As the news spread of Dick Cheney’s passing Tuesday and tributes came from his onetime Republican colleagues in Congress, many began to ponder an oft-asked question about the former vice president.
Had Cheney not resigned from the House in 1989 to become President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense, would he, and not Newt Gingrich, have become speaker when Republicans captured the House in 1994?
The “what if?” question is one that drew particular discussion among former lawmakers and on one in which there is no universal opinion.
“When [House GOP Whip and Mississippi] Rep. Trent Lott got elected to the Senate in 1988, we had to pick a new whip,” recalled former Rep. Bill Schuette, R-Mich., a close friend of both the elder Bush and Cheney, “I had the pleasure of nominating Dick for whip, and he was elected with very little trouble.”
That was in January 1989. Two months later, following the Senate’s rejection of former Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, as secretary of defense, President Bush made the surprise appointment of Cheney to be the first civilian head of the armed forces. His confirmation came in a matter of a few weeks.
So what would have happened had Tower been confirmed or Bush found another nominee to replace him?
“That’s a really good question,” former Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., said. “Dick told me that he made a conscious decision that he wanted to avoid the Senate and pursue his career in the House.
“Wonder whether he had the political acumen that Newt had? Newt arrived after two electoral defeats while Dick sailed in [and never lost an election].”
Regarding whether or not Cheney could have been speaker of the House, another former GOP lawmaker, Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., believes “possibly. Dick was certainly well-regarded.”
But, he quickly added, “Newt was the revolutionary who took us to the majority in 1994.”
When Cheney resigned from Congress to go to the Pentagon in 1989, his GOP colleagues elected Georgia’s firebrand Gingrich as whip (by two votes) and thus put him in line to become House GOP leader when longtime Minority Leader Bob Michel, R-Ill. — who symbolized to many younger conservatives an era of subservience to the Democrat majority — stepped down.
As it turned out, Republicans won control of the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years and Gingrich became speaker.
The questions, then, were would Cheney have led his party to a majority in the same way as Gingrich or did it require someone more combative than Cheney — with new ideas such as the “Contract With America” on which Republicans ran in a nationalized campaign — to pull off the feat of a majority in the House?
“I’d say Cheney probably would not have become speaker,” former Rep. John Napier, R-S.C., told Newsmax. “He was more in line with the traditional Republican leadership, and the timing and mood began favoring a Gingrich type leadership in the late ’80s and culminating in 1994 when control shifted.
“Cheney was more attuned to executive leadership. As a result of his work in the Ford Administration he knew all the pressure points for effective executive leadership.”
Asked if Cheney would have ended up speaker had he remained in the House, former Rep. Jim Courter, R-N.J., replied: “Most likely not. He was highly competent but did not engage much. I knew a different side of him because we were neighbors in Virginia and lived across the street from each other.”
Said former Rep. Bob Walker, R-Pa., Gingrich’s closest friend in the House GOP hierarchy, “it’s interesting speculation. Newt and Dick could have ended up as rivals.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Click Here Now.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
