Dull. That’s how some historians describe Dick Cheney, the man who spent more than 30 years in federal office, serving four Republican presidents.
Not Mike Pence dull. Or even George H.W. Bush dull (a man whom I can remember hearing women describe as reminding them of their “first husband”). No, Cheney was dull the way that men from the 1950s, the gray-suited company men of lore, were dull, and in fact he never quite shook the appearance of a relic from that decade. If, in those years, he had been an adult instead of child, growing up first in Nebraska and then in Wyoming, he could have fit in very nicely as a factotum to the Eisenhower administration. Then again, he could have fit in very nicely 30 years earlier—in the Coolidge administration.
It is remarkable, therefore, to consider that Richard Bruce Cheney, who died Monday at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, will go down as not only the most influential vice president in American history, but as the principal architect of American power in the first years of the 21st century; that is, until the abject failures of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq helped set the stage for the rise of Trumpian “America First” isolationism on the right, a commensurate anti-imperialism on the left, and a diminution of America’s position in the world.
He was that pivotal a figure.
Until 2000, when he took on the role of managing presidential candidate George W. Bush’s search for a running mate—such that the process ended with Cheney, himself, as the choice—Cheney was always the guy toting around briefing binders, following the guy who was really in charge. In the Ford administration, it was Donald Rumsfeld, whose star Cheney chased.
Rumsfeld, it so happened, was one of Richard Nixon’s few confidants who was not sullied by the Watergate scandal. And upon Nixon’s resignation, Rumsfeld was called home from Europe, where he had been ambassador to NATO, to assume the role of Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. He named Cheney his deputy. Less than a year later, when Rumsfeld moved over to become Secretary of Defense, it was Cheney who succeeded him at the White House. At 34, he was the youngest chief of staff ever to serve in the West Wing.
But still, dull. Or to quote critic A.O. Scott’s description of Christian Bale’s expert performance as Cheney in the 2018 biopic Vice, a man “endowed with whatever the opposite of charisma might be.”
No great intellect, the young Dick Cheney had crashed and burned at Yale, his first college, later admitting that even his favorite class there, on the diplomatic history of the Cold War, didn’t inspire him to get anything more than a C. Back home, the son of two New discount Democrats burnished his working-class cred by laying power lines to oil fields and communication cables to the nuclear missile sites outside Cheyenne—a poetic piece of his biography when you consider that laying “power lines” is what Dick Cheney would do for the rest of his life.
Drinking heavily, arrested twice for DUI, Cheney listened to those, including his future wife, Lynne, who urged him to look for a career path beyond the blue collar. He recovered enough academic ambition to make it through the University of Wyoming, earning a master’s, before landing a position as a junior aide to Wisconsin’s Republican governor Warren Knowles. The Cheneys, married by then, found opportunity at the University of Wisconsin, where Lynne pursued a doctorate in English, focusing on 19th century British literature. (In time, she would write books on American history, not to mention a steamy frontier novel called Sisters.)
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