Former Vice President Dick Cheney has died at age 84. It’s easy to talk about why Cheney is widely disliked (indeed, loathed) by many Republicans now. It’s much harder to remember and talk about why he was so widely admired by Republicans in his heyday.
One of the first things to remember about Cheney is he had a long resume in Republican politics. He was Gerald R. Ford’s Chief of Staff, a U.S. congressman from Wyoming, Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, Chair of the House Republican Conference, and (briefly) House Minority Whip, roles in which he was preceded or succeeded by people like Jack Kemp, Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich. He was clearly regarded as a very mainstream conservative Republican at the time.
After the senate rejected the nomination of former Texas Senator John Tower to be Secretary of Defense, Bush41 tapped Cheney for the role. Cheney was so unpopular that he sailed through the senate on a vote of 92 to 0, including Yea votes from such notorious left-wingers as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Daniel Inouye and Barbara Mikulski (not to mention Joe Biden). Obviously, it was a different time. His election was so in the bag a whole bunch of Republicans (like Phil Gramm) didn’t even bother voting.
Cheney was widely regarded as a very good Secretary of Defense, helping oversee the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, overseeing a successful invasion of Panama to remove dictator and drug-trafficker Manuel Noriega, and overseeing the successful operation of Desert Storm. Cheney was not the primary architect of Desert Storm, but was heavily involved in the planning carried out by General Norman Schwarzkopf, and he let Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell function as the public face of the D.C. end of the operation. He deserves credit for solid administration at a time the defense budget was actually shrinking.
By the standards of late 20th-century Republican, or indeed, consensus foreign-policy positions, Cheney’s views (muscular, anti-communist, Atlanticist, pro-Israel, globalist, etc.) were deeply uncontroversial at the time. The need to liberate Kuwait to prevent Saddam Hussein from controlling that much of the world’s oil supply was a bipartisan consensus policy, as shown by the congressional vote authorizing the use of military force against Iraq, which even Al Gore voted in favor of. At the time, “Neo-conservative” only meant a former liberal who had become a conservative, usually for their opposition to communism. The only significant voice on the right arguing against Desert Storm was Patrick Buchanan, who was considered more than a little funny about Jews.
Bush41 would lose to the political gifted but morally corrupt Bill Clinton (who would eek out two electoral pluralities thanks to Ross Perot), and Cheney would go off the run Halliburton.
I don’t remember the increasingly leftwing press flipping the switch from “Ordinary Politician” to “Master of Darkness” on Cheney until Bush43 tapped him as his Vice Presidential running mate. The press hated Bush43 for his “cowboy” manners, his accent, his parentage, and whomping favorite Ann Richards to get elected Texas governor. But their fury grew to gargantuan proportions following the 2000 Florida “hanging chad” election, where W managed to deploy enough legal firepower to prevent Democrats from stealing away his narrow 537 vote win. The victory in the Gulf War only made them hate Bush all the more, especially when Halliburton got picked to help run post-war reconstruction in Iraq.
Until Trump broke liberal brains, there were generally only two ways the modern left-leaning press thought of Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates: Evil masterminds (Nixon, Agnew, Dole (to an extent)) or dunces (Ford, Reagan, Bush43, Quayle, Palin, Ryan). If Bush43 was the dunce, then Cheney must be the evil mastermind. Cheney didn’t mind being the heavy, and didn’t seem to care what the press thought about him. (Accidentally shooting a guy in the face on a hunting trip didn’t help either.) Republicans liked Cheney for the same reason; he may have been a sonofabitch, but he was our sonofabitch. Having never been elected to the House or Senate, Bush43 delegated a lot of tasks to Cheney, since he knew the ends and outs of how the sausage got made, which gave rise to the leftwing myth of Cheney being the “evil puppetmaster” controlling 43. This was always bunk.
Caspar Weinberger and Donald Rumsfeld were never treated with the absolute loathing the left aimed at Cheney…but they almost certainly would have been had they been Bush43’s veep pick.
Somewhere along the way, “Neo-conservative” morphed away from its classical meaning to shorthand for “anyone who ever supported either Iraqi war or the war in Afghanistan,” never mind that all were overwhelmingly supported by Republicans at the time, just as the expensive difficulties of reconstructing Iraq came to be condensed down to “nation-building,” and Cheney was retroactively convicted of both.
Along the way, the Cheney=evil meme became so codified that The Simpsons had Smithers work for him after leaving Mr. Burns’ employ.
Then along came Donald Trump, and all the rules that had held for Republicans since at least Reagan went by the wayside. In 2016 Cheney reluctantly endorsed Trump after he clinched the nomination, became further alienated from him after Trump’s criticism of daughter Liz Cheney, and ultimately voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. When he started criticizing Trump, Dick Cheney earned Strange New Respect™ from the leftwing media that had previously declared him the devil incarnate.
To an extent, Cheney’s Trump-skepticism was not uncommon among Bush Republicans. A whole lot of Republicans (myself included) backed Ted Cruz in 2016, were disappointed when Trump won the nomination (ditto), and were skeptical Trump would govern as a conservative (ditto). Most of us were very pleasantly surprised when Trump made solid Supreme Court picks. Indeed, as the left became more radically unhinged in their searing hatred for Trump, the more Trump policy resembled that of traditional conservative Republicans.
But for Cheney, and the small handful of Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers on the establishment right, AKA Conservatism Inc., AKA Cruise Ship Conservatism, nothing could every sway them away from their initial distaste and dislike of Trump. He was always going to be Spy magazine’s short-fingered vulgarian, and was simply NOKD (Not Our Kind, Dear). Never mind that in 10 months, Trump47 has more real policy accomplishments than any President since Reagan. It will never be enough to change their irrational loathing of him. And they’ll never celebrate all his #winning because he keeps winning the wrong way.
Cheney was a very successful Secretary of Defense and Vice President, but like many Bush Republicans, the world changed underneath him, and he could never accept that Trump was a rebuke not only to the social justice excesses of Obama, but to various policy failures under both Bushes.
