Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.
The 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was for decades a towering and polarizing Washington power player. Cheney was in the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001, and in the split second of horror when a second hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, he said he became a changed man, determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks and to enforce US power throughout the Middle East.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act. This was a terrorist act,” he recalled of that day in an interview with CNN’s John King in 2002.
Before he was vice president, Cheney was a congressman representing a district of Wyoming. He was also White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, and he served as the secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush.
In his final years, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, became largely ostracized from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump.
