Former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Tuesday. He had one of the most consequential political careers in American history marked by spectacular achievements and enormous setbacks.
Cheney’s career really began with his association with Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a young Republican go-getter who had served in Congress and quickly made his way into administrative positions with the Nixon White House. Cheney conceived ways to impress Rumsfeld and caught a trip on the rising politician’s rocket. By the time of the Ford administration in the mid-1970s, Cheney found himself in the position of White House Chief of Staff at the extraordinary age of 34, meaning Cheney held one of the most consequential and stressful positions in the White House in his early 30s. Not long after, he would have the first of five heart attacks.
After Ford’s defeat, Cheney would go on to win the sole Wyoming seat in Congress and hold it for a decade. With George H.W. Bush’s victory in 1988 (essentially a third Reagan term), Cheney became the secretary of defense, a position in which he would experience his greatest success. When the United States convincingly defeated Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army to liberate Kuwait, Cheney’s boss Bush enjoyed some of the highest approval ratings any American president has ever achieved. Later, Cheney would explore his own presidential run but found that his leadership skills did not translate well to national retail politics.
His lack of charisma is part of what made it puzzling when the fast-ascending Texas governor George W. Bush turned to Cheney to run with him as candidate for vice president in 2000. Cheney had been tapped to find a running mate for Bush, not to be the running mate. Typically, the second position on the ticket is chosen to add some kind of electoral advantage. Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson and the famous “Boston to Austin” connection is the classic example. Cheney brought little help with Wyoming’s tiny population, but what he did have that Bush lacked was experience in national government. At the time, the word the media used was gravitas. The failure to choose a running mate from a populous state nearly cost Bush when the 2000 race ended with one of the closest margins ever.
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Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality; the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy; and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.