5 Ways Dick Cheney Influenced History

When then-candidate George W. Bush asked Cheney to help vet and select a running mate ahead of the 2000 presidential election, Cheney agreed. After evaluating various candidates through a process he controlled, he consented to Bush’s request that he take the role himself—with the qualification that the job would have to be much more than ceremonial.

It was a pattern that would repeat throughout Bush’s presidency, as Cheney made sure he was present during key decisions to shape the information being presented and offer influential advice at the right moment. Throughout their two terms, Bush and Cheney shared weekly lunchtime strategy sessions. Cheney also maintained offices in the West Wing and near the Senate and House chambers in the U.S. Capitol, giving him access to the centers of power where key decisions were being made.

When al-Qaeda terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Cheney was famously whisked away to one of several “undisclosed locations.” The move was intended to ensure that the executive branch had a decision-maker at the ready if the president became unreachable during an attack. In fact, during the first hour after the attacks, Cheney made the harrowing decision to authorize fighter jets to shoot down any hijacked U.S. airliners.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Cheney was consistently a key player in shaping the U.S. response, as Bush framed it as a war not against a specific terrorist group or country but a “war on terror” that could include any number of smaller or less well-defined conflicts. Cheney argued for the “1 percent doctrine” (also nicknamed the “Cheney doctrine”), which said that if there was even a 1 percent chance that a hostile power had developed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the U.S. response should be calibrated as if their existence were certain.

Cheney also authorized and forcefully defended U.S. military and intelligence forces’ use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—including ones previously banned as torture—on suspected terrorists and enemy combatants. At home, he pushed for a secret warrantless surveillance program that set aside civil liberty and privacy concerns for the sake of presidential wartime powers.

Cheney’s first service to the executive branch came during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. After serving as Wyoming’s sole congressman from 1979 to 1989, he was tapped to be President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense. In that role, Cheney led the Pentagon during the First Gulf War (1990-1991), in which a U.S.-led coalition ended Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait but failed to dislodge President Saddam Hussein from power.

After 9/11, Cheney was one of the first proponents of a second Iraq War as part of the war on terror. He lobbied President Bush and Republican leaders with what was later shown to be faulty information about alleged Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda and Hussein’s progress toward deploying WMD.

After the U.S. invasion toppled Hussein’s government, American forces found themselves an occupying force dealing with waves of insurgent attacks and a mounting military and civilian death toll. Still, Cheney held the line that the Iraq War had not been a mistake and that violent opposition to the United States and the new Iraqi government was in its last throes.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a massive global reorientation of military power. As secretary of defense, Cheney reshaped U.S. military strategy now that its longtime main adversary, the Soviet Union, was crumbling.

Cheney's Regional Defense Strategy aimed to hold off new rivals while shrinking the size and cost of the U.S. military. Gaps left by this reduced footprint could be filled by outside contractors. During Bill Clinton's presidency, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton, a global petroleum services company, whose subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) held significant U.S. military contracts.

When he accepted Bush’s vice presidential nomination, Cheney resigned his corporate role and eventually sold off his Halliburton stock, but KBR went on to be the U.S. military’s largest contractor during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, providing staff and services to aid the lengthy U.S. occupations and costly efforts to rebuild both countries as American allies.

If Dick Cheney was the most powerful U.S. vice president, it was in part because of his success in expanding the boundaries of the president’s power as well.

Cheney was one of the champions of a “unitary executive” theory that interprets the Constitution as granting indivisible executive power largely beyond the reach of legislative or judicial review. Cheney and the thinkers he supported advocated for a unitary executive approach in the context of wartime.

Many of the Bush administration’s expansions of presidential power were maintained during the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and expanded further under the Donald Trump administrations.