Former Vice President Dick Cheney dead at 84
By Don Gonyea
November 4, 2025 at 7:18 AM EST
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.
The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.
"Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing," the statement said. "We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man."
There was little in Cheney's early life to foreshadow the immensely influential role he would one day play at the highest levels of American politics. Born the son of a government conservation worker in Lincoln, Neb., in 1941, he would flunk out of Yale University and work as a lineman for a power company in his new home state of Wyoming; toss in a pair of drunken-driving convictions, and it's an inauspicious young adulthood.
But turn it around, Cheney did: marriage to his high school sweetheart, Lynn; two children; a college degree at the University of Wyoming; graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.
While Cheney was turning his life around, the U.S. was caught in the throes of the Vietnam War. Cheney supported that war but never fought in it. He received five military deferments. Critics would seize upon this decades later, as Cheney helped lead the U.S. into another controversial war — the one in Iraq.
Ordinary To Extraordinary
The future vice president began his political career as a congressional intern in 1969. That same year he went to work for a future partner in the Bush administration — Donald Rumsfeld, who ran an economics office in the Nixon White House.
Cheney left the White House before Nixon's resignation, but in 1974, he was back working for the new president, Gerald Ford. Cheney moved up quickly, becoming Ford's chief of staff at the age of 34.
It was then that he began to develop a philosophy that would come to full flower in the White House of George W. Bush. His belief was that the power of the presidency must be not only protected, but also restored. In the 1970s, he watched as Congress enacted reforms in response to Watergate and to Vietnam.
"We've seen the War Powers Act, an anti-impoundment control act, and time after time after time, administrations have traded away the authority of the president to do his job," he said in a 2002 interview on Fox News. "We're not going to do that in this administration. The president is bound and determined to defend those principles and to pass on this office, his and mine, to future generations in better shape than we found it."
War, A Recurring Theme
In 1978, Cheney ran for Congress in Wyoming and won. That was also the year he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks. He served in Congress for a decade and finally gave up his seat to become Secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush. This job brought Cheney's first confrontation with Saddam Hussein, when he directed Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. The war ended quickly after Iraqi troops were evicted from Kuwait. At the time, there were some who felt the U.S. should continue all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam's regime. President Bush declined; in 1994, Cheney defended that decision.
"The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we'd have to do once we got there," he said. "You'd probably have to put some new government in place. It's not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you'd have to stay. For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who's going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire."
Cheney left the Pentagon when the first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Two years later, he flirted with a presidential run of his own but instead headed to the private sector, joining the giant energy services company Halliburton.
Changing The Vice Presidency — And Foreign Policy
The job made Cheney a wealthy man, but he stayed involved in conservative politics. In 2000, he was asked by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to lead the search for a running mate. Bush later made a surprise announcement that he had chosen none other than Cheney.
"Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing," the statement said. "We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man."
There was little in Cheney's early life to foreshadow the immensely influential role he would one day play at the highest levels of American politics. Born the son of a government conservation worker in Lincoln, Neb., in 1941, he would flunk out of Yale University and work as a lineman for a power company in his new home state of Wyoming; toss in a pair of drunken-driving convictions, and it's an inauspicious young adulthood.
But turn it around, Cheney did: marriage to his high school sweetheart, Lynn; two children; a college degree at the University of Wyoming; graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.
While Cheney was turning his life around, the U.S. was caught in the throes of the Vietnam War. Cheney supported that war but never fought in it. He received five military deferments. Critics would seize upon this decades later, as Cheney helped lead the U.S. into another controversial war — the one in Iraq.
Ordinary To Extraordinary
The future vice president began his political career as a congressional intern in 1969. That same year he went to work for a future partner in the Bush administration — Donald Rumsfeld, who ran an economics office in the Nixon White House.
Cheney left the White House before Nixon's resignation, but in 1974, he was back working for the new president, Gerald Ford. Cheney moved up quickly, becoming Ford's chief of staff at the age of 34.
It was then that he began to develop a philosophy that would come to full flower in the White House of George W. Bush. His belief was that the power of the presidency must be not only protected, but also restored. In the 1970s, he watched as Congress enacted reforms in response to Watergate and to Vietnam.
"We've seen the War Powers Act, an anti-impoundment control act, and time after time after time, administrations have traded away the authority of the president to do his job," he said in a 2002 interview on Fox News. "We're not going to do that in this administration. The president is bound and determined to defend those principles and to pass on this office, his and mine, to future generations in better shape than we found it."
War, A Recurring Theme
In 1978, Cheney ran for Congress in Wyoming and won. That was also the year he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks. He served in Congress for a decade and finally gave up his seat to become Secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush. This job brought Cheney's first confrontation with Saddam Hussein, when he directed Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. The war ended quickly after Iraqi troops were evicted from Kuwait. At the time, there were some who felt the U.S. should continue all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam's regime. President Bush declined; in 1994, Cheney defended that decision.
"The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we'd have to do once we got there," he said. "You'd probably have to put some new government in place. It's not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you'd have to stay. For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who's going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire."
Cheney left the Pentagon when the first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Two years later, he flirted with a presidential run of his own but instead headed to the private sector, joining the giant energy services company Halliburton.
Changing The Vice Presidency — And Foreign Policy
The job made Cheney a wealthy man, but he stayed involved in conservative politics. In 2000, he was asked by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to lead the search for a running mate. Bush later made a surprise announcement that he had chosen none other than Cheney.