The late former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died at age 84, will principally be remembered for the Iraq War and the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but his impact on the office he held should not be overlooked.
Cheney revolutionized the vice presidency in ways that will long influence major party presidential nominees as they seek running mates to possibly fill the position.
While it is an exaggeration to say Cheney was co-president with former President George W. Bush — similar to the arrangement former President Gerald Ford, Cheney’s former boss, sought to join the 1976 Republican ticket with former President Ronald Reagan (Reagan demurred) — he was the most powerful vice president in history.
Mainly a symbolic job with only the constitutional duty to preside over the Senate while the president is alive and well, the vice presidency steadily gained in influence after former President Harry Truman was forced to assume the presidency with World War II raging, after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt died unexpectedly during his unprecedented fourth term. From that point on, it was generally accepted that the vice president should at least be in the operational loop to be prepared to take the top job in an instant.
Cheney was originally tasked with leading Bush’s vice presidential search committee before taking on the assignment himself. One of the reasons Cheney was selected was that he wasn’t planning on running for president, having passed on a bid for the GOP nomination in 1996, and was unlikely to change his mind due to his age and health. That meant, Bush hoped, that Cheney’s counsel wouldn’t be influenced by his political ambitions.
As it turned out, Cheney and his aides were deeply involved in decisions that defined, and turned public opinion against, Bush’s presidency. But former Vice President Kamala Harris suggested in her 2024 campaign memoir, 107 Days, that she shied away from the more ambitious names on her veep list and picked Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) at least in part because he wouldn’t outshine her.
Former President Joe Biden had a somewhat awkward, though publicly friendly, relationship with Harris precisely because she ran against him in the Democratic primaries, scoring a memorable debate moment at his expense in 2019, and wanted to be president. As the oldest person ever to serve as president, Biden had to be prepared for Harris to succeed him, whether he wanted her to or not.
Biden did take some steps to groom Harris for the top job. She held calls with top foreign leaders, and the White House often released readouts of them. Official communications frequently referred to the “Biden-Harris administration.” Biden endorsed her as his replacement quickly, although not immediately, after he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
But Harris’s allies often disliked the roles she was given by Biden, worrying she was being set up to fail. “I want to see her be used more effectively, and I think her being in charge of voting was important, but I question her other assignments,” Al Sharpton told the Root in 2021, adding that he planned to meet with Biden about it. The commentator Bakari Sellers called Harris’s policy portfolio “trash.”
Harris complained in 107 Days that she did not feel adequately supported by Biden or his staff. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” she wrote. “That, given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.” She recounted that Biden personally interrupted her presidential debate preparation with an unhelpful phone call.
Former President Barack Obama picked Biden as his running mate in 2008 for Cheney-like reasons. Biden had more foreign-policy experience, a much longer track record in Washington, D.C., and seemed unlikely to run for president. That last bit obviously turned out not to be true: Obama had to dissuade Biden from launching a campaign to succeed him in 2016 and continued to have misgivings as his former two-term vice president was actually elected president four years later. Obama later played a role in pushing Biden to abandon his reelection bid.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance enjoy a close relationship. Trump, who is term-limited, has gone further in preparing Vance to succeed him, even giving the vice president access to the GOP’s financial operation, while musing about the possibility of seeking a third term or Secretary of State Marco Rubio running. Trump famously had a rift with his first vice president, Mike Pence, over the 2020 election, which appears to have ended the latter’s career in electoral politics. Pence’s campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination went nowhere.
Vance and Pence were part of another Cheney tradition: they had longer-standing ties to the conservative movement than the president they served. Pence was supposed to balance the 2016 Republican ticket, reassuring evangelicals and other more traditional conservatives. Vance represented a kind of MAGA doubling down.
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Nevertheless, both Vance and Pence, in their own way, joined Cheney, Paul Ryan, Jack Kemp, and former Vice President Dan Quayle as protectors of the Republican ticket’s right flank. This tradition arguably goes back to Richard Nixon under Dwight Eisenhower and was continued by Nixon with Spiro Agnew, though Reagan broke it by picking an establishment figure in George H.W. Bush, and Ford did the same when he appointed liberal Nelson Rockefeller.
Every would-be president now has to contemplate whether they want their vice president to be a Cheney-like figure or not. In that regard, Cheney broke the vice presidential mold.
