet under Trump that vision has expanded in ways that Cheney could perhaps not imagine, helped in part by sympathetic rulings from the current supreme court that he played some role in shaping.
Cheney lived long enough to see confirmation of the fears he experienced after the January 6 riot.
“After the riot … he saw the dangers of an overly powerful president,” said Robert Schmuhl, professor in American studies at the University of Notre Dame.
It seemed a strange turnaround for a man who – at least in Bush’s first term, when his impact was at its zenith – accrued more power and influence than any other vice-president in US history.
Yet, said Schmuhl, it did not amount to a change of mind or heart. “He really worked to strengthen the presidency, but then recognized that you can only go so far, and that there should be guardrails,” he said.
“Dick Cheney was a very consequential figure but was also a deeply controversial figure – and in retrospect, the controversy overshadows the consequence.”
