WASHINGTON — Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at 84.

George W. Bush’s vice president died Monday from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said on Tuesday in a statement.

In Cheney’s hands, the vice presidency became a nexus of influence and manipulation — no longer the timid office whose occupants had tended their boss’s ambitions, gone to endless banquets and often waited in the wings for their own shot at the prize.

When he bunkered in secure undisclosed locations after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, that was less an inconvenience for Cheney than a metaphor for a life of power that he exercised to maximum effect from the shadows.

He was the small man operating big levers as if from Oz. Machiavelli with a sardonic grin. “The Darth Vader of the administration,” as Bush described the public’s view.

No one seemed more amused at that perception than Cheney himself.

“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”

The force was with him.

Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life under his son.

Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

“History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held,” Bush said Tuesday.

CHENEY AND TRUMP

Years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his 2020 election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”

In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.

Trump said nothing about Cheney publicly in the hours after his death was disclosed. The White House lowered flags to half-staff in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.

For all his conservatism, Cheney was supportive of his daughter Mary Cheney after she came out as gay, years before gay marriage was broadly supported, then legalized. “Freedom means freedom for everyone,” he said.

A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 that he awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.

Cheney made his vice presidency a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other conservative cornerstones.

Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile – detractors called it a smirk – Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.

Among those who worked with him and sometimes crossed him, Bush White House adviser Dan Bartlett told a Miller Center oral history series that one always knew where one stood with Cheney.

“In Washington and politics, you get a lot of people who will stab you in the back,” he said. “Dick Cheney was perfectly comfortable with stabbing you in the chest.” He liked that about him.

THE IRAQ WAR

A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left the government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction that he was essentially right.

He alleged links between the 9/11 attacks and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.

He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.

The U.S. intervention unseated the longtime autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein, but opened up a security vacuum that led to years of brutal civil war, the rise of extremist groups, including the Islamic State, and the expansion of Iranian influence.

On a busy street in Baghdad, Ahmad Jabar called former Cheney a “bloodthirsty person.”

“They destroyed us,” he said of the Bush administration, “and Dick Cheney specifically destroyed us. How are we supposed to remember him?”

For admirers, Cheney kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.

Well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.

Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to terrorism suspects. Bush did not fully embrace his hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea.