Former V.P. Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84

He died Monday night, surrounded by his wife, Lynne, and daughters, Liz and Mary. Tributes and condemnations arrived almost in the same breath, which feels exactly right for a figure who reshaped the national security state after 9/11 and never apologized for it.

Here’s the split screen that defines Cheney: the steady hand in the bunker on 9/11, and the chief evangelist for the Iraq War on faulty premises; the institutionalist who mastered the levers of government, and the architect of “enhanced interrogation” and maximal executive power; the conservative warrior who ended up voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 as a rebuke to Donald Trump’s anti democratic politics. Both images are true. The fight is over which matters more.

The Vice Presidency He Rewrote

Cheney did what vice presidents are not supposed to do: he governed. George W. Bush’s number two wasn’t a ribbon cutter or a funerals and fundraisers guy; he was a force center, a node through which intelligence, national security, and legal justification flowed. Historians and contemporaneous reporting agree that he expanded the office’s reach into policy, personnel, and process to a degree unseen before or since. Even people who bristle at the “Cheney was the real president” myth concede the point: Bush was “the Decider,” but Cheney built the menu.

Cheney’s conviction, especially after the second plane hit the South Tower, was that America had to preempt, not just punish. He backed shooting down hijacked planes if necessary and then set about constructing a post 9/11 order rooted in preemption, secrecy, and a deliberately muscular presidency. The White House lowered flags today; the symbolism is tidy, the legacy messier.

The Iraq War, And The Bill That Never Stops Arriving

The center of gravity in the Cheney legacy is Iraq. He said in 2002 there was “no doubt” Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a premise that proved false. He insisted the administration worked off the “best available intelligence,” but subsequent inquiries found exaggerations, misrepresentations, and a willingness to tilt ambiguous intelligence toward war. That decision, and the occupation that followed, destabilized a region, birthed a generation of veterans with moral injury, and helped seed the cynicism that turbocharged Trumpism. You do not have to take it from the left; listen to the conservative strategists who say he was central to everything the United States did after 9/11, for better and worse.

The human accounting remains staggering. Iraqis point to “chaos and terrorism” as his inheritance. Veterans describe an “unjust” war that scarred them. These are not abstract indictments; they are the lived experience that followed a doctrine, preemption, that outpaced its evidence and its planning.

The Rule of Law Dispute He Forced

Cheney did not hide his views on torture; he defended waterboarding and the black site system as necessary to keep the country safe. He believed in a theory of the unitary executive that put a premium on presidential power in wartime, and he built the legal scaffolding to match. For civil libertarians and many within the national security and legal communities, that scaffolding corroded democratic norms, the normalization of extreme secrecy, the erosion of habeas protections, the routinization of extrajudicial practices. This is the democratic norms ledger where the progressive critique is sharpest: if you loosen restraints for your emergencies, do not be shocked when future presidents use your tools for their ambitions.

The Irony Of His Final Act

The man caricatured as Darth Vader became, in the end, a vivid anti Trump Republican. He called Trump “a threat” and “a coward,” cut an ad for Liz Cheney’s doomed stand against election denialism, and ultimately cast his last presidential vote for a Democrat. You can read that as late stage institutionalism or as an establishment figure protecting the system he spent decades strengthening. Either way, it is a reminder that the guardrails conservatives once claimed, rule of law and constitutional order, are not ideological property; they are democratic commons.

The Global Echo

Cheney’s footprint was never just American. His ideas helped define a two decade security posture that allies emulated and protested in equal measure. The forever war politics that exhausted Western publics did not just swing a few districts, it reframed transatlantic debates over surveillance, migration, and military intervention. Europe’s skepticism of American primacy deepened in the Iraq era; so did NATO’s entanglement with United States counterterror doctrine. If you care about the health of liberal democracy worldwide, you can trace a line, from 2003 Baghdad to Brexit and beyond, through the disillusionment with elite judgment and opaque power. That does not make Cheney the cause. It makes him a prime mover in a story that unraveled far from Washington.

The Human Story Under The Armor

It is easy to miss the person under the myth. Cheney’s heart was a long running sub plot: five heart attacks; a period living without a pulse thanks to a mechanical assist device; a 2012 transplant he called “the gift of life.” Family statements today spoke of love, courage, kindness, and fly fishing. His influence on his daughter Liz’s constitutional spine is not incidental. There is a throughline from a belief in force to a belief in institutions: both presume the state must be strong enough to act and honest enough to be constrained. Cheney never reconciled those halves to his critics’ satisfaction. But they were there, and the contradiction is instructive.

The Verdict, For Now

History will not grade on a curve. The Iraq decision looms too large; the torture regime stains too deeply; the executive power project was too sweeping to be waved away by 9/11’s trauma. And yet, the counterfactual is real: the United States did not suffer a second catastrophic attack on Cheney’s watch. The security state he helped build, bloated, secretive, and often unaccountable, was also effective in its core mission.

A progressive read of Cheney’s legacy is easier than a fair one. The rule of law damage matters. Democratic institutions can be brittle, and he helped push them hard. But dismissing him as a villain misses the lesson. Cheney represents what happens when technocratic prowess meets moral certainty in a crisis: the machine hums, the guardrails bend, and the invoice arrives years later, with interest.

The mixed emotions will not resolve soon. They should not. Democracies remember better when the memories are complicated.