Trickier Dick Departs

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney
January 30, 1941 - Late yesterday afternoon

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do you any good if you lose,” Dick Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his 8th and final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Dick Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to just about every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics--and getting away with it--this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.

“He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls,” said Bruce Bradley, who hired Cheney to work at his investment firm in 1973, after Cheney left the imploding Nixon administration. “If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back." During debates arranged for the benefit of Bradley's clients at the time, Cheney would argue forcefully that Nixon's resignation was forced merely by his enemies' political ploys, and not because Nixon had violated any laws or betrayed the oath of his office.

In their 1983 Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives, co-authors Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney and his wife Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney fawned over House Speaker Henry Clay, describing him as the “most spectacular” asserter of power in history. “No one managed to do what young Henry Clay did to thrust a nation into war,” the couple wrote, referring to the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. “Audacious and bold, he and his war hawks were exhilirating company as they maneuvered a doubtful president and a divided nation into a firm and fiery course.”

The book goes on to admit that this “firm and fiery course” into the War of 1812 met with a series of “bloody and painful defeats” on land and ultimately ended in something of a stalemate, but this did not mean that Dick Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, was slated to learn the lessons of history he and his wife wrote of in their book.

(Indeed, a startlingly candid interview Cheney gave in 1994 in which he outlines all of the predictable problems with invading Iraq that in fact did come to pass, amply demonstrates one of two things: his cynicism or an inability to heed even his own intellectual conclusions if they proved politically inconvenient.)

Almost 20 years later, after repeatedly asserting that US troops in Iraq would be greeted as liberators, and that “the streets in Basra and Baghdad [were] sure to erupt in joy,” Cheney, flanked with propaganda from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), constructed a relentless and almost wholly fabricated public relations campaign that led the US into its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In his 2010 memoir, Direct Threats and Decisive Action (Harper-Collins) Cheney characterized the invasion and subsequent defeat and withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 as “an unfortunate intersection of unforeseen instabilities combined with a lack of political will.”

Born January 30, 1941 at 7:30 pm in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was the oldest son of Richard, who worked for the US Soil Conservation Service, and his mother Marjorie, who was a homemaker. He was followed by a brother, Robert, and sister, Susan. When he was 13, his family moved from Lincoln to Casper, Wyoming, a town of 17,000 at the time, where Cheney occupied himself hunting, playing poker, fishing, playing football, waterskiing on planks with a car towing him along the Alcova Dam aqueduct, and nurturing a reportedly lifelong love of military history and biographies.

After earning a scholarship to Yale in 1959, Cheney flunked out: “I had a lack of direction, but I had a good time,” he said. He returned to Casper, Wyoming, and worked as a lineman for a power company. In 1964 Richard married Lynne Vincent, whom he'd met at the age of 14. Lynne was a state champion baton twirler in high school. According to a Time Magazine profile, Lynne would start her routines by setting the ends of her baton on fire before hurling it impressively into the air. When she was done with her pyrotechnics, she would hand the baton to Cheney, who had been standing inconspicuously off to the side with a coffee can full of water, ready to douse the flames.

Cheney returned to Casper College and the University of Wyoming for his Bachelor's degree before pursuing his Master's degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin. During this time, from 1963 to 1965, Cheney received four student deferments for military service, and a fifth deferment in 1966 as a “registrant with child or children.”

In 1969, Cheney embarked on his political career when he was
hired, by Donald Rumsfeld, for the first of many positions within
the Nixon administration. In 1975, he was made the youngest-ever chief of staff when the doomed Gerald Ford appointed him to the post. Following Ford's defeat in 1976, Cheney successfully mounted a campaign to represent Wyoming in the US House of Representatives, where he served from 1978 until 1989.

He suffered the first of his many heart attacks in 1978, at the age of 37. Subsequent attacks are responsible for his distinctively crooked “smile.”

In 1979, he voted with the majority against making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday a national holiday, only to reverse himself, again with the majority, in 1983. In 1986 he voted against a resolution calling for US recognization of the African National Congress in South Africa, freedom for Nelson Mandela, and negotiations with the black majority.

“It was a step we simply weren't prepared to take,” he later explained to ABC's This Week. “The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization.”

During this time, Lynne Cheney was pursuing her own political career, and served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 until 1993.

In 1989, when George Bush Sr.'s nomination of John Tower was rejected, Cheney was nominated for Secretary of Defense. Cheney occupied himself at the Defense Department lobbying for a bigger military budget, MX missiles, and more B-2 "stealth bombers." After picking Colin Powell to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Cheney presided with Powell over Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

In 1993, Cheney returned to the private sector, joining the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank founded in 1943 primarily to support limited government, vigorous private enterprise, and strong national defense, for whom Lynne Cheney was also a senior fellow in education and culture. Lynne also served on the Lockheed Corporation's board from 1994 until 2001. In 1995, Cheney became chairman and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, where he served until 2000. Cheney put his connections to muscular use for his new employers: under his watch tax havens increased dramatically, and Halliburton won a variety of highly profitable no-bid or faux-bid contracts.

Staying busy on several fronts, Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and others, founded “The Project For a New American Century,” a think tank which had a defining influence on the disastrous foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

When Cheney departed Halliburton in 2000 to run for Vice President, he was paid $20 million and retained a significant number of guaranteed stock options for his efforts. According to the New York Times, despite his great wealth (estimated at between $30 and $100 million) Cheney requested and received permission in 2001 to transfer the estimated $186,000 annual electricity bill for his 33-room mansion, on the grounds of the Washington Naval Observatory, to the Navy.

One of the more infamous and emblematic moments of Cheney's brazen career occurred during his October 2004 debate with fellow Vice Presidential candidate, Senator John Edwards. Through his crooked half-smile, Cheney said: “"In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

Edwards, clearly rendered momentarily speechless by the statement, had met Cheney twice before: in 2002, when Edwards escorted Elizabeth Dole to her swearing in as Senator for North Carolina, where Cheney administered the oath, and at a National Prayer Breakfast in February 2001, where a transcript of the event shows Cheney acknowledging Edwards. Cheney was either lying, on live television, in front of millions of people, with little regard for how easy his claim would be to disprove, or he was mentally incompetent.

While some critics saw the assertion as a particularly cynical tactic, those perceiving mental infirmity were bolstered in their assertions when, on February 11, 2006, Cheney shot alleged friend, 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and torso while hunting quail on a Southern Texas ranch. Whittington, who suffered a non-fatal heart attack three days later, due to a piece of buckshot lodged in the outer wall of his heart, passed away a year later.

Cheney was not impeached or made to face any legal penalties for his role in the CIA leak grand jury investigation (otherwise known as the Plame Affair), his deliberate use of false information to manufacture support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, his problematic financial dealings while in charge of Halliburton Energy Services, or his alleged role in managing or directing a private "death squad".

Upon leaving office, Cheney breezed through the revolving door and back into high-paying corporate life and the comforts of his Wyoming ranch, accompanied by an unprecedented three round-the-clock (and taxpayer-funded) doctors from the White House Medical Group. Characteristically uncowed by the public's historically low opinion of him and his actions as Vice President, Cheney made a minor splash months after leaving office when he maintained, during a high-profile interview with an evening news program, that President Obama's policy changes with regard to Iraq and the use of torture on those classified as "enemy combatants" had made the U.S. less safe and more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

After heart attacks five and six left him incontinent, with an even more severe crook in his smile and an uncontrollable neck twitch, Cheney retreated almost entirely from the public eye. After attack number seven left him without the use of his right and less squinty eye, Cheney severely curtailed his hunting expeditions.

Late yesterday afternoon, Bruce “Dick” Cheney died at his Wyoming ranch of respiratory complications following an excruciatingly painful and drawn-out heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Lynne, and his two daughters, Mary, and Elizabeth, who has four grandchildren with former Homeland Security General Counsel, Philip J. Perry.

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