Dick Cheney's death marks the end of a political era

National Post, 9 November 2025

The most powerful vice-president in American history never aspired to assume the desk in the Oval Office

Richard B. Cheney is the penultimate death of an era that shaped American and global affairs from the Nixon administration, through the Reagan presidency and into the first decade of the 21st century.

Dick Cheney was in his late twenties when he took up a series of mid-level positions in the Nixon administration. His patron was Donald Rumsfeld, who became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff after Richard Nixon’s resignation. When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defence in October 1975, Cheney succeeded him as chief of staff, then only 34 years old. The two would become principal protagonists of the George W. Bush administration 25 years later, Cheney as vice-president and Rumsfeld back for a second tour at the Pentagon.

The late Nixon and Ford period included figures that would dominate Republican politics for generations — George Shultz as Nixon’s secretary of labour and of the treasury, and later Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state; George H. W. Bush as CIA director; Rumsfeld; James A. Baker III, Ford’s 1976 campaign chairman, who went on to do the same for Reagan in 1980, subsequently serving as his chief of staff and then treasury secretary, before managing Bush Sr.’s election campaign and serving as his secretary of state.

For 12 years, Baker was at the pinnacle of American political power, such that a recent biography of him was entitled “The Man Who Ran Washington”. Now 95, his will be the ultimate death in that cohort.

Cheney had a similar path. After Ford’s defeat in 1976, Cheney ran for Congress from Wyoming, quickly rising in the ranks of the Republican House leadership, likely a future Speaker. In 1989 though, Bush Sr. appointed him defence secretary, at which post he faced the conclusion of the Cold War and the hot war after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

By 2000, Cheney’s quarter century around the inner sanctum of presidential power prompted Bush Jr. to appoint him head of the search committee for his vice-presidential nominee. At some point the two decided that the seeker would become found, and Cheney himself served under Bush as the most powerful vice-president in American history. That was partly because he was not trying to get the top job. Since 1945, every-vice president has eventually run for president, save for Spiro Agnew (resigned in disgrace), Nelson Rockefeller (died), and Dan Quayle. Cheney also opted not to run and thus could pursue his agenda without concern for future political positioning.

That same 25 years near the presidency likely shaped Cheney’s response to 9/11. Expansive executive power, aggressively wielded, would be the answer. Some of that power was legislatively granted — the PATRIOT Act — and some was baldly asserted. Abroad, Cheney led the charge for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at home, the massive extension of the surveillance state.

The Bush administration’s “war on terror” included the capture of suspected terrorists abroad, their rendition to secret black sites and subsequent interrogation. Cheney would robustly advocate for and defend afterward what he called “enhanced interrogation” and what others, quite reasonably, considered torture. Alleged terrorists who suffered torture at American hands were not sympathetic figures, so there was no significant political price to pay. Moral stains are not so easily washed away.

Cheney would live long enough to witness the consequence of untrammelled power when others wield it. During and after his vice-presidency, Cheney waved off fears about excessive executive power on the grounds that his administration would not abuse its “enhanced” powers, but only employ them carefully to defend American security. Perhaps he worried privately about what the Obama administration might do; likely he never thought the next Republican administration would be the problem.

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