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Soon: Funeral Begins for Former Vice President Dick Cheney; Four Living Former Vice Presidents Expected to Attend Cheney's Funeral; Biden Arrives for Dick Cheney's Funeral. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired November 20, 2025 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:00]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. We are watching live pictures of the inside of the National Cathedral, and you see there now former Vice President Kamala Harris has arrived. She's sitting with the other former vice presidents who we have seen so far. You see Dan Quayle behind her as well as Al Gore. And we're waiting for another vice president, the one who was elected president, Joe Biden, who she served with to arrive as well.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: And it, it is just to remind our viewers notable, because Dick Cheney lived his life as a hardline conservative. He voted for Donald Trump in the first election. And then after January 6th, he came out and, you know, by his daughter, and said, I'm voting for Kamala Harris, the Democrat and Joe Biden obviously.

BASH: And Kamala Harris didn't just get his vote or Liz Cheney's vote, she got -- Harris got their support. They campaigned, particularly Liz Cheney, campaigned along with other disinfected Republicans with Kamala Harris when she had her 107-day campaign.

BROWN: Yes, it was quite a moment. I want to go to CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny. You were there at the National Cathedral outside as the attendees come in.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Pamela, certainly the theme of putting country over partisanship is echoing throughout the halt here at the Washington National Cathedral, and that, of course, is what Vice President Dick Cheney said a year ago when he did issue that endorsement of Kamala Harris. That is why this is such a striking moment of the guests inside. Republicans and Democrats almost from a bygone era as we await the hearse to arrive here. You can see the Military Honor Guard standing outside the cathedral, they will greet the former vice president, will be taken inside the cathedral for a bit of family time in the North X before this service begins. Most of the invited guests have taken their seats, as you can see there.

[10:35:00]

And every former living vice president is on hand, including, as you said Joe Biden. He, of course, vice president, became president. Today is his 83rd birthday, but notable, he also will be joining Vice President Harris for one of the very first times in public since she had some thoughts in her book, "The 107 Day Campaign," about his decision to run. He also will likely come face to face with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So, that is what is so extraordinary always about these funerals of this moment. It gives you a sense to -- for these leaders to come together in ways that they normally don't, except at official events like this.

But for President Biden, I am told by one of his advisors, he is attending this funeral as a sign of respect, obviously, to Dick Cheney, who served in Congress around the same time. Of course, Dick Cheney was the youngest White House chief of staff in the '70s, a member of Congress in the '80s, in the '90s, defense secretary and as vice president. And President Biden was along for every single chapter of Dick Cheney's rise through Washington, a towering figure in his own right.

But again, it's the eulogy from President George W. Bush that will certainly be notable to watch. He often adds humor to his eulogies. I'm told he's been working on this for some time. We don't often hear from President Bush. So, his eulogy to his vice president and friend, Dick Cheney, will certainly be notable as we await the motorcade here and the family's arrival momentarily. Pamela.

BASH: Jeff, thank you.

BROWN: Thank you so much, Jeff. Really appreciate it.

BASH: Thank you.

BROWN: And as Jeff noted, you know, just how what a moment it is for many reasons, but also because we are expecting President Joe Biden to arrive there. And I don't believe we've seen Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at any events or together. David Chalian, correct me if I'm wrong, since after the inauguration.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF AND CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Yes, I think the inauguration was the last time we saw them side by side in public. I know that they've each talked about having conversations with each other. And I don't know if they've seen each other privately.

But I -- you see Mike Pence now looking there, joining the other former vice presidents. And you saw Leader Thune of the Senate take his seat next to Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao. And a reminder of the vice president's role as president of the Senate. And again, another moment that even though obviously Donald Trump and J.D. Vance not invited to participate here, that the official Washington still moves forward through those trials and tribulations of that divide.

I mean, Leader Thune would not -- on a daily basis, doesn't do anything that he's going to try to upset the president, President Trump, by doing, but clearly also saw he should attend this funeral and pay his respects to Dick Cheney in his role.

BASH: This is one of those moments where I really wish I were a lip reader. Because -- and it's going to get even more so when Joe Biden shows up, because, I mean, sadly, it does take a funeral for moments like this to happen. But there you have Dan Quayle, Al Gore, who's just off screen on the left of Dan Quayle. Of course, Kamala Harris, as we've been discussing, and Mike Pence just sat down right next to her.

And there's no doubt they will be sharing some private moments and private conversation. And these are the moments, because they're going to be waiting for, what, like 22 minutes. And we know from reporting that we do after funerals like this that there are -- there's color, there's interesting color to glean from these interactions between these people who almost never get together.

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR AND SENIOR ANALYST: Also, Dick Cheney wasn't just any vice president, I mean, he has done -- had done almost every job you could do in Washington. He was a congressional fellow. One of his first interviews was with Don Rumsfeld, who didn't hire him. They later ended up working together. Just about everyone here might actually have spent significant time with him.

I think it's hard for people to understand that now, particularly this generation that may have seen him as a figure from the past that symbolized a lot of things, like the war on terror. But there -- he was powerful because he had sat in almost every chair, whether it be in the House, whether it be a chief of staff, whether it be the White House, whether it be defense. So, I was actually not surprised to hear that he would, like, march into the Defense Department and, or expect to see things because he was used to making those calls.

CHALIAN: I also think, you know, politicians at this level become caricatures in, in the public consciousness at times and, and, you know, the Darth Vader of Dick Cheney and on all of these things. But what you see in moments like this also, there are human beings, there are so few of them who've had that experience. And so, while I look at Al Gore here --

[10:40:00]

BASH: There's President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.

CHALIAN: And the former first lady. When I see Al Gore, and I think to the partisans chanting outside the Naval Observatory, get out of Dick Cheney's house in midst of the disputed 2020 election.

BASH: Sorry. I just want to say that that's President Biden greeting Mitch McConnell and his wife's secretary, former Secretary Elaine Chao, in addition to John Thune and Vice President Gore. It's as you were saying, you know, that people know these, there's, he's greeting another one of his predecessors in the vice president's job, Dan Quayle.

CHALIAN: It's a pretty exclusive club. Did we see any interaction yet between --

BASH: No. Let's wait and see what happens here. Oh, there's President Bush. CHALIAN: Yes.

BASH: And Laura Bush.

CHALIAN: Oh, there it is. Joe Biden shaking Kamala Harris' hand there off the screen.

BROWN: Pan the camera. We are -- there we go.

CHALIAN: Now, he was -- one thing about Dick Cheney that I remember, you know, he was a formidable guy. And when we were freshmen, we remember the Central America Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA, one of my freshmen colleagues who later became a governor was summoned to the White House because he was having some ambivalence. And he came back and he said, boy, that meeting was like a root canal. He (INAUDIBLE). He was tough.

BASH: Would you just discuss this moment with -- yes, this image of President Bush. We'll talk about President Biden in a second, but President Bush, because they served together for eight years, as David said, Bush famously chose the man who was in charge of the search committee to be -- for vice president, to be his running mate.

BROWN: Yes.

BASH: They didn't leave on the best of terms because Dick Cheney really wanted President Bush to pardon his -- Cheney's longtime aide and confidant, Scooter Libby, and Bush wouldn't do it.

BROWN: Yes, yes. And we are expecting President Bush to give his eulogy as our Jeff Zeleny laid out there. But I do think that is notable, the sort of complicated relationship that they had at the end. And also, you know, as we've talked about how Dick Cheney was one of the most powerful vice presidents in the modern era. And I think President Bush, for his part, wanted to make clear that, look, I was the final decision maker, right? He was very involved in the big decisions, but I was the final decision maker.

BASH: And just looking at Joe Biden there, again, not as a former president, but thinking about him in the context of being former vice president, Dick Cheney paved the way in that the way that he looked at the vice presidency and took on such a huge role. He paved the way for Biden. I'm not saying that Biden had the same power that Cheney did, but he probably had a lot more power than he would have had Cheney not come before him.

TIM NAFTALI, CNN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN AND FORMER DIRECTOR, NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY: No question about it. Foreign policy matters. I don't think that Joe Biden had the same influence on Barack Obama, I'm quite sure of it, actually, that Cheney had on George W. Bush.

But yes, it's one of the challenges for George W. Bush is that the Cheney story undermines his own legacy to the extent that you say that Cheney mattered, that diminishes the importance of George W. Bush. So, for him, it's an interesting balancing act, and I'll be listening to hear how he explains that balancing act. He was very careful in his memoir, George W. Bush is.

I will say this about the final dispute over Scooter Libby. George W. Bush thought that their relationship might be forever broken because of this disagreement. Apparently, they had real words over this issue of pardoning Libby. And Bush writes, and I was happy to learn later that we still had a relationship, but he thought it was done.

BASH: Can you quickly remind our viewers, just don't want to dwell on it too much, what the Scooter Libby issue was?

NAFTALI: This was an issue over Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA, and her husband was involved in an issue regarding yellow cake, which is a precursor to building nuclear weapons from Niger. And there was an issue over some -- let me put it this way, some efforts to undermine the argument that Cheney and Bush were misusing information to prove that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. And the way to do that was to smear Valerie Plame, by saying she's in the CIA. And that is -- it was illegal to reveal a covert operator. And the issue was who leaked it. Now --

CHALIAN: Richard Armitage

[10:45:00]

NAFTALI: Now, Richard Armitage, but Libby had testified under oath. And it was under oath that people argued he had perjured himself and he was found guilty of perjury. And the issue was whether he would have his sentence commuted and pardoned. He got his sentence commuted, but Cheney wanted him pardoned because Cheney felt that he had done nothing wrong. Because Cheney believed that these independent prosecutors were mischievous and that they always look to indict somebody. And the person they should have indicted was Richard Armitage, and they didn't and they went after Libby instead. That's the issue. And this almost broke the relationship between George W. Bush and Cheney, according to George W. Bush.

BASH: Yes. It's also a reminder of how much the post-Watergate, Washington was rebuilt by someone like Dick Cheney. He had watched Ford pardon Nixon. So, of course, he's going to turn to his president that he's serving with and say, why wouldn't you pardon my chief of staff?

NAFTALI: One thing that what George W. Bush said to Cheney seems so quaint now. He said, look, he was found guilty. I'm not going to overturn. I'm not going to overturn a decision made by a court just to protect someone.

CHARLIE DENT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ASPEN INSTITUTE, CONGRESSIONAL PROGRAM AND FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE (R-PA): The whole point of that investigation was to find out who leaked. It was Richard Armitage. And you would think, you know, the investigation would then have ended. But it didn't. And so, they had to get somebody ended up being Scooter Libby, which I think really did rankle a lot of people at the time.

BASH: Pam, you were saying that Scooter Libby is a pallbearer. BROWN: Yes, he's a he's a pallbearer. And we are actually expecting the Cheney motorcade to arrive just within minutes now. So, we're keeping an eye on that. You know, something else we were talking about, Dana, before this was the fact that Dr. Reiner, a CNN contributor, as we know, a heart doctor, is first up to give the eulogy. And that's unusual, right?

BASH: Yes.

BROWN: That's unusual. But as we were discussing, this funeral likely would have been much earlier had it not been for Dr. Reiner.

BASH: That's right. Dr. Reiner and people who regularly watch CNN will recognize him because he is one of our medical analysts. He is a helped keep Dick Cheney alive for decades because of the innovation that he helped find for Cheney with a heart transplant and other ways to help him. Cheney first had it -- how old was he when he first had a heart attack?

CHALIAN: 37.

BASH: Yes.

CHALIAN: He's 37 years old. He -- and by the time he comes into the George W. Bush administration, I think he's had four heart attacks, one of which --

BROWN: And he had the mild one right right after the --

CHALIAN: Right after the election. He was in hospital Thanksgiving of 2000.

BROWN: All right.

BASH: You had a story that you were going to -- one of you. You were going to tell.

DENT: Yes, I was elected in 2004. Dick Cheney did a fundraiser for me that year. And a cardiac thoracic surgeon was coming to my fundraiser. The day of the event, the surgeon called me and said, I can't come to the fundraiser. Can you get a picture of the vice president? Send it to me. I said, sure. Why aren't you coming? He said, oh, Secret Service called, said I had to stay at the hospital in case the vice president has some kind of cardiac episode. I told Dick Cheney the story and he started laughing hysterically and I thought it was going to create a cardiac episode. Yes, but the Secret Service is all over.

BASH: We should notice that the note that, Pam, this is -- the car, the hearse carrying the body of the late vice president, the former vice president arriving at the National Cathedral.

NAFTALI: In March of 2001 --

BROWN: Go ahead, Tim, if you want to keep making your point.

NAFTALI: In March of 2001, Vice President Cheney was so concerned that he might be incapacitated by a heart attack that he signed a letter of resignation and dated it and sealed the letter, gave it to one of his aides, lawyer, David Addington, and told Addington, if I'm incapacitated, give this to the president of the United States. Dick Cheney did not tell Lynne Cheney or the family that he had signed a letter of resignation. He did not want the family to determine whether or not he had been incapacitated.

He said, David, you do it. And he told President Bush. And he said to President Bush, it is your decision whether you forward this to the secretary of state, which would in effect mean that he'd resign. But I'd leave it with you. No one else will make the decision. Because he was worried about a Woodrow Wilson situation. Woodrow Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke. He was president -- vice president, but he was afraid that people would keep him in office when, in fact, he didn't want to be in office if he was incapacitated. He really believed he owed it to the American people to serve if he could serve. And at the point when he couldn't serve, the patriotic thing to do was to step down.

[10:50:00]

So, he set in motion his own removal as vice president if he suffered a massive stroke or a heart attack, which I think is just a sign of his patriotism and seriousness as a vice president. The family didn't learn about it at the time. Only George W. Bush and Lynne Cheney knew about it. And the family didn't know about it either. George Bush and Addington, his lawyer, knew about it.

BROWN: Wow. You know, we --

CORNISH: He took his health super seriously. His doctor said that if he had a moment where he felt off or called him, he would hand off his papers and say, OK, I'm going to get care. The other thing about this doctor is he started caring for Cheney very early in his career. It was one of his first patients. So, he literally grew up alongside the cardiac medicine that Cheney benefited from over the years, whether it be the heart transplant or some of the later technologies like CRISPR. There's -- it's interesting when you live that long, right, you're going to live alongside some great advances.

BROWN: Yes. And -- go ahead.

BASH: No. David Chalian, as we watch this moment and we take in this moment when George W. Bush and Joe Biden kind of came around the same time, and it was a little hard to see that moment, David Chalian, when Kamala Harris and Joe Biden saw each other, we believe, for the first time since the inauguration, at least in public.

CHALIAN: Certainly, in public. And now, we see the former first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, chatting with Kamala Harris, I will say, and it's always tough as you're reading body language here and the camera's not on all the time, so you're not seeing every moment. But I would say when we were on this shot for a while, there was a lot more camaraderie and warmth that Harris was having with the Pences than she was with the Bidens as they were sitting there. And so, it is now interesting to see this moment of Jill Biden and Kamala Harris in conversation, because that was not the case as we were looking at this shot earlier.

And I think, you know, given this is their first time in public together since the inauguration, given what Kamala Harris has talked about in her book, "107 Days," about Joe Biden and Jill Biden's decision to have Joe Biden run again, her reaction to that, and then the behavior of Biden, she writes about in the book during the course of those 107 days while she took over the mantle and was running. It's just fascinating to see them in public side by side after all of that sort of public airing.

And again, we're not lip readers and body language experts. But --

BROWN: Wouldn't you love to know what they're talking about though right now, right? I think we're all thinking that. And we still have around eight minutes to go until the official proceeding kicks off. We see there the hearse right outside the National Cathedral.

And, you know, Charlie Dent, you know, you knew Dick Cheney very well. And I'm just wondering, as we take a step back and reflect on his legacy, and you see the hearse right there, what's going through your mind?

DENT: Well, you know, he had a very strong worldview. He believed that America's power could be used constructively in the world. And we always talk about hard power, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, but we don't talk enough about how he believed in soft power.

You know, he and George W. Bush, they put together the PEPFAR program, the President's Emergency Program for Age Relief, which has saved, you know, millions of people, something that they did that they, that he and the president believe strongly in. So, they're, that's part of his legacy too, that I think a lot of people have forgotten. But he -- and he's different than this administration, obviously, because he did believe in things like freer trade, opening markets, embracing allies. You know, he had this, this great view that many of us as Republicans still share. And that's part of the big division within the Republican Party to this day about, you know, where MAGA is and where the Cheney view was.

BROWN: And that's notable because we are in the MAGA era here in Washington, and that is not represented here at the National Cathedral. In fact, President Trump and Vice President Vance were not invited.

BASH: I mean, if you look at that, Audie, and just at least the front row, or even most of the Republicans there, save a few who are elected members of the Senate, that does not represent today's GOP, like at all.

CORNISH: It's a different era. It is a completely different era. And so, many things, specifically in the area of foreign policy within MAGA ideology are in reaction to the things that Cheney was interested in, whether it be national security, paying attention to any kind of global institutions, going to the U.N. for literally any reason. These are things Cheney was still willing to do that they are not. And the whole concept of forever wars as a slur within Republican foreign policy circles, again, is in response to Cheney and the Republicans who came after him and who attempted to carry that forward, and frankly, weren't able to.

[10:55:00]

And that does count Liz Cheney. That does count Nikki Haley, many people who wanted to make foreign policy the issue and found that wasn't going to fly under the new scenario. I mean, J.D. Vance is not that, right? That is not known for diplomacy or any of those other skills.

BROWN: I want to go, while we're watching here, the coffin is about to be taken out of the hearse. Let's just take a moment and observe and listen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body of our brother Richard Bruce Cheney for burial. Let us pray with confidence to God, the giver of life, that he will raise him to perfection in the company of the saints.

Deliver your servant Richard, O sovereign Lord Christ, from all evil and set him free from every bond, that he may rest with all your saints in the eternal habitations, where with the Father and the Holy Spirit, you live and reign one God forever and ever.

CROWD: Amen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let us also pray for all who mourn that they may cast their care on God and know the consolation of his love. Almighty God, look with pity upon the sorrows of your servants for whom we pray. Remember them, Lord, in mercy. Nourish them with patience. Comfort them with a sense of your goodness. Lift up your countenance upon them and give them peace. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

[11:00:00]