Richard B. Cheney, RIP

I was sitting next to him at his house and got an email on my BlackBerry (if you know, you know). I thought I was being subtle. I slid the BlackBerry out of my pocket, glanced, and slid it back in my pocket.

“Do you do that around your kids?” the Vice President of the United States asked.

“I try not to, but they’re both really little, so it doesn’t really matter too much,” I replied.

“It matters the most at that age. It’s not the quantity of time, but the quality of time you spend with your kids. Don’t do that,” came Dick Cheney’s admonition.

I admit, I’ve gotten worse with my iPhone, but every once in a while, I can hear him yelling at me.

The former Vice President of the United States is dead at 84. He was the most influential Vice President in modern American history. Other Presidents have credited their Vice Presidents with influence and power. Cheney had both.

He did not care what you thought about him. Many of those on the right who now vilify him once loved him. In the White House, Cheney was known as a saboteur of big government plans. A few friends of mine still in D.C. tell how Cheney would call them to give them a heads-up on big government ideas floating in the Bush White House and would, as best he could, help kill those plans. He was not always successful.

Donald Rumsfeld once told me that he put Dick Cheney in charge of Richard Nixon’s price control plans because Rumsfeld knew Cheney hated price controls. Cheney could not stop them, but he slowed them down, drawing Nixon’s wrath. The lesson there is we sometimes heap aspersions on those we blame for things, and we never know how hard they worked to stop far worse stuff.

As a man in the arena, Cheney played a role in Congress, in the Secretary of Defense’s office, in the oil industry, and in the Vice President’s office. In his final weeks as Vice President, he invited me to lunch with him at the Vice President’s mansion. I sat around a table with Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Bill Sammons, Bill McGurn, and a few others. Cheney regaled us with stories, admonished me about checking my phone in front of my kids, and privately suggested I take up his passion — flyfishing. He’d push me again on that later in his life. He also suggested I read this book if I wanted to ponder if God influenced the shaping of the United States.

I did not know him well. I admired both the Vice President and his wife and his children, even if I might have disagreed with them on things.

At the end of his life, he fought for his daughter’s re-election and opposed Donald Trump, but he also appreciated the President’s decisive handling of Iran. Cheney, called by his opponents as either a “warmonger” or “globalist,” was actually an American who believed the American-led world order was the best thing for everyone on the planet. He was a real patriot and a multifaceted person whom others would caricature. But he was complex. He was also a husband, father, and grandfather.

Vice President Cheney is dead. God bless him and rest his soul and encourage and sustain his family.

RIP.