The word that best describes how former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wielded the responsibilities he undertook in public affairs over a long career, began improbably early in life and extended into years of repudiation by his fellow partisans, is unintimidated.
He was unintimidated by his rise to become White House chief of staff at age 34 in 1975, after flunking out of Yale University and not finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin (while his wife, Lynne Cheney, earned hers).
Cheney, who died early this month and was eulogized in a ceremony to which the current president and vice president were not invited, rose after being awarded an American Political Science Association fellowship in Washington. There, he favorably impressed two bosses who were elected to Congress at ages 28 and 30 — William Steiger, who, before his death at age 40, pushed a capital gains tax cut through a 2-1 Democratic House, and Donald Rumsfeld, who became former President Richard Nixon’s antipoverty program chief and former President Gerald Ford‘s chief of staff.
Still in his 30s, Cheney remained unintimidated by the travails of his patrons and his country — the forced resignation of Nixon in August 1974, the evacuation of U.S. troops from the embassy in Saigon in April 1975, the unveiling of Ford’s WIN (whip inflation now) buttons in October 1974. He seemed no more impressed than intimidated by his West Wing office near the president’s, nor his duties dealing with eminences such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Although Ford trailed far behind in polls, he nearly won a full term in 1976: if he had gotten 11,117 more votes in Ohio and 14,464 in Mississippi, he would have had 272 electoral votes to former President Jimmy Carter’s 268. Cheney returned to his native Wyoming and, undaunted by voters who expected to meet and grill candidates for high office in person, won election to the state’s sole House seat in 1978.
He was undaunted as well by what many regarded as inevitable American decline. I remember a conversation shortly after Reagan‘s inauguration in 1981, in which he expressed worry about overcoming Soviet advances abroad and budget deficits and stagflation at home. As a Reagan backer, during the Iran-Contra affair, he defended the administration’s right to conduct foreign policy — a harbinger of future stands in future controversies — and he was elected House minority whip after former President George H. W. Bush was elected in 1988.
Bush’s unexpected failure to get John Tower, a fellow Texan, confirmed as defense secretary had two pivotal consequences. One was the naming of Cheney, at age 48, as defense secretary. The other was the election by an 87-85 margin of Newt Gingrich, 46, to succeed Cheney as whip, which put him in line to push aside former Minority Leader Robert Michel and lead Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years in 1994. Whether Cheney’s talents would have produced that result is uncertain; in any case, Republicans have won House majorities in three-quarters of the elections since.
More immediately consequential was Cheney’s appointment. Unintimidated, despite his lack of military service, he assembled Operation Desert Shield and coolly fired the Air Force chief of staff for an unauthorized interview on the eve of Operation Desert Force. His White House, congressional, and national security experience made him a natural choice as head of former President George W. Bush‘s vice presidential selection committee and, after due consultation, for the vice presidential nomination itself.
Only four men served eight years as vice president before 1950; three made well-known comments about the insignificance of the office, and the fourth was known for his alcoholism. But since 1950, there have been five vice presidents who served eight years; three of them (Nixon, H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden) were later elected president in their own right, and a fourth (Al Gore) won the popular vote for the office.
Cheney was the odd man out, yet he was arguably the most consequential vice president of the five. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he pressed hard for aggressive measures to protect America from terrorism, arguing that enhanced interrogations and military action to remove the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq were justified if there was even a 1% chance of preventing a terrorist attack that, in a nuclear age, could have been orders of magnitude greater than 9/11. He acted on this conviction, unintimidated by the prospect of widespread opposition and of a decline that, in fact, occurred in his job approval.
In most ideological quarters, Cheney’s recommendations, implemented with W. Bush’s substantial but not total approval, were, if not a crime, then a blunder. But even if, as in all wars, mistakes were made, “regime change in Baghdad also brought blessings,” wrote the Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim.
Building on those blessings has been, ironically, President Donald Trump, who has routinely called the Iraq war a mistake and has been full of scorn for Cheney. Yet, it is impossible to imagine the success of Trump’s Abraham Accords and bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities if the Hussein regime were still in place; history may record it was necessary to take out the terrorist regime in Iraq before taking out the terrorist regime in Iran. Trump’s successful foreign policies may owe more to Cheney than either would feel comfortable admitting.
Cheney was no orator, but performed ably in his two vice presidential debates, in 2000 against Joe Lieberman, whom he liked and admired, and in 2004 against John Edwards, whose smarmy phoniness he despised. In that contest, Cheney was the first major party nominee to support same-sex marriage — long before Biden, former President Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton — and he gave unintimidated support to his daughter, Mary Cheney and her wife and their children.
DICK CHENEY’S COMPLICATED LEGACY
He gave unintimidated support as well to his daughter Liz Cheney, who, as a former Wyoming representative and member of the Republican leadership, opposed Trump’s course of action on Jan. 6 and supported his impeachment, conduct that I wrote at the time “any reasonable person could find impeachable.” That led to the Cheneys’ otherwise surprising endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
Let me close on a personal note. When I ran into Cheney, he often recalled playing high school football for Casper against Worland quarterback Grant Ujifusa, who later created The Almanac of American Politics and enlisted me as a co-author. With both now gone, I can’t help thinking that playing high school football on cold, maybe freezing, Wyoming fall Friday evenings may leave you unintimidated by anything you face later.
