For Dick Cheney, a Journey From Champion of War to Voice of Resistance

http://archive.today/2025.11.05-005745/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/us/politics/dick-cheney-trump.html

Dick Cheney and Kenneth Adelman were thick as thieves for decades. They worked side by side in Republican administrations, their wives and children were close, their families spent Thanksgiving together, they shared the same wedding anniversary.

Their relationship broke over the Iraq war.

Donald J. Trump brought them back together again.

Iraq, of course, was a defining moment of Mr. Cheney’s life in government. Like many Americans, Mr. Adelman supported the war at first, only to grow disenchanted. He and Mr. Cheney stopped speaking for 16 years. Then Mr. Trump came along, and Mr. Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney spoke out against him. And so, one day, Mr. Cheney and his old friend were on the phone again, putting “the void years,” as Mr. Adelman put it, behind them.

Their reconciliation speaks to the complicated place Mr. Cheney occupies in the public life of the nation at this point in its story. When he left office in 2009 as the most influential vice president in history, Mr. Cheney was to many the embodiment of an unpopular and bloody war. By the time he died on Monday night, he had become an unlikely voice of resistance to what he saw as a different kind of threat to America, allied not just with those who had soured on him, like Mr. Adelman, but even with others who used to call him a war criminal.

It led to the head-spinning moment in 2022 when Mr. Cheney joined his daughter on the floor of the House as the only Republicans there to mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Democrats who once considered Mr. Cheney the chief villain of Washington rushed up to greet him warmly. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker who used to joust with Mr. Cheney, held his hand as she spoke with him. And it led to his statement last fall that he would vote for Vice President Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump.

He was the steady hand on Sept. 11, 2001, helping coordinate the response to Al Qaeda’s attacks from the bunker under the White House, and he was a powerful advocate for the robust counterterrorism campaign that followed, including extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding that were widely viewed as torture. He never entertained doubts about those policies and believed that preventing another Sept. 11 justified them. “I firmly believe that it was the right thing to do,” he said after leaving office. “It worked.”

With a trademark crooked grin, he had a dry wit and embraced his dark image. When his friend David Hume Kennerly jokingly asked, “Have you blown away any small countries this morning?” Mr. Cheney replied, “You know, that’s the one thing about this job I really love.” At another point, he puckishly tried on a Darth Vader mask that aides had bought and posed for a picture. When he later tried to put the picture in his memoir, his wife, Lynne Cheney, talked him out of it.

After leaving office, he settled into semiretirement in a house in McLean, Va., that he and Mrs. Cheney had designed, the first they had ever built for themselves. He told a visitor he would never do it again. “There are thousands of decisions — doorknobs, by God!” he said.

A correction was made on Nov. 5, 2025: An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated Dick Cheney’s position in 1991. He was the defense secretary, not the secretary of state.