Philip Richard Perry has spent nearly all of his adult life outside public view. There has been one exception. Last November, inside Washington National Cathedral, he stood at a lectern during his grandfather Dick Cheney’s funeral and spoke. It remains the only public record of him saying anything at all. According to CBS News’ coverage of the service, he told the room that his grandfather had always said how proud he was of him and his siblings, and that they meant to live up to it.
Almost everything else that is known about him comes from a birth record, old campaign photographs, and the far more public careers of both of his parents.
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Who is Philip Richard Perry?
Philip Richard Perry was born July 2, 2004, at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., the fourth of five children born to Liz Cheney and her husband, Philip Perry. He weighed 8 pounds, 6 ounces, and arrived at 11:02 in the morning, according to the White House’s own announcement that day. He was also Dick and Lynne Cheney’s first grandson, after three granddaughters born earlier in the marriage.
Beyond that record, and last year’s funeral, there is no public trace of his schooling, his career, or where he lives now. For a family that has been in the news for three decades, that near total silence is unusual.
His mother became one of the most talked about Republicans in the country
Liz Cheney was born July 28, 1966, the elder of Dick and Lynne Cheney’s two daughters. She married Philip Perry in 1993 and went on to hold the same Wyoming congressional seat her father had held two decades earlier, serving from 2017 until 2023.
Here is what happened during those six years:
- House Republicans elected her chair of their conference in 2019, one of the party’s top leadership positions in the House.
- She voted to impeach Donald Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot, and her own party removed her from that leadership post four months later, in May 2021.
- That fall, she became vice chair of the House committee investigating January 6. Wyoming’s Republican Party responded by revoking her party membership, and the Republican National Committee censured her the following year.
- Harriet Hageman, backed by Trump, beat her in the 2022 Republican primary by a wide margin, holding her to just 28.9 percent of the vote.
- She campaigned for Kamala Harris in 2024 and urged fellow Republicans to vote against their own party’s nominee.
- President Biden awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal in January 2025, days before leaving office.
She now teaches as a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
His father built a quieter career inside the same administration
Philip Jonathan Perry was born October 16, 1964, in San Diego County, California. He earned a law degree from Cornell in 1990. Over the next fifteen years, he worked inside the same Republican administration where his wife’s father served as vice president, first at the Justice Department, then at the White House Office of Management and Budget, before the Senate confirmed him unanimously in 2005 as general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, where he oversaw roughly 1,500 attorneys.
He returned to private practice in 2007 as a litigation partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington, where he still works today. He met Liz Cheney at a Colorado College alumni event in Washington, and they married in 1993.
Four siblings, all just as private
Philip Richard Perry has three older sisters and one younger brother. All five siblings were born between 1994 and 2006.
| Sibling | Born | Publicly known detail |
|---|---|---|
| Kate Perry | 1994 | Married in 2021; expecting her first child around the time of the funeral |
| Elizabeth Perry | 1997 | Attended a Taylor Swift concert with her mother in 2024 |
| Grace Perry | 2000 | Also spoke at the funeral, recalling that her grandfather refused to trust GPS |
| Philip Richard Perry | 2004 | Spoke at the funeral; no other public record exists |
| Richard Jonathan Perry | 2006 | Born at the same hospital as his brother; also spoke at the funeral |
None of the five has ever given an interview.
A name built from two generations
Dick Cheney’s real first name was Richard. Dick was always the nickname. That matters here, because Philip Richard Perry’s name pairs his father’s first name with his grandfather’s actual one. His younger brother’s name flips the same pairing: Richard for their grandfather, Jonathan for their father’s middle name.
Nobody in the family has explained the choice publicly. But both Perry sons carry a piece of Dick Cheney’s identity built directly into their names, at the same time their mother spent her final years in Congress at odds with most of her own party over Donald Trump.
The part of this family that was never explained
Liz Cheney’s break with her own party is a matter of public record: an impeachment vote, a leadership removal, revocation of her state party membership, a landslide primary loss, and an endorsement of the opposing party’s presidential nominee.
None of her five children has ever discussed any of it publicly, not the impeachment vote, not the leadership fight, not the Harris endorsement. The single time any of them spoke at all was at the funeral, and even then the subject was fishing trips and Thanksgiving dinners, not politics.
A family that built its public identity around one of the loudest political splits in modern Washington raised a set of children who say almost nothing at all. Whether that was a rule the family set for itself, or simply what happens when five siblings watch their mother turn into a headline, none of them has ever said.
Quick answers about Philip Richard Perry
When was he born?
He was born on July 2, 2004, in Washington, D.C.
Who are his parents?
His mother is former congresswoman Liz Cheney. His father is Washington attorney Philip Perry, a partner at Latham & Watkins.
Does he have siblings?
Yes. He has three older sisters, Kate, Elizabeth and Grace, and one younger brother, Richard.
Is he related to Dick Cheney?
Yes. He is Dick Cheney’s first grandson, born to Cheney’s elder daughter, Liz.
What is known, and what still isn’t
There is no public sign that the family’s silence is about to change. What’s known about him still begins and ends in the same place: a birth record from 2004, and the one time he spoke, when he said little, meant it, and sat back down.
