Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
- Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died November 3 at age 84, had a long history of heart issues that “could almost be the history of medical progress against heart disease.”
- In 2007, a procedure on Cheney’s pulse-regulating device disabled the device’s wireless connection out of concern that a terrorist could hack it.
- In 2010, Cheney received an LVAD device ahead of a heart transplant, which resulted in him possibly living with no pulse for nearly 20 months.
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.
For nearly as long as Dick Cheney held public office, the scrutiny of his legislative actions was nearly matched by that of his cardiac health. The former Vice President, who died November 3 at the age of 84, had his first heart attack in 1978, the same year he was first elected to the House of Representatives.
When it happened, Cheney, then 37, wasn’t even that surprised. As he would later chronicle in his 2011 memoir In My Time, Cheney had a family history of heart issues. Indeed, the extent of Cheney’s father’s cardiac concerns wasn’t known until the elder Cheney underwent a six-way heart bypass operation in 1988, during which it was discovered that he had already had two previous heart attacks. (Knowledge of heart health was limited in the elder Cheney’s time. The first heart attack in a living patient had been diagnosed just three years prior to his birth).
Cheney suffered a second and third heart attack in the 1980s, but it was his fourth, in November of 2000, that prompted the most serious concern and intervention. After all, his heart health was now a matter of national security. Cheney was soon to be sworn in as Vice President of the United States—one proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency.
As the New York Times once noted, “Mr. Cheney’s medical history could almost be the history of medical progress against heart disease.” And given the time during which he was most prominently in the public eye—his 2001-2009 tenure as Vice President amidst the post-9/11 anti-terrorism hysteria—it is also a history of how emerging technologies of the time could represent both new hope and new threats.
In 2001, Vice President Cheney’s continued cardiac concerns prompted a procedure to implant an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD)—a device differing from a typical pacemaker insofar as it is also capable of delivering shocks “intended to restore a normal heart rate and rhythm when the heart falls too far out of beat for regular artificial pacemaker pulses,” according to Avive, an AED company.
For the nearly 800,000 Americans who have an ICD implanted, the device represents a powerful tool to fight back against heart health issues, which are collectively still the number one killer in the United States. But as technology progressed alongside the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, and American intelligence began to conceive of new ways the country could be attacked, Cheney’s team felt that his life-saving device could pose a threat.
As reported by ABC News in 2013, Cheney’s implanted device required maintenance back in 2007. His June physical of that year had noted that the device needed a battery replacement. While the procedure was publicly reported, it was not known to most at the time that a special precaution was taken for Cheney’s ICD, one that isn’t typically undertaken for the average patient: his doctors disabled the device’s wireless capabilities.
Their reasoning? To prevent a terrorist from hacking into the device and hijacking the Vice President’s heart.
Now, if that sounds more like something out of an over-the-top cable TV thriller series than real-life politics, the truth is, it’s both.
This very real concern over the cyber-vulnerabilities of the vice president’s ventricles later became a storyline in the second season of the Emmy-winning Showtime series, Homeland. In the episode “Broken Hearts,” the show’s chief antagonist, a terrorist named Abu Nazir, obtains the serial number for the show’s fictional Vice President Walden’s pacemaker. This allows him to wirelessly manipulate the device, which he uses to cause the VP to have a heart attack.
“I found [the depiction] credible,” Cheney told ABC News in 2013, “[...] because I knew from the experience that we had assessing the need for my own device that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible.” It should be noted that, back when the episode aired, the FDA issued a statement assuring Americans that attacks via pacemaker hacking were not a cause for concern for the average citizen, and they were “not aware of any patient injuries or deaths associated with these incidents.”
But a TV plot line wasn’t the only impact Cheney’s heart health had on the American popular consciousness. After leaving office, Cheney underwent a procedure that prompted the headline “Does Dick Cheney Have a Pulse?” and in doing so, the then-69-year-old conservative politician may have unintentionally became a cardiac health influencer.
Though he would ultimately have a heart transplant in 2012, in the summer of 2010, the former Vice President was outfitted with a device that would act as a sort of stop-gap before the intense procedure could be undertaken. That device was an LVAD, or left ventricular assist device—a device which is “implanted next to the heart to help its main pumping chamber, the left ventricle, pump blood through the body.”
Because these devices facilitate the continuous flow of blood, which ABC News likens to “water circulating in a fish tank rather than pumping like a heart,” it can sometimes create the sensation of no longer having a pulse while a patient is still very much alive. Experts at the time noted that this phenomenon is commonly exhibited in patients who rely on the LVAT for 100 percent of their circulation, but Cheney’s device was “likely doing 30 to 60 percent of the heart’s work,” so a faint pulse was likely still present.
The headlines around Cheney’s device and the pulse it produced (or, rather, the possible lack thereof) provided more than just fodder for late night comedians. A 2014 study showed that reports of Cheney’s LVAD actually increased public awareness of the device’s existence, prompting not just search engine inquiries, but a slew of social media explainers discussing the device and its benefits.
In effect, Cheney’s cardiac health saga, for all its national security concerns, may have raised public awareness about the dangers of heart disease and prompted others to take more pro-active measures for their own heart health.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
