In Vice President Dick Cheney’s later years, former detractors sometimes expressed puzzlement about his political trajectory. The onetime designated villain of the Iraq War had somehow mutated into a hero of the anti-Trump constitutional resistance. Had he changed? Or had they misjudged him?
People do change. Perspectives can shift. But oftentimes the secret to later-life decisions is encoded in early experiences.
Richard Bruce Cheney arrived in Washington in 1968 as a 27-year-old congressional intern. Within seven years, he rose to become White House chief of staff.
That spectacular ascent owed much to Cheney’s talents and work ethic. It owed more to the catastrophes and traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. As more senior staff resigned in disgrace or faced indictment, the way lay open for a younger man untainted by previous failures and scandals. Early in the Nixon administration, Cheney formed a close bond with Donald Rumsfeld, another thrusting young man a few years his senior. The president who succeeded Nixon, Gerald Ford, named Rumsfeld his first chief of staff. Rumsfeld selected Cheney as his deputy. In November 1975, Rumsfeld moved to head the Department of Defense. Cheney succeeded him in the White House job.
Cheney’s boyhood coincided with America’s rise to global preeminence. At age 34, he found himself near the top of the U.S. government at a time of humiliation and defeat. The new Ford administration set to work restoring the government’s credibility at home and America’s position in the world.
After Ford’s electoral loss in 1976, Cheney ran for Congress from his native Wyoming. He won his seat and rose rapidly in the House leadership. Along the way, he and his wife, Lynne, co-wrote an insightful analysis of congressional power.
The party of which Cheney was now a leader had been badly split by Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. Cheney was a Ford loyalist sympathetic to Reagan’s ideas, and especially Reagan’s faith in American power. The argument between Ford and Reagan was less about what America should do than about what America could do. Ford was most influenced by Henry Kissinger’s deep pessimism about American capabilities. The most insightful analysis of Kissinger’s thinking, Barry Gewen’s The Inevitability of Tragedy argues that Kissinger did not believe that the United States was institutionally, ideologically, or temperamentally suited to global leadership. True statesmanship required the U.S. to reach the best deals it could get before its power ran out.
Cheney never accepted that view. His robust support of Reagan’s self-confident policies elevated him to the No. 2 position among House Republicans in 1987. He was poised to become the next Republican speaker of the House but for another chance occurrence. In 1989, newly elected President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower as secretary of defense. Tower, a U.S. senator from Texas, was a longtime Bush ally. He was also an alcoholic, a sexual harasser, and a man who had offended enough fellow senators that they felt little inclination to overlook the first two offenses in the list. When his nomination fell apart, Cheney got the appointment instead—and then efficiently organized the U.S. liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1990–91.
Governments make mistakes, then overcorrect for those mistakes.
The Bush administration halted its 1991 campaign at the Kuwait-Iraq border. The administration collectively assumed that the Iraqi military or the Iraqi people would finish off Saddam Hussein without direct U.S. intervention. Instead, Saddam brutally crushed rebellions against his rule, in great part because the U.S. loosened its “no fly” rules to allow Saddam to use helicopter gunships to massacre civilian demonstrators. Inside Iraq, this permission was interpreted as U.S. complicity in Saddam’s survival. In fact, the decision seems to have been an unauthorized bungle by the U.S. commander in the region, Norman Schwarzkopf, who later told an interviewer that the Iraqis had “suckered” him.
The lesson Cheney took was that the Saddam problem would not solve itself. As Saddam resumed his aggressions and provocations after 1991, Cheney counted the end of the Gulf War as unfinished business. Like Ford, Bush lost reelection. Cheney entered private life as CEO of Halliburton, a major government contractor. He became a regular at events of the American Enterprise Institute. I got to know him a little in those days: a man who spoke little, listened deeply, and fitted everything he heard into a well-stocked and well-organized mind.
As conservative as he was on economics and national security, Cheney had little interest in the socially reactionary side of the conservative program. He voted in favor of the anti-abortion wish list in the House, but ignored the issue once he no longer faced a local electorate. (Later, he would endorse same-sex marriage during the election of 2004, at a time when the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign was hoping to use state referendums to ban same-sex marriage to energize voters against the Kerry-Edwards ticket.)
His indifference to the hottest of hot-button conservative issues doomed from the start any hope for a Cheney presidential run in 2000. Instead he offered the benefits of his deep experience to George W. Bush’s campaign.
Bush organized his campaign and his administration on a lesson he had learned from his father’s defeat in 1992.
The elder Bush delivered arguably the most successful foreign-policy record in U.S. history: not only the Gulf War victory, but also the peaceful end of the Cold War, the securing of the dangerously poorly managed Soviet nuclear arsenal, and more. None of it mattered much to the U.S. electorate in November 1992. The younger Bush concluded that his energy and attention in his first term would be focused tightly on the domestic agenda. Foreign-policy tasks, including the inherited Saddam problem, would await his second term, if he won it. Cheney’s expertise on security matters buffered Bush from being distracted by non-crucial foreign-policy work. That plan exploded with the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but it explains much about how the Bush administration found itself situated on the day of the al-Qaeda terror attacks.
By the end of 2001, the Taliban had been toppled in Afghanistan, but Osama bin Laden had escaped. The Bush administration faced a messy set of choices about what to do next. Reconstruct Afghanistan? That was the option urged by many Democrats. But nation-building in the world’s least hospitable environment seemed a costly and doomed undertaking. Declare victory and return to the domestic agenda? There were many on the Bush team who favored that approach, but with Osama bin Laden still at large, who would believe that occupying Kabul counted as victory? There had to be something else the U.S. could do, equal to the horror of the attack the U.S. had suffered on 9/11.
Finishing Saddam seemed, to many, that “something.”
After the Iraq War went wrong, Bush and Cheney were often and angrily accused of lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. This seems to me a charge grounded in a deep misunderstanding of events. Before 9/11, the administration underestimated al-Qaeda. After 9/11, it overcorrected in the opposite direction about Iraq. Every ambiguous piece of evidence was interpreted in the most ominous possible way, less as a political device than out of sincere conviction. Never again would the administration repeat the undervigilance of September 10.
Saddam Hussein wanted for his own reasons to convince the world that he possessed—or soon could possess—terrible weapons. He succeeded. President Bush said in his 2002 State of the Union address, “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.”
I was part of the team that worked on that speech. In retrospect, there is a bitter irony in the last line of the quoted text. Saddam did indeed have “something to hide,” but it was precisely that his regime’s plots to develop weapons had collapsed in corruption and incompetence. Saddam himself may not have understood the magnitude of the failure.
The Iraq War consumed the Bush administration—and, before it was over, undercut Cheney’s standing within the administration. The U.S. did eventually stand up a successor regime, but not the strong and pro-Western regime hoped for in 2003. Iraq has returned to world oil markets, but it remains a violent and unstable place open to Iranian influence and intimidation.
Anger and resentment left behind by the war were an important source of support for Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Trump flat-out lied when he pretended to have opposed the Iraq War in advance. But that lie did not matter much so long as his main opponent for the nomination was the brother of the president who had started the war. Trump won the nomination and then entered the presidency. Over the decade since, he has remodeled the Republican Party into everything that Cheney had always opposed and rejected.
Trump’s Republicanism is deeply pessimistic about America’s role in the world. It sees the United States as one great power among many, no better than the others.
Trump’s Republicanism is radically statist and protectionist, in service to reactionary cultural politics.
And it is above all contemptuous of law and constitutional limits. The very week of former Vice President Cheney’s death, the Trump administration will argue at the Supreme Court in favor of the president’s power to impose limitless tariffs on his sole personal claim that some kind of economic emergency exists, without any right of anybody else to question or refute that claim—meaning that the president has effectively discarded and replaced Congress’s Article I power to tax or refrain from taxing.
The young constitutional conservative elevated to the highest offices of government by the Watergate scandal would have been appalled and disgusted—and so was the old constitutional conservative who lived to see his cherished daughter a leader of the last band of principled conservative opposition to Trump’s attempt to overthrow a presidential election by fraud and force.
“In my beginning is my end,” wrote T. S. Eliot. There was one Dick Cheney all along. Know him better as you tell and honor the life story of this great servant of the American people in all his strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and failures.
