Dick Cheney, who spent eight years as perhaps the most influential vice president in history and surely one of the most polarizing, has died. He was 84.

“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed. The former Vice President died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease,” his family said in a statement released Tuesday morning.

A powerhouse tactician, Cheney was widely perceived as something of a shadow president during his eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president, having more influence and more power than any other occupant of that much-maligned office.

“Dick Cheney played a paramount role in decisions that ranged from war and peace to the economy, the environment, and the meaning of the law,” wrote Barton Gellman, author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.” “His hand was often unseen even by colleagues.”

The implacable Cheney also brought to the White House a deeply held belief that presidential power needed to be restored after being restricted too much by Congress.

“The brain trust of President George W. Bush — particularly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,” wrote Garry Wills in “Bomb Power,” “took office with him in 2001 to lead what they considered a counter-revolution. They denounced a congressional ‘coup’ that had hampered executive power in the 1970s.”

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cheney formulated the “One Percent Doctrine,” also known as the “Cheney Doctrine,” which stated that the United States needed to attack anyone who could conceivably pose a threat to it — preemptively. That doctrine played a huge role in the Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly the invasion of Iraq, and helped place the nation on war footing indefinitely.

“We realize that wars are never won on the defensive,” Cheney said in August 2002. “We must take the battle to the enemy.”

A lightning rod for those on the left, the assertive Cheney would sometimes be likened to “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader. Years later, former President George H.W. Bush would call him “Old Iron Ass” and say Cheney amassed too much power during his son’s presidency.

“He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer,” the elder Bush told author Jon Meacham of Cheney’s vice presidency.

As the years went on, Cheney would be treated both as a nefarious abuser of American power — “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney,” said Edward Snowden, exiled leaker of secret documents. “is the highest honor you can give to an American” — and a virile symbol of it: “Darkness is good,” Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon said in November 2016. “Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan. That’s power.”

But Cheney would also side with his daughter, then-Rep. Liz Cheney, in opposing Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and calling him out for his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I watched my dad serve in the highest offices in our country for nearly 50 years,” she wrote of him in “Oath and Honor.” “From him, I learned what it means to have the courage of your convictions.”

Richard Bruce Cheney was born Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

His father, Richard Herbert Cheney, was a soil-conservation agent for the government who was evidently pleased that his son shared a birthday with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Cheney the son entered Yale University in 1959, but after some academic struggles, found his way back west to the University of Wyoming, from which he graduated in 1965 — one year after marrying Lynne Ann Vincent. He then embarked on graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

According to David Maraniss in “They Marched Into Sunlight,” Cheney came to Madison after he won a contest in Wyoming for “a paper on the handling of right-to-work legislation in the Wyoming legislature.” Cheney was a student there during some of the peak years of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but neither the protests nor the war weighed heavily on him. “You didn’t get caught up in the issue that people were protesting or demonstrating against,” Maraniss quoted him as saying.

Cheney’s next stop was Washington, D.C., where he joined the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, serving in several positions, including on Rumsfeld’s staff at the Office of Economic Opportunity. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Cheney served on Gerald Ford’s transition team, before succeeding Rumsfeld as chief of staff in November 1975.

“It was as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff that Cheney’s talent for behind-the-scenes executive and political management blossomed,” wrote Geoffrey O’Gara. “By controlling the president’s schedule and access, he made himself invaluable to the executive and unavoidable to those who sought the chief’s ear.”

Cheney also sought to restore the prestige of the executive branch after Nixon’s ignominious departure, urging Ford, for instance, to defiantly push back against Congress during the Senate investigation into the CIA and the nation’s intelligence apparatus led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho).

The morning after Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election, it was Cheney who read the president’s concession to President-elect Jimmy Carter over the phone since Ford had lost his voice campaigning. Cheney subsequently returned to Wyoming and sought his state’s lone House seat, winning with 58.6 percent of the vote in November 1978 despite suffering a heart attack in June.

The candidate jokingly organized a “Cardiacs for Cheney” group to keep his campaign going. According to the Washington Post, he said no candidate had “ever tried the heart attack gimmick before.”

Cheney won reelection five times and rose to the position of House Minority Whip.

His career took an unexpected turn in 1989. President George H.W. Bush had nominated former Texas Sen. John Tower to be his secretary of Defense, but Tower, known for both drinking and womanizing, was rejected by his former colleagues.

The new president turned to Cheney, whose nomination was approved 92-0.

In August 1990, after Kuwait was overrun by Iraq’s army, the United States set about building an international coalition to liberate it. Operation Desert Storm was launched in January 1991, and victory was swift, with ground combat lasting less than a week. Cheney would share in some of that glory, along with Gens. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, but there would be ramifications down the road from the decision to leave Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in power.

“The idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the regime wasn’t anything I was enthusiastic about,” Cheney said later, according to Thomas E. Ricks in “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”

Cheney’s tenure at the Pentagon coincided with one of the more dramatic eras in American history. The Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union dissolved, reducing the threat of nuclear war to its lowest point in decades. By the time he left office, the United States was seen as the world’s last superpower.

“When he left Defense in 1993,” wrote O’Gara, “Cheney’s reputation for smart decision-making, lack of vanity and calm leadership had never been greater. There were White House conversations — Cheney was not in on them — about his replacing Dan Quayle as George H.W. Bush’s running mate for a second term.”

After Bush’s defeat in 1992, Cheney returned to private life. In 2000, Cheney was serving as CEO of Halliburton when he was asked to head George W. Bush’s search for a vice presidential candidate. It came as quite a surprise when Bush turned around and picked Cheney for the job.

“I am proud to have Dick Cheney at my side,” Bush said in his acceptance speech in Philadelphia. “He is a man of integrity and sound judgment, who has proven that public service can be noble service.”

Still, the situation struck many as unusual.

“To help him narrow down the list of possibilities,” quipped humorist Dave Barry, “Bush called on veteran political insider Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney, who conducted an exhaustive wide-ranging search that took him to every corner of his house.”

It was understood that Cheney, Rumsfeld and other D.C. veterans were needed to bring gravitas to the administration, having the experience and institutional knowledge the new president lacked. But Cheney was not one to be shunted aside on policy issues, as so many vice presidents had been.

“Cheney was not trying to aggrandize himself, to steer money to friends, or to set himself up for higher office,” Gellman told Harper’s in 2008. “He simply believed that the stakes were high and he was more capable than others.”

Cheney was firm in his belief that Congress had emasculated the presidency, and it was time for the White House to reclaim its full authority. He particularly resented legislation passed in response to the Vietnam War that was designed to put a brake on the president’s ability to wage war.

That all became clear after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, after two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, there were fears that a third was headed straight for the White House. A third plane soon hit the Pentagon.

“My Secret Service agent said, ‘Sir, we have to leave now,’” Cheney was quoted as saying by Garrett M. Graff in “The Only Plane in the Sky.” “He grabbed me and propelled me out of my office, down the hall, and into the underground shelter in the White House. … They practice this — you move, whether you want to be moved or not, you’re going.”

With Bush in Sarasota, Florida, that morning visiting a school, Cheney took hold of the situation in Washington from the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House’s North Lawn.

Cheney sought and received authorization from Bush to do what would have been unthinkable only hours earlier: permission to shoot down any civilian jet attempting another attack, presumably at the loss of innocent American lives. That proved unnecessary, as the fourth and final hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed after passengers stormed the cockpit.

“Cheney was famously implacable, but I thought I saw a reflection of horror on his face,” wrote Richard A. Clarke in “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror” of that day.

“In the years since,” Cheney was quoted as saying in “The Only Plane in the Sky,” “I’ve heard speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.”

After the horror of that day, no response to terrorism seemed to be off the table, both on the domestic front and around the globe. The “war on terror” was everywhere at once, and it came to include torture and other interrogation techniques formerly considered unthinkable.

A culture of secrecy was deemed essential for the government, but the United States could also invade its citizens’ privacy to protect them, using surveillance technology approved in secret hearings to collect staggering amounts of data from Americans. Cheney brushed past Fourth Amendment concerns.

According to Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, “The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11,” the Cheney Doctrine was first enunciated in a meeting discussing possible Pakistani links to Al Qaeda. All threats had to be neutralized before they could strike first, Cheney said.

“Now spoken, it stood,” wrote Suskind, “a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if is a certainty.”

Suskind added: “As to ‘evidence,’ the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn’t apply.”

Quickly, there was an invasion of Afghanistan. After that, Cheney would become the loudest voice in the administration in favor of invading Iraq, with or without the support of America’s allies, pushing back against others like Secretary of State Colin Powell who urged restraint until all the facts were in.

“There is no doubt Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said in August 2002. “There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

Iraq was invaded and Hussein was toppled, but no weapons of mass destruction were to be found, undermining the whole rationale for the war. As the situation in Iraq fell apart, Bush saw his approval rating tumble — and Cheney’s popularity fell with it.

Cheney also became ensnared in the scandal that resulted from the naming in a Robert Novak column of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the leak was seen as retribution for an article written by her husband. Though no one was convicted of leaking the information, Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of making false statements in the case.

The strangest incident of Cheney’s vice presidency occurred Feb. 11, 2006, when he accidentally shot Harry Whittington, an influential Texas attorney, during a quail hunt at a ranch.

Whittington was hit by dozens of pellets, but he survived. No charges were filed against Cheney, though some questions were raised about the length of time it took for information to come out — and why an experienced hunter like Cheney was not more careful. (The incident was embellished in “Vice,” the vicious 2018 biopic about Cheney starring Christian Bale.

A year later, Cheney was the target of an assassination attempt while visiting Afghanistan, though the administration denied it at the time. According to Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers,” Cheney was the intended target of a suicide bombing at the Bagram Air Base that left 23 people dead. Cheney was not near the explosion.

At the end of Bush’s tenure, Cheney did not seek the presidency, though he remained in the spotlight. Through the Obama years, the former vice president would remain a vocal advocate of the Bush administration’s aggressive actions to keep America safe — sometimes jabbing at Powell and others — as well as a consistent critic of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who called Cheney “the most dangerous vice president” in American history.

“When we get people who are more concerned,” Cheney said at the start of the Obama administration, “about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, I worry.”

To some it seemed, Cheney was still fighting his Washington foes.

In “Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War,” author Mark Danner wrote: “Cheney’s dark admonitions were both exculpatory, pointing back to and justifying what the Bush administration had done, and menacing, warning about attacks that he claimed were coming and laying down a clear predicate for who would be blamed in their wake.”

In December 2015, Cheney was honored in a Capitol ceremony to unveil his his vice presidential bust.

“For eight consequential years, I benefited from his wise counsel. He was the principal and most trusted adviser on the most difficult questions facing our country,” George W. Bush said.

Cheney also spoke of how he hoped future visitors would remember him.

“I would want them to know this much at least — here, was a believer in America,” Cheney said, “so fortunate in his life experiences, so blessed in his friends, so grateful in all his days to have served as vice president of the United States of America.”

With his daughter Liz, he wrote “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” The book emphasized his belief that no country had ever done more for the world than the United States: “We have guaranteed freedom, security, and peace for a larger share of humanity than has any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us.”

Liz Cheney was elected to Congress from Wyoming in 2016 and rose to the No. 3 spot in the House Republican caucus. Later, she would become one of President Donald Trump‘s most vocal Republican critics and a member of the House’s Jan. 6 committee, factors that contributed to her losing the Republican primary for her House seat in 2022.

In January 2021, Dick Cheney joined the other nine living former Defense secretaries (including Rumsfeld and Powell) in signing an open letter stating that Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election, and that Trump and the current leaders of the Pentagon would be betraying their country if they worked to keep him in office. “American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are the hallmarks of our democracy,” they wrote.

“Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the letter said. “We did not swear it to an individual or a party.”

Days later, according to her book “Oath and Honor,” Dick Cheney would warn his daughter by phone that Trump was attacking her in his Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse even as she and the other members of Congress met to certify the Electoral College results. “He has created a serious threat to your security,” Liz Cheney said he told her.

“The next time I talked to my father,” she wrote in her book, “I was being rushed from the House chamber as the violent mob mobilized by Trump stormed through the Capitol.”

During 2022, Cheney recorded a campaign message for his daughter, who was under fire in Wyoming for her work in the House investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“In our nation’s 246-year history,” Dick Cheney said, “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election. … Liz is fearless. She never backs down from a fight.”

She lost her primary anyway.

In September 2024, both Cheneys said they intended to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” he said in a statement.