RIP Dick Cheney, the last of the Cold War Republicans

Dick Cheney was one of the last of his breed: the Cold War Republican.

The former vice president, who died Tuesday at age 84, was a hardheaded man who wore many hats, from wunderkind 34-year-old White House chief of staff to defense secretary and No. 2 Republican in the House.

He left his most vivid mark as veep from 2001 to 2008.

For everything Republicans have in common — and all their longstanding divisions on issues such as immigration and trade — a hawkish stance on foreign affairs was the glue holding the party together from Dwight Eisenhower’s election in 1952 through George W. Bush’s second term.

Those were the days when pundits talked of Republicans as the “Daddy Party,” protecting the homeland from Communists and terrorists by meeting them far from home.

Cheney was a creature of that era, and all four of the presidents he served — Nixon, Ford and both Bushes — came out of the GOP’s moderate wing.

Movement conservatives long mistrusted him: He was Ford’s chief of staff during the bitter Reagan-Ford primary in 1976.

Never one for charm or for bombast, he could be cordial with Democrats he respected — his low-key debate with Joe Lieberman in 2000 now seems out of a bygone age — and a grimacing bulldozer with those he didn’t, such as the callow John Edwards.

A Westerner from the hard lands of Wyoming, he preferred smaller government and low taxes.

But despite a mostly conservative voting record on social issues, his heart was never in those battles. Cheney ultimately broke with his party on same-sex marriage.

Yet, for much of his life, Cheney’s public image was that of Darth Vader, an unapologetic hardliner who was loathed by the left and the media — and who didn’t care if you hated him.

They despised Cheney for his signature issues: a strong America abroad after Vietnam, and a strong presidency after Watergate.

Cheney’s House Republican colleagues voted him into leadership almost as soon as he reached Capitol Hill. But they were then in their fourth decade as a powerless minority, so Cheney jumped at the chance to head the Pentagon under George H.W. Bush.

He oversaw a small war in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega from power, a large war to drive Saddam Hussein from Iraq, and a humanitarian deployment to Somalia that went sideways under Bill Clinton.

Along the way, Cheney won the respect of friend and foe for his mastery of details, his air of unflappable confidence, and his wizardry in the black arts of bureaucratic infighting.

When George W. Bush ran for president as a governor light on foreign policy experience, putting his father’s defense secretary on the ticket offered crucial gravitas.

Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, formed a bridge between the new administration’s ambitious neoconservatives and its more cautious realists, such as secretary of state Colin Powell.

After 9/11, America needed to hit back. The nation also revamped its anti-terror measures, on edge for the next shoe to drop.

The moment was made for Cheney.

Bush, as the “decider,” provided the swagger; Cheney made the machine move.

Lacking presidential ambitions himself, he never got in Bush’s way — but he amassed more power than any prior vice president through his competence, force of will, and knowledge of the ropes.

Cheney’s legacy is inseparable from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which took on the Gulf War’s unfinished business.

It began brilliantly, but the American public was not prepared for how long and costly it would become, and wasn’t on board when the war’s rationale diverged from the focus on weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney’s disdain for public relations contributed to an administration-wide failure of persuasion that bled political capital.

Bush’s second term gave way to disaster and an unraveling coalition amid Hurricane Katrina, setbacks in Iraq, and the financial crisis.

With a finger in most every pie, Cheney earned credit and blame across the board.

In later years, as Donald Trump trashed the Iraq War and turned away from the Cold War consensus, Cheney and his daughter Liz grew strident in their break with the Republican president.

Historians may wonder how the Iraq War broke that decades-long consensus so badly.

Unlike Vietnam, there was no draft, no half a million troops in the quagmire, no wall of 55,000 names.

Unlike Vietnam, we won: Iraq today looks nothing like Saddam’s aggressive, expansionist tyranny.

Moreover, the capture of Osama bin Laden’s courier in Iraq was key to locating bin Laden — together with other Bush-era tools of surveillance and interrogation.

That, too, is part of Dick Cheney’s legacy.

And so is the fact that — 24 years later — that second shoe, another catastrophic attack on the American homeland, still has not dropped.

For Cheney, that was the most important war of all.

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. Twitter: @BaseballCrank