The word that best describes how former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wielded the responsibilities he undertook in public affairs over a long career, is “unintimidated.”

Cheney, who died early this month, was unintimidated by his rise to become White House chief of staff at age 34 in 1975, after flunking out of Yale University and not finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.

Still in his 30s, Cheney remained unintimidated by the travails of his patrons and his country – the forced resignation of Nixon in August 1974, the evacuation of U.S. troops from the embassy in Saigon in April 1975, the unveiling of Ford’s WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons in October 1974. He seemed no more impressed than intimidated by his West Wing office near the president’s, nor his duties dealing with eminences such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Cheney returned to his native Wyoming and, undaunted by voters who expected to meet and grill candidates for high office in person, won election to the state’s sole House seat in 1978.

He was elected House minority whip after former President George H. W. Bush was elected in 1988. Bush’s unexpected failure to get John Tower confirmed as defense secretary had two pivotal consequences. One was the naming of Cheney as defense secretary. The other was the election of Newt Gingrich to succeed Cheney as whip, which put him in line to lead Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years in 1994. Republicans have won House majorities in three-quarters of the elections since.

Unintimidated, despite his lack of military service,Cheney assembled Operation Desert Shield and coolly fired the Air Force chief of staff for an unauthorized interview on the eve of Operation Desert Storm.

Since 1950, there have been five vice presidents who served eight years; three of them (Nixon, H.W. Bush and Joe Biden) were later elected president in their own right, and a fourth (Al Gore) won the popular vote for the office.

Cheney was the odd man out, yet he was arguably the most consequential vice president of the five. After the 9/11 attacks, he pressed hard for aggressive measures to protect America from terrorism, arguing that enhanced interrogations and military action to remove the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq were justified if there was even a 1% chance of preventing a terrorist attack that, in a nuclear age, could have been orders of magnitude greater than 9/11. He acted on this conviction, unintimidated by the prospect of widespread opposition and of a decline that, in fact, occurred in his job approval.

In most ideological quarters, Cheney’s recommendations, implemented with W. Bush’s substantial but not total approval, were, if not a crime, then a blunder. But even if mistakes were made, “regime change in Baghdad also brought blessings,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim.

Building on those blessings has been President Donald Trump, who has routinely called the Iraq War a mistake and has been full of scorn for Cheney. Yet it is impossible to imagine the success of Trump’s Abraham Accords and bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities if the Hussein regime were still in place. Trump’s successful foreign policies may owe more to Cheney than either would feel comfortable admitting.

Cheney was the first major party nominee to support same-sex marriage and he gave unintimidated support to his daughter Mary Cheney and her wife and their children.

He gave unintimidated support to his daughter Liz Cheney, who, as a former Wyoming representative and member of the Republican leadership, opposed Trump’s course of action on Jan. 6 and supported his impeachment. That led to the Cheneys’ otherwise surprising endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.

When I ran into Cheney, he often recalled playing high school football for Casper against Worland quarterback Grant Ujifusa, who later created “The Almanac of American Politics” and enlisted me as a coauthor. With both now gone, I can’t help thinking that playing high school football on cold – maybe freezing – Wyoming fall Friday evenings may leave you unintimidated by anything you face later.