Former Vice President Dick Cheney, key architect of war on terror and Trump outcast, dies at age 84

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who advised presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush and was a key architect of the war on terror, has died at the age of 84, his family announced Tuesday.

"His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” his family said in the statement.

Cheney suffered from heart disease for decades and fell out of favor among many Republicans in the Trump era, even famously casting a vote in the 2024 election for Democrat Kamala Harris after a long feud with America's 47th president.

But for decades he was at the pinnacle of Washington's power structure as a White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, a Wyoming congressman who defended Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, and the defense secretary to George H. W. Bush who helped lead America into the first Gulf War against Iraq's Saddam Hussein alongside Gen. Colin Powell.

It was his service as vice president to the younger Bush that earned him the title of America's most powerful second in command, famously huddling in the basement of the White House to architect America's response to Al-Qaeda's devastating terror attack on America on September 11, 2001.

Cheney proved an unabashed champion of America acting as the world's policing superpower, becoming the face of the neo-conservative movement inside the Republican Party.

But it was that advocacy for relentless military power that led him into controversy and eventual disfavor with the public and the GOP, both of which tired of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cheney left office in 2009 with a popularity rating of just 31%, marred by the revelations that he pushed the United States into a second war with Iraq on the pretense that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that were never found and that U.S. intelligence agencies waterboarded terrorist prisoners.

Eldest daughter Liz, an attorney, was a Wyoming congresswoman from 2017 to 2023, after serving in the George W. Bush State Department. While in Congress, she supported President Trump's agenda during his first term but supported the second impeachment of him following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. 

Her position on the House Select Committee on the riot and outspoken criticism of Trump resulted in the Wyoming Republican Party in 2021 revoking her membership. Cheney was also censured by the Republican National Committee and lost reelection in 2022. She also endorsed Harris for president.

During Cheney's reelection bid, her father ran a 60-second ad in which he said nobody in the history of America has been "a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump." He also called Trump a "coward" for his response to losing his 2020 reelection bid.