Dick Cheney: Peacekeeper

S ome years ago, still a college student, I was in the waiting hall of the American Enterprise Institute to meet a friend. Unbeknownst to me, a board meeting was happening behind the wall I was leaning against. A man walked out of the room and walked through the hall. I stared at him, frozen. One of my heroes, Dick Cheney, had locked eyes with me, as I was incapable of speaking. “Hello, sir!” said the former vice president and simply passed me. I was still paralyzed.

I met Mr. Cheney a few more times after that, including once when I distracted him from his dinner to get my copy of his memoirs signed. Like all Millennials, I had known him as the vice president of the Iraq War. Unlike for most of my peers, that was a positive impression. Much older — and slightly wiser — I have come to admire him even more, considering everything else that he did.

History is funny sometimes. Imagining the intimidating Dick Cheney, the stalwart conservative, as a nerdy doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin’s positivist political science department is comical, but the future vice president’s early adulthood started as such. The department offered him a congressional fellowship, which he accepted; he never returned to complete his studies. Seven years later, he would become the youngest White House chief of staff in history, all while Gerald Ford was pulling the country out of Watergate and ending the Vietnam War.

After the Ford administration, Cheney became a congressman. The speaker’s gavel became his ambition. In his fourth term, he became the third-ranking Republican in the House and ranking Republican on the intelligence committee. In the next term, he became the minority whip. He would have become the speaker, but the nomination of John Tower failed, and Cheney abandoned that particular ambition and became the secretary of defense, overseeing a monumental transition in world politics.

At any given time, there are four primary concerns on the mind of the secretary of defense. One is foreign threats, and the other three are the constituencies he serves: his department, which is the largest bureaucracy in the government; the president; and Congress. These are the job’s legal requirements. Informally, the secretary must account for the press, public opinion, and his colleagues in other departments. Charles A. Stevenson has called the position the “Nearly Impossible Job” for a good reason. Cheney’s tenure included every possible challenge. But when recency bias erodes and honest historical accounts come out, he deserves to be ranked as the best secretary of defense.

The first Iraq War presented many of these challenges — most importantly, the eternal frictions between the military and the political class. Cheney had to deal with his senior officers from both sides.

On the one end was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, who opposed the war, even hesitating to provide military options. Cheney ordered Powell to give him options and simultaneously asked other senior officers and his civilian subordinates for more. And last, he took the general to make his case against the war to the president, who heard him and eventually overruled him. The outcome was a compliant chairman and a range of military options to provide the president.

From the other side was the chief of staff of the Air Force, who appeared too enthusiastic. In preparation for the war, and despite better advice, General Michael Dugan decided to travel to Saudi Arabia with the press. The result was a Washington Post article quoting Dugan extensively on possible targets. Worse, he had speculated that Americans would support the war “until body bags come home,” volunteering a playbook to Saddam Hussein. Firing the Air Force chief of staff before a heavy air campaign is a gutsy move. With the president’s backing, Cheney dismissed Dugan.

Militarily, the war could hardly have gone better. Cheney had to return to the Cold War. Germans had already taken down the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union was at risk of breaking up. Most of the administration feared the possible chaos that would ensue and wished to preserve a pacified version. Cheney was the dissenting voice, especially believing that the United States should support Ukrainian independence. The administration took a separate course. Yet despite the administration’s effort, Ukraine became independent and remains so. The thought of how Vladimir Putin would act if his country were even larger and more powerful vindicates Cheney. As vice president, he would once again demonstrate his foresight by warning Europe that Putin would use their energy dependence on him against them. Like with Ukrainian independence, Cheney was correct and unpersuasive.

The only achievement greater than winning a war is preserving peace. In the last months of the administration, Cheney turned down an offer to become the White House chief of staff to secure future tranquility. He presented the Defense Planning Guidance and Regional Defense Strategy, and they became the architecture of the post–Cold War defense policy. Despite the caricatures of unilateralism, the documents emphasized that the U.S. alliance network was the source of American power. Peace dividends would become a popular phrase, but Cheney advised that U.S. military presence in the rest of the world was the necessary investment to deny rising challengers. The new Clinton administration accepted Cheney’s prescriptions, resulting in two decades of great-power peace in Eurasia.

Americans and too many of their leaders were excited about reducing military commitments. Cheney was not. He objected to Brent Scowcroft’s plan for both the United States and the Soviet Union to withdraw their forces. For one, the Soviets would have a much easier time restoring them. At any rate, the Soviet Union wound up having to do it, and America remains in Europe. Later on, he told Congress, “Never in this century have we ever gone through one of these periods of downsizing the force and done it right.” The downsizing of the 2010s, which he forcefully opposed, and the wars of the 2020s, again, vindicate Cheney.

Cheney’s success stems from his unique talent. Paul Nitze wrote of “tensions between opposites,” between theory and practice. Paul Wolfowitz, who was Cheney’s chief policy adviser, writes, “Cheney was one of those rare senior officials who are able to do both.” He was at once an extraordinary intellect and a competent manager. His meteoric rise in the ranks of House Republicans proved that he was a capable politician, enabling him to manage the administration and Congress, yet he was a principled man. He recruited the best to become his subordinates, trusted them, and delegated vital tasks to them. He allowed senior officers to voice their opposition in private, and he sacked one when it became necessary. He was wary of tyrants, and he liked for America to carry a big stick and wave it at them. The democratic process might have frustrated him, yet, for the post–Cold War world, he recommended, “America and its allies now have an unprecedented opportunity to preserve with greater ease a security environment within which our democratic ideals can prosper.” Today’s turmoil is the result of abandoning his wisdom.

But Cheney’s greatest attribute was being a serious man. He took America’s role in the world seriously, and that required him to take his own role seriously. He worked hard, he was never outwitted, and he mastered the issue at hand. In 2002, he attended a CIA briefing on al-Qaeda. “The briefing was a disaster,” then-CIA Director George Tenet writes. It turned out that Cheney knew more about the terrorists than did the agency expert briefing them. This had a trickle-down effect: Everyone at his office would fully prepare to meet the boss’s intimidating and demanding probes.

Dick Cheney was intelligent and capable; better yet, he was right and righteous. It is easy to say that they do not make men like him anymore. But that would be a cliché — worse, it would be misleading. They rarely ever did.