STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
One of our perspectives today on former Vice President Dick Cheney comes from Jonah Goldberg, editor of The Dispatch, who followed much of Cheney's career. He's died at age 84. And, Jonah, welcome. I guess we should say neither you nor I are really old enough to have followed all of Cheney's career, but a fair...
JONAH GOLDBERG: Right.
INSKEEP: ...Amount of it. How should we think about him?
GOLDBERG: I think in some way - well, first of all, you know, I always - I struggle with this. Whenever somebody at a ripe age with - who lived this incredibly full life passes away, the focus on sort of, oh, it's a sad day - I get it. But at the same time, he lived an incredibly interesting, full life with major accomplishments.
INSKEEP: True.
GOLDBERG: And whether you love him or hate him or anything like that, one can't say at 84, after all he did, you know, it was - he was taken at a tragically young age or anything like that. It's - I had the same thing go through my head when William F. Buckley died, my old boss. It's, like, it's sad because it's the closing of a chapter, but it's also this amazing story. And Cheney's is an amazing story. He - you know...
INSKEEP: How should we...
GOLDBERG: ...He flunked out of Yale.
INSKEEP: Yeah. Did you say flunked out of Yale? I didn't know that. Go on.
GOLDBERG: Well, that's what he told people.
INSKEEP: OK.
GOLDBERG: He went to Yale briefly, got into some shenanigans - who knows? - and ended up going to, I want to say the University of Wisconsin, where while he was finishing his PhD, he gets called up to basically go to Washington and becomes a congressman, becomes the youngest chief of staff in the Ford administration, secretary of defense under Bush 1. And he was this sort of - he comes from an era where you could be a fierce partisan but also a serious policy intellectual and also a patriot who sometimes - some people would say to a fault - puts the country first beyond sort of partisan or popular considerations. And I think a lot of that is sort of gone these days. He was just a serious man.
INSKEEP: I just want to note, he became a critic of President Trump. His daughter Liz Cheney was a fierce critic of President Trump. And at the end, if I'm not mistaken, former Vice President Cheney voted for a Democrat for president who he could not possibly have agreed on with very much in terms of issues but believed it was better for the country. Is there any irony in that?
GOLDBERG: There's a lot of irony to Dick Cheney's career. He was one of the foremost public officials in the sort of intellectual realm championing this idea of a stronger executive branch. He thought the executive branch would become too weak, that Congress and the courts and the permanent bureaucracy had overtaken things. And a lot of that argument has been picked up in ways that obviously Dick Cheney would not endorse by the Trump administration.
He was also an architect of the - you know, the action that took Manuel Noriega out in Panama, which, you know, a lot of the supposedly intellectual arguments in favor of what Trump is doing in the Caribbean and with Venezuela these days point to that as the precedent that allows them to do this.
And it's a - it's sort of an example of - Dick Cheney's entire life, he argued for a stronger presidency on the assumption that the presidency would be, you know, occupied by a person of real conviction and patriotic principle. And it's sort of - you know, it's a - for him, it has to have felt a little bit like a Frankenstein's monster to have this guy he did not like and thought did not put the country first using a lot of the arguments and mechanisms that he tried to put in place for his own ends.
INSKEEP: Just about 30 seconds then. I think you're telling me that he didn't really have a legal argument with President Trump. He had a character argument with President Trump.
GOLDBERG: I think that's right. I think that's right. There are a lot of - it's sort of like John Bolton, who's got his own issues these days. John Bolton, in terms of, like, the intellectual superstructure of Trumpism - there's a lot of agreement there, but they just don't think the guy is - was fit for the office. And so they put the country first because they thought the character mattered more than just mere policy positions.
INSKEEP: Jonah Goldberg is editor of The Dispatch and has been a regular guest here for years. Jonah, it's good to hear from you again. Thank you so much.
GOLDBERG: Always great to be here. Thanks, Steve.
INSKEEP: And if you're just joining us, former Vice President Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84. Among other things in his life, he served as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush and also vice president to President George W. Bush. We'll continue covering his life. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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