In My Time (19 page)

A campaign plan drafted by Mike Duval, Foster Chanock, Bob Teeter, and Jerry Jones recommended that the president engage Carter in a series of debates. The president liked the idea of going on the offense and issued the debate challenge in his convention speech. It was a bolder move than it might sound today, when presidential debates are a given and even the running mates are expected to square off. There hadn’t been any debates since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and no sitting president had ever agreed to, much less proposed, a joint televised appearance with his opponent.

The Ford-Carter debates are remembered now for one exchange that cost us dearly. It seems almost beside the point to note that our man came out of the first exchange looking great and climbing in the polls. It was that next encounter, in San Francisco on October 6, that broke our momentum.

The trouble came with a question to the president from Max Frankel of the
New York Times.
It concerned America’s dealings with the Soviets, and Frankel implied that the Helsinki Accords constituted acceptance of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. That hit a sore spot with Ford, who felt that Helsinki had been misrepresented, and in the course of his answer the president declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
When Frankel pressed him again, the president clarified his answer some: “The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”

Watching this on television from the green room behind the stage, I thought it sounded odd, but I didn’t expect it to be much of a problem. In fact, when the full ninety minutes were up, I thought that apart from that one misstep, Ford had put in another solid performance. Not long afterward, however, when Stu Spencer and I paid the usual post-event call on the press corps, I knew something bad was up when my friend Lou Cannon of the
Washington Post
saw me and called out, “Hey, Cheney, how many Soviet divisions are there in Poland?”

The president’s slip-up, which some were already calling the “liberation” of Eastern Europe, was the only story of the night. Our field poll conducted during the debate registered no adverse impact from Ford’s statement. But the press and the Carter campaign were working on that, and by the next day we were hurting badly. As we boarded Air Force One for the hour-long flight to Los Angeles, I was sure that nothing short of a retraction would do. Ford would simply have to admit that he misspoke, offer a clarification, and get this thing behind us.

The moment we were in the air, I made straight for the president’s cabin and laid it on the line. He was unconvinced, insisting it was an innocent mistake that voters wouldn’t hold against him—
of course
the leader of the free world understood that Soviet forces were not in Eastern Europe by invitation. When Ford sent me away, I went for reinforcements and came back with Stu Spencer, who helped explain to the president that this was bigger than he thought.

Okay, Ford finally agreed. He’d try to clear it up at the next stop. But even the statement he offered soon afterward at the University of Southern California and yet another statement the next morning to a San Fernando Valley business group did nothing to get us out of the fix we were in. Someone had to tell the president that his two “clarifications” were just not clear enough. He needed to face the problem and the press directly, and it had to happen immediately, before he left Southern California.

When Spencer and I finally got him cornered and the president agreed to meet the problem head-on, we were in the mayor’s office at the city hall in Glendale. Ford had just addressed a rally outside, and I’d been back talking to reporters, who were enjoying all of this a little too much. By now they were writing about almost nothing else. I told the president that we could set up the press in the back parking lot and he could clean things up once and for all right there.

Even then he needed persuading, but we didn’t let up, until finally he said, “Oh, all right, I’ll do it.” As press secretary Ron Nessen shepherded the press into place, we went carefully over what Ford was going to say. When it was time to go out, I was still worried that he wouldn’t be as blunt and direct as the moment required, so I said, “Mr. President, do you have firmly fixed in your mind what it is you want to say?” He spun around on me and said, jabbing a finger in my chest with every word, “Poland is not dominated by the Soviet Union!” The tension broke with a good laugh, and his performance with the press a few moments later showed the candidate at his best.

There was no getting around the setback the Ford campaign had suffered, but in the closing days of the election the president drew roughly even with Carter. Gallup even had him ahead by one on the day before the election. We were hopeful of victory, but realistic enough to know that everything would have to break our way in the end. And accomplishing that, in those final hours, seemed a tough proposition.

I suppose that’s why we all found ourselves so emotional on the very last stop of the campaign, in Ford’s hometown of Grand Rapids. On the morning of Election Day, the citizens of Grand Rapids unveiled a special tribute. It was a mural in the local airport terminal, showing scenes of Ford’s life from boyhood to the presidency. Seeing it for the first time, he got pretty choked up and spoke of his mother, Dorothy, and adoptive father, Gerald R. Ford, Sr., and all they had done for him. It was as sincere and sweet a moment as you’re likely to see during a campaign, and the genuine feeling in the room—a town’s pride in a favorite son, and a man’s loving gratitude to his parents—was lost on no one. I recall looking over to the press area and seeing a few tears even
there. For all of us, it was a reminder that however the fates played that day, the career that began here in Grand Rapids was quite a story, and the vote we awaited could take nothing away from all that had been achieved in the life of this good man.

I HAD ONE MORE unexpected part to play in the election of 1976. Wednesday morning, after the results were in, it was time to call President-elect Carter. Having just about lost his voice by then, all Ford could manage were a few words of congratulations before turning the phone over to me to read his formal statement conceding the election. If Jimmy Carter ever enjoyed the sound of my voice, that would have been the time. I didn’t care for the task, but it was surely a great moment in Carter’s life, and he had earned the satisfaction and title that were now his.

The truest glimpses of democracy in action don’t always come during a presidential election, but often right afterward, when suddenly one team places itself at the service of the other. Overnight, you go from “How do we beat them?” to “How can we help them?” The finality of defeat has a way of awakening goodwill all around, sometimes more than the losing side might have thought possible.

So it was with the transition from Ford to Carter. To my own surprise, I had no trouble at all showing the ropes to Jack Watson, Carter’s transition chief, and the rest of the incoming staff. Under orders from Ford and with the details ably handled by Jack Marsh and military aide Major Bob Barrett, my job was to make sure the Carter people had the calm and orderly transition into power that Ford never got. The whole Ford team took pride in carrying out the president’s wishes.

On January 20, 1977, after a breakfast with senior White House staff and some final sorting and packing in the West Wing, I hopped in the motorcade to the Capitol. I figured it would be the last time I would have a close view of an inauguration, and the plan from there was to leave with former President Ford on the helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base. From just inside the doorway to the Capitol Rotunda, I watched Jimmy Carter take the oath of office and then in a gracious
touch, thank Gerald R. Ford “for all he has done to heal our land.” Moments earlier, I had also made a point of watching the real transfer of power. At the very instant Carter had finished reciting the oath of office, I watched as the “football”—the heavy briefcase containing nuclear launch codes—was passed from the hands of Ford’s military aide to Carter’s.

There were handshakes and goodbyes on the way to the chopper, and as we lifted off and circled the Capitol dome, there was not much to say. Waiting for me at Andrews were Lynne and the girls; we joined a big crowd there to see the Fords off on their journey to California. And what next for us? Well, with no work to do, not much of a plan, and just ten days to go before my thirty-sixth birthday, we piled into our silver station wagon and decided to get something to eat. Just outside the gates of Andrews is a McDonald’s I’d passed a hundred times in White House vehicles, always with better things to do than pull in for a Big Mac and fries. Now it was a different story, and the afternoon was given over to a leisurely lunch under the golden arches.

There would be plenty of time down the road for taking stock of the Ford years and my part in the story. Better still, our thirty-eighth president would live well into his nineties, and as the years advanced so would our friendship. In the winter of 1977, however, it was hard to shake the feeling of disappointment at having come so close to earning a full term for Jerry Ford and not quite making it.

In the way of consolations, my colleagues and I knew at least that the presidency of Gerald Ford was incomplete only in its count of 895 days. It had been filled with testing and trial enough for a much longer stay. And we who had worked for this president knew he had proved as worthy of that office as any who had ever come before. I’ve always liked the late columnist David Broder’s observation that Ford was exactly the kind of person Americans say they want in a president, but didn’t know it when they had him.

My own debt to the man is beyond my power to settle, though he was not the type to make you feel indebted. Just about everything that followed in my career I trace back to the break he gave me and the confidence
he placed in me. Many others will tell you the same story about themselves. Among veterans of the Ford years, there is also a warmth and camaraderie you don’t always find among the alumni of administrations past. To a person, they’ll all tell you that this good spirit began with our leader.

The disappointment I felt in the winter of 1977 has long since given way to sheer gratitude for one of the greatest and happiest experiences in my life. My favorite memento from the period is a letter from my mother that I’ve kept in a frame for years. She wrote it the day after the ’76 election, saying, “It’s hard to put down what I feel—much love, much pride, and I know you will come out of this knowing that you did your best.” Sometimes in life that’s all you’re left with, the knowledge that you gave a job your best shot. And sometimes that’s enough.

W
hile the Carters were settling into the White House, the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds were on Eleuthera, a small island in the Bahamas, vacationing in a borrowed cottage. We swam and sailed, played tennis, and enjoyed conch soup, a local delicacy. We also spent several evenings dining off an enormous roast that Joyce Rumsfeld, who’d learned to be thrifty on a government salary, had cooked at home and brought along in her luggage.

After two and a half very intense years, our time in the Bahamas was a most welcome break, but when we got back to Washington, I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Age thirty-six was too young to retire. I had lost all desire to return to the academic world, which appeared pretty tame after a tour in the Ford White House. There were some private sector possibilities, but most involved becoming part of the permanent Washington establishment, and that held no attraction for me.

In the end I decided that what I really wanted to do was run for office. I wanted to put my name on the ballot, and if I was going to
do that, the best place for me was Wyoming. It was not at all certain that the opportunity to run would occur anytime soon, but once I had decided I wanted to pursue a career in public office back home, it made no sense to hang around Washington. As I have told many an aspiring candidate since, if you want to run for office, you have to get out of D.C. and establish yourself someplace around the country where you may someday have the chance to run. Washington is full of people who would like to hold office and would be good at it, but they can’t bring themselves to take that first step.

In June 1977, as soon as school was out, I loaded up a rental truck and drove to Casper, then came back to Washington, rented another truck, and repeated the trip, taking eight-year-old Mary with me this time. I hitched our Volkswagen Beetle behind the moving truck, and at Lynne’s insistence, filled it with houseplants. Mary, armed with an old Windex bottle full of water, was given the job of spraying down the houseplants every time we stopped for gas.

Back home in Casper, we moved into a comfortable old house with a big porch across the front. White with green shutters, it had been built in 1916 by one of the original ranch families in central Wyoming. It needed a lot of work, most of which Lynne and I did ourselves, everything from stripping wallpaper to repairing the roof. I joined the board of a local bank and did a little work for my old firm, Bradley Woods and Company. Lynne got a part-time teaching job at the community college.