In My Time (15 page)

Having been on the receiving end of it for so many years, President Ford was well acquainted with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, conferring the veto power. Few presidents have put it to better use. In all he sent back sixty-six pieces of legislation to Congress, preventing billions of dollars in unnecessary spending and helping lay to rest any assumptions on Capitol Hill that the executive branch had been cowed into submission by Richard Nixon’s impeachment crisis.

The president also laid down a rule for the executive branch stating that with very few exceptions there would be no new spending initiatives.
We called this mandate “No New Starts,” and it fell to me to be the enforcer. I had to defend this policy many times, and against no one more often than the vice president.

Quite apart from his personal advantages, which had instilled in him little fear of large price tags, Nelson Rockefeller had been governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. In that capacity he had conceived and executed a series of huge projects. When President Ford placed him in charge of domestic policy, new federal initiatives seemed to the vice president like the natural order of the day.

Ford held a weekly meeting with his vice president, and Rockefeller often used the time to lobby for his latest ideas. Listening to a few of those pitches myself, I could see why Ford liked and admired this man, who had natural charm and a forceful personality. After his meetings with the vice president, Ford would often call me into the Oval Office, hand me Rockefeller’s latest proposal, and say, “Dick, what do we do with this?” And each time I would reply, “Well, Mr. President, we’ll staff it out.” This meant that the idea would be circulated for general review, including a cost assessment by OMB, and that it would invariably come back with the answer that the proposal had been found inconsistent with our policy of No New Starts.

That got the job done, but in time Rockefeller came to feel frustrated with limits that struck him as arbitrary and unimaginative. Despite the serious assignments Ford gave him in such matters as reassessing CIA programs and methods, in the end Rockefeller seemed to feel, as other vice presidents had before him, that the work of the office hadn’t measured up to the title.

Ford was always sensitive to Rockefeller’s situation, having counted his months as vice president as a generally miserable experience. But Rockefeller never blamed Ford for his disappointments in office. He decided that the cause of his troubles was elsewhere—with Don Rumsfeld and that deputy of his. In my case, I suppose it must have been a little galling to see his grand ideas sandbagged by some staff aide who was exactly half his age and who had never been elected to anything.

Rockefeller let loose on me only once, later on at the 1976 Republican
National Convention, after the sound system had mysteriously gone dead in the middle of his speech. Protocol issues earlier in the week—debates about whether it should be Rocky, the sitting vice president, or Bob Dole, the running mate, who joined Ford onstage after his acceptance speech—had left him feeling slighted one too many times. On the final night he spotted me in the corridor beneath the rostrum and saw a fitting target for all his frustrations. He leaned in close and really let me have it, even accusing me of sabotaging his speech. I took my verbal pounding, assured the vice president of my innocence, and got out of there as fast as I could.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas in 1974, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story reporting that the Central Intelligence Agency had engaged in illegal operations inside the United States, including placing wiretaps on American citizens and journalists. Within a matter of weeks, the Senate (the Church Committee) and the House (the Pike Committee) and the White House (the Rockefeller Commission) had all launched inquiries into the CIA’s activities.

Jack Marsh kept me apprised of the Rockefeller Commission’s progress and the work of the two committees on the Hill. The president was often irate about the congressional committees—and with good cause. At times their sensational proceedings seemed sure to cripple America’s intelligence capacity, if not destroy it. In the end, the result of the various CIA investigations was the disclosure of many unsavory activities that had taken place in the past, the correction of some very serious abuses that were still being committed, and a regularized procedure for congressional oversight that in ten years I would find myself a part of.

By the time President Ford came into office, the United States was unwinding its commitment in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed in January 1973 and American combat forces had been removed. The South Vietnamese government had been promised economic assistance to build up its defense forces, as well as renewed U.S. military action if the North Vietnamese violated the terms of the peace.

The violations began almost before the ink was dry and slowly continued, until at the beginning of 1975 the North Vietnamese had sent some three hundred thousand troops into South Vietnam and seized control of fourteen provinces. By the beginning of April, they were in a position to conduct a strike on Saigon. President Nixon had given his assurance that the U.S. would help the South Vietnamese resist a renewed enemy attack, but the antiwar forces in both houses of Congress were able to cut off funding that would have been necessary to support—or save—our South Vietnamese ally.

Faced with the lack of funds, President Ford could do nothing but evacuate, first from Cambodia, which fell on April 17, 1975, and then from Saigon. The night of April 28, when President Ford ordered the final evacuation of Saigon, I was at the White House. While the dramatic news footage kept the focus on the thousands of Americans and Vietnamese we were airlifting by helicopter off the roof of the American Embassy, I found it impossible to ignore the fact that we were leaving tens of thousands of Vietnamese who had cast their lot with us.

After that final unraveling, there was debate in the White House over what was left to be said about the conflict, and Ford’s instinct, as with the pardon after Watergate, was to let go of the past and find a way to bring the people and the country forward. In a speech at Tulane University in April, he declared the war “finished as far as America is concerned.” I was with him in New Orleans that night. I remember distinctly that when he spoke those words, some people in the audience wanted to cry and some wanted to cheer, but there was an unmistakable sense of relief for all of us that transcended one’s view of the war. Indeed, even for me, and I had supported the effort, hearing the president say those words was welcome in a way it is hard to describe. We had lost more than fifty-eight thousand young Americans in the war, and Vietnam had divided us as a nation for so long. The war in Southeast Asia had ended in an awful way, but at least it had ended. It was over.

From that low point onward, the great foreign policy challenge of the Ford presidency was to shake off the effects of a searing defeat.
Here was the first American president never elected to national office, overseeing the final withdrawal of American forces from a foreign theater of war in defeat. Ford was left to deal with the consequences of this devastating setback for America’s interests and morale. He faced a crucial test just a few weeks later, when communist forces in Cambodia seized the unarmed American merchant ship
Mayaguez
in international waters and captured its crew of thirty-nine men. The
Mayaguez
was anchored offshore, and President Ford ordered that U.S. naval aircraft should interdict any boat traffic between the mainland and the American ship.

When a small boat was spotted departing the
Mayaguez,
a naval aviator believed he saw some members of the U.S. crew aboard and had the good sense to confirm his order before firing. His request, relayed up his chain of command, made it all the way to the Pentagon and then to the commander in chief. We were in a meeting monitoring the crisis in the Cabinet Room when the president was informed he had a call. He picked up the handset of the telephone that hangs at the president’s spot underneath the cabinet table, listened to the request, and conveyed the order that the pilot should hold his fire. It was the right decision. The crew had been on board the small boat. It was also the only time in all the hours I have spent in meetings in the Cabinet Room that I recall seeing any president use the phone at his place.

All these years later, few people even remember the
Mayaguez
and to those who do, it may seem like a very small incident in the greater scheme of things. But President Ford’s swift action at the time—demanding the release of the crew and sending in the Marines and air strikes to ensure their safety and reclaim the vessel—had a lasting effect for the good. It said to our enemies and to the world that while America might have withdrawn from Vietnam and been forced to acquiesce in the hostile takeover of that nation, our adversaries would make a mistake to think that we would ignore provocation, particularly when American lives were involved.

Throughout the
Mayaguez
crisis, Henry Kissinger was constantly
on the phone monitoring the situation and demanding information. When I think of all that Henry had been through in that same room with President Nixon, I still marvel at the energy and focus he brought to the service of President Ford. He’d been with Nixon from 1969 until the very last day—seeing all the highs and lows of the Vietnam peace negotiations, the great breakthrough with China, the endless exertions of Cold War diplomacy, the shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East—and still showed no sign of weariness or passivity in his service to the president or his defense of America’s interests. Even while acting as both national security advisor and secretary of state, he was remarkably clear in mind and purpose. Henry was one of America’s higher-profile secretaries of state and not exactly the kind to resist the pull of celebrity. But all that was part of a very impressive package. If ever there was a Washington heavy hitter whose actual talents and achievements justified his star billing, it’s Henry. Nothing about him is overrated.

Of course Henry and I were far from peers in the Ford years when it came to our grasp of international affairs, and I was usually content to be a learner and listener in his company. This was the recommended practice for staff generally, as Henry was alert to his prerogatives and tolerated no intrusions. Indeed the only time I ran into trouble with him was because he suspected larger designs and far more guile than were in me at the age of thirty-four. In August 1975, after signing the Helsinki Accords, the president visited Poland and Yugoslavia. After Ford and the official delegation had settled into the hotel in Warsaw, I broke off from the group and was driven to a private home on the edge of the city. There, by prior arrangement, I met with our ambassador to East Germany, John Sherman Cooper. After a lengthy and highly useful conversation, Ambassador Cooper and I parted, and I returned to the business of the president’s trip.

A few days later, I was working aboard Air Force One when I found myself confronted by an extremely agitated secretary of state. Just who did I think I was, going off on my own to meet with one of “his” ambassadors? He was furious over this breach of hierarchy. And in no uncertain terms he told me that whatever nefarious things were going on with
my secret meetings and back channels, they were completely unacceptable. He wanted a stop to it at once. The president would hear about this. Cooper ought to be fired on the spot. And so on.

It took some doing, but I got Henry calmed down and explained that the president had asked me to see the ambassador because he’d been thinking ahead to next year’s primary elections. John Sherman Cooper had been involved in Kentucky Republican politics since the 1920s, had been one of the state’s United States senators for more than three terms, and had served as an ambassador under Eisenhower before Ford had made him a diplomat several months before. Kentucky’s thirty-seven delegates would be up for grabs in the upcoming primary, and where Republican politics in the Bluegrass State were concerned, the man to see was John Sherman Cooper. So it was all perfectly innocent, and I assured Henry that I wasn’t doing any diplomatic maneuvering behind the master’s back. That ended my upbraiding, and it turned out that my perilous mission to the Warsaw suburbs was worth it. With a lot of good advice from Cooper, President Ford managed a come-from-behind victory in the Kentucky primary.

Actually, the closest I ever came to acting as a diplomat in those days was in my occasional role as mediator between Henry and others in the administration. One day in early 1976, the offending party, as Henry saw it, was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Pat was our ambassador to the United Nations and as his counterparts there could attest, was not the sort to keep his complaints to himself. Both men knew how to work the press too, and for some time had been taking shots at each other through unattributed quotes fed to James “Scotty” Reston of the
New York Times.

The final straw came on the last day of January. I’d gone with the president to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was going to kick off the 1976 bicentennial celebration with a speech in the old colonial House of Burgesses. Ford was in the very chamber where Patrick Henry, protesting the Stamp Act, had denounced King George III. But instead of sitting in the gallery witnessing this moving and historic event, I was upstairs in a cramped, stuffy closet where a White House phone
line had been installed, listening to Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have at it. I must have spent an hour in that closet refereeing the fight, with my brief interjections mostly only allowing the smoke to clear so they could both reload and take aim again. It all ended with Moynihan’s resignation.

ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING, our thoughts were never very far from the impending presidential election. Ford had announced on July 8, 1975, that he would run for a full term in 1976. Although that was a fairly early start for an incumbent’s campaign, here again he was on new ground, and none of us doubted that we were going to need every bit of that time to get things up and running. Ford had never run for office outside Michigan’s 5th District, so we would have to build a national political organization virtually from scratch in less than twelve months.