Dick Cheney
Among the Republicans who repeatedly voted against the freeing of Nelson Mandela was Dick Cheney, a rising Republican congressman from Wyoming at the time. He would go on to become secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s/early 90s and then, of course, vice president under Bush’s son, George W. Bush, beginning in 2000.
Cheney was one of the multiple Republicans who opposed a resolution calling for South Africa to release Mandela from prison in 1985.
The following year, Cheney voted against sanctions on South Africa that would help topple the apartheid regime. He refused to apologize for the way he voted in the 1980s many years later when he was running for vice president alongside Bush in 2000.
“The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization,” he said to ABC News. “I don’t have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago.”
