WHEN al-Qaeda terrorists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center, US Vice President Dick Cheney was holding the fort at the White House.
His boss, then-US President George W. Bush, was visiting a Florida school and Cheney — who died on Monday aged 84 — was left in initial command after the terror attack of September 11, 2001.
Rushed by secret-service agents to a safe bunker, he authorised the military to shoot down any further suspicious planes. This later proved unnecessary — but he had given a calm and commanding performance.
It positioned him to become a key architect of the US War On Terror that followed — and perhaps the most powerful Vice President in America’s history.
He was also a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and championed the use of controversial interrogation techniques against terror suspects — including waterboarding, deafening noise, extreme cold and confinement in coffin-like boxes, which human-rights groups branded torture.
After 9/11, he said: “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side. We’re gonna spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without discussion, using sources and methods available to our intelligence agencies.”
His commitment to the War On Terror was uncompromising.
School gridiron star
Former UK Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair wrote in his memoirs that Cheney “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.
He was for hard, hard power — no ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”
Cheney, a giant of the Republican Party who also served as a Congressman and Defense Secretary, died on Monday night from complications of pneumonia, as well as cardiac and vascular disease.
George W. Bush called him a “decent, honourable man” who had “prioritised the freedom and security of the American people”.
Born Richard Bruce Cheney in the Midwest city of Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, his dad was a soil-conservation agent and his mum a softball star.
When he was 13, the family moved to the oil town of Wyoming, where he developed a love of hunting and fishing that would last for life. Later, while Vice President, he famously accidentally shot a hunting partner in the face.
A high-school gridiron star, he began dating champion baton-twirler Lynne Vincent — who he would later wed and stay married to for 61 years, until his death.
In 1959, he won a scholarship to Yale University — but would fail to graduate. He later admitted falling in with “young men like me who were not adjusting well [to Yale], and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life”.
He later gained a master’s degree in politics from the University of Wyoming but at 21 was convicted of drink-driving.
A year later he was again stopped while intoxicated behind the wheel and admitted: “I was headed down a bad road.” In 1964, he tied the knot with Lynne, who later became a TV talk show host.
They would have two daughters — Liz, who became a Republican Congresswoman, and Mary.
With the Vietnam War raging in 1959, Cheney faced being drafted. But he got a string of deferments, for study and when Lynne became pregnant. He later said: “I had other priorities than military service.”
In 1968, he got his first taste of Washington DC as an intern to a Congressman who was part of then- US President Richard Nixon’s Republican administration.
The next year he became an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld — then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Nixon’s administration but later Defense Secretary in the Seventies under President Gerald Ford and Noughties for George W. Bush.
In 1975, Cheney became Chief of Staff to President Ford, at the age of 34. But when Ford lost the next year’s presidential election to Jimmy Carter he returned to Wyoming to run for Congress.
He suffered a heart attack during the campaign but won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1978.
He quit chain-smoking but would suffer four more heart attacks, and in 2012 had a heart transplant.
Cheney was an arch conservative, backing tax cuts and opposing abortion, gun controls and sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
In 1988, President George H.W. Bush won the presidency and made Cheney Defense Secretary.
He played a key role in ejecting Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, after they invaded.
But his explanation as to why the US decided not to topple Saddam would later haunt him. He said: “Once you took down Saddam Hussein’s government, what are you going to put in its place? That’s a volatile part of the world and you could see pieces of Iraq fly off. It’s a quagmire.”
This proved prophetic a decade later when he and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq led to bloody chaos.
Cheney had insisted there was no doubt Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and he vowed US troops would be “greeted as liberators”. But he was wide of the mark on both counts.
After eight years in the White House with George W. Bush, from, 2001-2009, he quit public life.
In 2018, Brit actor Christian Bale played him in black-comedy movie Vice — and when later accepting a Golden Globe, Bale said: “Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.”
Conservative Cheney nevertheless voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, which she lost to Donald Trump. He said: “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Cheney loved being lampooned as Darth Vader and even dressed as the Star Wars villain to go on a talk show to promote his memoir.
It was a rare moment of humour from a hardman who, for better or worse, did much to shape the world.
