WASHINGTON — They gathered at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday — former presidents, vice presidents, sworn political foes and newfound friends — in a show of respect and remembrance for Dick Cheney, the consequential and polarizing vice president who became an acidic scold of President Donald Trump.
Trump, who has been publicly silent about Cheney’s death Nov. 3, was not invited to the memorial service.
Two ex-presidents came: Republican George W. Bush, who eulogized the man who served him as vice president, and Democrat Joe Biden, who once called Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” but now honors his commitment to his family and to his values.
“Solid and rare and reliable,” Bush said at the service of his vice president, praising a man whose “talent and restraint” exceeded his ego. “Smart and polished, without airs.”
Bush and others noted the understated demeanor of a man who nevertheless wielded great influence in government. “Above all,” Bush said, “I wanted someone with the ability to step into the presidency without getting distracted by the ambition to seek it.”
Among the eulogists, Liz Cheney, the eldest daughter, only obliquely addressed what amounted to a father-daughter feud with the president — a man her dad had called a “coward” for trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
She spoke of her father’s conviction that when confronted with a choice between defending the country and a political party, the country must come first. “Bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans,” she said.
Liz Cheney is a former high-ranking House member whose Republican political career was shredded by a MAGA movement angered by her investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Thursday, she chose not to speak directly of Trump.
She spoke of seeing clouds in the shape of angels just before her father died.
A Who’s Who of Washington, minus you know who
Moments before the service began, figures of recent but now receded power mingled: Bush and Biden and their wives sitting in a row together, former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris and Mike Pence chatting side by side in their pew with Al Gore and Dan Quayle together behind them.
Biden greeted Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former longtime Senate leader, and his wife, former labor and transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Behind them sat Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who spent time talking with another former House speaker, Republican John Boehner. All gathered among the soaring interior columns of the grand cathedral known as “a spiritual home for the nation.”
Others delivering tributes at Thursday’s funeral were Cheney’s longtime cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner; former NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, who was Cheney’s spokesman at the Pentagon; and several of the former vice president’s grandchildren.
“I’m happy to report that I haven’t given many eulogies,” Reiner said in his remarks. “Nobody wants a doctor who is great at funerals.”
Reiner recalled doctors telling Cheney decades ago, after the first of multiple heart attacks, that he should abandon his political ambitions then. Yet he kept winning elections as a Wyoming congressman for years after that.
Cheney, he said, was always the “calmest person in the room.”
Cheney had lived with heart disease for decades and, after the Bush administration, with a heart transplant. He died at age 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said.
Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, on stage at another event in the morning, was asked about Cheney and said: “Obviously there’s some political disagreements there but he was a guy who served his country. We certainly wish his family all the best in this moment of grieving.”
Vance was also not invited to the funeral, according to a person familiar with the details who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The White House lowered its flags to half-staff after Cheney’s death, as it said the law calls for, but Trump did not issue the presidential proclamation that often accompanies the death of notable figures, nor has he commented publicly on his passing.
The deeply conservative Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration was legendary and, to his critics, tragic.
He advocated for the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the basis of what proved to be faulty intelligence and consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush credited him with helping to keep the country safe and stable in a perilous time.
Bad blood between the Cheneys and Trump
After the 2020 election won by Biden, Liz Cheney served as vice chair of the Democratic-led special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. She accused Trump of summoning the violent mob and plunging the nation into “a moment of maximum danger.”
For that, she was stripped of her Republican leadership position and ultimately defeated in a 2022 Republican primary in Wyoming. In a campaign TV ad made for his daughter, Dick Cheney branded Trump a “coward” who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.”
Last year, it did not sit well with Trump when Cheney said he would vote for the Democrat, Harris, in the presidential election.
Trump told Arab and Muslim voters that Dick Cheney’s support for Harris should give them pause, because he “killed more Arabs than any human being on Earth. He pushed Bush, and they went into the Middle East.”
