Dick Cheney, powerful vice president during war on terrorism, dies at 84By Barton Gellman and Marc Fisher
Former vice president Dick Cheney, who recast an understudy’s job into an engine of White House power, becoming chief architect of a post-9/11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died Nov. 3. He was 84.
The cause was complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. They did not say where he died.
Heart disease had shadowed Mr. Cheney most of his adult life and was a particular concern during his two terms as next-in-line to President George W. Bush. He suffered the first of five heart attacks at 37 and had eight “cardiac events” between the 2000 and 2008 elections.
After the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, took on the role of primary strategist in all-out military deployments in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. As part of this multitrillion-dollar campaign, intelligence officers were dispatched to use “any means at our disposal,” as Mr. Cheney put it, to find and kill terrorists and those who aided them.
Mr. Cheney and his senior lieutenants, Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and legal counsel David Addington, worked in strict secrecy to circumvent or reinterpret legal prohibitions against torture, domestic espionage and clandestine imprisonment without charge. Mr. Cheney said in 2008 that “it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation.” A 9/11-style attack, he said, “wasn’t going to happen again on our watch.”
Before joining Bush’s ticket in 2000, Mr. Cheney amassed unsurpassed credentials, having served as White House chief of staff, defense secretary and minority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, the second-ranking Republican leadership position in a House then controlled by Democrats.
During Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, Mr. Cheney presided over Halliburton, a Fortune 500 oil field services company, as chairman and chief executive, joining the ranks of America’s moneyed corporate elite....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/11/04/dick-cheney-us-vice-president-dead/
