In My Time (10 page)

They set some ground rules: We weren’t allowed to ask questions or say anything; we could only observe. The faculty in the room that day had a long list of concerns—about students, about the administration, about the chaos—but no one addressed the larger context. As we met, college campuses all across the country were in an upheaval, and it was a traumatic time in American politics. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the year before; the war in Vietnam was raging. We’d just lived through the Tet Offensive, the presidential election of 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run, and the election of Richard Nixon. There were many incredibly intelligent people in that room whose scholarly achievements had given the University of Wisconsin its sterling reputation. But the meeting could hardly have been further removed from the experience I was having in Washington, and I was beginning to realize that it was the political life that I preferred.

Back in D.C., the congressmen briefed the president on their campus visits and issued a public report that offered a number of ideas, including lowering the voting age to eighteen. While condemning violence on campuses, the group stood united behind the idea of “no repressive legislation,” and the powers that be in Washington seemed to listen, because the move to deny federal aid died.

There were a few footnotes to our visit to the Wisconsin campus. Six months after we saw Fred Hampton at the SDS rally, he was killed in a police raid on a West Side Chicago apartment. The next summer in Madison, a van loaded with explosives blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center in Sterling Hall, where as a student I had often used the computer in off-hours when the time was cheap. The four student bombers had chosen the middle of the night, thinking that the building would be deserted, but a graduate student with a wife and three young children was there working. He was killed and three others seriously injured.

__________

AFTER ONLY A COUPLE of months of working for Steiger, it was, according to APSA rules, time to begin planning for the switch to the other house and the other party. Having begun the fellowship with a Republican congressman, I would be expected to complete it with a Democratic senator. In my case, it wouldn’t be just any Democratic senator, because there was a slot waiting for me in Ted Kennedy’s office.

Ordinarily this half-and-half arrangement made great sense. Most fellows were assigned to a member of the staff and given the kinds of projects that could be completed in a couple of months; few had any direct contact with the boss except in an occasional staff meeting. But Steiger had kept me working closely with him from my first day on the job. I didn’t want to leave such a unique position just when I was starting to get up to speed.

I had a good relationship with Bob Bates, the APSA intern assigned to Senator Kennedy’s office, and I knew that he felt the same way about working there. He had been assigned to the press secretary and had been given some significant responsibilities. We had lunch and hatched a plot to make the switch on paper and show up for a day at our “new” jobs before returning to the old ones.

It took another lunch (and a couple of martinis) to convince the APSA program director that our intentions were as pure as our logic was sound. After I met briefly with Senator Kennedy, who was polite but distracted, and Bob Bates met with Steiger, each of us went back to the offices where we had started our fellowships. I never really worked for Senator Kennedy, though for the rest of my political career, I expected that any day someone was going to turn up paperwork saying that for four months I did.

DON RUMSFELD WAS SWORN in as director of OEO on May 26, 1969. That same afternoon I got a call from Frank Carlucci, who said Rumsfeld had asked him to help get OEO up and running. He wanted to know if I would be part of a task force they were setting up. I said I would be happy to be there, and the next morning I went to the OEO building at Nineteenth and M Streets, where I was welcomed by Carlucci
and then joined about fifty other people jammed into a conference room.

Carlucci, who would quickly become a friend (and, years later, would be my predecessor as secretary of defense), was a compact, wiry man whom Rumsfeld had met when they were both varsity wrestlers at Princeton. Although not yet forty he’d already had a storied career in the Foreign Service, including an assignment in the Congo during which he had been stabbed. He had been on his way to a sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Rumsfeld asked him to help out at OEO.

Rumsfeld came into the meeting and talked for half an hour, completely enthusiastic about OEO’s starting to make a real difference in the lives of the poor. This was not a man who had been sent to dismantle the agency. As soon as he left, a young woman came in. “Is there anybody here named Cheney?” she asked. I raised my hand and she motioned me out of the room and down a couple of corridors. “Mr. Rumsfeld would like to see you,” she said, opening a door and ushering me in.

Rumsfeld was seated at a desk and poring over a thick file. He didn’t look up, so I had a chance to observe his office. It had windows on two sides, none of them too clean, as I remember it. There was a desk, a sofa, and a coffee table that had clearly seen better days. A couple of cans were strategically placed under dark spots on the ceiling.

Finally he looked up and pointed at me. “You, you’re congressional relations,” he said. “Now get the hell out of here.”

Back in the corridor, it took me a minute to process what had just happened. It was harsher than my first encounter with Don Rumsfeld, but this time I had been offered a job. Accepting it would mean delaying my return to Wisconsin and the work on my Ph.D., but I told myself that it was only for a year, and I’d have a chance to be where the action was, where things were getting decided. I set out down the hall to find the congressional relations office, not realizing what a life-altering decision I was making. I didn’t know I was saying goodbye to the academic world forever and signing up for a forty-year career in politics and government—but it was exactly the right call.

__________

THE OEO CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS office was small and leaderless, and although I was still a congressional fellow, I found myself working with the House and Senate in Washington as well as with governors and legislatures across the country. The state-level relationships were frequently more complicated—and far more testy—because many governors felt that OEO’s reason for being was to make things difficult for them. Governors had the right to veto OEO programs, and the director of the agency had the right to overrule those vetoes. This situation guaranteed a lively and contentious time.

One morning soon after I arrived, I got an irate call from the governor’s office in Juneau, Alaska, about an OEO grant that was in the works. If it went forward, I was warned, the governor would veto it and we would have a real mess on our hands. I assured the voice on the phone that I would look into the situation, and after a few calls, I found the individual in our building responsible for the grant. I asked him to bring me the package so I could study it. Half an hour later, it had been delivered by hand and was locked in my desk drawer, where I intended it to stay until I could sort things out.

A couple of days later Juneau was back on the phone. The grant, which was still locked in my desk, had just been announced, and the governor was about to hold a press conference condemning the project and proclaiming his veto. I learned that there were multiple copies of the grant package and that my request for one of them had triggered an alarm that led to the speeding up of the announcement. Thus in my first days I learned a valuable lesson about dealing with bureaucracies: There is always more than one copy.

One morning I got a call from Bill Bradley, who said that Rumsfeld had asked him to meet with me. Bradley’s arrival at OEO, another example of Rumsfeld’s Princeton connection, had created a minor stir. Although he was in only his second season as forward for the New York Knicks, Bradley’s background as an Olympic champion and Rhodes scholar had already made him a national figure, and his interest in politics was widely known.

Rumsfeld had given Bradley the task of finding him an all-purpose assistant, a job I was certainly interested in. Since my peremptory hiring I’d had the opportunity to spend some time with Rumsfeld, and it turned out that our different personalities and temperaments actually worked well together. He was certainly a tough and demanding boss, but no tougher or more demanding of others than of himself, and that was a quality I greatly respected. Beneath the gruff exterior he was as thoughtful as he was focused, and he had developed an intensely loyal team of which I already considered myself a part.

Bradley interviewed a number of people, and at the end of that process, I had the job. Since Rumsfeld was not only OEO director, but also an assistant to the president, I now had a desk in the West Wing of the White House. There was nothing fancy about my White House office. It was more like a closet, and I shared it with Don Murdoch, another Rumsfeld assistant. But a desk in the West Wing was a prime piece of Washington real estate, and I’ll confess I was pretty proud of it.

I now started each morning with Rumsfeld at the White House. While he attended the senior staff meeting, I got a head start on his day. Then we were driven over to the OEO building, where we worked until early evening. Then it was back to the White House for a few more hours before we headed home, he to what had to be Georgetown’s smallest row house and I to the apartment in Annandale.

When I moved onto the federal payroll at OEO, I had to fill out a number of very comprehensive forms. One of them asked about prior arrests, and I listed my two DUI incidents in 1962 and 1963. Apparently this had raised no alarms at OEO, but when the FBI conducted the usual full field investigation for anyone who would be working in the West Wing, red flags went up.

Rumsfeld called me into his office and asked if it was true I had been arrested twice. I said I had. He asked if I had put the arrests on the original form. I said I had. He asked his secretary to bring the file in, and he studied the form closely. Then he closed the file. “Okay, that’s good enough for me.” There were plenty of young people with outstanding records that Rumsfeld might have turned to once he became
aware of the blemishes on mine. But he stood by me, and I have never forgotten that.

IN SEPTEMBER, KENTUCKY GOVERNOR Louie Nunn vetoed renewed OEO funding for an antipoverty program in the mountainous eastern part of his state, charging corruption and claiming that federal funds were being used to entrench the local Democratic Party and the Turner family that controlled it. Nunn, a Republican governor, had been an early and strong supporter of Nixon, and the White House naturally wanted to be responsive. But the program was in the home district of Democratic congressman Carl Perkins, one of the most powerful men in Washington and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, which authorized OEO’s budget. Moreover, the Turners weren’t the kind to buckle under pressure, as I learned when Rumsfeld sent me to Breathitt County to see if I could figure out what was going on.

Treva Turner Howell, whose parents had established the Turner dynasty, took me around to show me all the good works OEO was funding. At the end of the day she drove me back to her house, sat me down at the kitchen table, and poured us both stiff bourbons. With great charm and even more insistence, she restated her case, reminded me of Chairman Perkins’s interest in her work, and indicated that as far as corruption was concerned, she had the goods on Louie Nunn.

OEO funds were, without doubt, strengthening the political hold of Breathitt County’s Democratic machine, headed by Jeff Davis Howell, Treva’s husband, and while it could be argued that this was improper, my job was to find out whether it was illegal. When I got back to Washington and Rumsfeld wanted to know whether the program was corrupt, my answer was: possibly, but there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to charge illegality. That was enough for him. He overrode Governor Nunn’s veto.

Louie Nunn went through the roof, and Rumsfeld found himself in a meeting with Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, who had taken Nunn’s call. Ehrlichman conveyed the governor’s particular unhappiness that some interloper named Cheney had undercut his authority,
and he suggested sending a White House team to investigate, a step Rumsfeld argued against. Because the basic question was whether the operation was illegal, Rumsfeld suggested sending the FBI. I was not surprised when I heard that the FBI reached the same conclusion I had, and the veto override stood.

ON APRIL 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese had been stockpiling ammunition and staging troops for the war in South Vietnam.

Meeting President Nixon for the first time with Don Rumsfeld in the Oval Office in 1970. I had seen President Johnson at his last address to a joint session of Congress in January 1969. I’d also seen President Kennedy when he visited the University of Wyoming in 1962, and President Harry Truman in 1948 when he’d done a whistle stop tour campaigning through Nebraska, but Nixon was the first president I’d ever met. (Official White House Photo)