Dick Cheney, former vice president of the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush, between 2001 and 2009, died yesterday, November 3, at the age of 84, according to a statement issued by his family.
Cheney, considered one of the architects of the so-called “war on terrorism” and who was key in the United States war against Iraq, died from complications of pneumonia and cardiovascular problems, according to the statement.
Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84. pic.twitter.com/UPjyG10bdd
—The Associated Press (@AP) November 4, 2025
For cnn He is the “most powerful vice president of the modern American era” who helped the country “get involved in the disastrous invasion of Iraq based on erroneous premises.”
Born in a small mountain town
Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska. While living in the small mountain town of Casper, Wyoming, he met Lynne Vincent, his high school sweetheart and future wife.
Cheney was admitted to Yale University on a scholarship, but had difficulty integrating and maintaining his grades. By his own admission, he was expelled and returned west to work on power lines.
In a turning point for Cheney, Lynne gave him an ultimatum; As she told The New Yorker, she had made it clear that she was not interested in marrying a county lineman. Cheney returned to college and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming. The couple married in 1964.
September 11 gave rise to a new man
Cheney was in the White House, with the president out of town, on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the attacks against the World Trade Center occurred, an event for which he was determined to avenge the Al Qaeda attacks and impose American power throughout the Middle East with a neoconservative doctrine of regime change and preventive war.
From a bunker deep inside the White House, the US network notes, Cheney assumed control of the crisis, directing the response of a nation afflicted and suddenly at war. He gave the order to shoot down any other hijacked plane heading to the White House or the Capitol.
The September 11 attacks triggered the United States war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, who harbored Al Qaeda, although the terrorist group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, managed to escape.
Soon after, Cheney pushed to expand the offensive into Iraq and against its leader, Saddam Hussein, whose forces he had helped drive out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, when he was Pentagon chief under President George HW Bush.
“The vice president’s aggressive warnings about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs, its alleged ties to Al Qaeda, and its intention to supply lethal weapons to terrorists to attack the United States played a critical role in preparing the ground for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003,” he notes. cnn.
Congressional reports and other postwar investigations demonstrated, however, that Cheney and other administration officials exaggerated, misrepresented, or failed to adequately present erroneous intelligence about weapons of mass destruction programs that Iraq ultimately did not possess.
A critic of Trump
In his final years, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, was practically marginalized from his party due to his intense criticism of President Donald Trump, whom he called a “coward” and the greatest threat the republic has ever faced, the source says.
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In an ironic epilogue to his political career, he cast his final vote in the 2024 presidential election for liberal Democrat and fellow vice-presidential club member Kamala Harris, reflecting how the populist Republican Party had turned against its traditional conservatism.
Cheney suffered from cardiovascular disease for most of his adult life, surviving a series of heart attacks, going on to live a full and vigorous life, and living many years in retirement after a 2012 heart transplant that he called in a 2014 interview “the gift of life itself.” He is survived by Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary Cheney, and seven grandchildren.
