Dick Cheney’s death closes the book on an era
Dick Cheney was never meant to be rehabilitated. For long he was the embodiment of American hubris — gray, unblinking architect of the Iraq War, ice-cold defender of “enhanced interrogation,” bureaucratic hawk. Yet as news spread of his death at 84, many of those who once loathed him found themselves mourning, even just a little bit, a kind of America that no longer exists.
It is difficult to overstate the role Cheney played in today’s world. As George W. Bush’s vice president, he transformed a clueless president into the vessel of his own worldview — one that saw the United States as the custodian of a global order built after 1945 and sanctified after 1989. He was, in a sense, the last great Cold War warrior, armed with the conviction that American strength was not only justified but necessary to preserve civilization from chaos.
That conviction led, of course, to catastrophe. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified on false intelligence — about weapons of mass destruction and phantom ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda — that Cheney aggressively promoted. The war destroyed Saddam’s regime but unleashed forces the United States could not control. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized a region, and perhaps permanently discredited the notion that America’s military might could remake the world in its image. In the years that followed, Cheney became a shorthand for the arrogance of empire. If the 20th century ended in triumph, the 21st began in his shadow.
Before he became the growling embodiment of post-9/11 power, Dick Cheney had already done the full Washington tour: aide to Nixon, congressman from Wyoming, Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. By 2002, as vice president, he was the most powerful number two in modern memory — and also the only one to shoot a man in the face during a quail hunt in Texas Because, well, of course he did.
And yet history, with its perverse irony, has a way of flipping reputations. When Donald Trump captured the Republican Party, turning it inward and downward — against alliances, institutions, and even democracy itself — the old order suddenly seemed, if not good, then at least sane. Cheney, who once embodied the hard edge of American exceptionalism, began to look like a man of principle. He defended NATO. He respected process. He believed in truth, even when he manipulated it. For all his ruthlessness, he was a builder, not a burner.
That distinction has become crucial. The MAGA movement that replaced Cheney’s Republicanism is not merely isolationist but nihilist, a coalition united basically by contempt — for expertise, for restraint, for the very idea of a republic governed by norms. Cheney’s world was one of excessive confidence in institutions; Trump’s world is one of gleeful destruction of them, to be replaced by personal interests and naked corruption. When Cheney’s daughter Liz became a pariah in her own party for rejecting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, the transformation was complete: the man once vilified as the Darth Vader of Washington had become, by comparison, a guardian of the light.
None of this absolves him. Cheney’s America tortured prisoners, spied on its citizens, and squandered potentially useful moral capital. But he was also a believer — in government, in the Constitution, in the idea that America’s role in the world carried obligations as well as privileges. In that sense, he represented something now almost extinct: a right wing that still saw the state as a moral actor rather than a cow to be milked and a theater for grievance.
It says something profound about this moment that Cheney’s final act of dissent — reportedly casting his last presidential vote last year for Democrat Kamala Harris — felt completely coherent. He did not change; his party did. The America he served could still distinguish between power and chaos. Today’s GOP cannot.
So Cheney becomes a marker in the long decline of American conservatism. His sins were of arrogant empire; Trump’s are of personal megalomania. One believed perhaps in the overreach of authority, the other in its concentration for personal ego and enrichment. Between them lies the story of how the world’s indispensable nation utterly lost its way. Cheney will not be remembered with warmth, and should not be. But I think he’ll be remembered with some understanding.
Whereas I once met Bush Sr. and also shared a stage with Bush Jr., I never did meet their loyal servant Cheney. But I almost feel like I know him, and have a strange sympathy for him, on account of his incredibly gullible appearance on Sascha Baron Cohen’s brilliant Who Is America.
In this showstopping howler, with Cheney seemingly unaware it was a total joke, he is “interviewed” by the fake Israeli officer Eran Morad, who asks him to name his favorite war (it’s Desert Storm), engages him on how people wanted to “get rid of Bush and see more Dick,” and actually gets him to autograph a waterboard. I’m still not sure how to explain what happened. But it makes Cheney both sinister and human in a way that must be seen to be believed.
SBC tried that once with Trump, years ago, as the character Ali G, trying to “pitch” him a glove for catching melting ice cream from cones. Trump caught on and walked off the set. He is nowhere near the sophisticate Cheney was, and he’s ignorant as hell, but totally stupid he is not.
