The tragic arc of Dick Cheney

Ten years ago, I spent some time with Dick Cheney while working on a documentary for Wyoming PBS titled “Dick Cheney: A Heartbeat Away.” I can confirm what many of Cheney’s friends will say — away from the camera, he could be charming, wryly witty and more honest and direct than any politician outside of his sometime friend, the late Al Simpson.

Cheney’s vaunted role in American governance for almost half a century, and his tight-lipped public persona, were often mitigated with Wyoming journalists — I got to know him, just a bit, over sandwiches and fly rods. But neither of us would say we were friends — we were rarely in touch after the documentary came out — and I am not betraying a friend’s confidence when I write about him now. 

The former vice president was a man of few words, but skillful with the ones he dispensed. Before cameras were involved he told me a jaw-dropping story over lunch that felt like a national security scoop — but later, knowing better how he operated, seemed more a calculated way of tossing a tasty elk steak in front of a hungry journalist. 

(The story he told — during our first lunch together, in 2013 — was about 9/11. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-Vice President Cheney was in a command center in the White House basement, while President George W. Bush remained in the air. Another plane commandeered by terrorists was headed toward Washington, likely targeting the Capitol or the White House. Military brass came to Cheney in the bunker: Should we shoot it down? Unhesitatingly, he said yes. But when the military planes went up to intercept the incoming threat, they discovered while in the air that their armaments were not engaged — they could not fire. As we all know, courageous passengers on that plane fought the terrorists, leading to a crash in a Pennsylvania cornfield.)

In hours of interviews, Cheney was an able story-teller, frank and often funny about his Ivy League failure, his beer-soaked years as a roughneck and his relationship with Lynne Vincent, which many credit with righting his wayward ship. In 2014, as a former vice president with no security detail, he obligingly jumped alone behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang I’d borrowed in Casper so we could recreate his campaign drives on Wyoming’s lonely backroads in his first run for the House of Representatives. He allowed us to talk to the doctors at George Washington University who had performed his heart transplant. And if he didn’t like a question — like when I asked how he answered critics who faulted him as secretary of defense (he served in that role from 1989 to 1993) for not having served in the military — he’d say, “No, Geoff, nobody cares about that.”

When you have the forceful temperament, intellect, persistence and good fortune to land a pivotal role in the modern history of the world’s most powerful country, you must submit, during your life and long after, to the judgment of history. 

I am no historian, but I know as a journalist that these anecdotes and insights will not play large in those judgments. Rather, it will be his role as secretary of defense for the elder George Bush, vice president for George W. Bush, the military interventions in the Middle East that he advocated and led, and the harsh interrogations — some would say torture — of suspected terrorists that he felt were justified and legal. 

In these controversial events, Cheney trusted his close circle of aides and felt little need to seek approval outside the White House. From his earliest years in government — starting in the beleaguered administration of Richard Nixon — Cheney advocated for concentrating power in the executive branch, a constitutional theory later dubbed the “unitary executive.” 

Then, after retirement, a heart transplant and the attack on the Capitol in 2021, Dick Cheney became a forceful critic of Donald Trump, calling him “a threat to our republic (who) tried to steal the last election using lies and violence.” He even voted for the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. But I cannot find, reading news reports of that time, that he made any connection between Trump’s authoritarian, if erratic, behavior, and his own earlier assertion of broad executive authority.

Which brings me back to the personal. Cheney was intensely loyal. He found people of quality to work with, and he stuck by them. His attacks against Trump focus on the president’s undermining of democratic processes, rather than Trump’s attempt to concentrate power in a White House without guardrails.

The powerful executive branch that Cheney pushed for depends on leaders of high character, because it diminishes checks and balances. Even many of those who felt Cheney over-reached (remembering the “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the Iraq War) would grudgingly acknowledge his patriotism and character. But there is an element of tragedy in the way Cheney’s overweaning assertion of executive power  now emboldens a president he opposed so forcefully. And for all the vehemence of Cheney’s opposition to Trump, it had little impact on the outcomes of the 2024 election. 

I’m pretty sure, though, that if I’d suggested to Cheney that his life had the arc of tragedy, he would have looked at me with something between a smile and a snarl, and said, “No, Geoff, nobody cares about that.”