Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon said the late former Vice President Dick Cheney fell victim to a “cartoonish representation” of his career.
Cheney died Monday at the age of 84, with his family saying the cause of death was “complications of pneumonia and cardiac arrest.” Gurdon said Cheney leaves behind a legacy as “one of the most powerful and most influential vice presidents of the modern era,” but has often been given more credit than due.
“Well, he was certainly an extremely strong and powerful vice president,” Gurdon said on BBC World News on Tuesday. “But he was not, as he was characterized by the Left to be, the person who was really making the decisions.”
“This was a kind of an almost cartoonish representation of the strength that he had in the Bush Administration, and it played very well into the Left-wing messaging about the administration,” Gurdon added.
“It made him look more sinister and menacing and kind of secretive, on the one hand, and it made George W. Bush, the president, look weaker and more stupid, which also was part of the way that the Left wished to portray the administration,” Gurdon continued.
Following the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, Cheney and his daughter, former Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, publicly condemned President Donald Trump. At the time, Liz Cheney was chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, but she faced a mutiny after bucking the party with her criticisms of Trump regarding the Capitol riots. She went on to lose her seat in 2022, despite her father making a cameo in a campaign ad on her behalf, in which he continued to criticize Trump.
According to Gurdon, when Liz Cheney lost, it represented “an almost complete break” from her father’s old Republican Party.
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“That [election] was sort of a moment when the Republican Party showed that it had had it with the old Bush era and the Dick Cheney era,” Gurdon said. “It was rid of the Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, … that whole side of it, and moving in the direction of Donald Trump.”
Dick Cheney was so distant from the Republican Party that he endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. The endorsement did not make a significant difference in his home state of Wyoming, where he and his daughter served as the lone representatives.