WASHINGTON (AP) — Washington National Cathedral on Thursday hosts a bipartisan show of respect and remembrance for Dick Cheney, the consequential and polarizing vice president who in later years became an acidic scold of fellow Republican President Donald Trump.
Trump, who has been publicly silent about Cheney’s death Nov. 3, was not invited to the 11 a.m. memorial service.
Two ex-presidents came: Republican George W. Bush, who is to eulogize 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.
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 behind them. Biden greeted Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former longtime Senate leader, and his wife, former labor and transportation secretary Elaine Chao.
Daughter Liz Cheney, a former high-ranking House member whose Republican political career was shredded by Trump’s MAGA movement, will join Bush in addressing the gathering at the grand church known as “a spiritual home for the nation.”
Others delivering tributes at Thursday’s funeral are Cheney’s longtime cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner; former NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, who was Cheney’s spokesman at the Pentagon; and the former vice president’s grandchildren. Hundreds of guests are expected.
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.
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.
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, 2021, riot at the Capitol. 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 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.”
