In My Time (13 page)

W
hile I waited for Rumsfeld’s flight, I was joined by a White House driver carrying a message for Don. The new president wanted Rumsfeld to head up his transition team. As we left the airport and headed for D.C. in the White House car, Don showed me the message and asked me if I would take a few weeks off from my job to help him out. It wasn’t a question I had to think twice about. A president had just resigned under the most extraordinary circumstances, another had been sworn in, and I had a chance to assist in the changeover.

As we drove into the White House complex through the southwest gate, I couldn’t help but think with amazement that I had left government eighteen months ago, and now here I was right back in it. I was fully aware that the fact that I had left before Watergate erupted was one of the reasons I was here, and the same was true of Don. He and I had one other advantage. We were both young and foolish enough to think there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do.

The transition office was in the basement of the Old Executive
Office Building, and I spent the next ten days there, writing and reviewing sections of the transition report. I wasn’t senior enough to be in the meetings with the president, but the orders I got secondhand were unequivocal and unmistakable: We were to stick to organizational and domestic matters. President Ford didn’t want any recommendations for changing foreign policy. He believed that continuity there was essential. Indeed, on the night before he became president, he had stepped outside his house in Virginia to announce that Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger would be staying on.

Perhaps the new president’s most pressing decision involved the selection of his vice president—and that was also to be outside the purview of the transition committee. Bryce Harlow, an old Washington hand trusted by all, was instrumental in the process. Harlow prepared a tally sheet on a yellow legal pad, listing all the possible vice presidential choices down one side and their qualifications on the other. Ford later told me that his choice had really come down to three individuals: Nelson Rockefeller, George H. W. Bush, and Don Rumsfeld.

Ford said he viewed Bush and Rumsfeld as the future of the party, and Rockefeller as the establishment candidate. He went with Rockefeller, in large part because the unique circumstances of Ford’s sudden accession to the presidency called for a vice president who needed no introduction to the world.

On the evening of August 19, 1974, Don happened to be at our house in Bethesda. We listened to the kitchen radio as news reports described the unfolding scene at Rockefeller’s New York estate, where aides and family members were gathering. A fleet of sedans was lined up, and Rockefeller family jets stood by ready to fly the whole entourage to Washington. Don laughed at the superior resources Rockefeller brought to the competition. “Here’s Nelson Rockefeller with planeloads of people flying down from New York,” he said, “and all I’ve got is you, Cheney.”

Shortly after the Rockefeller announcement, the transition team presented its report to the president. Rumsfeld and I went our separate ways, he back to his NATO post in Brussels and I back to Bradley
Woods. Thus, like most of America, I was surprised a few weeks later when on September 8 President Ford announced that he was granting a “full, free, and absolute pardon” to Richard Nixon. He described his action as a way to “shut and seal” the matter of Watergate and to mitigate the suffering of Richard Nixon and his family.

All these years later, the wisdom and generosity of Gerald Ford’s instincts have been recognized for their courage and honored for their rightness. But at the time the pardon was controversial and unpopular. I was among the majority of Americans who thought then that it was a mistake. While I was prepared to believe that it might be justified eventually, I was sure that it would cost Ford too much of his support in the near term.

The immediate result was indeed a firestorm of controversy and criticism. According to a Gallup poll, Ford’s approval rating dropped from 71 percent to 49 percent. The press corps declared the pardon indefensible. They condemned the president and lionized their former colleague Jerald terHorst, whom Ford had just named as the White House press secretary. When terHorst was informed about the pardon, he resigned in protest just as the president was about to go on camera. Across the country people who had been relieved by Ford’s becoming president turned negative. There were widespread rumors about a secret deal, with Ford being elevated to the presidency in return for promising to pardon his predecessor. News of all this was accompanied by stories of bitter turmoil and conflict between Nixon and Ford people in the White House—at least some of which were true.

In addition to the negative impact on the president’s own approval rating, the pardon clearly hurt us in the 1974 elections, which followed less than two months after the pardon was issued. Many commentators believe it ultimately cost Ford reelection. The impact of the pardon was intensified by the fact that it was a total surprise to everyone. Ford announced it on a Sunday morning at a time when not many people were watching television, so few Americans heard his explanation directly. Additionally, the announcement was made without any notification to the Congress or discussion in the press. I always believed that the negative
impact could have been lessened if more thought had been given to how the pardon was announced.

While I was unfortunately accurate in my assessment of the negative political impact, I was wrong about the wisdom of the pardon itself. It was clearly the right decision, and over the next few years in the White House, I was thankful that Watergate was behind us rather than hanging over our heads with a former president facing trial.

A week or so after the pardon, I was in Florida on a business trip when I got a call from Rumsfeld. Once again the president had asked him to come back from Europe, and once again he wanted to meet with me before he went to the White House. On Saturday night, September 21, we met in his room at the Key Bridge Marriott, just across the Potomac River from Georgetown, and he said he believed President Ford was going to ask him to be White House chief of staff. If he took the post—and given the serious disarray at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that was a big if—he wanted to know whether I would agree to sign on with him. I said I would. When he called me the next morning, he had accepted the job and asked me to be his deputy.

A week later, on Sunday, September 29, I met President Ford for the first time.

With President Ford during one of our daily sessions in the Oval Office (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

Rumsfeld had a meeting at the White House, so I went with him to look around the chief of staff’s West Wing suite in preparation for moving in. I remember being particularly fascinated with the desk that Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, had designed especially to meet his needs. It was enormous, covering an entire wall, and it was an electronic masterpiece that included the ability to record office conversations. The phones were all equipped with “cutout” buttons that permitted a secretary or an aide to pick up an extension and listen in without the outside party hearing any telltale clicks.

When Don came back from his meeting
in the Oval Office
, he brought the president with him. Ford was extremely pleasant and gracious, which I knew took some effort because he was clearly preoccupied with the condition of his wife, Betty, who had undergone surgery for breast cancer the day before. What I remember most about that first encounter was how quickly and completely Jerry Ford accepted me. I
was thirty-three years old, just six years out of graduate school, with a résumé that wouldn’t necessarily rise to the top of anyone’s pile. All I really had going for me was the good opinion of Don Rumsfeld.

In the Oval Office on April 28, 1975, with President Ford and
Don Rumsfeld, two men who changed my life. (Official White House Photo/David
Kenner)

And suddenly I had the confidence of the president of the United States. At the time I felt very lucky and grateful to them both, and the feeling has never changed.

When Don and I started work on Monday morning, it was clear that the task at hand was enormous. We made a preliminary decision not to get bogged down in any of the projects that were already under way or any of the turf wars or personnel problems that were beginning to reach critical mass in the West Wing. Our job was to concentrate on laying the groundwork for future efforts by reorganizing and staffing the White House. It was obvious that many of the carryover Nixon people needed to go so that we could put a fresh face on the new administration.

Jerry Ford was very different from Richard Nixon—to put it mildly—and it was important that the administration reflect the man it served. At the same time it was important not to be indiscriminate, unfair, or vindictive. Nixon had attracted many able and exceptional men and women, and it would be unfair to them and a disservice to the country to make them suffer from guilt by association. One of them, speechwriter and communications expert Pat Buchanan, chose to quit, and we were sorry to lose him. Others like Red Cavaney, Jerry Jones, and Terry O’Donnell agreed to stay on in key posts. The point was to make decisions on individuals and on the merits. After all, if everyone who had worked for Nixon were to be automatically terminated, Don and I would have to be among the first to go.

We knew that many of the new people coming on with Ford had little or no experience in the executive branch, and we didn’t think that on-the-job training in the White House was a good idea. One of the bright exceptions was Jack Marsh, whom Ford had named counselor to the president, with cabinet rank. Jack had served in Congress for eight years as a Democratic representative from Virginia. Nixon had appointed him assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, and
when Ford was named vice president, he brought Jack on board as his national security advisor. In the Ford White House, Jack would take on many difficult assignments and handle them all with skill. He was a pillar of strength for the president—and for me.

But for the most part, the new people were green. And being green in Washington—as I had discovered when I thought I had solved the Alaska OEO grant problem by locking the paperwork up in my desk—can create problems. The mechanism, for example, by which material and memos were circulated for comment and review before going to the president was still entirely in the hands of Nixon holdovers. The new Ford staffers, many of whom were still isolated across the street from the White House in the Old Executive Office Building, didn’t even realize that they were out of the information loop.

One obstacle to bringing order to the White House in the early months was President Ford’s preferred model of White House organization, a design he described as the “spokes of the wheel” model, which was based on the way he had structured his congressional and committee staffs. The idea was to have eight or nine senior advisors each reporting directly to him, without any one having authority over the rest. It was a collegial style of doing business that had served him well for twenty-five years on the Hill as a representative from Michigan, and he assumed it would work in the White House. There was also a widespread belief that Watergate had been caused in part by Bob Haldeman’s domination of the White House staff, and Ford saw “spokes of the wheel” as a healthy break from the past. The problem was that it soon became clear it didn’t work. It took a while, but the president finally agreed that he needed someone on the staff who could wield real authority, a conclusion that all his successors have ratified.