Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who once accidentally shot his friend in the face and was filmed gleefully signing a “waterboard kit,” has died aged 84.
Cheney’s family confirmed that the Republican, who was hugely influential in launching the disastrous war in Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, died Monday due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
“We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man,” the family said in a statement.
Cheney, widely considered the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, served two terms alongside President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.
His decades-long political career, which also included serving as secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, will be remembered for pushing the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003 on misleading claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
It will also be remembered for a controversial incident that plagued Cheney’s life, where he accidentally shot a man while hunting birds in Texas in February 2006. Cheney’s victim, Texas attorney Harry Whittington, suffered wounds to his face, neck, and upper torso after getting blasted by the vice president.
Whittington, 78 at the time, suffered a minor heart attack days later when birdshot moved into his heart, and a collapsed lung that was not reported at the time. Dozens of pellets remained in his body for years, The Washington Post reported in 2010.
Amazingly, Whittington later apologized to Cheney and his family for what they “have had to go through this week” after being released from hospital.
In a 2010 interview with The Washington Post, Whittington refused to answer whether Cheney ever apologized to him for the shooting. “I’m not going to go into that,” was his response.
It is unclear if Whittington ever received an apology from the former vice president. He died in February 2023 aged 95, having suffered a brief illness and a fall at his home.
In a 2006 interview with Fox News, Cheney admitted he was at fault for the shooting but stopped short of apologizing. “You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I’ll never forget,” he said.
In 2018, Cheney once again became the butt of national ridicule after comedian and Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen, in disguise as an Israeli counterterrorism expert, got him to autograph a makeshift “waterboard kit” without much hesitation.
Waterboarding is the so-called “enhanced interrogation technique”–otherwise known as torture–to simulate the feeling of drowning that the CIA widely used against suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever signed a waterboard,” Cheney said during a teaser trailer for Cohen’s show This Is America, released in July 2018.
“I’m often surprised by the lack of self-awareness people show, and I could not believe the former vice president of the United States would do that,” Cohen said in a 2019 interview.
“If anything, he should be incredibly embarrassed about being associated with waterboarding. The idea that he was proud enough to actually sign it as memorabilia was astonishing.”
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