In January 2022, Richard Bruce Cheney made a surprise appearance on the floor of Congress. His return to Capitol Hill marked the anniversary of the ruckus that briefly delayed certification of election results the previous year. Cheney, accustomed to rough words from his opponents, found himself in an improvised receiving line. ‘No Republicans showed up’, the New York Times recounted,
But Democrats in the House, including the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were effervescent. After 13 years in retirement and of all-but-unimaginable changes in American life wrought by the rise and fall of President Trump, Mr Cheney and Liz Cheney were engulfed by a parade of Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the former vice president a war criminal. The Democrats shook Mr Cheney’s hand, and some embraced Ms Cheney, who introduced him to her erstwhile colleagues, saying: ‘This is my father. This is Dad.’ It was a stunning moment and an emblem of how much had changed in the Trump era.
Pelosi praised his attendance, declaring that, whatever past quarrels, they had never differed over their commitment to ‘honoring our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution’; Steny Hoyer saluted Liz Cheney ‘for having the courage to stand up for truth’; Adam Schiff looked back misty-eyed to ‘a time when there were broad policy differences, but there were no differences when it came to both parties’ devotion to the idea of democracy’. ‘It’s an important historical event’, Cheney explained when asked what drew him to Washington to commemorate the January 6th ‘insurrection’: ‘I was honoured and proud . . . to recognize this anniversary, to commend the heroic actions of law enforcement that day, and to reaffirm our dedication to the Constitution’. Media accolades did not save his daughter’s seat in Congress from a MAGA primary challenge, although the Resistance circuit offered a lucrative fallback. When he endorsed Kamala Harris last September, Cheney said of Trump ‘there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic’.
Twenty-five years ago, Cheney displayed a different attitude towards the sacral rites of democratic transition. As lawyers contested George W. Bush’s razor-thin Florida margin, his running mate took charge of a privately funded transition operation based at his McLean residence, preparing a presidential team before an official victor was declared. Recounts stalled in Miami-Dade and the courts deliberated over ‘hanging chads’; Cheney nonetheless pressed ahead, bringing in Ari Fleischer as spokesman and vetting cabinet nominees all while the General Services Administration refused to release federal resources. He declared Florida’s certification to be conclusive, dismissed Gore’s legal challenges as an exercise in denial and warned that any hesitation in assembling a government would jeopardize national security. Meetings with congressional leaders in Austin followed, signalling that the administration-in-waiting intended to behave as though the matter were settled. The haste was not improvised. In truth, the VP-elect had devoted the better part of a long career to reflection on the relays of power.
He wasn’t born to it. Raised in Wyoming by New Dealer parents, Cheney won admission to Yale through connections of his future wife, Lynne, only to flunk out twice. A period of drift and minor alcohol-related scrapes back West ended when she insisted on a more disciplined course. Five draft deferments later, by his mid-thirties he was serving in the Office of Economic Opportunity as deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, whom he followed into the Ford Administration and eventually replaced as chief of staff to the president. A Watergate survivor, he learned the lesson of Nixon’s collapse: ‘Don and I survived and prospered in that environment because we didn’t leave a lot of paper lying around’, he observed. At the White House he proved a virtuoso of bureaucratic manoeuvre. He and Rumsfeld eased Rockefeller off the 1976 ticket, sidelined Kissinger and conspired to extinguish détente. Quiet, relentless, Cheney rarely took credit; he showed an appetite for minutiae and stamina for unglamorous work, seeing to it that the West Wing plumbing got fixed and cruets were replaced on the presidential table. Colleagues remembered a discreet, preternaturally middle-aged man, his distinguishing features a lawless smirk and ‘snake-cold eyes, like a Cheyenne gambler’s’, as another Ford adviser recalled.
From the mid-1970s onward, Cheney’s deepest preoccupation was the balance of power within the American state, which he interpreted through an expansive presidentialist lens. The post-Vietnam reassertion of congressional authority – the War Powers Act, restrictions on intelligence activity, heightened oversight – struck him as illegitimate encroachment on the executive’s constitutional domain. Election to Wyoming’s lone House seat in 1978 offered a platform that lent itself to these concerns. Under Ford, he had collaborated with the CIA’s legislative office (one of its officers was the young William Barr) to determine which documents to turn over to Church’s Senate probe; appointed to the House Intelligence Committee, he cultivated a taste for raw intel and served as conduit between Langley and the Republican leadership. Subterranean operations suited Cheney’s unvoluble temperament. He brought on staff another young CIA lawyer, David Addington, who would remain by his side for the rest of his career. Together they worked to blunt Democratic efforts to scrutinize covert operations. Cheney’s 1987 minority report on Iran-Contra crystallized this position, finding that fault lay not with the White House but with a legislature that overstepped its mandate. Were the powers of the presidency construed too narrowly, the document concluded, ‘the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.’
As secretary of defense under H. W. Bush, Cheney oversaw military operations in Panama and the Gulf at a moment when the Pentagon’s self-belief reached its high-water mark. He consistently pressed for more forceful options – floating contingencies for the battlefield use of nuclear weapons should Iraq resort to chemical warfare and, alone among senior officials, backing Israel’s wish to retaliate during the missile strikes of January 1991. The outcome of Desert Storm affirmed a view he had held since the 1970s: American predominance required readiness to act decisively and to deter potential challengers by demonstration of overwhelming capacity. From that vantage, the disintegration of the Soviet Union opened the door to a more ambitious design. Drawing on Zalmay Khalilzad’s study of Yugoslavia, Cheney considered further fragmentation of Russia itself as essential insurance against renewed hegemonic ambition. Such thinking fed into the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, produced by Khalilzad in Paul Wolfowitz’s office at the Pentagon, which posited a world shaped by a single power intent on preventing the rise of competitors and prepared to strike pre-emptively. When a leaked draft, blunt in its assertion of American paramountcy and disregard for allied sensitivities, provoked backlash, Cheney praised its author for having ‘discovered a new rationale for our role in the world’ and had the final version published under his own name. Bowdlerised to appease critics, the framework nonetheless survived: Clinton’s team retained its core premises, ensuring that by the end of the decade the assumption of American indispensability had settled into bipartisan routine.
Cheney’s rock-ribbed Western conservatism did not exclude shifts of convenience or calculation. His apprenticeship under Wisconsin congressman William Steiger exposed him to a brand of Republicanism that prized pragmatism and bipartisanship, reflexes he carried into the Ford years, when by his own account he muted his views to preserve room to operate. In Congress he compiled a voting record to the right of Gingrich even as colleagues found him the more conciliatory of the two, and he stood with Bush and Powell in opposing any march on Baghdad in 1991 – leading Clinton to reproach the Administration for failure to topple Saddam and letting ‘the poor Kurds and the Shiites twist’. Cheney’s stint at Halliburton in the second half of the nineties brought further adjustments: he sharply criticised ‘sanction-happy’ US policy towards Tehran and Tripoli, reflecting that ‘the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments’, and demurred from calls for an American drive on Iraq.
Despite his enduring collaboration with neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Khalilzad and Lewis Libby – men he found useful and whose commitment to unchallenged American predominance he shared – Cheney never adopted their missionary language about exporting liberal institutions or remaking foreign societies. His outlook reflected a flinty nationalism adapted to the post-Cold War scale of American power, reinforced by ties to Israel’s security establishment and admiration for those within it who rejected compromise and distrusted diplomacy. Observers like William Burns noted that this affinity required no special sympathy for the Jewish state. Cheney by disposition favoured those ready to use force and sceptical of multilateral constraint. He lent his name to the Project for a New American Century and drew on its personnel, yet remained, in Scowcroft’s view, neither doctrinaire nor driven by moral crusade, closer in spirit to the ‘meta-realism’ of Dean Acheson. Victor Davis Hanson, whom Cheney conferred with in the lead-up to the second Iraq war, described him as
an old-school realist who has changed because of his experience. He’s gone back and re-examined everything he did, and he’s come to a new realism. He’s not dealing with a world the way it always has to be. He’s dealing with a world that can be changed.
After a brief exploratory initiative in 1996, Cheney abandoned the idea of running for president himself. Invited by the younger Bush to vet VP candidates four years later, he found a task better suited to his gifts – work behind the scenes that allowed him to compile voluminous incriminating dossiers on potential nominees. Allegations that Cheney contrived his own place on the ticket have no firmer basis than the caricature of a puppet-master manipulating the hapless ‘W’; by all accounts the attraction was mutual. But the vice presidency offered Cheney an unprecedented institutional role. In the domains that mattered most to him – intelligence and national security – he wielded influence that often exceeded that of cabinet officers. Operating through mid-level appointments and a network of trusted subordinates embedded throughout the bureaucracy, he left an imprint on early decisions covering everything from taxation and environmental regulations to emergency preparedness, all under a regime of opacity that became his trademark. He dissimulated even when the truth would have served him. Disclosure invited scrutiny; scrutiny invited limits; limits imperilled the office. Public relations counted for little. ‘He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the politics’, said one insider.
With the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney’s predilection for unencumbered authority and the exercise of hard power found new scope. Throughout the 1980s he would slip out of public view for several days at a time, joining Rumsfeld and select officials in clandestine rehearsals designed to preserve a governing core after a thermonuclear strike. The broad outlines of such schemes had existed since the early Cold War, but the Reagan administration breathed new life into them, aligning ‘continuity of government’ (COG) planning with a strategic doctrine that anticipated protracted nuclear war. Old bunkers were refitted, encrypted communications networks expanded and alternative chains of command mapped out to circumvent the statutory order of succession. These exercises proceeded on the assumption that the legislature might be unable to reconvene and that even attempting to do so could create rival claimants to authority. Cheney thrived in this atmosphere. He immersed himself in the programme, which operated under an anonymous office with a classified budget, reportedly $1bn a year by 1984. Its more controversial contingency plans, shaped by Oliver North and figures carried over from Reagan’s California years, envisioned the suspension of civil liberties, military administrators installed at state and local level, and mass detentions authorised without judicial process. COG exercises continued without interruption throughout the Bush Sr and Clinton presidencies; after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke enlarged their remit considerably.
When the time came, Cold War catastrophe drills provided a template for action. As TVs broadcast footage of the World Trade Center collapsing, Cheney directed emergency measures from a bunker beneath the East Wing while the president remained airborne and senior officials were rushed to mountain redoubts. On report of additional hijackings, he gave orders that suspect civilian aircraft were to be shot down. Within the hour, he began putting together an auxiliary administration to take over the essential functions of the state if the capital fell. Addington improvised a chain of communication to the Justice Department’s crisis centre, summoning a circle of lawyers – Alberto Gonzalez and Timothy Flanigan at the White House and John Yoo at the OLC – who would supply the legal scaffolding for what was to come. The programme of dispersal extended well beyond the Cabinet. Congressional leaders were urged to leave DC then largely excluded from the emergency hierarchy. ‘One of the biggest problems you got is to get the people who are supposed to get to the alternate locations to get their worthless asses out’, complained General Wayne Downing, the president’s senior terrorism adviser. ‘We could lose two-thirds or three-quarters of the Congress, and don’t tempt me to say it, that could damn well be an improvement.’ Cheney himself spent time at Camp David, near the cavernous complex under Raven Rock, among other ‘undisclosed locations’, joining meetings by secure video link.
In the months that followed, the ‘shadow government’ receded as COG planning moved from rehearsal to policy. Congress, working at speed, adopted the Patriot Act in late October; two of its initial doubters in the Senate reversed course after receiving anthrax-contaminated mail, first blamed on Baghdad but later traced to Fort Detrick. The vice president’s office established the framework for indefinite detention, wide-ranging domestic surveillance and the gruesome apparatuses of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’. Created in 2002, NORTHCOM integrated the armed forces into domestic security, linking military assets to federal law enforcement, state police and private contractors via shared intelligence hubs. At the same time, Bush proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a pair of executive orders that remain in effect a quarter century later – renewed annually by successive administrations – the first enabling reserve call-ups, extensions of service and the flexible deployment of National Guard units, the second establishing the framework of the Treasury’s ‘counter-terror’ sanctions regime.
Cheney’s mania for intelligence deepened in this period. As the case for Iraq took shape, he oversaw a parallel channel through Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, which recycled fragments from sympathetic foreign services, fed them back through allied circuits and by repetition turned conjecture into classified fact. Cheney then pushed these claims in public with unblinking assurance: on Meet the Press he declared in September 2002, with ‘absolute certainty’, that Saddam was acquiring the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a bomb. He had derived from the Soviet collapse the conviction that hostile states could fall quickly once pressure was applied, and this contributed to his preference – expressed already in 1991 – for dispensing with UN approval and moving straight to the use of arms. Netanyahu provided the felicitous coinage ‘Coalition of the Willing’. The resulting debacle did not quash enthusiasm for regime change. As Bush’s presidency came to a close, Cheney’s attention shifted to Tehran. He spoke with increasing frequency about the possibility of preemptive strikes to eliminate Iranian nuclear facilities. Within his circle, frustration at Bush’s reluctance to escalate produced more elaborate ideas. Advisers sketched out a scenario in which an Israeli attack – limited in effect but symbolically potent – might provoke an Iranian response against US assets in the region and thereby compel Washington to act. David Wurmser, who had just left Cheney’s staff, outlined such a plan to a private audience in May 2007, arguing that even a token strike on Natanz could trigger the chain reaction.
But the vice president’s influence had begun to wane by the second Bush term. Rumsfeld’s ouster and the departure of Wolfowitz, Feith and Bolton deprived him of key allies. Still more of a blow was the loss of his devoted chief of staff, Libby, indicted for perjury in the investigation into the exposure of CIA officer Valerie Plame, reprisal for her husband’s challenge to the Administration’s Iraq-WMD claims. This trespass against the intelligence services was a step too far. Bush commuted the sentence but withheld a pardon (latterly bestowed by Trump), leading Cheney to rebuke him for ‘leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle’. Out of office, the relationship between the two men, close but never intimate, appeared to cool. Bush’s father opined that in the decade after his own presidency Cheney had become ‘very hard-line’, ‘just iron-ass’, a transformation he attributed in part to Lynne, ‘the éminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails’. Cheney enjoyed the epithet and made it his own. Unhaunted by regret, he judged the Iraq War to have been ‘well worth the effort’.
For all the obloquy heaped on him in the final years of the Bush presidency – from liberal revulsion at torture and surveillance to conservative unease over executive aggrandisement – Cheney’s architecture of power proved remarkably durable. Obama’s ascent brought no reckoning. Having flip-flopped as a senator in 2008 to legalise warrantless surveillance and ensure telecoms’ immunity from prosecution, the 44th president entered office declaring that neither CIA interrogators nor their civilian sponsors would face legal scrutiny and he left Guantánamo intact. He radically expanded the assassination programme he inherited, revived military commissions, tightened secrecy by invoking national-security concerns and created a new category of perpetual detainees whose cases could not be tried in court. Rhetoric – ‘disposition matrix’, ‘kinetic action’, ‘high-value detainees’ – evolved by euphemistic substitution. At the 2011 CPAC gathering, where Cheney presented his former boss with the American Conservative Union’s ‘Defender of the Constitution’ award, Rumsfeld could needle:
I look at the current administration’s many reversals of their announced policies on national security issues – Guantánamo Bay, military commissions, indefinite detention, CIA drone strikes. It makes me wonder if Dick has more influence on President Obama than the people that got him elected.
Across the next two presidencies and into the present one, the same system has proceeded along a single, uninterrupted track. Trump’s first term largely maintained the apparatus he inherited: targeted killing continued under the same authorities; the border ‘emergency’ showed how easily long-standing budgetary and national-emergency powers could be bent to executive will; Guantánamo’s utility was confirmed rather than questioned; and the government’s prerogatives in intelligence gathering were renewed. Biden preserved the essentials. His administration relied on Article II and the old AUMFs for repeated uses of force, defended state secrets before the Supreme Court, kept Gitmo available as an executive instrument and again extended the core surveillance authority – an unbroken line from the early 2000s. Trump’s second term has stayed within that same framework, occasionally making explicit what was already latent: lethal operations justified by standing post-9/11 rationales, renewed pursuit of reporters’ records, a more forceful use of the DHS–ICE machinery established two decades ago, tactical manipulation of executive privilege and familiar efforts to reshape the budgetary order through executive fiat. The script may differ, but the dispensation is the same.
Cheney understood the figure he cut: Halloween gags with his dog dressed as Darth Vader, speeches cued to the Imperial March, laconic jokes about being an ‘evil genius . . . that nobody ever sees come out of his hole’. Days after 9/11 he set the tone – ‘We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side’, he told a television audience, insisting that victory required spending ‘time in the shadows’. Inside government he carried the same note. When Robert Gates, under pressure from the Administration to take a public position against the Oslo Convention, asked indignantly whether the White House expected him to be ‘the poster boy for cluster munitions’, Cheney smiled: ‘Yes, just like I was with torture’. What sulphur clung to him came with the brief. ‘My job was to do what the president needed to have done’, he maintained. He preferred hard options, contemplated chilling alternatives, saw coercion and concealment as ordinary disciplines of rule. He absorbed the blame others would not wear. Never the outlier his critics imagined, he expressed an attitude native to the upper reaches of US statecraft, where necessity displaces the more conciliatory lexicon of restraint.
Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Imperium Uncloaked’, NLR 147.
