Towering Republican and 46th US vice president Dick Cheney dies at 84

America’s most powerful modern vice president, Dick Cheney, who was the chief architect of the “war on terror” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and helped lead the country into the Iraq War on faulty assumptions, died on Monday night, as per a statement from his family. He was 84. The 46th vice president, who served under Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was a towering and polarizing power player in Washington for decades. However, Cheney was largely ostracized from his party in his final years over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump, whom he branded a “coward” and the greatest-ever threat to the republic. At the fag end of his political career, Cheney cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat and fellow member of the vice president’s club, Kamala Harris.

Cheney suffered from cardiovascular disease for a long period in his adult life but survived many heart attacks and lived many years in retirement after a heart transplant in 2012 that he hailed in a 2014 interview as “the gift of life itself.”

“Richard B. Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, died last night, November 3, 2025,” his family said in a statement. “He was 84 years old. His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed. The former Vice President died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.”

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Cheney, dubbed a ‘war hawk’, pushed for Iraq invasion

Cheney, known as somewhat of a war hawk, helped lead the push under President George W. Bush to invade Iraq on the basis of intelligence, which was later proven wrong, that Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction.

He worked for nearly four decades in Washington. He served as the youngest White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford; represented Wyoming in the US House of Representatives; was secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush; and later served two terms as vice president under Bush junior, President George W. Bush.

Cheney was enjoying a lucrative career in the corporate world and was the CEO of Halliburton, a Texas-based energy company when George W. Bush urged him to vet potential vice-presidential nominees. In the end, Cheney himself took the oath of office.

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On 9/11, Cheney took charge as Bush was out of Washington

On September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the United States, Cheney took charge as President Bush was out of Washington.

“When the president came on the line, I told him that the Pentagon had been hit and urged him to stay away from Washington,” Cheney recalled in his memoir, ‘In My Time’. “The city was under attack, and the White House was a target. I understood that he didn’t want to appear to be on the run, but he shouldn’t be here until we knew more about what was going on.”

“The first war of the twenty-first century wouldn't simply be a conflict of nation against nation, army against army. It would be first and foremost a war against terrorists who operated in the shadows, feared no deterrent, and would use any weapon they could get their hands on to destroy us,” he added.

After the hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center in New York, Cheney became determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks and to enforce US power. Cheney later said that the attacks left him with an overwhelming sense of responsibility to ensure such similar incidents never happened again in the US.

Never regretted his decisions, actions

After the 9/11 attacks, reports of “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects were severely criticised as torture, but Cheney insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable.

He was also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Cheney was never regretful and said he had done what was necessary in response to the unprecedented attack on the US that killed nearly 2,800 people.

“I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said when confronted by a Senate Intelligence Committee.

On being questioned about the Iraq War, he said, “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.”

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