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For decades, Dick Cheney, who died on Tuesday at 84, loomed over American life as the archetypical conservative power player: stern, unflashy, grimly effective.
He wore wire-frame glasses that were like something one could find advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics. His suits were unwaveringly dark, worn with nothing-to-them striped ties. Only a gold Rolex on his wrist hinted at Mr. Cheney’s ascent to prominence in the go-go ’80s.
Still, stacked next to the slim, on-trend suits worn by JD Vance, or the patriotic pocket squares of Pete Hegseth, Mr. Cheney was about as ostentatious as an I.B.M. accountant. This abiding, all-business image suited a man who studied political science and seemed destined to work in Washington from birth. His unremarkable style also played into his critics’ claims that Mr. Cheney was a wolf in a prosaic suit.
If Mr. Cheney had a doppelgänger, it was Merkin Muffley, the straight-man president in “Dr. Strangelove.” He certainly had the same receding hairstyle. By his 30s, the young Nebraskan, who rose nimbly through the ranks of the GOP, was chief of staff to Gerald Ford and already sporting a conspicuous comb-over. By middle age, as defense secretary for George H.W. Bush, that comb-over shrunk to a bushy corona of hair along the back of his head — a style known to many as “the power doughnut.”
It was the hairstyle of a man who had accepted his fate and was not interested in wrestling with vanity. If he appeared prematurely old, so be it. He was, his ever-shrinking follicles seemed to say, preoccupied with weightier matters.
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But of course, unlike Mr. Muffley, Mr. Cheney never occupied the Oval Office. Instead, as vice president to George Bush, and especially after America invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Cheney’s critics would come to see him as a Machiavellian figure pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
That Mr. Cheney’s resting face seemed to be a lopsided, knowing smirk (a Reddit thread from last year with 73 comments asked that crucial question: “Which era of Cheney had the best Cheney-smile?”) added to the impression that the second-in-command was always scheming.
So inscrutable was Mr. Cheney’s public image that nearly a decade after he left the White House, the movie “Vice” attempted to probe the interiority of the man many consider to be the most powerful vice president in history. In the film, a bald-capped, big-gutted and bespectacled Christian Bale, plays Mr. Cheney. To date, it's the only Hollywood biopic on a vice president.
Mr. Cheney though, never seemed to pay much mind to his image.
In a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, in which the writer asked Mr. Cheney about his “grim caricature,” Mr. Cheney said, “My image might be better out there, this caricature you talk about might be avoided, if I spent more time as a public figure trying to improve my image, but that’s not why I’m here.”
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By that point in his public life, though, his image was fixed. Just a year before Mr. Cheney shot a fellow hunter while quail shooting in Texas. The incident was ruled an accident, but the shooting — an intimate act of violence from a sitting vice president — became fodder for commentators and comedians.
“Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction,” said David Letterman on his late night show. “It’s Dick Cheney.” That the lawyer who Mr. Cheney shot apologized to the V.P. for what “his family have had to go through this past week” seemed to affirm that Mr. Cheney was an almost supernaturally fearful figure.
In retirement, his image softened. He settled in Wyoming and started dressing like a “Yellowstone” character in tattersall shirts, fleece vests and cowboy hats. In 2015, the Republican National Committee even offered an Official Cheney Cowboy Hat in exchange for a $72 donation. For a breath, Mr. Cheney was, in the words of ABC News, a “fashion icon.”
The cowboy hat stayed on when Mr. Cheney made an appeal, in 2022, for Republican voters to reject Donald Trump and lend support to his daughter Liz, who was running for a house seat in Wyoming. In the video, Mr. Cheney, who would go on to vote for Kamala Harris, wore an American flag pin and an “I Voted” sticker over his Orvis fleece vest and soberly praised his daughter as “fearless.”
This time, he didn’t smile.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
