Dick Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism

As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory recalls an excerpt from an interview I had with Bob Michel while reporting for a New Yorkers profile of Cheney from 2001. Michel now seems like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for every major civil rights bill and who loved to work out legislative compromises with Democrats. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Michel was the parliamentary minority leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary Republicanism eventually forced Michel to step aside — but for most of Michel’s time as leader, Cheney was one of his top deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant and reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The guy with the phlegmatic process? Certainly not.

We were speaking a few months before the September 11 attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney the same way as Michel. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from directing the Republican vice presidential search in 2000—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming a vice presidential candidate himself. After 9/11, it immediately became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing neutral, at least in the eyes of the Republicans who outranked him, rather than having actually been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), skillfully setting the country on the path that led to the War on Terror and the War in Iraq.

How did Cheney manage to make people seem like someone he wasn’t? When did he become so conservative? And, finally, his reemergence in recent years as a passionate opponent of Donald Trump raises what might be the most interesting question of all: What, exactly, made the current version of conservatism so repugnant to him?

My theory is that Cheney’s time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960s was his ideological Rosebud. Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his sweetheart from Casper, Wyoming, in 1964. Both were the children of career civil servants. With their typical small-town, middle-class backgrounds and Dick’s practice of saying as little as possible, they came across as unremarkable, middle-class Americans. In 1966, the Cheneys enrolled as doctoral students at Madison; he in political science, she in English. Dick didn’t graduate because he went to work for Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles, another moderate Republican. Lynne did finish, in 1970, the same year radicals bombed a mathematics research center on the university campus, killing one person inside. The Cheneys appear to have gained from their time in Wisconsin an unshakable conviction that the far left poses an ever-present threat that Democrats and liberals are incapable of taking seriously. In 2001, Lynne told me that these years had converted them to conservatism. Dick said, “When I was given the choice between returning to college or remaining in politics, it really wasn’t a close call. »

Dick Cheney has always been much more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. From H. Bradford Westerfeld, a professor with whom he studied during his brief period at Yale (he left after two years and later graduated from the University of Wyoming), he absorbed the idea of ​​the Cold War as a world-defining existential struggle. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheney, then secretary of defense, quickly commissioned a report suggesting that the United States would become the world’s sole superpower — permanently, if possible. However, the threats, particularly those emanating from radical Islam, worried him. He viewed 9/11 not only as an attack that needed to be responded to, but as an opportunity to make the United States more secure by using military force to transform the entire Middle East into a region friendly to the United States. Cheney believed that our enemies, if they demonstrated strength beyond the capabilities of liberals, would always submit to our will. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the Iraqi adventure wouldn’t work.

If you gave modern Dr. Frankenstein the challenge of designing a Republican that Cheney would find repulsive, he would be impossible to invent someone more perfect than Trump: city-dwelling, undignified, ostensibly wealthy, incapable of ever remaining silent, and drawn to negotiations rather than force to solve problems. Substantively, a crucial element of Trump’s appeal was his denunciation of the “forever wars,” of which Cheney had been the principal perpetrator. Cheney probably never had the illusion that his brand of maximum hawkishness enjoyed broad public support, but Trump, demonstrating that he could make anti-Cheneyism unstoppably powerful among Republican voters, still must have stinged. His staunchly loyal and Republican daughter Liz, whom he would have liked to see rise as high or higher than him, found herself unable to fill her father’s old House seat in the face of Trump’s vengeance, after she became an unusually public critic of his within the party.

Cheney’s life provides a good way to follow the evolution of the Republican Party and American conservatism over the last half century. He began his political career in a party dominated by moderates and helped make it much more conservative. But he was always an insider, who didn’t expect that more conservative also meant flamboyant populist. In his typically pessimistic way, he helped shape both the zenith of American power at the turn of the millennium and then the overreach that ended that moment. He saw a series of disasters in the early 21st century – 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis – lead to the rebirth of isolationism, the ideology he feared most, as the dominant element of his party, when he thought it resided primarily on the left.

Through luck or courage, Cheney lived longer than expected, given his spectacular heart problems: five heart attacks, beginning when he was still in his 30s, then a transplant. His surprising ability to survive gave him the opportunity to ultimately evolve from taciturn companion to flowery dissident. It wasn’t natural for him and it couldn’t have made him happy. He must have died disappointed. ♦