The word that best describes how former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wielded the responsibilities he undertook in public affairs over a long career, began improbably early in life and extended into years of repudiation by his fellow partisans, is “unintimidated.”

He 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 (while his wife, Lynne Cheney, earned hers).

Cheney, who died last month and was eulogized in a ceremony to which the current president and vice president were not invited, rose after being awarded an American Political Science Association fellowship in Washington. There, he favorably impressed two bosses who were elected to Congress at ages 28 and 30 — William Steiger, who, before his death at age 40, pushed a capital gains tax cut through a 2-1 Democratic House, and Donald Rumsfeld, who became former President Richard Nixon’s antipoverty program chief and former President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff.

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.

Although Ford trailed far behind in polls, he nearly won a full term in 1976: if he had gotten 11,117 more votes in Ohio and 14,464 in Mississippi, he would have had 272 electoral votes to former President Jimmy Carter’s 265. 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 undaunted as well by what many regarded as inevitable American decline. I remember a conversation shortly after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, in which he expressed worry about overcoming Soviet advances abroad and budget deficits and stagflation at home. As a Reagan backer, during the Iran-Contra affair, he defended the administration’s right to conduct foreign policy — a harbinger of future stands in future controversies — and 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, a fellow Texan, confirmed as defense secretary had two pivotal consequences. One was the naming of Cheney, at age 48, as defense secretary. The other was the election by an 87-85 margin of Newt Gingrich, 46, to succeed Cheney as whip, which put him in line to push aside former Minority Leader Robert Michel and lead Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years in 1994. Whether Cheney’s talents would have produced that result is uncertain; in any case, Republicans have won House majorities in three-quarters of the elections since.