Richard Bruce Cheney (died November 3rd 2025, aged 84) was an American politician widely regarded as the most powerful vice-president in United States history.
Cheney was brought up in Wyoming from his teens, where he developed a lifelong love of fishing and the outdoors. He attended Yale but dropped out.
Under Gerald Ford, Cheney became the youngest White House chief of staff in American history. He later served as vice-president to George W. Bush, having been sworn in by 2001.
On the morning of September 11th 2001, with President Bush unavailable, Cheney was in the White House bunker when he gave the order to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane heading towards Washington, DC. The order came to nothing—the passengers had downed the plane themselves. He later recalled the sight of the Pentagon, with a still-smoking hole in its side, as he took off in a helicopter from the south lawn of the White House.
After the attacks Cheney became known as the architect of the war on terror and of the invasion of Iraq. He argued that terrorists did not deserve prisoner-of-war protections under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and advocated enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding. Critics said the Iraq war cost thousands of lives, lowered America's international reputation and came to be seen as the country's biggest foreign-policy disaster in a generation.
The left called him "sinister", "Satan" and "Darth Vader"—a label he partly embraced, calling it one of the nicer things he had been said about him. Sir Tony Blair, Britain's former prime minister, observed that even moderates tended "to reach for the garlic and crucifixes" at the mention of his name. When the Washington Post called him a "moderate" he requested a correction: he was a conservative, through and through.
His Secret Service code name was "Angler". His autobiography, In My Time, contained 53 mentions of the word "fish", compared with three of "Geneva Conventions" and ten of "human rights". Staffers called his office the "Star Chamber" after a secretive English Tudor court.
Cheney suffered eight cardiac events during his eight years as vice-president. He once accidentally shot a hunting partner in the face.
In 2024 Cheney announced he would vote for Kamala Harris, saying that in his nation's 248-year history there had never been anyone who was a greater threat to it than Donald Trump.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.