For Dick Cheney, a Journey From Champion of War to Voice of Resistance

Dick Cheney and Kenneth Adelman were thick as thieves for decades. They worked side by side in Republican administrations, their wives and children were close, their families spent Thanksgiving together, they shared the same wedding anniversary.

Their relationship broke over the Iraq war.

Donald J. Trump brought them back together again.

Iraq, of course, was a defining moment of Mr. Cheney’s life in government. Like many Americans, Mr. Adelman supported the war at first, only to grow disenchanted. He and Mr. Cheney stopped speaking for 16 years. Then Mr. Trump came along, and Mr. Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney spoke out against him. And so, one day, Mr. Cheney and his old friend were on the phone again, putting “the void years,” as Mr. Adelman put it, behind them.

Their reconciliation speaks to the complicated place Mr. Cheney occupies in the public life of the nation at this point in its story. When he left office in 2009 as the most influential vice president in history, Mr. Cheney was to many the embodiment of an unpopular and bloody war. By the time he died on Monday night, he had become an unlikely voice of resistance to what he saw as a different kind of threat to America, allied not just with those who had soured on him, like Mr. Adelman, but even with others who used to call him a war criminal.

Mr. Cheney never changed his mind about the war, and neither have his critics. But he saw his opposition to Mr. Trump as consistent with a lifetime of defending the nation. To the former vice president, Mr. Trump was the antithesis of a true conservative, willing to burn down the constitutional house for his own self-aggrandizement and accumulation of power, most notoriously by trying to overturn the 2020 election that he had lost.

“Here was somebody running against everything he had worked for his whole life,” Mr. Adelman reflected on Tuesday after Mr. Cheney’s death was announced by his family. “There was no doubt that we were going to be on the same side on Trump because of his break with all the policies we stood for over the years and his opposition to a peaceful transfer of power, which is the basis of American government.”

Mr. Cheney was always more complicated than the cartoonish image that emerged during his eight years as President George W. Bush’s No. 2. It was true that he singularly drove policy more than any of his predecessors, but insiders said he was never the puppet master that many imagined. Indeed, by the second term, Mr. Bush had begun moving away from him on many issues, instead relying more on his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Mr. Cheney was calm and unflappable, he mastered his briefing books and, while partisan, he maintained friendships across the aisle when he served as White House chief of staff, congressman and defense secretary. But many confused his moderate mien with moderate politics and were surprised that he turned out to be so conservative as vice president. In fact, he was always conservative; when The Washington Post referred to him during his House days as a moderate, he had an aide call for a correction.

He was the steady hand on Sept. 11, 2001, helping coordinate the response to Al Qaeda’s attacks from the bunker under the White House, and he was a powerful advocate for the robust counterterrorism campaign that followed, including extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding that were widely viewed as torture. He never entertained doubts about those policies and believed that preventing another Sept. 11 justified them. “I firmly believe that it was the right thing to do,” he said after leaving office. “It worked.”

With a trademark crooked grin, he had a dry wit and embraced his dark image. When his friend David Hume Kennerly jokingly asked, “Have you blown away any small countries this morning?” Mr. Cheney replied, “You know, that’s the one thing about this job I really love.” At another point, he puckishly tried on a Darth Vader mask that aides had bought and posed for a picture. When he later tried to put the picture in his memoir, his wife, Lynne Cheney, talked him out of it.

After leaving office, he settled into semiretirement in a house in McLean, Va., that he and Mrs. Cheney had designed, the first they had ever built for themselves. He told a visitor he would never do it again. “There are thousands of decisions — doorknobs, by God!” he said.

On the wall he hung a sword from his great-grandfather, who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. Nearby he displayed a brick from the house of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and another from the house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, had been killed. Intriguingly, his bookshelf included volumes critical of him, including one titled, “Dick: The Man Who Is President.”

For the first few years after leaving office, he was vocal in accusing President Barack Obama of watering down national security policies, but then largely withdrew, ceding the public stage to Liz Cheney, who won his old House seat. On Jan. 6, he was watching television when the mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He called his daughter, who was on the House floor, to warn her.

After that, he joined his daughter in speaking out. “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Mr. Cheney said last year in announcing his vote for Ms. Harris. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

His statements and his appearance on the House floor prompted some Democrats to broaden their views of Mr. Cheney. “He put country above party and I think that was something I certainly respected,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, one of the Democrats who greeted him on the floor, said on Tuesday. “You saw a dad standing up for both principle and for family. You saw him in a different light.”

For Ken Adelman, it became a moment of re-evaluation too. He and Mr. Cheney first met in 1970 in President Richard M. Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity, where both worked for Donald H. Rumsfeld. They both worked for Mr. Rumsfeld again in President Gerald R. Ford’s administration. Mr. Adelman later served as President Ronald Reagan’s arms control director. His wife, Carol Adelman, was assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Aid and hired Liz Cheney as an assistant.

They were men of different temperaments. Mr. Cheney was as stoic as Mr. Adelman was chatty. Mr. Cheney, a fly-fishing enthusiast, only invited Mr. Adelman to join him once. “I’m never taking you fly-fishing again,” Mr. Cheney told him afterward. “Why?” Mr. Adelman asked. Mr. Cheney answered, “You talk too much.”

But they shared a hawkish view of national security, particularly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Adelman was among the conservatives encouraging the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He wrote an opinion piece predicting it “would be a cakewalk.” After Baghdad fell, Mr. Cheney hosted a small dinner to celebrate. Mr. Adelman hugged him and they raised a toast.

Soon, though, as the assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction proved false, as sectarian strife exploded into civil war and as administration officials kept claiming the United States was winning, Mr. Adelman grew disgruntled. A member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, he concluded that the war was being bungled and that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary, were not facing facts as so many Americans and Iraqis were being killed.

“There was just such neglect,” Mr. Adelman said. “It just drove me up the wall and I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Mr. Adelman “had it out with Rumsfeld” in a 90-minute argument and the secretary fired him from the defense board. But Mr. Adelman never directly confronted Mr. Cheney. Instead, when the vice president invited him to a Christmas party in 2006, Mr. Adelman decided not to go. They did not speak again for the next decade and a half.

The estrangement gnawed at Mr. Adelman. “It bothered me every day of my life,” he recalled. But he admired the Cheney family’s willingness to speak out against Mr. Trump when other Republicans would not.

So as Liz Cheney helped lead the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack despite attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies, Carol Adelman called her up in the summer of 2022 to praise her courage. The Adelmans offered to host a campaign fund-raiser for her in the backyard of their home in Aspen, Colo.

One day soon after, the phone rang. “There’s someone who wants to say hi,” Liz Cheney said. Dick Cheney came on the line and he and Mr. Adelman began talking as if they had never stopped. “When we got back together, his first words were about Mussolini,” Mr. Adelman recalled. They left their rift over Iraq unspoken as they began seeing each other again for dinners and the like. “We never talked about it,” Mr. Adelman said. “We just went on.”

Instead, they shared their antipathy for Mr. Trump and what he was doing to the country. They were turned off by what Mr. Adelman called the “corruption of the process,” the indecency, the abandonment of Reagan-era principles, the kowtowing to Russia and the attempt to reverse a democratic election.

But there was, at last, an upside, Mr. Adelman said. “It did bring us together.”