Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney was the 46th Vice President of the United States, serving under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. He died on 3 November 2025, aged 84.

Career

The Bush administration’s own archived biography sets out the sequence. Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on 30 January 1941 and raised in Casper, Wyoming, taking a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Wyoming. His public service began in 1969 in the Nixon administration, at the Cost of Living Council, the Office of Economic Opportunity and in the White House. He joined Gerald Ford’s transition team in August 1974, served as Deputy Assistant to the President, and in November 1975 became Assistant to the President and White House Chief of Staff for the remainder of that administration.

The same source summarizes the rest: U.S. Congressman for Wyoming, Secretary of Defense, chief executive of the Halliburton Company, and Vice President of the United States.

Death

Cheney died on Monday 3 November 2025 at the age of 84. His family stated the cause as complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

Relevance to This Site

Cheney is covered here for the period rather than for any digital presence of his own. The policies of the administration in which he served — and the intelligence claims made in support of them — were the subject matter around which the American political blogosphere of 2002 to 2006 organized itself, on both sides. He belongs to the era this site treats as the prehistory of platform politics: an era in which a vice president’s arguments reached the public through television and the press, and were contested in comment threads and on weblogs rather than on platforms that did not yet exist.

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: the “reaching millions via television and digital media” audience placeholder, and the description of him as an “influential figure in post-9/11 policy and intra-party political debates”, which asserted a characterization rather than a fact. The White House biography is a first-party account written by the administration he served in, and is used here only for offices held and dates, not for assessments of his conduct in them. His dates as Congressman, as Secretary of Defense and at Halliburton are not given by that source and are not stated here.