As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorker profile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary brand of Republicanism eventually forced Michel aside—but during much of the time that Michel was leader, Cheney was one of his principal deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant, reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The phlegmatic-process guy? No way.

We were speaking some months before the September 11th attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney in the same way that Michel did. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from running the 2000 Republican Vice-Presidential search—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee himself. After 9/11, it instantly became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing to be neutral, at least to Republicans who outranked him, rather than actually having been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), expertly putting the country on a path that led to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

How did Cheney manage to strike people as something he wasn’t? When did he become so conservative? And, finally, his reappearance in recent years as a passionate opponent of Donald Trump raises what might be the most interesting question of all: What was it, exactly, that made the currently reigning version of conservatism so repellent to him?

My theory is that Cheney’s time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late nineteen-sixties was his ideological Rosebud. Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his home-town sweetheart from Casper, Wyoming, in 1964. Both of them were the children of career civil servants. With their echt-small-town middle-class backgrounds, plus Dick’s practice of saying as little as possible, they came across as generically, unremarkably Middle American. In 1966, the Cheneys enrolled as doctoral students in Madison; he in political science, she in English. Dick didn’t complete his degree because he went to work for Wisconsin’s governor, Warren Knowles, another moderate Republican. Lynne did finish, in 1970, the same year that radicals bombed a mathematics research center on the university’s campus, killing one person who was inside. The Cheneys appear to have taken from their time in Wisconsin an abiding conviction that the far left is an ever-present threat that Democrats and liberals are incapable of taking seriously. In 2001, Lynne told me that those years had converted them to conservatism. Dick said, “When I was given a choice between returning to academia or staying in the political area, it really wasn’t a close call.”

Dick Cheney was always far more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. From H. Bradford Westerfeld, a professor he studied with during his brief time as an undergraduate at Yale (he left after two years and later graduated from the University of Wyoming), he absorbed the idea of the Cold War as a world-defining existential struggle. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, quickly commissioned a report suggesting that the United States become the world’s lone superpower—permanently, if possible. Even so, threats, including from radical Islam, preoccupied him. He saw 9/11 not just as an attack to be answered, but as an opportunity to make the U.S. safer by using military force to transform the entire Middle East into an America-friendly region. Cheney believed that our enemies, if shown strength at a level that was beyond the capabilities of liberals, would always submit to our will. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the Iraq adventure would not work out.

If you gave a modern Dr. Frankenstein the challenge of designing a Republican whom Cheney would find repellent, it would be impossible for him to invent someone more perfect than Trump: citified, undignified, showily rich, unable to ever remain silent, and drawn to dealmaking rather than force as the way to solve problems. Substantively, a crucial element of Trump’s appeal was his denunciation of the “forever wars,” of which Cheney had been the principal author. Cheney probably never had any illusion that his brand of maximal hawkishness had broad public support, but Trump demonstrating that he could make anti-Cheneyism unstoppably potent with Republican voters still must have stung. His very loyal and very Republican daughter Liz, whom he would have liked to see rise as high or higher than he did, wound up being unable to hold her father’s old seat in the House in the face of Trump’s vengeance, after she had become an unusually public intraparty critic of his.

Cheney’s life makes for a good means of tracking the evolution of the Republican Party and American conservatism over the past half century. He started his political career in a party dominated by moderates, and helped to make it far more conservative. But he was always an inside player, who didn’t anticipate that more conservative would also come to mean flamboyantly populist. In his own distinctively pessimistic way, he participated both in crafting the zenith moment of American power, around the turn of the millennium, and then in devising the overreach that brought that moment to an end. He saw a series of early twenty-first-century disasters—9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis—lead to the revival of isolationism, the ideology he feared most, as the dominant element in his party, when he’d thought it resided mainly on the left.

Thanks to luck or grit, Cheney lived longer than anyone expected, given his spectacular heart problems: five heart attacks, beginning when he was still in his thirties, and then a transplant. His surprising survivability gave him the opportunity to change, in the end, from taciturn company man to florid dissenter. This wasn’t natural for him, and it couldn’t have made him happy. He must have died disappointed. ♦