Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, a key architect of George W Bush’s “war on terror” and an early advocate of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has died at the age of 84.
He died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease on Monday night, his family said.
Cheney served as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff in the 1970s, before later becoming one of the most powerful US vice presidents in history under Bush.
In his later years, he became a bitter critic of the Republican party under the leadership of Donald Trump.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honour, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” his family said in a statement.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1941 and later attended the prestigious Yale University on a scholarship but failed to graduate.
He went on to gain a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Wyoming.
His first taste of Washington came in 1968, when he worked for William Steiger, a young Republican representative from Wisconsin.
Cheney became chief of staff under Ford when he was just 34, before spending a decade in the House of Representatives.
As secretary of defence under George Bush Snr, he presided over the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Gulf War, in which a US-led coalition evicted Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
He then became VP to George W Bush in 2001 and played a greater role in making major policy decisions than most of his predecessors.
It is for this role that he will be remembered best and most controversially.
During the younger Bush’s administration, he singlehandedly turned his role as vice-president from what was traditionally an empty role, with little formal power, into a de-facto deputy presidency, overseeing American foreign policy and national security in the wake of the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001.
He was a leading advocate of US military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Cheney said that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons were never found during the military campaign.
He also repeatedly claimed there were links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the terror group led by Osama bin Laden that claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. He said the attackers would incur the “full wrath” of American military might.
“The fact is we know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were heavily involved with terror,” Cheney said in 2006.
In 2005, Cheney warned of “decades of patient effort” in the war on terror, warning “it will be resisted by those whose only hope for power is through the spread of violence”.
His key role in the campaign heavily affected his political legacy, after the US took years to extricate itself from its costly war in Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Despite decades working for Republican presidents, he later became a bitter opponent of President Donald Trump.
Having initially endorsed him in 2016, Cheney was appalled by allegations of Russian interference in the presidential election and Trump’s seemingly casual attitude towards Nato.
He supported his older daughter, Liz, as she became a leading Republican “never Trump” in the House of Representatives – and condemned the refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election.
Two months before last year’s US presidential election, Cheney staged a major intervention: announcing that he would vote for the Democrats’ Kamala Harris.
He said there had “never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump”.
In return, Trump called Cheney “irrelevant RINO” – an acronym which stands for “Republican in name only”.
In his final years, Cheney would become a persona non grata in his own party, which had been reshaped in Trump’s image.
His daughter, who had followed him into Congress, was ousted from office for her criticism of Trump.
In an odd final twist, his own Trump criticism – and endorsement of Harris – would win him praise from some on the left who had once denounced him decades earlier.
