Richard Bruce Cheney elevated the role of vice president to a power it had never held before – and probably never will again.

It was Cheney, operating largely in secret after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with a cadre of like-minded aides known as “the Vulcans”, who masterminded a controversial set of tools to deal with what he saw as a new and urgent threat.

Right-hand man: Dick Cheney with George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential election.Credit: AP

Many of those policies are not regarded fondly by history. They include going to war preemptively, as the United States did against Iraq in 2003, rather than in response to an attack; an aggressive program of warrantless domestic surveillance, which bypassed legislative prohibitions and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; and allowing ruthless interrogation procedures against terrorism suspects that critics would say fit the definition of torture.

Cheney would remain unapologetic for all of it. “Torture, to me,” he said on NBC News’s Meet the Press in 2014 “… is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Centre in New York.”

In a statement after Cheney’s death, former president George W. Bush described him as “a calm and steady presence in the White House amid great national challenges” who provided “honest, forthright........

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