THE REAL DICK CHENEY: EPISODE ONE

Most Americans only know the headline version of Dick Cheney. The old photos. The heart surgeries. The growl of his interviews. The quiet reputation for being the “adult in the room.” When he died, the tributes came fast. Flags dropped to half-staff. Pundits recycled the same sanitized story. And a whole generation of younger Americans were left with the impression that Cheney was a steady hand who guided the country through hard times.

This series is the answer to that lie.

The Real Dick Cheney is a six-part investigation into the man behind the mythology. It is not a documentary built to flatter Washington. It is the story of the architect of America’s endless wars. It is the story of the operator who spent his life pushing the United States toward an imperial presidency. It is the story of the vice president who manipulated intelligence, ignored the Constitution, dragged the National Guard into foreign wars without a declaration, and left a trail of broken nations, broken families, and broken trust.

Episode One sets the foundation. Before we talk about Iraq or torture or Halliburton or PNAC, we need to understand the rise of Dick Cheney as a political creature. Most people don’t know how a kid who couldn’t keep himself out of trouble at Yale and Wyoming ended up controlling the levers of power inside the White House by his mid-thirties. They don’t know how he learned that process is power and that whoever controls information controls the presidency. They don’t know the backroom stories, the whispered warnings from staffers, or the small decisions that gave him the instincts he would later use to drag America into the longest wars in its history.

Episode One walks through Cheney’s early climb. The internships. The Ford White House. The maneuvering that turned him into the young gatekeeper who could make or break decisions before they ever reached the Oval Office. It traces the formation of the core belief that shaped his entire career. Cheney never believed in checks and balances. He believed the executive should dominate. He believed Congress was a speed bump. He believed the president should have the power to declare war with or without the people’s representatives. Those aren’t guesses. Those are his own words, repeated throughout his career and stamped into every decision he made.

From there the episode follows him into Congress, where he built alliances with defense contractors and began tying his political future to a worldview that treated military power as the first resort rather than the last. It shows how his decade in the House hardened him into a reliable vote for more power in the presidency and more money for the Pentagon. It shows how those years gave him the Rolodex he would later rely on as Secretary of Defense.

Then we take you into the Gulf War, where Cheney got his first real chance to shape the world. Most Americans remember that conflict as clean and fast. What they don’t remember is how Cheney used it to build the modern contracting empire. Halliburton. KBR. Logistical outsourcing on a scale the Pentagon had never attempted. The scaffolding for private war. Episode One makes clear that Cheney didn’t stumble into that world. He built it. He cultivated it. And when he left government, he cashed in.

Halliburton is not a footnote in his story. It is the story. As CEO, Cheney presided over a company that expanded aggressively into areas where profit depended on American deployments. The food, the fuel, the bases, the reconstruction projects that somehow never reconstructed anything. When he returned to the White House years later, those same companies would receive billions in no-bid contracts during the war he helped engineer. America has had war profiteers before, but rarely one who moved so seamlessly between public office and the boardroom and back again.

Episode One also looks at Cheney’s role in choosing himself as George W. Bush’s running mate. People forget this. Bush didn’t pick Cheney. Cheney picked Cheney. He ran the search committee. He interviewed other candidates. He controlled the paperwork. Then he told Bush that the best option was the man doing the choosing. Powerful interests inside the GOP nodded because Cheney was the safety blanket they needed. A Bush presidency felt manageable if Cheney was holding the reins behind the scenes.

This first installment introduces the world that produced the Project for the New American Century, the think tank that carried Cheney’s worldview into the 2000s. PNAC wasn’t just a group of commentators. It was the ideological backbone for the doctrine Cheney championed. Their 2000 report talked openly about reshaping the Middle East and said their plans would be hard to sell to the public without “a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” When 9/11 happened, the men who wrote that sentence walked straight into the West Wing.

Throughout Episode One, we weave in the personal stakes. The families who served. The loved ones who never came home. The National Guard units that were turned into an overseas fighting force because Congress refused to do its job. We tie that history to the broader mission of this organization: restoring constitutional war powers and making sure the mistakes engineered by powerful men never fall on the backs of our sons and daughters again.

You will meet Aaron, a friend whose service and sacrifice represent everything noble about the American soldier and everything rotten about the people who exploited that nobility. His story appears throughout the series, but the introduction grounds the viewer in why this project matters. This isn’t a hit piece. It’s a reckoning. It’s a refusal to let Washington bury the truth along with the man who caused so much pain.

The rest of the series will cover different chapters of the Cheney story. Episode Two will dig into PNAC, the ideology that shaped him, and the fortune he made as a war profiteer. Episode Three will walk through the machinery of the Iraq deception. Episode Four will show the human cost of the doctrine he imposed. Episode Five will trace his influence long after he left office. Episode Six will focus on how the country digs its way back from the damage he caused and why Defend the Guard is one of the only realistic tools the people have left to rein in war powers.

But Episode One is the doorway. It sets the stakes. It explains why we’re doing this and why the country can’t afford to whitewash the legacy of a man who spent half a century dismantling constitutional limits on war.

If you are younger than thirty-five, none of this was explained to you. You grew up in the shadow of decisions made before you were old enough to vote. You inherited the consequences without ever being told the truth. This series is for you. It’s for veterans who carried the weight of these wars long after the architects went home. It’s for families who still keep folded flags on their mantels. It’s for Americans who refuse to forget what was done in their name.

If this series speaks to you, subscribe and follow the podcast. Share it. Rate it. Help it reach the people who need to understand how we got here and why the next chapter depends on whether we are willing to confront the truth of the last one.

Listen on:

Spotify

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X (full episodes posted at @troopshomeUS)

And if you want to stand with the movement fighting to restore constitutional war powers and end the habit of endless war, visit BringOurTroopsHome.US and DefendTheGuard.US.

The history they tried to bury is now out in the open. This is Episode One. This is the story the country was never supposed to hear.

The Real Dick Cheney: Who He Really Was (Part 1 of 6)

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