"Fortunate Son" Dick Cheney Dead at 84

George W. Bush's Vice President was the chief architect of the post 9/11 security state and the disastrous Bush Doctrine of preemptive war.

Former Vice President Richard Cheney died on Monday, November 3, 2025 at the age of 84. He is best remembered as the unusually powerful Vice President of George W. Bush.

After the preventable 9/11 attacks happened on Bush & Cheney’s watch, Cheney set about expanding the already vast edifice of the U.S. security state and advocating passage of the Patriot Act and the PREP Act, which have been used to subvert the U.S. Constitution ever since. The latter act was especially instrumental in laying the ground work for the tyranny that was imposed on the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cheney and his cronies—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and Robert Kagan—also set about preparing to invade Iraq, which Perle had already advocated in his 1996 policy paper (written for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

Like his fellow hawk, John Bolton—who wrote in his Yale University 25th reunion book: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy”—Mr. Cheney had better things to do than serve in Vietnam, and he received four college deferments and one “hardship” deferment following the birth of his daughter. Even harder than slinging out with Charlie in the jungles of Vietnam was assisting his wife in rearing an infant.

Prior to serving as Bush’s Vice President, Cheney held the following offices:

• White House Chief of Staff (1975-1977): Served under President Gerald Ford, one of the youngest to ever hold the role.

• U.S. Representative (1979-1989): Represented Wyoming’s at-large congressional district for six terms, including time as House Minority Whip.

• Secretary of Defense (1989-1993): Under President George H. W. Bush, Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led coalition that liberated Kuwait from Iraqi forces in 1991.

In the private sector, he was the CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Following in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson—whose old cronies at Brown & Root received rich federal contracts in Vietnam during the Vietnam War—Cheney’s pals and major stockholders at Halliburton did very well during the Iraq War that he relentlessly pushed.

And while Cheney was all about vanquishing America’s purported enemies such as Libya and Iran, while he was CEO of Halliburton, he lobbied against the U.S. sanctions against Iran. Brown & Root (purchased by Halliburton in 1962) performed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work for Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

This morning, as I reflected on Cheney’s life, I was reminded of the CCR song “Fortunate Son” and the war in Vietnam that he dodged.