Known and Unknown (110 page)

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I first gathered the sayings and thoughts that collectively would become known as “Rumsfeld's Rules” while I served in the U.S. Congress in the 1960s. I continue to accumulate them to this day. Some rules are original. Many are quotes or variations of ideas from others. If known, the original source is credited. Readers will find examples of the rules scattered through this book.

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Most of the hostages were held until January 20, 1981, the day Reagan was inaugurated president.

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The casualties included 220 Marines, 18 Navy corpsmen, and 3 Army soldiers.

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The alleged mastermind of the attacks—Imad Mughniyeh—was indicted in absentia by a U.S. grand jury. Immediately after the Beirut bombing he took flight and could not be found. Mughniyeh became one of the world's most wanted terrorists. Over the decades he was linked to a number of other high-profile attacks until he was killed, ironically, by a car bomb in Syria in 2008.

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Eventually, the Pentagon settled on an air strike against the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, on December 4, 1983. The result was that the Syrians sustained little damage and the United States looked ineffective.
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I had known Weinberger from our time in the Nixon administration. He had served as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he was known as “Cap the Knife” for his cost-cutting efforts, and later as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). When he became Secretary of Defense, he had a different task. The Carter administration had systematically reversed the DoD budget increases James Schlesinger and I had initiated under President Ford, and when Reagan came in, the DoD budget needed to be increased. Cap and I were friends, and when he died in 2006, Colin Powell, who had been one of his senior military assistants, and I delivered eulogies.
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Every presidential administration since Richard Nixon's has held that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional.

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The military adviser in Lebanon was Brigadier General Carl Stiner, a pivotal figure in the development of U.S. special operations forces.
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The shelling from the
New Jersey
kicked up dust but did no damage whatsoever. As I learned from my former senior military assistant, Vice Admiral Staser Holcomb, then serving as commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, the President's orders to respond to the shelling had come down the military chain of command “through multiple sets of clenched teeth.” In other words, no one had been insubordinate, but the reluctance at each level had the effect of substantially modifying the response Reagan intended.

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The dangers confronting the Gemayel family did not end with the murder of Bashir, and they did not disappear after the United States withdrew from Lebanon. Amine's son, Pierre, was openly critical of Syria's influence in his country. Twice elected to the country's parliament, Pierre was serving as Lebanon's industry minister when he was assassinated on November 21, 2006.

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The Kennedy who most aided the cause of the America Firsters was Joseph P. Kennedy, John's father and a former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Returning to the United States in 1940, he announced that the British would have to seek an accord with Nazi Germany. “Democracy is finished in England,” he was quoted in a notorious front-page article. “It may be here.”
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The Rumsfelds trace their roots to a small farm on the outskirts of Sudweye in Schleswig-Holstein. Members of our family can still be found there. In the late nineteenth century, my great-grandfather Johann Hermann Rumsfeld, a merchant seaman, immigrated to America. After settling initially on the East Coast, his son John von Johann Heinrich eventually made his way westward to Chicago.

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She itemized her expenses for Dad, including $70.00 for the house payment, $6.52 for gas and electricity, $2.60 for water; $8.37 for milk; $47.00 for six months' taxes, and $7.00 for my new pair of shoes. Mom supplemented our income by working as a substitute schoolteacher. The tight finances were yet another challenge that she—like so many other military wives—was facing on her own.
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Our entire primary campaign cost a whopping twelve thousand dollars. It was at the time the most money that had been spent in that district on a congressional race.

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There were some memorable characters. I was once on the House floor reading a bill that we were about to vote on later that day. Congressman John Byrnes of Wisconsin, well known as a serious legislator, came up to me. “Don't start reading that stuff, Don,” he said jokingly, “or you'll never make it around here.”

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Around the same time I found myself in similar circumstances regarding Japan. My father had volunteered to serve in the Navy in World War II and was assigned to the Pacific theater against the Japanese, then our bitter enemies. Less than two decades later Japan had embraced democracy and a Western economic system. I began involving myself in issues related to Japan, and began a long relationship with the people of that country. I helped establish the U.S.-Japan Parliamentary Exchange Program during the 1960s, which was designed to develop closer ties between legislators, businessmen, journalists, and scholars from both countries. I stayed engaged with Japan over the decades, serving on President Reagan's Commission on the Conduct of United States/Japan Relations from 1983 to 1984 and as a member of the board of trustees of the Japan Center for International Exchange from 1990 to 2001.

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There was a story circulating at that time about a meeting the President had with a group of industrialists. After issuing an optimistic prognosis for the country, Kennedy said, “If I were not President, I would be buying stock right now.” “Sir, if you were not President,” a man at the end of the table retorted, “I would be buying stock too.”

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For a rich lesson in Texas politics and U.S. history, it is worth listening to the historian Michael Beschloss's compilation of LBJ's secretly recorded tapes in
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964
and
Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965.

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The supermajority needed to stop a filibuster was changed from 67 votes to 60 votes in 1973.

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In the House 80 percent of Republicans voted in favor, compared to 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, the numbers were similar—82 percent of Republicans in favor versus 69 percent of Democrats.

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My Democratic opponent was a businessman, lawyer, and former vice president of the University of Chicago. He called me “more negative than Goldwater” and concluded that the “Goldwater-Rumsfeld attitudes and voting records are negative, irrelevant, and unsuited to our times. They seem to me doctrinaire and extreme.”
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The following Christmas, Ford graciously gave me a copy of his book about Lee Harvey Oswald,
Portrait of the Assassin
(Ford had served on the Warren Commission that had investigated the Kennedy assassination). Ford inscribed it: “To Don Rumsfeld in appreciation of your fine friendship and wonderful loyalty and to express my deep gratitude for your assistance, cooperation and leadership in the rugged days of 1965.”

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These efforts eventually took shape in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.

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We were friends outside work as well. Bill Steiger, Pete Biester, and their wives became close friends of Joyce's and mine. The Biesters lived a few blocks from us, and our children went to the same schools. Steiger had had solid experience in the Wisconsin state legislature as well as excellent political instincts. It was a real loss when he died shortly after his fortieth birthday in 1978, from complications of Type 1 diabetes.

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In his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln pointed out, “And so I think my friend, the Judge, is equally at fault when he charges me at the time when I was in Congress of having opposed our soldiers who were fighting in the Mexican War…. You remember I was an old Whig, and whenever the Democratic party tried to get me to vote that the war had been righteously begun by the President, I would not do it. But whenever they asked for any money, or land warrants, or anything to pay the soldiers there, during all that time, I gave the same votes that Judge Douglas did.”
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On June 2, 1965, I testified before the Joint Committee on the Organization of the Congress and raised a series of questions about the balance in responsibility between the executive and legislative branches of government.
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Thurmond made a strong pitch for his favorite candidate, a rising star in the conservative wing of the party: California Governor Ronald Reagan. Since Reagan, like Nixon, hailed from California, the ticket would lack geographic balance. Congressman John Rhodes of Arizona also threw out a name no one else had mentioned: Congressman Gerald Ford. But Ford, like Reagan, had few backers among GOP elders.

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I was later named cochairman of the Republican truth squad, along with Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott. Our small team of senators, governors, and congressmen followed Vice President Hubert Humphrey around the country and held press conferences after his appearances to get Nixon's positions into local media at the same time Humphrey was getting coverage. True to form, the genial Humphrey would occasionally stop by to see us and say hello, even as we were preparing to counter his presentation.

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Moynihan later served as ambassador to India and to the United Nations before being elected to the United States Senate from New York, holding the seat until 2000, when he retired.

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The census had determined that my congressional district's residents, while not the wealthiest in the country, did have the highest annual earned incomes.

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It was cold comfort some years later when Jack Anderson finally confessed that his column on me was among his biggest mistakes.
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I asked Cheney to work on a dispute involving a community action program in eastern Kentucky. He found himself smack in the middle of an old-fashioned Southern political blood feud between an influential Democrat, Treva Howell, and Republican governor Louie Nunn. Both were leveling serious allegations of wrongdoing at each other. The charges were so serious that I told key Nixon aide John Ehrlichman that the FBI needed to become involved. Ehrlichman said he intended to send what he called his “own people from the White House” to investigate. I told him that getting the White House involved in investigations of that type was one of the dumbest proposals I could imagine and that I would ask the FBI to look into it myself, which I proceeded to do. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover found that neither Howell nor Nunn had broken the law. Ehrlichman's team of investigators gained greater fame—or infamy—in subsequent years as “the White House plumbers.”
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When our family of two adults, three children, a dog, and a cat moved out a few years later, we were amused but not surprised to find that our house was advertised for sale as “suitable for a bachelor.”

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Even today, particularly on Sundays when we do not get to church, Joyce and I listen to a recording of Elvis singing gospel songs. He remains one of our favorite singers.

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The Cost of Living Council (CLC) did have one attraction: It was an education. It brought together the administration's finest economic experts—including Shultz, Arthur Burns, Herb Stein, Paul McCracken, Ezra Solomon, and Marina Whitman. Larry Silberman, then the Undersecretary of the Department of Labor, and James Lynn, the Undersecretary at Commerce, worked closely with me as well to help figure out what we could do to implement the President's directives without damaging the economy. Dick Cheney, who had asked for his own area of responsibility, came on board as Director of Operations.

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Most of the regular attendees were at the senior staff meeting on June 19, 1972: Shultz, Moynihan, Harlow, Haldeman, Colson, Ehrlichman, and press secretary Ron Ziegler.

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By the time he was done, Nixon had accepted fifty-seven resignations and made thirty new appointments.
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At the time I was unaware that Henry Kissinger was also taping his phone conversations with others. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had also done so.

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We were often reminded that most of the representatives at NATO had experienced the war firsthand. Joyce experienced this when she paid a social call on the wife of Marcel Fischbach, Luxembourg's ambassador to NATO. To make conversation, Joyce asked Madame Fischbach how she had met her husband. Mrs. Fischbach replied matter-of-factly that when Luxembourg was occupied by Germany, the Nazis would round up young unmarried girls and send them to the Nazi officers' clubs for entertainment. Since at that time they were leaving married women alone, her parents had taken the precaution of arranging for her to marry a man she barely knew—Marcel Fischbach.