Known and Unknown (16 page)

 

I
was struck by the fact that Nixon was running against a Democratic opponent who in many ways was his opposite. Aptly labeled “the happy warrior,” Humphrey was upbeat and engaging. He was also tough. Reciting the litany of previous incarnations of a new Nixon persona in 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1962, Humphrey noted, “Now, I read about the new Nixon of 1968. Ladies and gentlemen. Anyone who's had his political face lifted so many times can't be very new.”
¹⁰
I had a feeling a Humphrey-Nixon debate would not help our side.

The Nixon campaign agreed—the candidate had not forgotten his difficulties debating John F. Kennedy in 1960. That September, Bryce Harlow, a friend and well-known Washington figure, came to my congressional office. Harlow was working hard on the Nixon campaign. He told me that Nixon did not want to give Humphrey the chance to debate and to untether himself from the unpopular Johnson. Furthermore, Democrats in Congress, at Humphrey's and LBJ's urging, were proposing to suspend the equal time provisions so that Governor George Wallace would be able to participate without any other third-party candidates. Wallace, a segregationist candidate from Alabama, was running for president as an independent. His candidacy promised to siphon support from Nixon in the south, and like Humphrey he was quick and entertaining in a debate format. Harlow told me Nixon was disinclined to give Wallace any airtime and that he considered it unfair for just one third-party candidate to be included.

Harlow asked me to help stop the suspension of the equal-time provisions that would have allowed for the three-way debate. I thought we had substantial common interests on the issue: I agreed with Harlow's political assessment that a three-way debate was the worst scenario for Nixon, and I disapproved of the Democrats' last-minute attempt to jury-rig the rules. I also thought this might be an opportunity for my group in Congress to get some attention for the issues we wanted to advance. “Rumsfeld's Raiders” were pushing a reform package that included measures popular with the public, such as campaign finance reform and a ban on the use of political contributions for personal enrichment.

As Harlow set himself up in Ford's minority leader office, just off the House chamber, we crafted a campaign of legislative maneuvers to stall the suspension of equal-time provisions. Any member could stop business in the House of Representatives by requiring the clerk to call the roll in order to have a majority of members (a quorum) present. So before the debate legislation came up for a vote, one of us would ask for a quorum call and the rest of us would work to ensure that there were never enough members present on the House floor for debate or votes to continue. From noon on October 8 until well into the next day our group arranged for thirty-three consecutive intentionally unsuccessful quorum calls.

This was not well received by the Democratic Speaker of the House, John McCormack. He threatened to send out the Capitol police force to physically round up members and lock them in the chamber. At one point, Congressman John Anderson of Illinois was barred from leaving the House floor—leading to a bizarre scene in which a member of Congress was pounding on the doors of the House chamber, shouting that he was being held hostage by the Speaker.

In addition to the repeated calls for a quorum, we also managed to arrange votes on a series of amendments to the legislation that dragged things out even further. LBJ must not have been pleased. We were outmaneuvering the legislative master himself.

Before we were done, we kept the House in session all night in what became the longest continuous session of the U.S. House of Representatives since the battle over the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Some of the tradition-conscious Republican leadership considered our efforts unseemly, but Minority Leader Gerald Ford stood apart and cheered us on. Our effort was dubbed “The Longest Night.”

Our goal was to delay the bill because we knew we did not have the votes to defeat it. We were trying to hold out for two days so Senate Republicans could make a similar effort and prevent the bill from being voted on before Congress was set to adjourn on October twelfth. It worked. The bill was shelved indefinitely. Humphrey and Nixon never debated, nor did Governor George Wallace. Our efforts caught Nixon's attention, and the candidate let it be known that he was grateful for our assistance.

A week later, Nixon invited me to accompany him on a campaign swing through the South and Midwest, where I got to know him a bit better.
¹¹
Despite his somber, pensive, and businesslike demeanor, Nixon showed himself to be an engaging stump speaker. He worked at it, meticulously preparing his notes beforehand. At one point he became so involved in his speech that he nearly fell off the crate he was standing on.

Toward the end of one flight, Nixon called me into his private compartment. Then fifty-five, his hair, touched with gray, was receding. He got right down to the business of the campaign and asked me where I was scheduled to speak over the closing weeks. I told him I was going to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

“That's good,” he said, putting on his master political strategist hat. “Stay out of Illinois.” Though he might have been elected president in 1960 if Illinois had tilted to him over Kennedy, Nixon seemed to think he would win the state this time.

On the next leg of our trip we had a longer conversation.
¹²
Nixon was relaxed as we spoke. He seemed to want to know more about me—he asked me if I smoked, and I told him I did smoke a pipe. He expressed irritation at the campaign and what he considered to be Humphrey's attempts to characterize him as a racist. “If I did that to Humphrey I'd never hear the end of it in the press,” Nixon mused. “Do you think I should debate him?”

“No, I don't,” I replied.

He told me his advisers were telling him to hit Humphrey harder in his speeches. I told him I thought he was doing fine. Humphrey was a likable character, and I didn't think that being harsh to him would be a good strategy. Later Nixon received kudos in the press for appearing on the popular entertainment show
Laugh-In
—something of a precursor to
Saturday Night Live
—and saying the show's catch phrase, “Sock it to me!” The fact that Nixon was willing to appear on the show demonstrated to many of his critics that he was able to take himself less seriously and have a little fun.

As Nixon had predicted, the election was close—his victory margin was less than 1 percentage point, making the 1968 presidential election one of the tightest in American history. Richard Nixon had risen from the political grave.

“F
or the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor,” Nixon observed in his convention speech in Miami.

“And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.” To cheers, Nixon said it was time “to quit pouring billions of dollars into programs that have failed in the United States.”
¹

One of the chief targets of the Nixon speech was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which had started under John F. Kennedy as a small set of experimental programs run out of the Executive Office of the President. The agency had been lassoed by his successor, LBJ, as part of what he grandly called his War on Poverty.

Under Johnson, who thought on a mammoth scale, OEO ballooned. At one point it administered Community Action Programs, Head Start, the Job Corps, Legal Services, and the Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA (a domestic Peace Corps) as well as programs to help senior citizens, Native Americans, migrants, neighborhood health centers, and drug treatment centers, plus others, a number of which evolved into their own independent activities over time.

As a member of Congress I voted against the 1964 legislation that established the Office of Economic Opportunity.
²
I was uncomfortable with OEO programs being run out of the Executive Office of the President rather than being housed in the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. It seemed like another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing department bureaucracies.

As OEO grew during the Johnson administration, so did its opposition. When Nixon took office, it was clear that Johnson's lofty goal of eradicating poverty was failing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent, and it proved difficult to identify and track progress. There was also an air of radicalism in some of the OEO programs. When I first walked through the OEO offices I saw posters of the Marxist Che Guevara proudly displayed on the walls. In some parts of the country taxpayer dollars were going to radical and violent “Black Power” groups. An additional controversy was that OEO provided funds to community groups, intentionally bypassing the locally elected governors and mayors. This led to resentment of OEO by state and local officials of both political parties.

Though Nixon ran on a platform hostile to the OEO, he decided after his election he would not abolish it outright, but instead would try to reform it. Racial tensions were high, and many groups had their hopes set on the success of OEO's mission. Nixon thought OEO might somehow be redirected into more realistic and effective activities. When he was searching for someone to run the agency, now the scourge of most conservatives in his base of support, Nixon turned to his top domestic policy aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for suggestions.

Pat Moynihan was creative, entertaining, and one of the smartest individuals I had ever met. As the saying went, Moynihan wrote more books than most people had read. He had applied his considerable intellect to the Department of Labor during the Kennedy administration, and later had written on Lyndon Johnson's vision of the Great Society. A Democrat with an independent streak, he was now working for Kennedy's old rival, Richard Nixon, as an expert on urban and minority affairs.
^*
I thought it said something laudatory of Nixon that he saw the merit of bringing Moynihan into his confidence.

Moynihan had keen political instincts. Who better, he proposed, to run an agency disliked by Republicans in Congress than…a conservative Republican from Congress? Pat knew I had voted against OEO but that I had supported civil rights legislation and had shown an interest in tackling reform. He strongly recommended that Nixon appoint me. It was an unorthodox choice.

My reply to the request from the new president was also unorthodox: “No.” I was not thinking about leaving Congress at the time, though I was still tangling with the old guard. In early 1969, for example, I had run for chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. I thought I had support all lined up when, at the last minute, my longtime nemesis Minority Whip Les Arends persuaded Bob Taft of Ohio to run against me. Taft won by one vote, but I still enjoyed my work and wasn't much interested in joining the Nixon administration in an assignment that seemed almost destined to fail.

Nixon's aides continued to press me as they put together their new administration. I continued to resist. Finally, I wrote a straightforward, detailed memo to the Nixon team outlining why I was not the right choice to run OEO:

I figured I would not hear about Nixon's proposal again. Then one Sunday that spring, as Joyce and I were having dinner with our kids, the telephone rang. Before long I was talking to President Nixon. It was the first time a president of the United States had called my home.

“Don,” Nixon said, “I want to invite you and your wife down to Key Biscayne to talk.” I told the President I would be willing to meet with him in Florida, where Nixon occasionally vacationed. When we got off the phone I told Joyce about the conversation.

“Well, it's settled,” she said simply. She liked the OEO idea even less than I did, since it meant leaving Congress to run an agency I was ambivalent about at best. But she concluded immediately that I was unlikely to leave a meeting with the President of the United States without committing to accept the job.

The reserved Nixon spent his decades in politics having to push himself to be in the public eye. Even while supposedly relaxing in sunny Florida, he was formal and businesslike. As I noticed in our earlier meetings, he could be less than easy in his personal interactions. When Nixon met Joyce, for example, he acknowledged her with a smile. “Don,” he said, “I'm glad to see you brought your daughter.” Nixon would repeat that quip on more than one occasion.

If not warm and easy in personal relationships, on a professional level President Nixon proved persuasive. As we met in Florida in April 1969, Nixon told me he needed me to take the OEO job. “The agency needs to be run right,” he said. “And you'll have my full support.” As I made my case for not taking the post, Nixon kept telling me he did not agree and that I was the right man for the job. He left the impression that he had a personal interest in my future. And when the President told me he needed my help, I found it hard to keep up the fight. Nixon persuaded me to take on an assignment I didn't want, at an agency I had voted against, with a mission that Nixon didn't like, for a purpose that was still unclear.

As our discussion on OEO was ending, I told the President that I'd recently returned from a second trip to Southeast Asia. Referencing Johnson's credibility problems on the war, I suggested that Nixon examine carefully the American military's bombing of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese targets in neighboring Laos. The Johnson administration's silence on the issue left the American people unaware of the bombing campaign. Our friends in the region—the governments of Laos and Cambodia—insisted that American officials not reveal that they had given approval to bomb in their countries. Had it become public, Laos and Cambodia would have had to protest the very activity they had approved. The problem, as I told Nixon, was that while our friends were cooperating they were protecting themselves. By continuing a secret bombing campaign, Nixon would not be protecting himself.

“President Johnson got into trouble for not telling the truth,” I noted. “Your administration does not want to fall into the same pattern.”

Nixon listened intently and nodded. I hoped the message got through.

Having agreed to the President's request, we encountered an unanticipated problem that put my nomination in question. The Constitution prohibits individuals from receiving a government salary outside Congress if the salary for that position was increased during their time in Congress. While I had been serving, Congress had raised salaries for federal posts, including the director of OEO, which made me ineligible to receive the new salary for that position. Nixon's legal staff discovered the issue and asked the Justice Department to look into the matter. A young assistant attorney general arrived at my house on a Sunday afternoon to discuss a possible solution. The suggestion was that I not receive a salary as director of the OEO and instead be paid as an assistant to the president in the White House. At the President's suggestion, I was also to be made a member of the President's cabinet. I can still picture that lanky lawyer sitting at our small dining table, discussing the issue. As it turned out, I owed the start of my service in the executive branch of the federal government to the fine legal mind of William Rehnquist, a future chief justice of the United States.
⁴

 

D
uring my early months at the Office of Economic Opportunity, I had my first protracted encounter with the national media, and the episode left an indelible impression on me. On September 22, 1969, I opened the
Washington Post
to a column by Jack Anderson. Anderson was a syndicated columnist, appearing in nearly one thousand papers across the country. His pieces sought to offer a glimpse of Washington to average Americans, and he especially enjoyed targeting politicians and government officials. That morning I was in his crosshairs.

The column's title caused a sensation: “
ANTI-POVERTY CZAR EMBELLISHES OFFICE
.”
⁵
“Anti-poverty czar Donald Rumsfeld has wielded an economy ax on programs for the poor,” Anderson wrote. “He has used some of the savings to give his own executive suite a more luxurious look, thus reducing the poverty in his immediate surroundings.”

Anderson's column, which reached as many as forty million readers, could not have come at a worse time. I was trying to forge relations with the agency's employees, many of whom were skeptical or downright hostile to Republicans. I also wanted to try to give the OEO some credibility among its critics as being well run, to try to earn support in Congress.

Anderson's column damaged those efforts badly, painting a portrait of me as a stereotypical fat-cat Republican, in stark contrast to my predecessor in the job, President Kennedy's wealthy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who was portrayed as being sensitive to the mission of OEO. “Under Sargent Shriver, the anti-poverty director's office was unique in government,” Anderson noted. “There were no carpets, and the furnishings were prim.” Anderson's claims included the following:

One could see why the piece was irresistible to critics. It was undoubtedly given to Anderson by an insider who didn't like the reforms I was implementing to make OEO more efficient and leaner. There was only one problem: Anderson's story was not true. In fact, as far as I could tell, not a word of that column was accurate, with the exception of the correct spelling of my name. Anderson had not bothered to make a simple phone call to confirm his facts or even to ask for a comment.

I had learned in managing Congressman Dave Dennison's 1958 campaign how even the appearance of wrongdoing could be terribly damaging. A newspaper article, no matter how false, can stick to a public figure for decades. The old axiom about the press is that a politician should never engage in battle with an opponent that buys ink by the barrel. But I had to do something. So I dictated a four-page response that addressed the Anderson column point by point, including:

After my secretary typed up my response, I invited Anderson to read it and to take a tour of my office. After he saw with his own eyes that his entire piece was false, I was under the naïve impression that he would correct his column with the same fanfare that his original column received. But, quite the contrary, he informed me that while he regretted the error, he had recently inherited his column from longtime columnist Drew Pearson. Anderson said he feared that if he admitted he had run a totally false column, some of newspapers in the syndicate for his column might drop it.
^*
Obviously, he was more concerned about his paycheck than the damage the article did to me or the truth.