The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Dick Cheney.md

category	aliases	tags	summary	born	location	relations	created	updated
Political Figure	Richard Cheney Richard B. Cheney	Person WhiteHouse RockefellerCommission IranContra Halliburton	Ford's chief of staff who edited the Rockefeller Commission report in 1975, co-author of the Iran-Contra minority report, Secretary of Defense, Halliburton chief executive and Vice President from 2001 to 2009.	1941-01-30	Casper, Wyoming	type with role start end fn employed_by White House deputy assistant to the president, then chief of staff 1974 1977 1 type with role start end fn head_of Department of Defense Secretary of Defense 1989 1993 1 type with role end fn head_of Halliburton chief executive 2000 5	2026-09-22	2026-10-14

Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, and grew up in Casper, Wyoming. He was a congressional fellow in 1968, worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Cost of Living Council, was deputy assistant to President Gerald R. Ford in 1974 and 1975 and his chief of staff from 1975 to 1977, represented Wyoming in the House from 1979 until March 17, 1989, was Secretary of Defense from 1989 to 1993, and was Vice President under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.¹

The Rockefeller Commission Report

In June 1975, as deputy to the chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney led the editing of the draft report of the Rockefeller Commission 1975 on Central Intelligence Agency activities in the United States. His handwritten comments survive. The section "Alleged Plans to Assassinate Certain Foreign Leaders," 86 pages long, was removed and replaced with a note that the commission had lacked time to finish the subject; language calling CIA activities "unlawful" was softened to "improper," except for the drug experiments, which were labeled "illegal"; and a recommendation that CIA employees be able to report improper activities was narrowed to orders "outside of established channels."²

Iran-Contra

As a House Republican on the Iran-Contra investigating committees, Cheney signed the minority report of November 1987, drafted principally by the committee staffer Michael Malbin. The report quoted Federalist No. 70, "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government," and stated that the Constitution protects the President's ability "to persuade U.S. citizens to engage voluntarily in otherwise legal activity to serve what they consider to be the national interest. That includes trying to persuade other countries to contribute their own funds for causes both countries support. To whatever extent the Boland Amendment tried to prohibit such activity, they were clearly unconstitutional."³

On December 10, 1986, Cheney questioned Robert McFarlane before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about the Boland Amendment. McFarlane testified that in the summer of 1985 he "went to considerable length to determine whether" Oliver North had violated it, and that a document search "turned up two or three inches of paper, that reported on contacts that did occur between Colonel North and myself, indeed the President and Contra leaders." The committees wrote that in this testimony McFarlane withheld his concerns about the documents and asserted that they proved North had fully complied with the Boland Amendment.⁴

Halliburton

Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton in the late 1990s. Ray Hunt of Hunt Oil Company joined its board in 1998 and went at once onto its compensation committee, which that year gave Cheney a bonus of 1.1 million dollars and restricted stock worth 1.5 million on a salary of 1.18 million.⁵ As Vice President, he said on August 26, 2002, that the case of the Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself"; Kamel had told UN inspectors in August 1995 that Iraq's chemical, biological and missile stocks had been destroyed.⁶

Allegations

Cathy O'Brien, who describes herself as a survivor of Project Monarch mind control, named Cheney among officials she said abused her, in Trance Formation of America (1995, with Mark Phillips). Her claims about named officials are uncorroborated.⁷

Footnotes

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1. U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art and Archives, "CHENEY, Richard Bruce." https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/10884 ↩︎

2. Prados, John, and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, eds. "Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots." National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 543, February 29, 2016, document 15. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report ↩︎

3. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, H. Rept. 100-433, S. Rept. 100-216, November 1987, minority report, minority views, ch. 1, p. 451, and ch. 2, p. 460. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/18221 ↩︎

4. Iran-Contra report, majority views, ch. 6, p. 132 and nn. 193-194 (McFarlane before the House Intelligence Committee, Dec. 10, 1986). https://archive.org/download/Iran-ContraReport/Report%20of%20the%20Congressional%20Committees%20Investigating%20the%20Iran-Contra%20Affair.pdf ↩︎

5. Halliburton Company, Schedule 14A proxy statement, 2004, Securities and Exchange Commission. ↩︎

6. Rangwala, Glen. "The interview with Hussein Kamel," February 2003, quoting the UNSCOM and IAEA note of the meeting of August 22, 1995; Barry, John. Newsweek, March 3, 2003. ↩︎

7. O'Brien, Cathy, and Mark Phillips. Trance Formation of America. 1995. ↩︎