Dick Cheney at the White House with then US president George W Bush in May 2006. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Fate decreed that on the Tuesday morning that September when the aeroplanes struck the Twin Towers in New York and, soon afterwards, the perimeter of the Pentagon, president George W Bush was speaking with schoolchildren in a Florida classroom while his vice-president, Dick Cheney, was in the White House.
In the awful, addled hours afterwards, the locations of both men cemented the reputation that has underpinned the obituaries for Cheney following the announcement of his death, on Monday, at the age of 84. He was, quite simply, the most influential and consequential vice-president in living memory and arguably in US history.
He served as defence secretary to George Herbert Bush before standing with George W Bush as his running mate in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. It was during that decade, facilitated by the exceptional latitude afforded him by Bush the Younger, that Cheney defined his
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