There are many angles to the life of Dick Cheney: son of Wyoming, Nixon administration official, Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, partisan of Ford in the 1976 Ford-Reagan primary, Wyoming representative, Reagan-era member of House GOP leadership (he was elected elected chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee after just one term in the House), survivor of at least four heart attacks, secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush during the Panama invasion and the Gulf War, Halliburton CEO, head of George W. Bush’s vice presidential search and ultimately his VP for eight years, crucial player in the post-9/11 national security strategy and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, advocate for a strong and unitary executive branch, husband of Lynne Cheney, father of Liz, and along the way a hate object for the left and the MAGA right. Cheney was a hard-hitting if sometimes quiet participant in generations of battles within the right and the GOP, sometimes on the right side, and sometimes on the wrong one.
One thing I always liked about Cheney — and opinions differed on this — was his approach to communications. Politicians tend toward either pandering or bluster, either of which talks down to the audience as if they were middle schoolers. Cheney always sounded like he was briefing a board of directors. He wasn’t conspicuously trying to sound erudite; he didn’t have a Buckleyesque vocabulary or leaven his speech with literary references. He managed to be plain-spoken while talking to his audience as if they were all serious, intelligent adults. He always conveyed the sense of a man who knew what he was talking about. It’s an under-utilized approach.
One element of Cheney’s biography I have often noted is that he demonstrated a major drawback to affirmative action programs. In Cheney’s case, it wasn’t race but geography: He got into Yale because he was from Wyoming. An undoubtedly brilliant man who would go on to become White House chief of staff by age 34, Cheney was nonetheless academically unprepared and ended up dropping out, working as a lineman, drinking too much, and generally making trouble for himself. A few years later, after meeting Lynne, he was fortunate to take a second chance, straightened himself out, graduated from the University of Wyoming, and made a rapid ascent into American government. But not everybody gets or takes that second chance. Pushing Cheney into an academic and social environment for which his early life had not prepared him derailed his education.
The big what-if in Cheney’s career was the Senate voted down John Tower as George H. W. Bush’s first choice for secretary of defense. When Bush tapped Cheney as his next choice, that had enormous ripple effects in two directions. For Cheney, it didn’t just bring a star-making turn as wartime SECDEF, it also brought him into the Bush orbit and directed his career back toward the executive branch, an energy-company CEO gig, and the vice presidency. But for the GOP Congress, it had a very different effect: Cheney would have been next in line behind Bob Michel to head the House GOP in 1994, and as a skilled Washington infighter, he would not have been easily dislodged from that post. Had he not been promoted into the cabinet, we never get Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995, and the whole history of the 1990s looks very different.