Dick Cheney had his first of five heart attacks at age 37 in 1978 while campaigning for Congress. It didn’t slow him down. He won that race, rose to No 2 in House GOP leadership, presided over the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Kuwait as defence secretary, became CEO of a Fortune 500 company and returned to government for two terms as vice-president.

Cheney died on Monday at 84, half a century after becoming the youngest White House chief of staff and a quarter-century after prevailing in the contested 2000 presidential election. He lived a life of consequence, rising from modest roots and relentlessly powering through health challenges, including a heart transplant in 2012.

He forged the modern vice-presidency. He emerged as the leading architect of the response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then the misbegotten occupation of Iraq. He viewed his long-term project as reclaiming power for the executive branch that had diminished in the wake of Watergate. He pushed the boundaries of executive power long before President Donald Trump. In many ways, Cheney set the tone for what Trump is doing now.

Before becoming vice-president, many confused Cheney’s mild-mannered style for moderation and his reticence for reluctance. Yet he was always a fierce operator who had an intuitive sense of how to pull the levers of power to advance his conservative priorities – and pigeonhole ideas he didn’t like. Cheney likened this to putting “an oar in the water”. That meant installing loyal allies at all levels of government and subverting transparency requirements to operate in secrecy.

In 2000, Cheney was leading George W. Bush’s search for a running mate when the Texas governor unexpectedly picked him for the job. He was considered a seasoned Washington hand, intended to reassure independents who feared Bush lacked foreign policy experience. After 9/11, Cheney seemed an inspired pick. He warned the public that the government would need to “spend time in the shadows” to make sure nothing like the attack ever happened again.

They succeeded at that, but in the process, Cheney was too eager to cut legal corners and too willing to trade civil liberties for security. He championed enhanced interrogation, which critics considered torture, and the secret rendition of terror suspects without charges. He supervised a new programme of warrantless domestic surveillance that circumvented federal laws and the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Cheney’s influence diminished during Bush’s second term. The President stopped waterboarding, closed secret CIA prisons and went to Congress to authorise electronic surveillance. The men drifted apart and ultimately had a falling-out over Cheney’s demand that Bush pardon his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice related to the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity. Libby was widely seen as taking the fall for Cheney. “We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cheney reportedly told Bush. Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.

The Plame affair was part of the Bush Administration’s effort to sell the public on the war in Iraq, for which Cheney was a leading spokesman. He was emboldened by the success of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when he was President George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary. After 9/11, Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his nuclear programme and Iraqi intelligence services were working with al-Qaeda. He cherry-picked and exaggerated US intelligence to advance his agenda. Neither claim was true. Nor was he correct that US troops would be “greeted as liberators”.

The return to Iraq turned out to be a strategic blunder that cost more than 4,000 American lives. To the end, Cheney continued to be an unapologetic defender of the decision that most of the country, and his party, came to regret. Backlash to what felt like endless wars, alongside the Great Recession, laid the groundwork for Barack Obama to win the presidency in 2008 and Trump to take over the GOP in 2016.

Today, Washington is again consumed with talk of whether to seek regime change, this time in Venezuela. The ghosts of Iraq haunt that debate. If Trump takes out Nicolás Maduro, will the situation improve? What would follow? The hubris of Cheney and his compatriots is part of the reason America now collectively second-guesses itself whenever considering overseas adventurism. One of the most confident men in DC helped create a less confident America.

Unlike both Bushes, Cheney endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020. But he turned on Trump when he refused to accept defeat in that election and then incited a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Cheney’s daughter, Liz, who held his old House seat, voted to impeach Trump and co-chaired the January 6 committee. That drew a Trump-endorsed primary challenger. The elder Cheney recorded an advert and did all he could to help. Even though Liz Cheney lost that race, and Trump returned to the presidency, Cheney died a proud dad. After spending his career as the consummate insider, Cheney finished his life back on the outside.