NEWSLETTER: Dick Cheney quietly exits the world he destroyed

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney died shortly before major elections, allowing him to once again evade accountability.

There was a deluge of articles when Henry Kissinger passed, revisiting his murderous policies in Southeast Asia and rightly casting him as a monster of American history. A busy news cycle spared Cheney any such reckoning, even though he was personally responsible for a similar scale of carnage and the destruction of our democracy.

Cheney got his start in the Nixon White House, where he had a front-row seat to the Watergate debacle. It’s well documented that Cheney saw Nixon’s downfall as more tragedy than travesty, supporting Nixon’s claim that “when a president does it, it’s not illegal.” This is how he became an adherent of the unitary executive theory—the belief that the president has total power over the executive branch and that neither Congress nor the courts should ever interfere with it.

He took this view to Congress, where, in 1987, he served on the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration was accused of secretly selling weapons to Iran to fund rebel fighters in Nicaragua. Many legal scholars said the sales amounted to high treason.

The committee found that the White House broke the law. Cheney dissented, arguing that Congress was wrong to undermine the president’s foreign policy.

President George H.W. Bush rewarded Cheney’s loyalty by making him defense secretary. In 1990, Cheney urged Bush not to seek congressional approval for the Gulf War—advice that Bush ultimately chose to ignore.

“I argued that we did not need congressional authorization, and legally, from a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed,” Cheney boasted in 1996. “If we lost the vote in Congress, I certainly would have recommended to the president that we go forward anyway.”

A decade later, when George W. Bush became the Republican nominee for president, he hired Cheney to pick his running mate. Cheney chose himself and became the 46th vice president of the United States.

Entire books have been written on what came next. Cheney pushed the weapons of mass destruction lie that led to the Iraq War and the deaths of 200,000 civilians. He personally approved the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. His chief of staff, Scooter Libby, outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame over a grudge Cheney held against her husband. Libby was later convicted for this, but Cheney pressured Bush to commute his sentence. President Donald Trump granted Libby a full pardon in 2018.

Cheney never faced consequences for any of this. President Barack Obama preferred to turn the page rather than push for investigations and prosecutions. I think this was a mistake. Not holding Cheney accountable or legally challenging his unitary executive theory is what has enabled Trump to ignore congressional edicts, murder Venezuelan fishermen, and kidnap mothers off city streets.

Later in life, Cheney found an unexpected allyship with Democrats. He was a vocal critic of Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But he never showed remorse for the bloodshed he caused or the authoritarianism he inspired.

If Democrats ever retake power, I hope they won’t make the same mistake twice, and let Trump or his henchmen slip into the afterlife scot-free.

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