Back when he was a House member from Wyoming, Dick Cheney was part of a congressional delegation that visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s. During a lull in the schedule, Cheney and his colleagues were sitting around trying to entertain themselves when one of their wives decided to administer personality tests. The results included professions for which the members would be well suited.Cheney’s ideal job? A funeral director.I briefly worried that telling this story at this moment might be in poor taste, given that Cheney, the powerful and polarizing former vice president, died Monday at 84 of complications from pneumonia and heart disease. But he was always amused by the vignette, which was oft-told in his circles. It was also consistent with the “Prince of Darkness” caricature that Cheney readily embraced. In life or death, he wouldn’t have cared much either way.That was always one of Cheney’s more defining charms, or anti-charms: Of all the political figures I’ve ever written about, I don’t think any of them paid less attention to what anyone else said or thought about them. Cheney was fully secure in what he believed, what he wanted, and ultimately who he was.He cared, I suppose, about public opinion insomuch as it mattered to his political standing, the selling of his ideas, and the advancement of his agenda. But he was indifferent to self-promotion, and had no need for cheering crowds and fawning coverage, typically the mother’s milk of political ego. He was truly one of the most sheepish and least flamboyant figures ever to skulk through the power alleys of the capital.[David Frum: There was one Dick Cheney all along]Could this read to some as arrogant, disdainful, and callous? Sure. Do you think it mattered to him—at all? During Cheney’s vice presidency, I asked his longtime friend and career patron, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to assess Cheney’s need for public love and appreciation in a job that can be thankless to begin with. “Almost zero,” Rumsfeld told me, and I remember wondering why he had bothered to qualify his response with “almost.”In the early stages of Cheney and President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, I was assigned to write a profile of Cheney for The Washington Post Style section. It had become clear by that point that Saddam Hussein had not harbored weapons of mass destruction; the Iraq War was headed south, and American troops had not, in fact, been “greeted as liberators” in Baghdad, as Cheney had predicted. The vice president’s approval ratings were somewhere down in the underground bunker (or “secure, undisclosed location”) where Cheney was sometimes said to be housed during the tense post-9/11 years of his vice presidency.“You never get in trouble for something you don’t say” was one of Cheney’s political mantras, first attributed to Sam Rayburn, the longtime Democratic speaker of the House from Texas. The veep rarely granted interviews, especially on the subject of himself. But for some reason, he let me hang around him a bit. Our first encounter was in his Air Force Two cabin, en route to a fundraiser in the Seattle area. “In my experience, those who have had the most impact are people who keep their own counsel,” he told me. “They don’t spend time worrying about taking credit.” In his own case, Cheney said, “It’s not so much a strategic decision as much as it’s what I’m comfortable with.” This was as close as Cheney ever came to unburdening himself in public.He offered none of the small talk or icebreakers that typically clutter these exercises, although there might have been one aside about how we had the same haircut. The press had changed a great deal, Cheney told me when I asked him why he almost never made himself available. “As an institution. Evolved. Kind of thing where it’s almost impossible to catch up with a bad story. Factual errors.” He went on.“Nobody goes back to check the accuracy. Can be frustrating.”He was not the most expansive interviewee.But Cheney could display an exceedingly dry, even absurdist sense of humor on occasion. During his and Bush’s campaign against Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, Cheney had a bit in his stump speech comparing himself to his VP opponent. “People keep telling me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, charm, and great hair,” Cheney would say. “And I say to them, ‘How do you think I got this job?’”The line always got big laughs, but it was also a sly dig at Cheney’s deeply tanned and heavily hair-sprayed counterpart. Cheney had little use for slick characters such as Edwards. And this was long before the latter’s career imploded over a nasty sex scandal resulting in a love child Edwards had with his campaign videographer.Cheney’s deep suspicion of peacocks and sycophants was just a sliver of why he despised Donald Trump, his bootlicking MAGA entourage, and what generally has become of the party in which the Cheney family was royalty for nearly half a century. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in an ad for his daughter Liz’s unsuccessful reelection campaign in Wyoming in 2022.[Russell Berman: ‘I’m not sure progressives want Democrats to be that big-tent’]Cheney’s contempt for Trump was deep, visceral, and obviously personal, considering Liz’s fierce resistance after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the public vendetta it stirred against her. He became the highest-ranking Republican official to condemn Trump and warn against his reelection. He did so unequivocally, and conspicuously, in contrast to the determined muteness of the president he had served as deputy. Cheney even endorsed Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, a step that many of Trump’s most fervent Republican critics could not bring themselves to take. Consider John Bolton, who condemned Trump nonstop after serving as his national security adviser: Bolton said that although he couldn’t vote for Trump, he would still vote Republican. He wrote in Dick Cheney’s name instead.Although Cheney was unlikely to move many swing voters at that point (let alone dislodge many Trump voters), his endorsement of Harris was still an extraordinary move, given how loathed he had been by Democrats when he was Bush’s vice president. There was no greater boogeyman than Cheney in an embattled administration that was full of them by the end. Cheney made it comically easy at times. He once told a Democratic senator to “go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor. (“Best thing I ever did,” he said later.) And yes, there was that time he shot a friend with a 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun while they were quail hunting in Texas. Cheney barely acknowledged the incident, though he did say it was an accident.Cheney made one of his last public appearances in August 2021 at Rumsfeld’s funeral, on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. In eulogizing his longtime friend and mentor, Cheney commended Rumsfeld as being a true Washington original. “Nothing about Don was typical or derivative or standard-issue,” he said.Nothing about Cheney was derivative or standard-issue, either. Regardless of the hatred he drew from Democrats in the aughts and from Trump world post–January 6, he was bipartisan in his indifference to both. He didn’t care what you thought or need your applause, grudging or otherwise.