WASHINGTON — Washington Nationwide Cathedral on Thursday hosted a bipartisan present of respect and remembrance for Dick Cheney, the consequential and polarizing vice chairman who in later years turned an acidic scold of fellow Republican President Donald Trump.
Trump, who has been publicly silent about Cheney’s loss of life Nov. 3, was not invited to the memorial service.
Two ex-presidents got here: Republican George W. Bush, who eulogized the person who served him as vice chairman, and Democrat Joe Biden, who as soon as referred to as Cheney “essentially the most harmful vice chairman we’ve had in all probability in American historical past” however now honors his dedication to his household and to his values.
“Stable and uncommon and dependable,” Bush stated of his vice chairman, praising a person whose “expertise and his restraint” exceeded his ego. “Good and polished, with out airs.”
Among the many eulogists, Liz Cheney, his eldest daughter, solely obliquely addressed what amounted to a father-daughter feud with the president — a person her dad had referred to as a “coward” for making an attempt to overturn his loss within the 2020 election.
She spoke of her father’s conviction that when confronted with a alternative between defending the nation and a political celebration, the nation should come first. “Bonds of celebration should all the time yield to the only bond we share as People,” she stated.
A former high-ranking Home member whose Republican political profession was shredded by Trump’s MAGA motion, Liz Cheney selected to not communicate immediately of Trump. She spoke of seeing clouds within the form of angels simply earlier than her father died.
Moments earlier than the service started, figures of current however now receded energy mingled: Bush and Biden and their wives sitting in a row collectively, former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris and Mike Pence chatting facet by facet of their pew with Al Gore and Dan Quayle collectively behind them.
Biden greeted Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the previous longtime Senate chief, and his spouse, former labor and transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Behind them sat Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the previous Home speaker. All gathered within the grand cathedral generally known as “a non secular residence for the nation.”
Others delivering tributes at Thursday’s funeral have been Cheney’s longtime heart specialist, Jonathan Reiner; former NBC Information correspondent Pete Williams, who was Cheney’s spokesman on the Pentagon; and the previous vice chairman’s grandchildren. Six grandchildren have been there — a seventh is about to present beginning.
“I’m completely happy to report that I haven’t given many eulogies,” Reiner stated in his remarks. “No one needs a health care provider who’s nice at funerals.”
Reiner recalled docs telling Cheney a long time in the past, after the primary of a number of coronary heart assaults, that he ought to abandon his political ambitions then. But he stored profitable elections as a Wyoming congressman for years after that.
Cheney, he stated, was all the time the “calmest particular person within the room.”
Cheney had lived with coronary heart illness for many years and, after the Bush administration, with a coronary heart transplant. He died at age 84 from problems of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular illness, his household stated.
Trump’s vice chairman, JD Vance, on stage at one other occasion within the morning, was requested about Cheney and stated: “Clearly there’s some political disagreements there however he was a man who served his nation. We actually want his household all the most effective on this second of grieving.”
Vance was additionally not invited to the funeral, in response to an individual acquainted with the small print who was not licensed to talk publicly and spoke on situation of anonymity.
The White Home lowered its flags to half-staff after Cheney’s loss of life, because it stated the legislation requires, however Trump didn’t difficulty the presidential proclamation that always accompanies the loss of life of notable figures, nor has he commented publicly on his passing.
The deeply conservative Cheney’s affect within the Bush administration was legendary and, to his critics, tragic.
He advocated for the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the idea of what proved to be defective intelligence and persistently defended the extraordinary instruments of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults. Bush credited him with serving to to maintain the nation protected and secure in a deadly time.
After the 2020 election gained by Biden, Liz Cheney served as vice chair of the Democratic-led particular Home committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol. She accused Trump of summoning the violent mob and plunging the nation into “a second of most hazard.”
For that, she was stripped of her Republican management place and in the end defeated in a 2022 Republican major in Wyoming. In a marketing campaign TV advert made for his daughter, Dick Cheney branded Trump a “coward” who “tried to steal the final election utilizing lies and violence to maintain himself in energy after the voters had rejected him.”
Final yr, it didn’t sit nicely with Trump when Cheney stated he would vote for the Democrat, Harris, within the presidential election.
Trump instructed Arab and Muslim voters that Dick Cheney’s assist for Harris ought to give them pause, as a result of he “killed extra Arabs than any human being on Earth. He pushed Bush, and so they went into the Center East.”
