In his final days at the White House, Dick Cheney proposed an epitaph. His, he suggested, had been “a consequential vice presidency.” It was an understatement, and characteristically oblique. Consequential might describe Lincoln or Lenin, Gandhi or Genghis Khan. Cheney was speaking of influence, and for once he acknowledged his own. He knew he had changed the nation’s course, and he professed to have no regrets. After all this time, I’m still not sure whether to believe that.

I have argued elsewhere that his work as principal architect of the Iraq War and the War on Terror did ruinous damage to America’s national interests and moral standing. That is no small censure, but it does not suffice to represent the man in full.

What I learned from archival research, hundreds of interviews, and many hours of watching Cheney at close quarters during his Pentagon years, is simply not compatible with his caricature on the left as a villain. Vice, the vicious satire that the director and screenwriter Adam McKay claimed to base heavily on my book about Cheney, mimicked a documentary but strayed miles from a faithful portrait. Cheney’s legacy is far more complex, beginning with the motives and singular personal code that guided him.

Save for the Obama years, when Cheney left government to run Halliburton, he devoted his whole adult life to public service without a hint of personal corruption. He was widely counted among the finest defense secretaries of his era, conducting deft diplomacy and guiding the U.S. military with stunning success through the challenges of the Gulf War. He was a patriot of deep and immoderate convictions, driven by vivid perceptions of national peril. He inspired great loyalty among subordinates and friends.

In his two terms as vice president, Cheney displayed the characteristic flaws of a man who was certain he knew better than the citizens he served what was good for them—indeed, what they urgently required. He gave himself license, accordingly, to break rules, stretch the law, and conceal much of his work.

Cheney played a dominant role in populating the early George W. Bush administration with committed conservatives, many loyal to him personally, following the 1980s Republican precept that “personnel is policy.” He placed allies in key institutions such as the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which issues binding interpretations of law across the executive branch. He emphasized traditional right-wing priorities such as military spending increases, deep tax cuts, and energy deregulation.

Yet he was an outlier within the GOP for his reluctance to exploit social fissures for partisan advantage. In 2004, long before most national Democrats, Cheney endorsed gay marriage—at a moment when Bush was preparing to center his reelection campaign on a same-sex-marriage ban. “Freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney said, noting that his daughter Mary is gay.

Cheney was fundamentally honest about who he was and what he stood for, but he told significa