Dick Cheney

1941-2025

Dick Cheney News: Former Vice President Dies at Age 84

Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, who advocated for the invasion of Iraq during the George W. Bush administration, died on November 3, 2025. He was 84 years old.

Cheney died of complications from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease, according to a statement from his family. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement read. “His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed.”

The former vice president and defense secretary had a history of extensive coronary issues, suffering five heart attacks between 1978 and 2010 before receiving a heart transplant in 2012. But that didn’t stop him from making his mark in Washington, D.C.

Cheney, a Republican, began his political career as an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld in 1969, who was then the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity for the Richard Nixon administration, and went on to serve as the White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s.

Ascending the ranks of political power, Cheney was then elected to represent Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. He served six terms in the House before resigning to become President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense in 1989.

Most notably, Cheney served as the 46th vice president under his former boss’s son, President George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2009. During his two terms, he took on a much more active role in the administration than his predecessors. Cheney made headlines for his leading role in initiating the Iraq War and for his support of the expansion of government surveillance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In 2003, Cheney was embroiled in controversy when his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was indicted and convicted for leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Though Cheney denied any involvement, this conflicted with Libby’s testimony.

Cheney also made waves in 2004 when he publicly came out in support of same-sex marriage, breaking with the Bush administration. Despite his already low approval ratings, Cheney’s reputation took a hit in 2006 when he accidentally shot his friend, Harry Whittington, on a quail hunting trip, though Whittington sustained minor injuries.

Cheney leaves behind a legacy as a powerful, yet polarizing politician who helped redefine the role of vice president into a position of influence.

Dick Cheney served as the 46th vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. The Wyoming native entered politics in 1965, beginning as an intern for the Senate, Cheney quickly rose to power by first becoming an aide to the Wisconsin governor, then working for President Richard Nixon’s administration in 1969. He served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff from 1975 to 1977, then served six terms in Congress before being appointed secretary of defense by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. About 10 years later, he worked for another Bush administration, this time as vice president to President George W. Bush in 2000 for two terms. As vice president, Cheney was known for taking on a prominent role in the Bush administration, being a more active vice president than what had ever been seen in the Oval Office before. He died in November 2025 at the age of 84.

FULL NAME: Richard Bruce Cheney
BORN: January 30, 1941
DIED: November 3, 2025
BIRTHPLACE: Lincoln, Nebraska
SPOUSE: Lynne Cheney (1964-2025)
CHILDREN: Mary and Liz Cheney
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, to parents Richard Herbert Cheney, a soil-conservation agent, and Marjorie Lauraine Dickey Cheney, a former softball player. Both of his parents were Democrats. Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming, a town he would later describe as being idyllic with a classic 1950s feel. It was there that he met his high school sweetheart and future wife, Lynne Vincent.

Upon graduating from high school, Cheney was accepted to Yale University and offered a full-ride scholarship. He enrolled, but eventually dropped out due to poor grades. While attending classes, he worked as a power lineman in a working-class town. Although Yale had not suited Cheney, he decided to pursue college once more. He enrolled at the University of Wyoming, where he received a B.A. in political science in 1965 and an M.A. in political science in 1966.

During his time as a student, Cheney applied for and received five draft deferments and thus avoided being drafted in the Vietnam War, stating that he “had other priorities in the '60s than military service.”

With two degrees under his belt, Cheney started his political career in 1965. He worked as a part-time legislative intern to the Wyoming Senate legislature, which had a Republican majority. Cheney and his wife, both of whom had been raised in Democratic households, began professionally associating as Republicans. After Cheney won a national writing contest for student political scientists, he was offered a position as an aide to Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles.

Cheney and Lynne both enrolled in PhD programs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Lynne received her doctorate in English, but Cheney had not yet finished his dissertation when he received a fellowship to work in Washington, D.C., for Congressman Bill Steiger, a Wisconsin Republican.

Cheney later indicated that he wanted to go into politics because of his dissatisfaction with ivory tower academia: “I was always struck, because [there were] a lot of complaints about the administration, the management of the university, oftentimes about the students — sort of critical of everybody out there, because the place was chaotic at that time. There were days when the National Guard was out with its tear gas trying to control the protesters. These folks were unhappy with what was happening, but in all the time I'd been in Wisconsin not one of these folks had ever stood up and been counted on either side of the debate. They were totally disengaged.”

While serving as Steiger's aide, Cheney wrote an administrative memo discussing how then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld should handle his confirmation hearings to become the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Steiger showed the memo to Rumsfeld, who promptly hired Cheney. This was the beginning of a powerful Washington relationship that informed every subsequent Republican administration into the 2000s. By 1976, Cheney was chief of staff of the Gerald Ford White House.

When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, Cheney moved back to Wyoming to run for the state's sole seat in the House of Representatives. His high-stress political life was beginning to take a toll, though: Cheney suffered his first heart attack during the campaign, at only 37 years of age. Successful nonetheless, Cheney became a powerful Republican congressman. He won re-election five times, serving as chairman of the House Republican Conference and becoming House Minority Whip in December 1988.

Before the 101st Congress could convene, Cheney was unexpectedly selected to be the secretary of defense for incoming President George H.W. Bush. As defense secretary, Cheney dealt with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of defense spending. He earned the respect of the military with his careful handling of Operation Desert Storm.

When Bill Clinton was elected to the presidency in 1992, Cheney left the government and joined the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Though he contemplated running for president in 1996, he instead opted in 1995 to become CEO of energy services company Halliburton, which required him to move to Dallas.

In 2000 Texas Governor George W. Bush asked Cheney to head up the search for his vice presidential nominee. Bush eventually asked Cheney himself to serve as his vice president. Cheney then resigned as CEO of Halliburton and focused on the campaign. After a long and contested process, Bush and Cheney were declared the winners of the 2000 election.

From the start, there were signs that the Bush-Cheney relationship would not be a typical president-vice president relationship. Former vice president Dan Quayle recalled attempting to brief Cheney on a vice president's typical duties, which include fundraising and public appearances. Cheney reportedly replied, “I have a different understanding with the president.”

In effect, Cheney served as Bush's surrogate chief of staff throughout his administration, with access to every layer of Bush's White House and many surrogates on the Hill. Fiercely loyal to Bush, and with no ambition to serve as president himself, Cheney was not a “shadow president” implementing his own agenda, but rather the person implementing the details of Bush's outlined plans. Heavily involved in both military and national security issues at the highest levels, Cheney greatly expanded the power of both the executive branch and of the vice presidency itself, even at the risk of exerting unconstitutional powers, many of which were later explored in a Pulitzer-Prize winning series by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman.

Valerie Plame Scandal

Perhaps the largest overstepping of bounds came from Cheney's involvement with the Valerie Plame scandal. In 2003, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, was involved in leaking to the press the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent who was also the wife of Bush critic and ambassador Joe Wilson. Libby was eventually found guilty of lying during the investigation and was sentenced to jail; President Bush commuted his sentence but did not pardon him. Cheney later publicly announced that he disagreed with Bush's decision, marking one of their very few public disagreements.

Same-Sex Marriage

Another major area of disagreement between Cheney and Bush was same-sex marriage: Bush was opposed, whereas Cheney's younger daughter, Mary, is a lesbian. Neither Dick and Lynne Cheney supports a federal amendment banning same-sex marriage, as they believe that states should be able to decide; however, they allowed Bush to form his own federal policy on this issue during the administration.

Hunting Accident

An avid hunter and fisher, his Secret Service code name was “Angler,” and he made headlines in 2006 for accidentally shooting his friend and fellow hunter, Harry Whittington, in the face, though the injuries were minor.

After leaving office in 2009, Cheney continued to maintain a public profile, regularly appearing in the news as a critic of President Barack Obama's administration, though he later praised Obama for his handling of Osama bin Laden's assassination. After suffering his fifth heart attack in 2010, he had an artificial heart pump implanted, but this did not slow down his pace of speaking and writing. The following year, the former vice president released his memoir, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, which reflected on his time in office during the Iraq War. In March 2012, he finally underwent a heart transplant, which he later referred to as “the gift of life itself.”

Following the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, Cheney controversially defended the agency's use of waterboarding other harsh techniques implemented under the Bush administration, arguing that they did not amount to torture. “I’d do it again in a minute,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2014. A year later, he and his daughter, Liz Cheney, co-authored the book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, which heavily criticized Obama's foreign policy positions.

In 2018, Cheney was the subject of the biopic Vice, in which he was portrayed by actor Christian Bale. While he initially supported President Donald Trump during the start of his first time, he criticized the administration in 2019 over its foreign policy initiatives, arguing that Trump's approach was more comparable to Obama's than traditional Republicans.

Cheney married his high school sweetheart, Lynne Vincent in 1964. The couple went on to have two daughters, Liz and Mary. Both his daughters later became involved in politics, with Liz going on to the become a congresswoman. Dick and Lynne were married for more than six decades until his death in November 2025.

In his later years, Cheney was less politically vocal, though he did sign a 2021 opinion piece, along with other former defense secretaries, warning against involving the military in election disputes following Trump's denial of the 2020 presidential election results. He also campaigned for his daughter Liz's 2022 re-election bid for her Wyoming House seat.

On November 3, 2025, Cheney died at the age of 84 of complications from pneumonia and cardiovascular disease. He is survived by his wife, Lynne, and daughters, Liz and Mary. Even in death, Cheney will go down as one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history.

• I think that freedom means freedom for everyone.
• What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action.
  
• If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.
  
• Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose.
  
• It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

Biography.com Editors

Staff Editorial Team and Contributors

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Catherine Caruso

Associate Profiles Editor

Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.