Dick Cheney, who served as vice president under President George W. Bush and became one of the most powerful and polarizing figures in modern American politics, has died at 84 , his family said Tuesday. From his beginnings in small-town Wyoming to his years at the heart of two Bush administrations, his life traced a path through half a century of American government—marked by strategic mastery, fierce controversy, and an unyielding belief in the exercise of authority. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska,