In the fall of 1959, Dick Cheney arrived in New Haven from his hometown of Casper, Wyoming, to begin his first semester at Yale College.
The future vice president of the United States, who died Nov. 3 at age 84, had been president of his high school class and co-captain of the football team. But he was also a scholarship student - common now, rarer then - who had never previously traveled east of Chicago. For him, it felt like a foreign world.
"Many of my fellow students had gone to prep school. They had had experiences very different from mine and knew things that I did not," Cheney wrote in "In My Time," a 2011 memoir. "… I was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Instead of being president of my class and hanging out in the student council office, I was waiting on my classmates in the dining hall."
Still, Cheney encountered a lasting influence at Yale. In interviews, he recalled studying under H. Bradford Westerfield, a distinguished scholar of political science who introduced generations of future leaders - including Cheney's future running mate, George W. Bush '68 - to statecraft. Cheney said Westerfield helped shape his approach to foreign policy.
Cheney, who lived in Berkeley College, ultimately spent three semesters at Yale, leaving in 1962 to return to Wyoming and to his high-school sweetheart, Lynne, who would become his devoted wife of 61 years.
Back in the West, he took a job building power lines and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming. He also pursued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin before heading to the nation's capital and beginning an extraordinary rise in government that would eventually make him one of the most influential people in U.S. public life of the past 50 years.
By age 34, Cheney was serving as White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, a 1941 Yale Law School graduate. Cheney would go on to represent Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives for 10 years, serve as secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush '48, and serve two terms as vice president under President George W. Bush '68. Cheney was instrumental in guiding the response of the younger Bush's administration to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Widely considered one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, his reputation as a military hawk drew praise from some quarters and fierce criticism from others, especially for his role in the U.S. "war on terror" and invasion of Iraq. He also sought to advance the principles of a "unitary executive theory," which espouses that a president has sole authority over the executive branch, particularly on matters related to national security, with minimal oversight from the courts or Congress.
For all the gravity attached to his government roles and personal demeanor, Cheney could apparently handle ribbing.
While speaking at Yale commencement in 2001 (where he was receiving an honorary degree), George W. Bush playfully described bantering with his vice president about their shared school.
"A Yale degree is worth a lot, as I often remind Dick Cheney, who studied here but left a little early," he said. "So now we know: If you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president."
Cheney himself appeared to savor certain ironies of his history with Yale.
In an interview with journalist James Rosen, Cheney recalled speaking at the university in the 1990s, after he had directed the Pentagon during the first Gulf War, in which the United States led a 42-country coalition in driving Iraqi military forces from Kuwait.
"I always enjoyed the fact that … I was invited back to Yale to speak to a large gathering of alums in the dining hall where I used to sling hash when I was a freshman," he said."
In a statement published this week on the George W. Bush Presidential Center website, Bush called Cheney's death "a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends."
"History will remember him," the former president said, "as among the finest public servants of his generation - a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held."
