Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a war hawk who served three GOP presidents, dies

by Joey Garrison and Susan Page
November 4, 2025


WASHINGTON ‒ Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful vice presidents in United States history, a chief architect of the war in Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a member of an old Republican Party guard that is quickly fading away, died on Monday night.

Cheney, whose death was confirmed by a statement from the Cheney family, was 84.

With his reputation as a war hawk, Cheney helped lead the push under President George W. Bush to invade Iraq based on intelligence ‒ later proven wrong ‒ that Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction.

Dick Cheney, former vice president and political force in the White House
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Dick Cheney, vice president under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, has died. He was considered one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history.

See his political career in photos, including here at a news conference about the war appropriations bill in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 3, 2007.

Tapped by Bush as his 2000 running mate for his decades of Washington experience, Cheney became a top target of Bush critics for the enormous role he played in shaping the administration’s foreign policy.

A Republican congressman from Wyoming in the 1980s and Defense secretary for the elder President George H.W. Bush, Cheney's first prominent role in Washington was as deputy chief of staff and later White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford.

After his two terms as vice president ended in 2009, Cheney became one of the nation's most prominent Republicans to oppose Donald Trump. Along with his daughter, Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman, Dick Cheney said that he voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. "There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," Cheney said before the election, which Trump won.

President George W. Bush (right) and Vice President Dick Cheney meet Joint Chiefs and Combatant Commanders in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington Jan. 29, 2008.
Dick Cheney's evolution: From one-time college dropout to most powerful vice president in American history

WASHINGTON – He was the most powerful and the most controversial vice president in American history.

Richard Bruce Cheney was a laconic one-time college dropout who found his place in Washington, moving to the capital as a congressional fellow and rising in short order to become White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, a Wyoming congressman in the House Republican leadership and wartime secretary of Defense for the elder President George H.W. Bush.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, father of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), listens to daughter's remarks during a primary night event Aug. 16, 2022 in Jackson, Wyoming.

Then, for eight years as vice president for the younger President George W. Bush, Cheney acted as no second-in-command had before — directing the presidential transition, devising policy on energy and leading a concerted administration effort to restore and expand executive authority from what he saw as congressional incursion. Read more.