The throng of mourners assembling at former vice president Dick Cheney’s funeral in Washington Thursday is set to be led by former president George W. Bush and a cast of Republicans who held power in the nation’s capital nearly a generation ago.
Bush is slated to eulogize the 46th vice president at the 11 a.m. service at Washington National Cathedral, an august setting where state funerals have been held for presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.
Neither President Donald Trump or Vice President JD Vance are expected to attend the service, their absence punctuating the divide between the president’s MAGA movement and the traditional conservatism embodied by the Bush-era Republican Party.
Trump, who has made no public statements about Cheney’s death, has long expressed disdain for the former vice president and his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming. Liz Cheney was among Trump’s most vocal critics after the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
A year ago, her father broke ranks with the GOP and said he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race, an astonishing turn for a lifelong Republican that demonstrated the extent to which Trump had upended his party. Cheney said at the time that Trump could “never be trusted with power again” after seeking to “steal” the 2020 election.
A Cheney family spokesman said a guest list for the funeral was not available in advance of the service. Former president Joe Biden, a Cheney critic in the past, said through a spokesman that he would attend.
Regarded by historians as the nation’s most powerful and polarizing vice president, Cheney, 84, died Nov. 3 of complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to his family.
As Bush’s second-in-command, Cheney’s influence extended far beyond the ceremonial role traditionally assigned to vice presidents. He helped direct the nation’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, advocated for expanding the government’s surveillance powers and pushed the United States into two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cheney’s two terms as the younger Bush’s understudy was the culmination of a career in Washington that began in 1969, when, at the age of 28, he joined the Nixon administration. He first worked as a special assistant to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, who became his mentor.
At 34, Cheney became the youngest White House chief of staff to serve in that position, appointed by Ford to replace Rumsfeld when the president named him defense secretary. After Carter defeated Ford in 1976, Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he won a congressional seat in 1978, rising up to minority whip in the House and serving for a decade before resigning to join the first Bush administration. As defense secretary, Cheney oversaw the U.S. military operation during the Persian Gulf War.
Delivering speeches and bantering with voters — the stuff of retail politics that many of his contemporaries embraced — was not Cheney’s thing. His wire-rimmed glasses, conservative suits, and flat speaking style seemed more fitting for an actuary. His crooked smile often seemed more like a grimace.
Instead, Cheney forged a reputation as the consummate Washington insider, a shrewd tactician who preferred to exercise power behind closed doors. His adversaries liked to refer to him as “Darth Vader,” a nickname Cheney once saiddid not bother him because it “is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.”
Cheney became the target of late-night comedians’ ridicule in 2006 when he accidentally shot a friend, Harry Whittington, a Texas attorney, in the face with a pellet gun while quail hunting. Whittingham, who was 78 at the time, survived despite suffering a minor heart attack. The incident was a low point for Cheney, who was criticized for waiting until the following day to acknowledge the shooting.
Another nadir for Cheney occurred when his most trusted aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who served as his chief staff, was convicted in 2007 of lying to FBI agents and a grand jury investigating the leaking of the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer. Plame’s then-husband, Joseph Wilson, a diplomat, had written an article undercutting the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to amass unconventional weapons.
A judge sentenced Libby to 30 months in prison, a sentence Bush commuted in 2007. Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.
Unlike many vice presidents who preceded him, Cheney never ran for president. Indeed, he did not even set out to become vice president, only accepting the post after Bush assigned him to lead a search for a suitable running mate and then chose him.
Cheney’s deep résumé and sober-toned gravitas reassured those who questioned whether Bush, then the governor of Texas, possessed the intellect, experience and understanding of Washington to lead the country.
Before his selection was finalized, Cheney underwent a medical evaluation that took on added significance because he had previously had three heart attacks and had undergone quadruple bypass surgery. He suffered his fourth heart attack several weeks after the conclusion of the 2000 presidential campaign that Bush won over Vice President Al Gore.
During the campaign, Cheney found himself the target of criticism from conservatives when he said it should be left up to states to decide the legality of same-sex marriage. His position put him at odds with the Republican Party’s platform, as well as Bush, who would call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
By then, Cheney had learned that his youngest daughter, Mary, was a lesbian. “People should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into,” he said during a vice-presidential debate with Democrat Joseph Lieberman.
Before his swearing-in, Cheney resigned as CEO of Halliburton, the multinational oil services corporation, where he presided from 1995 to 2000 and made millions of dollars, the kind of money that had eluded him as a career government official. His ties to Halliburton would later prompt John F. Kerry, then running for president, to charge that Cheney profited off special treatment Bush’s White House extended to the company, a claim the administration denied.
As vice president, Cheney played an instrumental role in the fraught aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in which nearly 3,000 people died. With Bush away from Washington that day, it was Cheney who, after the U.S. Secret Service lifted him up and rushed him to a bunker beneath the White House, ordered American forces on high alert and the evacuation of the U.S. Capitol.
In the ensuing months, Cheney was a chief proponent of sending troops into Afghanistan to crush al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization led by Osama Bin Laden that was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. He also influenced Bush’s decision to dispatch American troops into Iraq, contending falsely, as it was later learned, that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney further burnished his reputation as a hawk by endorsing the brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists and for championing the creation of the U.S. Patriot Act, which expanded law enforcement’s capacity for using warrantless surveillance. The new law opened the Bush administration to charges that it was endangering civil liberties.
To those who complained about brutal interrogation tactics and expanded surveillance powers, Cheney liked to point out that the country had not been a target of terrorism after Sept. 11.
In addition to Bush, the speakers at the service are to include Liz Cheney, the former vice president’s grandchildren and Pete Williams, a former NBC News correspondent who was Cheney’s spokesman when he served in Congress and when he was defense secretary under the elder President Bush.
Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife of 61 years, is expected to attend the service but is not scheduled to speak. The couple met as high school students in Casper, Wyoming, where his family moved after he spent most of his childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Dick Cheney often attributed his professional success to his partnership with his wife, whom he credited with helping to straighten him out after he flunked out of Yale in the early 1960s and was twice arrested for drunken driving.
“We did a bunch of stupid stuff you do when you’re in college,” Cheney told an interviewer in 2015, opening up, if only for a moment, about his personal life.
Then the door shut again.
“I’ve never dwelled on it or written about it,” the former vice president added, “and I don’t plan to.”
The post Cheney’s funeral expected to draw Bush and GOP’s old guard, not Trump appeared first on Washington Post.
