More than 1000 people, including former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden, filled the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday to pay their respects to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died Nov. 3.
Florida International University Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor Daniel Pedreira wasn’t there, but he met Cheney and believes that Wyoming resident was the most powerful vice-president in American history.
“He reshaped the role of vice president of the United States,” said Pedreira, interviewed at FIU on Thursday. “He was kind of one of the biggest hawks in terms of pushing for war.”
Pedreira, a political science professor whose interests include executive politics and international relations, acknowledges that Cheney was controversial, largely because of the leadership role he took when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Cheney pushed the United States to invade and pressured intelligence agencies to support the administration’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
It was later determined that they had none.
“[The invasion] was seen as an attempt to close the chapter of the first Gulf War,” he said. “But at the expense of a war that dragged on for a long time.”
U.S. troops didn’t leave the Gulf country until 2011.
Pedreira had the opportunity to meet the former vice president in 2004 at a town hall in Miami during Bush and Cheney’s re-election campaign. He described the interaction as humanizing, since Cheney was nicknamed “Darth Vader,” the villain in the Star Wars franchise, at the time.
“What you could actually feel when you met him, was his intelligence and his drive, like I think that was something that really shaped who he was,” said Pedreia.
Pedreira believes that Thursday’s funeral showcased more than just a remembrance; it brought people together, including both Bush, a Republican and former Democratic president Joe Biden, who served in the U.S. Senate with Cheney.
“I think it demonstrated the ability of people from different parties and drastically different points of view coming together,” he commented.
