By Frankie Taggart, AFP
From left: Former US president George W Bush, Laura Bush, former US president Joe Biden, Jill Biden, former US vice president Kamala Harris, former US vice president Mike Pence and Karen Pence attend the funeral service of Dick Cheney, in Washington DC. Photo: AFP / Saul Loeb
Dick Cheney, celebrated as a master Republican strategist but defined by the darkest chapters of America's War on Terror, was honoured on Friday (NZT) in a funeral attended by Washington's elite that pointedly left out President Donald Trump.
Cheney's career reads like a catalogue of American statecraft, even as his long shadow over foreign policy - as defence secretary during the Gulf War and the 46th vice president under George W Bush - still divides the country.
Bush and fellow former president Joe Biden were among more than 1000 guests at Washington National Cathedral. But Trump, who hasn't commented on Cheney's death, and Vice President JD Vance were not invited.
The Neo-Gothic Episcopal church, veiled in muted autumn gloom and fortified by tight security, set a tone of quiet gravity as a Who's Who of luminaries gathered beneath its vaulted stone arches.
Former US president George W Bush speaks during the funeral service for the late US vice president Dick Cheney at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on November 20, 2025. Photo: AFP / Saul Loeb
"Colleagues from every chapter of his career will tell you that he lifted the standards of those around him, just by being who he was: so focused and so capable," Bush told the congregation.
"In our years in office together - on the quiet days and on the hardest ones - he was everything a president should expect in his second-in-command."
Every living former vice president, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Al Gore and Dan Quayle, were in attendance, along with generals, foreign dignitaries and Supreme Court justices.
Praised for his intellect and described by historians as the most powerful vice president in modern US history, Cheney was admired as a strategist of unusual clarity, and a steady hand through America's darkest hours.
His career spanned the Cold War, the Gulf conflict and the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
As vice president, he helped drive national security policy and drove an unprecedented expansion of presidential authority.
He was said to embody the paradoxes of power: a meticulous operator often thrust into the spotlight, a staunch conservative who backed civil rights for his lesbian daughter and a statesman regarded as both indispensable and dangerous.
Cheney's daughter Liz, famously ousted from the congressional Republican Party over her opposition to Trump, spoke movingly about connecting with her father in his final years, watching sports and old movies, and hitting the road together.
"We drove for hours. We talked about life and family history and America," she said.
Liz Cheney speaks during the funeral service. Photo: AFP / Saul Loeb
Darker legacy
Flags across states were lowered to half-staff after his death on 3 November.
But looming over every tribute was the darker side of his legacy: the expansion of executive power, the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq and the debate over America's use of torture.
For critics, he was the architect of some of the nation's most calamitous decisions, a politician whose belief in executive power left deep scars at home and abroad.
Cheney was a key advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq - famously stating that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" - a conviction that haunted him after the intelligence behind the claim unravelled.
He championed sweeping surveillance powers under the Patriot Act and defended controversial "enhanced interrogation" techniques.
Later in life he emerged as a critic of his own party's populist drift. A vocal detractor of Trump, whom he called a "threat to our republic," he even endorsed Harris, the president's Democratic election rival in 2024.
Trump's absence reflected the ideological rifts that divided Washington during Cheney's final years, and the demise of the bipartisanship valued by the oldest generation of power-brokers.
The president has been silent on Cheney's death, though his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was "aware" of his passing.
Responding to past criticism, Trump once described Cheney as an "irrelevant RINO" and a "king of endless, nonsensical wars, wasting lives and trillions of dollars".
-AFP
