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Dick Cheney was the chief architect of the catastrophic War on Terror who never apologised - even after he shot an elderly man in the face on a quail hunt READ: Dick Cheney dead: Vice President who served with George W. Bush dies By TOM LEONARD, US CORRESPONDENT Published: 00:23 GMT, 5 November 2025 | Updated: 00:34 GMT, 5 November 2025 Most politicians try to avoid a reputation for villainy. But Dick Cheney relished his nickname in Washington: 'Darth Vader'. In later life, when questioned about his ominous image, he'd point to a badge of the Star Wars baddie he'd fixed on his huge Ford pickup truck. 'I'm rather proud of that,' he'd say. In 2016, key Trump ally Steve Bannon offered an even more sinister comparison: 'Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan: that's power.' With his cultivated image as a strong, silent Westerner – complete with cowboy hat – Cheney was the driving force of the ill-fated Iraq War of 2003 to 2011, and a shadowy political operator widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in US history. Like the Vader comparison, he was proud, or at least unrepentant, of much in his career, even if it left plenty of his fellow Americans appalled. As 'Veep' to the far less experienced George W. Bush, he was effectively the architect of the fateful 'War on Terror' that the US declared after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 – and in which some 4.6 million people are believed to have died. He was unapologetic about his efforts in pursuing that conflict – judged a ruinous and destabilising misadventure by most historians – from waterboarding suspected terrorists even while critics insisted the practice was torture, to imprisoning Islamic radicals for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay. A leading light of the so-called 'neocons' (neo-conservatives) whose hawkish views on the primacy of defending American and Western civilisation dominated US foreign policy at the beginning of the 21st century, he always argued America had to be strong abroad and shouldn't hesitate to go to war. Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, his family said President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynn at the Stars and Stripes Gala in 2005 Cheney has died aged 84 from what his family described as complications of pneumonia, and cardiac and vascular disease. He'd already survived at least five heart attacks – the first when he was just 37 – and had a heart transplant in 2012. He served three Republican presidents but, in Donald Trump, he finally found that there were limits to his loyalty. Trump, he said, was a 'coward' and a 'threat to the republic' who, he insisted, had tried to steal the 2020 election. Last year, Cheney publicly voted for Democrat rival Kamala Harris. Say what you like about Cheney – and the Left had plenty of objections to the conservative with the unnervingly crooked smile – but according to admirers he was a man who stuck to his principles and showed a moral backbone often missing in today's opportunistic and increasingly venal Republican Party. He was fiercely anti-abortion but he staunchly supported his daughter Mary after she came out to the family as gay while in high school, many years before gay rights were a remotely mainstream cause in the US. 'Freedom means freedom for everyone,' he later said. He said his favourite virtue was integrity, and his idea of happiness was fly fishing on Wyoming's Snake River. His image as a countryman took a knock in 2006, however, when he accidentally shot another hunter in the face, neck and torso – thankfully not fatally – during a quail hunt. The victim, a 78-year-old Texan lawyer, suffered a heart attack several days later. Cheney never formally apologised. Born in Nevada, he moved with his family to Wyoming when he was 13, where his father worked as a minor agricultural official. He met his future wife, Lynne Vincent, with whom he had two daughters, including politician Liz Cheney, at high school. Cheney is seen with Joe Biden and his wife Jill at the Capitol in 2009 Cheney won a scholarship to Yale University but was asked to leave after his grades slipped. Back in Wyoming, he began working as a line repairman for an electrical company before enrolling at the University of Wyoming, majoring in political science. It was Lynne who has been credited with encouraging him to pursue a political career. After starting as an aide to the Wyoming governor, he soon made his mark in Washington, where at just 34 he was made chief of staff (the youngest in American history) to President Gerald Ford. BREAKING NEWS Former US Vice President Dick Cheney dies aged 84 Cheney rejected some of the perks of the job, continuing to drive around in his ten-year-old Volkswagen rather than using a chauffeur-driven limo. As a Wyoming US Congressman for a decade, he established himself as a hardline conservative and Cold War warrior who opposed Nelson Mandela's release from prison, condemned gun control and referred to Soviet officials as 'pigs in suits'. He joined George Bush Snr's cabinet as defence secretary in 1989, unflappably overseeing the 1989 US invasion of Panama and the 1991 operation to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. The older Bush cemented Cheney's reputation for toughness by nicknaming him 'Old Iron Ass'. Cheney left politics in 1993 – when Bill Clinton led the Democrats to power – to go into business, two years later taking over Halliburton, one of the world's biggest energy corporations. In 2000, he was asked to help George W. Bush choose a running mate in his presidential campaign but, instead, 'Dubya' selected him. Cheney's heart issues – he'd had a quadruple bypass in 1988 – and lack of personal charisma made some Republicans reluctant to put him on the campaign trail, while he himself had dismissed the vice presidency as a 'cruddy job'. But he accepted and 'Bush/Cheney' won. It soon became clear that, unlike other VPs, Cheney was intent on accumulating and exercising power himself – albeit subtly. Biographer Barton Gellman said: 'Dick Cheney played a paramount role in decisions that ranged from war and peace to the economy, the environment and the meaning of the law. His hand was often unseen even by colleagues.' Before his vice presidency, Cheney (right) held a number of high ranking positions in the Republican party After the 9/11 attacks, he championed the so-called Cheney Doctrine, a national security strategy that argued that the US needed to attack anyone who conceivably posed a threat. The idea was influential in Bush's decision – championed against domestic opposition by Tony Blair – to widen the War on Terror to include Iraq, which played no role in 9/11. Cheney remained unbowed even as US casualties mounted into the thousands and the 'weapons of mass destruction' used to justify the invasion failed to materialise. His refusal to ever express any regret about the Iraq War fuelled suspicions that he'd had ulterior motives for pushing for it – a theory that gained traction when his old company, Halliburton, swiftly won major contracts to supply the US military in the field. Critics claimed Cheney had a personal financial interest in pursuing the invasion. By the time he'd ended his tenure as VP, his public approval rating had sunk to 13 per cent. But he continued to heckle the Democrats from the sidelines, in particular raining criticism on Barack Obama. 'Dick Cheney said I was the worst president of his lifetime,' Obama quipped. 'Which is interesting – because I think Dick Cheney is the worst president of my lifetime.' Cheney's legacy will probably never overcome the Iraq War, in which up to a million people are estimated to have died and which laid the seeds for the rise of Isis and much else. In 2018, Christian Bale played Cheney – unflatteringly – in a satirical feature film, Vice. Cheney recalled that his granddaughter went to see it. 'I said: 'What did you think?' She said: 'Well, it says you are a real badass. And that's cool.' He would surely have been delighted. Share or comment on this article: Dick Cheney was the chief architect of the catastrophic War on Terror who never apologised - even after he shot an elderly man in the face on a quail hunt Add comment
