For nearly two years, Dick Cheney lacked a detectable pulse. In the summer of 2010, Cheney was facing end-stage heart failure. He had suffered his first heart attack in 1978, his second and third in the 1980s, and his fourth in November 2000, presumably when the strain of stealing a presidential election proved too much to bear. Despite these valiant efforts, Cheney’s heart was unable to kill him off. Not even a fifth heart attack, in February 2010, when Cheney’s two terms as “vice” president had finally come to an end, could finish the job. That’s when Cheney’s doctors decided that his defibrillator was no longer sufficient, and five months later, they outfitted him with something called a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD. Though designed to compensate for the diminished capabilities of Cheney’s heart by facilitating the circulation of his blood, the LVAD did not pump blood like a real heart does. Instead of discrete beats, the LVAD produced an even, continuous flow, like a river. A 2012 heart transplant restored Cheney’s pulse for the remainder of his life, but the LVAD period always struck me as the fullest physical realization of who Cheney was and what he did to the world. To think that, as you met the gaze of his cold blue eyes or considered the way his mouth always seemed on the verge of a snarl, you could reach out, gently press a fingertip to the inside of his wrist, and feel . . . nothing!
Is this reading of the most consequential vice president in American history a reductive political projection? Am I failing to give enough weight to his apparently loving, decades-long marriage to Lynne? Am I unfairly discounting his consistent public support for his younger daughter’s homosexuality at a time when such support was still rare and politically dangerous among Republicans? Am I being petty in refusing to acknowledge the inner strength Cheney demonstrated in turning his life around after his expulsion from college and two drunk-driving arrests at the age of 22? After all, many of those who knew and worked with him in Washington seem to remember him fondly, judging by the statements they released after his passing. Kamala Harris, for example, described herself as “saddened” to hear of his death, and she praised him as a “devoted public servant . . . who, with a strong sense of dedication, gave so much of his life to the country he loved.” Joe Biden was a touch more measured in his eulogizing, but he still allowed that he and Cheney both cared a lot about their families. He also spent his 83rd birthday attending Cheney’s funeral, which is remarkable when you consider how many birthdays Biden has left. James Carville, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Rachel Maddow, and Al Gore were there as well.
If Al Gore can bring himself to publicly mourn a guy who robbed him of the presidency, then sure, maybe I am being petty. I don’t care. Lots of people get sober after a misspent youth and experience a change of heart about gay people once it turns out they are related to one. Only Dick Cheney managed to fatally undermine all three branches of the federal government and mastermind the destruction of the Middle East at the same time. We’d all be better off today if Cheney had kept drinking after he got kicked out of Yale.
“Men make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” That may be broadly true, but Dick Cheney got to make history under the exact circumstances he would have chosen. He got to wield the power of the office of the presidency without needing to win it — he was an indifferent campaigner with neither the desire nor the ability to charm voters on the stump — and without needing to navigate any of the many unique challenges involved in occupying it. September 11 ensured that a majority of Americans temporarily shared Cheney’s paranoid and Manichaean view of international relations. As a result, he got to start a war that he and his fellow neoconservatives had been fantasizing about for many years. He also got to pass off the problem of ending that war to his successors. Cheney even got to enjoy the experience of watching the television show Homeland turn his medical history into a thrilling plotline, in an episode where terrorists hack the vice president’s defibrillator and give him a heart attack. “I found it credible,” Cheney said on 60 Minutes, with his inimitable anti-charisma. “I was aware of the danger, if you will, that existed.”
There is another episode in Cheney’s life that is emblematic of his impact on the country’s politics. In early 2006, Cheney was on a hunting trip near Corpus Christi, Texas, accompanied by the ambassador to Switzerland and Harry Whittington, a lawyer and political operator. Late on a Saturday, Cheney saw a single quail fly out of its covey. He wheeled to his right and fired. He didn’t hit the bird, but he did hit Whittington, in the face, neck, and chest. Some of the bird shot made its way to Whittington’s heart, and he suffered a minor heart attack; he was hospitalized for six days following the accident.
Whatever the war on terror means for history, that is also the meaning of Dick Cheney’s life.
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On its own, the story of the vice president of the United States eagerly blasting away with a shotgun before bothering to assess the situation in front of him, and without stopping to consider the consequences of pulling the trigger, would have been richly symbolic. Just eleven days later, the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra by Sunni extremists would finally spark the civil war made inevitable by the American invasion back in 2003. As if that wasn’t enough to keep editorial columnists busy for a few weeks, when Whittington finally emerged from the hospital to give a press conference, he apologized to Cheney. “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week,” said Whittington, whose face and neck were still covered in green, purple, and brown bruises. For his part, Cheney never offered any kind of public apology to Whittington, and the Washington Post later reported that he never apologized in private, either. In his memoirs, Cheney wrote that he “appreciated the grace with which [Whittington] handled the situation.” I’ll bet.
It is almost charming how tidy an allegory this is for the impunity culture that Cheney and the other members of the Bush Administration worked so assiduously to entrench in Washington, and which has now spread into so many areas of American society. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Donald Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally. Well, Cheney actually did stand in the middle of South Texas and shoot somebody, and he walked away without so much as saying sorry, much less with any kind of censure or punishment.
This was a hallmark of the presidential administration Cheney helped to lead for eight years. In 2002, Cheney was instrumental in persuading congressional Democrats to stop calling for a full investigation into how and why the country’s intelligence agencies had failed to see September 11 coming. That same year, President Bush “unsigned” the Rome Statute, the document that had established the International Criminal Court just four years earlier, and then signed into law a bill prohibiting the US from cooperating with the ICC in any way. (One provision authorized the president to use military force to free any American detained by the ICC, which gave the bill its colloquial name: the Invade the Hague Act.) In 2005, as thousands of New Orleanians remained trapped in their flooded homes or the squalid Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush told the world-historically incompetent FEMA director Michael Brown that he was doing a “heck of a job.”
And then there was America’s torture program, under which the US illegally detained and brutally abused many hundreds of people during the first eight years of the war on terror. As Jane Mayer documented in nauseating detail in her book The Dark Side, “almost immediately after September 11, 2001, Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the US Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror.” As early as November 2001, Cheney indicated that the US would become the first country ever to authorize violations of the Geneva Conventions, asserting in a speech to the US Chamber of Commerce that suspected terrorists did not “deserve to be treated as prisoners of war.” Over the coming weeks, John Yoo, David Addington, and other government lawyers followed Cheney’s lead, drawing up the now notorious memos, presidential orders, and other documents that “legalized” practices such as indefinitely detaining suspects without charges, refusing to allow those suspects to communicate with family members or international monitors, and waterboarding them.
Cheney lied about and defended this program throughout his time in office. When Republican Senator John McCain led a 2005 effort to pass legislation banning “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of any prisoner of the US government, Cheney personally went to Capitol Hill to lobby against it. Even after he left office, Cheney continued to bang the drum for a program that most Americans considered to be a stain on the country’s history. In 2011, while promoting his memoir, Cheney said he thought the US should still be using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, if “we had a high-value detainee and that was the only way we could get him to talk.” In 2014, when a Senate report brought renewed attention to the torture program, Cheney took to the airwaves once again. Asked on Meet the Press about his role in creating the program that had now come in for such harsh official criticism, Cheney said, “I’d do it again in a minute.”
What lends special political significance to Cheney’s role as one of the chief legal and political architects of the torture program is what happened after he left office — or, rather, what didn’t. In 2009, the ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos asked President Obama if he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate potential war crimes committed by members of the Bush Administration. This was among the most consequential decisions that Obama would have to make during the first days of his presidency. Everyone knew that the Bush Administration’s actions after September 11 had made a mockery of international law and shredded the country’s moral credibility. For American politics to ever recover from such a sustained period of brutality and lies, there would have to be some kind of accountability, and Obama would have to be the one to administer it. Stephanopoulos was giving him a perfect opportunity to declare that, no, members of the executive branch couldn’t lie to Congress and have people tortured without facing official consequences afterward. But after a little boilerplate about how nobody is “above the law,” what Obama said was, “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward.” The meaning of the words “look forward” was obvious: There would be no trials, no convictions, no congressional investigations. Obama had made his decision; the best way to address torture was to pretend that it never happened. He gave a nice speech or two about how torture didn’t reflect America’s core values, but he gave a nice speech or two about everything — legally, Obama turned torture into a nonevent. From that point on, everything was permitted, especially for the executive branch. His interview with Stephanopoulos was the moment when it became possible for someone to get caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” and still get elected president.
Cheney had a long career in Washington. He arrived as an intern for a Republican congressman from Wisconsin in 1969, and he stuck around for forty years, working as a staffer for Donald Rumsfeld, a House representative for the state of Wyoming, secretary of defense under Bush the elder, and finally, after a lucrative sojourn in the private sector as the CEO of Halliburton, as vice president. But were it not for the war on terror, Cheney would be nothing more than a footnote to histories of the post-Vietnam era in American politics. September 11 set Cheney on his way to becoming a key figure in the history of American empire. His was the crucial voice in deciding that America’s response to September 11 would go far beyond targeting al Qaeda, and he was instrumental in determining that the US would wage this new war as brutally, and expansively, as possible. Whatever the war on terror means for history, that is also the meaning of Dick Cheney’s life.
All Cheney wanted was for the US to do whatever was required to stay on top — public opinion, human rights, and basic morality be damned.
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So what exactly did the war on terror mean? To my mind, the best answer to that question can be found in the postscript that Giovanni Arrighi wrote for the second edition of his book The Long Twentieth Century, which he completed in 2009 but didn’t live to see published the next year. In that book, Arrighi argued that after the Second World War, the US, like all capitalist world powers before it, had for a period ruled as a hegemonic power, the word hegemonic indicating that its rule was at least semi-consensual. During the first three decades of the postwar era, the US fueled the fastest rates of economic growth the world had ever seen, and because it shared a sufficiently large portion of the benefits of that growth, the rest of the capitalist world accepted — albeit often reluctantly, and not always without serious conflict — America’s privileged position of leadership. Beginning in the 1970s, however, global growth began to slow, and as a result, US hegemony began to weaken. By the turn of the century, it was obvious to many that a moment of crisis was arriving.
Neoconservatism, the ideology that gave shape to Cheney’s working life and for which he was the single most effective advocate, was fundamentally an attempt to use America’s unprecedented military supremacy to ensure that slowing global economic growth did not also herald the end of America’s superpower status. The leading intellectual lights of the neoconservative movement didn’t share Arrighi’s Marxist analysis of global economic dynamics, but to read any collection of their writings, such as Robert Kagan and William Kristol’s edited volume Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Defense Policy, is to encounter a group of thinkers who were painfully aware that if the US wanted to remain unchallengeable in the 21st century, it could no longer count on the miracle of its postwar economic dynamism to keep the rest of the world happy. Still, a less happy world could be kept in line, so long as the US was willing to rely more on military action and international policing. This was nothing less than an attempt to transform the terms under which the US interacted with other nations in defense of its own supremacy, and while Cheney didn’t have the intellectual sophistication of even a Kagan or a Kristol, he shared their aggressive and paranoid temperament, and he was eager to put their plans into action.
The neoconservative era culminated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By the end of the aughts, when Arrighi was writing his postscript, the invasion’s failure to deliver on its promises was obvious. “The unraveling of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century,” Arrighi wrote, “has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of US hegemony — that is, in its transformation into mere domination.”
Dick Cheney personified that transformation; his face was the face of “mere domination.” Some politicians really do seem to need to believe in America’s essential goodness in order to get through the day. Not Cheney. If you want to see the difference, watch any video of George W. Bush delivering a speech in the months after September 11, with Cheney standing next to him. Bush, God bless him, was just vapid enough to believe his own rhetoric about how the US military was about to make the whole world safe for freedom and democracy. While his low intellectual standards and high degree of self-satisfaction meant that most of his post-9/11 speeches were unbearably smug, you could not call them insincere. To watch Bush deliver his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, the first speech to reveal the scope of what was coming, is to encounter a hegemony that truly does not yet realize its time is over. “America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror,” he said, less than four months into a war that would end twenty years later with America’s total defeat. “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free.” Dubya’s voice swelled with hope, his eyes shone — this man really did think that America’s resolve and purity of heart had liberated the women of Afghanistan.
While Cheney didn’t have the intellectual sophistication of even a Kagan or a Kristol, he shared their aggressive and paranoid temperament, and he was eager to put their plans into action.
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But every so often, Dick Cheney’s face would come into view behind Bush’s shoulder. His eyes did not shine, nor did his chest swell with hope and resolve. He knew better than his boss that the time had passed when America could rule the world and make even remotely plausible claims to moral superiority while doing so. All Cheney wanted was for the US to do whatever was required to stay on top — public opinion, human rights, and basic morality be damned.
In 2008, ABC’s Martha Raddatz interviewed Cheney in Oman and pointed out that two-thirds of Americans no longer thought that the disastrous Iraq War was worth fighting at all.
“So?” Cheney replied.
“You don’t care what the American people think?” Raddatz asked him.
Any other politician would have offered a panicked, backtracking “clarification” beginning with something like, “Of course I care what the American people think.” But Cheney was not any other politician. “No,” he said. “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.” That’s the kind of thing you say when you’re no longer worried about maintaining hegemony, and Cheney meant it just as sincerely as Bush meant the rhetoric about the liberation of women.
Still, maybe one shouldn’t be too hasty to view Bush and Cheney as contrasting figures. Neither could have ascended to such lofty political heights without the other, and they always made the most sense as a complementary set, with Bush putting a human face on Cheney’s remorseless will to power and Cheney keeping Bush busy with things to do at work each day. There were even a number of parallels between the two men. Both were boozed-up Yalies who got DUIs as adults (Cheney in his early twenties, Bush at 30) and took a little longer to figure out what they wanted to do with themselves than their parents would have liked. Each credited the woman he married with helping to straighten him out. Both dabbled in the oil business during periods when they weren’t involved in politics and government full-time. And both were girl dads whose daughters occasionally made things difficult for them at work, whether by being gay or just partying too much.
I began to think more about these similarities in 2021, when, after the January 6 riot, Dick Cheney switched from supporting Donald Trump to opposing him. In 2022, he appeared in an ad for his daughter’s congressional campaign. “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said. “He is a coward. . . . He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it.” Two years later, he went further, endorsing Kamala Harris in an attempt to prevent Trump from winning the White House a second time. “We each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” he said.
This, to put it lightly, was a bit much. “We each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” said a man who gained the White House only because the Supreme Court stole an election for him! Donald Trump is a “threat to our republic,” said a man whose life’s work was devoted to destroying the system of federal checks and balances that every child in America learns is the foundation of that republic. The Harris campaign’s eagerness to repeatedly tout the endorsement of one of the least popular political figures in the country was galling but not surprising. Cheney’s decision to grant the endorsement, however, was a surprise, or at least it was to me. Did he really think there was a substantial bloc of undecided voters who would be swayed by the opinion of a man whose nickname during his years in power was Darth Vader? Did he really not see what a favor he was doing to Trump by giving him the opportunity to once again bash the Bush Administration? Finally, could Cheney possibly not understand how much he had done to make Trump’s presidency possible? In the fall of 2024, as I watched some Harris surrogate put on a smug little grin and mention Cheney’s endorsement for the hundredth time, I thought about Cheney and Bush again, and then I had a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before: Was Cheney the stupid one?
