Andrew Peach

At the age of 34, after just five years in Washington, he became the country's youngest ever presidential chief of staff, serving Gerald Ford in the White House.

He went on to represent Wyoming for a decade in the House of Representatives, before George Bush Sr.

appointed him Secretary of Defense in 1989.

Dick Cheney oversaw the US invasion of Panama and successfully fought the first of his two wars against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

His twin associations with the Bush dynasty and Iraq would come to dominate the rest of his political career.

The attacks of 9-11 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror, a colossal challenge for a new President Bush and for the tough, taciturn man at his side, a man who, in the president's absence from the White House on that fateful day, wasn't afraid to take charge, as veteran Washington journalist Tom DeFrank recalls.

Cheney was in the White House.

Cheney was hustled down to the secure basement room of the White House.

and he immediately started calling people.

He called the president, he called the Pentagon, he started calling the appropriate government agencies.

Cheney knew instinctively what had to be done.

Before long, Dick Cheney was being described as the most powerful vice president in American history.

At a time of national anxiety, he expressed the kind of steady resolve Americans wanted to hear.

When diplomacy fails, we must be prepared to face our responsibilities.

and be willing to use force if necessary.

Direct threats require decisive action.

That decisive action included launching a war against Iraq, despite the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9-11.

Dick Cheney was among those who spoke with most apparent conviction about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

His misplaced confidence about how quickly the war might be won and his willingness to pursue America's opponents through what he himself described as the dark side made him a lot of enemies at home and abroad.

He was unrepentant on the use of extreme methods of interrogation, supported the rendition of terror suspects and the use of Guantanamo Bay as a military prison.