When Dick Cheney was George W. Bush’s Vice President, he wielded his power quietly and behind the scenes. Having been elected on the ticket, he was the only person in the West Wing Bush couldn’t fire. And he was also that rare ambitious person in Bush’s orbit who didn’t want to be President himself. He gave few public speeches. He didn’t seek public credit. He exercised his power in other ways. He had control over White House personnel decisions and populated the executive branch with his allies. He used his influence in the Bush Administration to carry out a larger project: to increase the power of the Presidency.
It was a project that was often criticized, but largely successful, as Bush’s successors proceeded to at times act more unilaterally, often citing reasons tied to national security. Two decades later, as Cheney’s death on Tuesday comes as President Donald Trump has killed dozens of people on alleged drug boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters and takes steps toward a military strike on Venezuela—all without consulting Congress, some argue the former Vice President’s efforts helped set the stage for such actions.
“One of the dangers of Cheney’s theory of the presidency was that someone who didn’t care about the Constitutional balance of power would take advantage of those powers,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs
Cheney had first worked in the White House under Richard Nixon, and stayed on to work for his predecessor, Gerald Ford, after Nixon resigned in disgrace for misusing presidential power to feed his personal political ambition. Cheney eventually rose to be Ford’s White House chief of staff, was elected as Wyoming’s only Congressman, and served as Secretary of Defense during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. One of his conclusions after all that government service was that Congress had scraped too much power away from the presidency after the fiasco of Vietnam and scandal of Watergate.
When he became Vice President, he set about rectifying that. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, Cheney orchestrated the U.S. response. He advocated for Bush to sweep away American restraint and moral high ground and begin torturing suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. He endorsed the National Security Agency sweeping up American communications. And, convinced he’d left unfinished business by not deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq a decade before, cherry-picked flawed intelligence reports about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify a wholesale invasion of the country.
On a flight aboard Air Force Two in December 2005, more than two years into the ill-fated U.S. occupation of Iraq, Cheney told reporters, “Yes. I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority,” Cheney said. He said he believed that the War Powers Act of 1973, which required a president to report to Congress before committing forces to a war “was an infringement upon the authority of the President.”
Naftali interviewed Cheney in 2007, as part of the Richard Nixon Oral History Project, when
Naftali was director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Cheney, he says, had “concluded that Congress has taken advantage of the weakening of the presidency by Vietnam and Watergate and that was not good for the country. He believed the presidency had to be strengthened.”
Cheney helped cement his expansive view of presidential power while in the Bush White House by pushing for legal opinions to bolster it. But by the end of Trump’s first term in office, Cheney was appalled by what the first Republican to follow Bush to the White House done with the office. He was especially outraged by Trump’s unwillingness to accept the results of the 2020 election and his role on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters beat police officers to storm the Capitol and delay the certification of results. During the 2024 election, Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and called Trump a “coward” and a “threat to our republic.”
Cheney may not have foreseen how Trump would use the powers of the presidency that Cheney had helped reclaim. “Dick Cheney was a proponent of a powerful presidency. Unfortunately, he lived to see the dark side of that policy when someone uses the office for personal rather than national interests,” Naftali says.
But not everyone is convinced that Trump’s aggressive use of presidential power during his second term can all be laid at Cheney’s feet.
“Would Trump have behaved this way if Cheney didn’t create such an active presidency? I think he would have,” says Lauren Wright, a political scientist at Princeton University, and author of Star Power: American Democracy in the Age of the Celebrity Candidate.
While Cheney pushed the envelope on executive authority, Wright argues that Trump didn’t need Cheney’s example to take it even further. “I do think he absolutely played a role in asserting executive authority,” says Wright of Cheney. “But I think Trump would have done these things anyway.”
