Few political figures over the previous 50 years paved the way in which for the nation’s present disaster greater than former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on Monday on the age of 84.
As George W. Bush’s vp from 2001 to 2009, Cheney promoted the unitary government principle to consolidate energy within the presidency, advocated for abuses of worldwide and U.S. legislation within the world battle on terror, together with using torture on detainees, and pushed a unilateral overseas coverage to invade Iraq that sidelined allies and finally upended the whole world order.
Cheney lived lengthy sufficient to see his imaginative and prescient fulfilled, with a unitary government working above and outdoors of the legislation and a U.S. overseas coverage unconstrained by alliances and humanitarian legal guidelines coming to fruition within the type of President Donald Trump’s second administration. In the long run, Cheney got here to oppose the monster he created. After endorsing Trump in 2016, Cheney turned away from him after the Jan. 6, 2021, rebellion and endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024.
This end-of-life reconsideration, nevertheless, doesn’t undo his life’s work.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, Cheney lived there till his teenagers when his household moved to Caspar, Wyoming. After briefly attending Yale College and dropping out, Cheney moved again to Wyoming the place he attended the College of Wyoming and married his highschool sweetheart, Lynne (Vincent) Cheney. Regardless of being of age for navy service, Cheney obtained 5 deferments to keep away from the Vietnam Battle draft. “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” he would later say. As a substitute, he went to Washington as an up-and-coming Republican operative, taking a job as a congressional intern in 1969 earlier than transferring to the Nixon White Home to work beneath Donald Rumsfeld within the Workplace of Financial Alternative. Cheney would depart for the non-public sector after Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
Nixon’s second time period featured a serious change in his strategy to the presidency, one that may influence Cheney’s political profession. As a substitute of working with a Congress closely managed by Democrats, Nixon sought to behave unilaterally by way of the executive state to counter the liberal insurance policies of Congress. He centralized energy within the White Home, impounded funds appropriated by Congress, redirected company priorities away from these designated by Congress and aimed to pursue overseas coverage with out Congress.
However the paranoia that underlay Nixon’s pursuit of unilateral energy finally turned his downfall. The bugging of the Democratic Nationwide Committee places of work at The Watergate Lodge in the course of the 1972 presidential marketing campaign led to impeachment proceedings and his resignation. Congress additionally responded to Nixon’s abuses by passing reforms to constrain the presidency.
When Vice President Gerald Ford took over in 1974, Cheney returned to the White Home as deputy chief of workers beneath Rumsfeld.
Each Cheney and Rumsfeld, who turned Ford’s secretary of protection, held on to Nixon’s imaginative and prescient of a strong presidency uninhibited by Congress, notably within the realm of overseas coverage. Cheney believed that Congress had gone too far with the passage of legal guidelines just like the Battle Powers Decision and the Freedom of Info Act that have been meant to rein within the president, drive him to share energy with Congress and supply data to the general public. He additionally vigorously opposed Secretary of State and nationwide safety adviser Henry Kissinger’s coverage of detente with the Soviet Union.
Picture by David Hume Kennerly/White Home through CNP/Getty Pictures
So each Cheney and Rumsfeld went about secretly undermining all of this. In 1975, they orchestrated the “Halloween Massacre,” forcing the resignation of the CIA director and Kissinger from his White Home perch as nationwide safety advisor and the elevation of Rumsfeld to secretary of protection and Cheney to White Home chief of workers. There, they undermined Kissinger’s negotiations with the Soviets and pushed Ford to undertake their extra aggressive overseas coverage priorities.
One results of the Halloween Bloodbath was the elevation of George H.W. Bush to CIA director. Bush appointed a “Team B” to draft an alternate evaluation of the menace posed by the Soviet Union. The choice evaluation, staffed with hardcore conservatives and hawks — together with Rumsfeld’s private emissary, a younger Paul Wolfowitz — used cherry-picked intelligence to color an image of a rising Soviet menace. Ford and Kissinger aimed to bury the Workforce B report, however its incorrect conclusions that the Soviet Union was engaged in a large weapons buildup that wanted to be countered can be mirrored in Ronald Reagan’s hawkish stance when he took workplace.
After Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter, Cheney ran for Congress in Wyoming, successful a seat in a Republican wave in 1978. There he turned a number one conservative voice and the highest Republican on the Home Intelligence Committee, the place he labored to undermine congressional oversight of the Reagan administration. This included working protection for the Reagan administration when it confronted congressional scrutiny over the Iran-Contra Scandal.
When George H.W. Bush received the presidency in 1988, Cheney was appointed secretary of protection. In that place he labored to undermine Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Employees, in the course of the lead-up to the primary Gulf Battle. Repeating the Workforce B playbook, Cheney had Wolfowitz and his aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby draw up different plans for the invasion of Iraq. Cheney additionally pushed Bush to sideline Congress by invading Iraq with out congressional authorization. Bush ignored each of Cheney’s requests.
Bush misplaced reelection to Invoice Clinton in 1992, and Cheney moved again to the non-public sector. He was named CEO of the oil providers firm Halliburton in 1995 and remained there till 2001 when he turned vp. He didn’t abandon political activism throughout this era, although. In 1997, he was a key signatory of the Undertaking for a New American Century, a neoconservative suppose tank that advocated for the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and using American navy energy to unilaterally reshape the world.
When George W. Bush received the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, he appointed Cheney to guide the seek for his vp. Cheney finally selected himself. Barely eking out a win because of an notorious Supreme Courtroom determination, the Bush administration appeared at first to be a type of unintentional presidencies doomed to a single time period. However occasions have a curious manner of altering historical past.
On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Commerce Heart, one other into the Pentagon, and a fourth was crashed by passengers in a discipline in Pennsylvania.
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush stated on Sept. 20, 2001. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Mark Wilson through Getty Pictures
From his work on Workforce B to his protection of Iran-Contra to his efforts to grab management of the primary Gulf Battle, Cheney had ready for this second. Centralizing energy in his workplace, Cheney turned the architect of the battle on terror, pursuing a secretive coverage that noticed the White Home as a unitary actor and worldwide legal guidelines as mere items of paper.
“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” Cheney informed NBC’s Tim Russert on Sept. 16, 2001. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”
And so the nation would go to the darkish facet.
After the seize of alleged al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a “high-level detainee,” a characterization later deemed doubtful, the administration raced to extract data from him. At CIA black web site prisons, American and overseas interrogators tortured Zubaydah in March and April 2002. These interrogations led the Division of Justice to retroactively approve torture methods by way of the issuance of authorized opinions generally known as the Torture Memos.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney stated in a 2008 interview.
CIA interrogators waterboarded Zubaydah 83 occasions, subjected him to sleep and sensory deprivation, stripped him of his clothes, confined him to a field, held him in stress positions, beat and kicked him, pulled him by a collar round his neck, uncovered him to chilly temperatures for prolonged intervals of time and denied him meals. The FBI interrogators who interviewed Zubaydah previous to his torture reported that he had already given up all actionable intelligence he had earlier than he was tortured.
What he did say after being tortured was that al Qaeda and Hussein have been working collectively. The Bush administration had requested interrogators to search out such hyperlinks. This “intelligence” would make its manner into the administration’s case for battle in opposition to Iraq.
The case for invading Iraq can be buttressed by Rumsfeld, who was serving his second stint as secretary of protection. As within the Ford administration, Rumsfeld created a Workforce B within the type of the Workplace of Particular Plans designed to undermine the CIA’s intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and connections to al Qaeda. The Workplace of Particular Plans stovepiped uncooked intelligence gathered from a fabulist appropriately nicknamed “Curveball” and different high-ranking officers linking Hussein to al Qaeda.
Nevertheless it was one other fabricated allegation that helped the administration make the case for battle that may finally result in Cheney’s lack of energy.
In his 2003 State of the Union speech to Congress, Bush made the notorious declare that, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This intelligence, originating from an Italian intelligence service, was, nevertheless, primarily based on cast paperwork. It was additionally undercut by the CIA’s personal investigation.
After listening to the allegation, the CIA despatched Joe Wilson, a former ambassador to Iraq and Niger, to research it in Niger. Wilson discovered that there “was nothing to the story.” After Bush’s speech, Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Occasions revealing that the “uranium from Africa” assertion was not true.
One week later, conservative columnist Robert Novak sought to undermine Wilson’s story and the CIA’s findings by citing “two senior administration officials” to make the declare that Wilson was chosen for the project on the behest of his spouse, deep-cover CIA worker Valerie Plame. As a CIA operative, Plame’s id was categorized. The CIA demanded the Division of Justice examine who leaked her id.
The following leak investigation would middle on Cheney’s workplace. A grand jury investigation revealed that Cheney informed his high aide, Scooter Libby, about Plame’s employment on the CIA and that Libby then informed six different Bush administration officers, which included Novak’s sources, Karl Rove and Richard Armitage, and two different reporters, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper. Cheney reportedly mentioned leaking Plame’s id to the press with Libby on a flight on Air Drive Two. In 2007, a jury convicted Libby on 4 counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and giving false statements. His actions have been largely seen as an try and cowl up Cheney’s involvement.
Bush would sideline Cheney after this episode, however his influential imaginative and prescient of the presidency remained. He fought internecine bureaucratic battles in opposition to the deep state in pursuit of unitary presidential energy, advocated for savage insurance policies in open defiance of worldwide and U.S. legislation, aimed to neuter congressional oversight, pursued a battle primarily based on lies that spurned allies and rejected intelligence and seen it as essential to go over to the darkish facet.
A lot of this originated in Cheney’s opposition to Congress’ therapy of Nixon in his early political profession, nevertheless it quickly turned the strongest pressure within the Republican Get together.
Trump’s first time period in workplace exemplified all of those strains. He sought unitary management, ran his administration on a collection of more and more absurd lies, ignored congressional oversight and broke or advocated for breaking quite a few worldwide or U.S. legal guidelines. His second time period has taken issues additional with a full-blown try at autocratic consolidation by way of the train of unitary government energy and an all-out assault on civil liberties. Cheney’s battle on terror toolkit has been turned inwards, with immigrants handled as terrorists, detained and rendered to overseas prisons, and the political opposition labeled as “domestic terrorists.” Worldwide legislation is put aside as Trump bombs alleged drug boats with no intelligence supplied to justify them. Congressional oversight beneath Republicans is nonexistent.
It was Cheney who created the mannequin for Trump. Whether or not or not he got here to remorse creating this monster doesn’t matter at this level. Even in dying, Cheney’s imaginative and prescient lives on as Trump’s autocratic creep continues to unfold throughout the nation.
