Known and Unknown (32 page)

The logo for my brief presidential campaign was, appropriately, a dark horse.

I considered informing President Reagan personally about my decision, but I didn't want to put him in an awkward position, considering that his vice president, George H. W. Bush, was the leading candidate. Instead, I went to see one of Reagan's close friends and advisers, then Attorney General Ed Meese.

A respected figure among conservatives, Meese was a thoughtful man who always seemed to put loyalty to President Reagan ahead of his own ambitions. “Ed, I'm considering running for the nomination,” I told him. “I thought I'd let you know.”

Meese expressed his appreciation that I informed him personally. Although he said he was likely to stick with Bush, he welcomed me into the race. “It's important to have alternatives available in case something happens,” he commented. I knew our conversation would find its way to President Reagan.

There was another person I wanted to speak to before I made any announcements. I flew out to meet with President Ford at his home in California. Despite Bush's considerable advantage as the sitting vice president, Ford felt the 1988 contest was open. Very kindly, he told me that he had been describing me to his friends as the “competent” choice.
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But considering my time away from the public spotlight, Ford wondered how I could get from where I was to where I wanted to go.

Having participated in several presidential campaigns over the years, I was well aware that putting one together from scratch was a monumental undertaking, especially without being a front-runner and not currently in elective office or carrying a famous name. Bush had made light of the so-called vision thing, but I felt it was important for a candidate to be able to explain why he had decided to run for the country's highest office.

I believed my national security background qualified me to uphold the Reagan standard of “strong and decisive leadership” with respect to the Soviet Union and the other threats that were gathering around the globe.
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I also wanted to focus on opportunities for all Americans, building on my experiences in Congress and the private sector.

My hope was to emerge at the top of the second tier of candidates, while the two front-runners, Bush and Bob Dole, faced off. It was a page from the playbook of my first congressional primary, when my plan had been to run ahead of the other second-tier candidates, and then try to persuade them to drop out and support me, leaving me in a one-on-one race with the front-runner. As in 1962, a great many things would have to fall my way for that plan to work. For one thing, the other second-tier candidates would have to falter. Second, I would have to raise sufficient funds to be able to hang on through Super Tuesday and beyond.

After having served by then as a member of Congress, an ambassador, White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and a private sector chief executive officer, running for president was humbling. I remember going to speak to college Republicans at the University of Northern Iowa. The schedule my campaign group prepared said that three hundred students might attend. But almost no one showed up. The seats were empty, with the exception of the college Republican chapter president and a few of his friends. There, as at other events, my small staff may well have outnumbered interested voters.
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I participated in all of the presidential candidate forums to try to boost my candidacy, but they received very little coverage, because Bush, wisely pursuing a front-runner's strategy, usually didn't attend.

It was hard to raise money with low name recognition, but of course it was hard to increase name identification without spending money. Ironically, the new public-financing laws enacted in the wake of Watergate, supposedly to keep money from distorting the political process, favored incumbents. It made fund-raising for lesser known candidates an even steeper uphill climb. I now was barred by law from contributing more than $50,000 to my own campaign if I wanted to receive federal matching funds, which I knew I would need. In Illinois, I needed to deposit $6,000 on a $600-a-month office. “Multiply that 1,000 times around the country,” I said at the time, “and you see what candidates are experiencing.”
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I soon became concerned about running a campaign deficit. I had read about Democratic Senator John Glenn's debt-ridden 1984 presidential campaign, and it raised concerns in my mind.
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Knowing Glenn from his days as an astronaut, I called him and asked about his campaign experience. He told me he had given the maximum a candidate was legally able to contribute to his own campaign, so to pay off his debts he had to try to raise additional funds. But few new donors were reaching for their wallets to contribute to a campaign that had already ended in a loss, and many of those who had contributed to his campaign already had given the maximum the law allowed or they could afford. The result was that members of Glenn's campaign staff and a number of vendors were stiffed. It was a tough situation for an honorable man like Glenn, particularly since he had the financial capability to pay the debts personally. But many did not know the new campaign law prevented Glenn from doing so.
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If my campaign went on through the primary and we were not able to raise enough money, I knew I would be in the same position. As a conservative concerned about debt, the hypocrisy of running a campaign on a deficit was not appealing, particularly when I knew it would not be legal for me to personally pay it off. I concluded that I should not go forward, and announced my decision in April 1987, eight months before the first primary vote was scheduled.

From the sidelines, I watched the campaign unfold. In the Iowa caucuses, Dole from neighboring Kansas won, but Pat Robertson was a surprising second. Bush ran third. Then came the New Hampshire primary, where Bush had his longstanding New England roots and connections, his family name, and the money that came easily to an incumbent vice president and front-runner, allowing him to flood the airwaves and pull out a win, in part by attacking Dole as a secret tax raiser. Dole's campaign began to falter.

At that point, I faced a decision. I could endorse no one, or I could endorse Bush, the likely winner, or I could endorse Bob Dole. I thought Dole would be a better president, so I endorsed him. So did Al Haig, another candidate who dropped out of the race about when I did. Bush went on to win the nomination and easily defeated his lackluster Democrat opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

For me, the bright spot in the new Bush administration was the secretary of defense. I had not spent much time with Dick Cheney since I left Washington in 1977. He had since been elected to Congress from Wyoming while I was working in Chicago. Contrary to what people might have expected, considering our relationship, I don't recall having any conversations with Cheney about the Defense Department during his four years in the Pentagon running it. He may have been sensitive to President George H. W. Bush's attitude toward me and kept his distance. In any event, Cheney and I were each busy with our respective careers, his in Washington, D.C., and mine in business ventures from New York to Silicon Valley.

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n 1988, fourteen years after my dad died, my mother, Jeannette, was in the passenger seat in a car accident. The doctors thought she would recover, but bedridden, her inactivity led to pneumonia. Mom died at the age of eighty-four. She was a wise, wonderful, supportive figure throughout my life. She had been healthy before the accident, and my sister Joan and I weren't ready to lose her. Still, I was grateful that each of our children had had an opportunity to know her well. At age fifty-six, both of my parents were now gone, which left me with a deep sense of loss.

In 1990, I became the chief executive officer of General Instrument Corporation (GI), a New York City–based supplier of electronics to the cable and satellite television industry. GI had been acquired in a leveraged buyout by Forstmann Little & Company. Ted Forstmann's unusual talent was in finding companies he believed could be significantly improved by bringing in new management. He raised money from investors, which he would then borrow against to get more funding, so he could purchase companies for what he believed was less than what they could be worth. Forstmann Little would eventually take the company public again at a higher value than its purchase price, pay the original investors and any loans, and use the profit to make still more acquisitions. GI was an interesting challenge, since I knew no more about electronics than I had about pharmaceuticals when I joined Searle. A scientist working for the company, Dr. Woo Paik, had developed a breakthrough technology: the world's first all-digital high-definition television. Once again Washington intruded. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively forced General Instrument and our partner, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to combine with Zenith, AT&T, Thomson, Philips, RCA, and NBC to form what was called the Grand Alliance for digital high-definition television. The theory was that we would collaborate on fashioning an American standard for HDTV and share in the royalties. Apart from the damage that decision by the FCC did to GI's leading position—since GI was the company that had developed all-digital HDTV—the government's unhelpful involvement also contributed to the delay of the technology's introduction in America for close to a decade.
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n 1992 William Jefferson Clinton defeated President George H. W. Bush when he sought reelection. Clinton, a young Democrat, was elected with less than half of the vote. An intelligent man with excellent political instincts, Clinton had a talent for locking you in his gaze and saying insightful things you were interested in hearing. He had a passion for domestic policy and could hold forth on the subtleties of single-payer health care without losing his audience. But Clinton had a manner somewhat different from presidents I had especially admired, such as Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan. They were modest people who seemed almost surprised to be in the White House—in Ford's case, it was genuine surprise. By contrast, Clinton seemed to have been aiming for the presidency practically since childhood, and he appeared not at all surprised that he had attained it.

In his first four years in office, Clinton raised taxes on the American people after promising a tax cut—a reversal that had proven perilous for his predecessor. The Clinton team's military operation in Somalia ended in retreat and emboldened Islamist extremists. The administration responded indecisively to a series of terrorist attacks, including the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Having confronted the problem of terrorism as President Reagan's Middle East envoy, I couldn't help but think back to what had happened in Lebanon and how it had brought America's credibility into question.

Due to the policies of the Clinton administration—including a plan to have the federal government take over the American health care system—Republicans gained ground during the first years of his term. In 1994, the leadership of a then little known congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich brought the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in decades. Gingrich combined the intellectual firepower of his academic background with a zeal for commonsense solutions. He could rattle off ideas like a machine gun.

The Republican wave continued through 1995. Bob Dole, then serving as the Senate minority leader, became the Republican presidential nominee. With Dole leading Clinton in early polls, a federal government shutdown was blamed on Republicans in Congress, damaging their image. The Clinton political machine launched tough attacks on Dole and the Democrats pulled ahead.

I watched the unfolding campaign from Chicago. I was sorry to see Dole struggling against the incumbent president. In the spring of 1996, Bob's wife, Elizabeth, called and asked me to come to Washington to help the campaign on policy issues. I agreed to do it on a part-time basis. I'd known Elizabeth since she had served in the Nixon administration. Strong and polished, she was an excellent partner for Bob.

Dole was struggling with the same problem that Gerald Ford had faced early on—he was a legislator by nature who had to make the transition to becoming a presidential candidate and an executive. There was so much to like and admire about Bob Dole the person, and certainly the legislator. But the traits that drew people to him and made him a lion in the Senate did not translate well to a candidate for president.

Having run for president three times, he was not always receptive to advice, especially from a campaign staff he hardly knew. On a flight aboard his campaign plane, Dole finally gave in to pleas from his aides to practice a speech with a teleprompter. So he proceeded to practice the speech by reading it—in silence. The staff stood there baffled while Dole practiced the speech in his head.

I spent my time on policy issues, working with longtime Minnesota congressman Vin Weber. Together we helped Dole craft a supply-side economic message by seeking input from some of the leading economic experts in the country, including Milton Friedman, publisher Steve Forbes, and Dr. John Taylor of Stanford University. The Dole proposal had as its centerpiece a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut for the American people. He argued that by letting people keep more of their own money, they could better stimulate the economy than the federal government could. Still, with the country seeming to be at peace and reasonably prosperous, Dole lagged behind Clinton.

In the late summer of 1996, languishing in the polls, Dole called me up one evening. He said he was going to announce me as the general chairman of his campaign. I laughed when I heard the idea, which seemed to have come out of nowhere. I reminded Dole that I had agreed to help out part-time on policy.

“Well, I've got to do it,” Dole insisted. “I have to show we're doing something to shake up the campaign.” Again I resisted, since I knew who was running the Dole campaign—the candidate and his large paid staff of professional managers. By the end of the conversation I thought I had made myself clear that I could not do it.

To my dismay, Dole went ahead the next day and announced that I was his chairman. I subsequently learned that Dole already had a campaign chairman—New Hampshire governor Steve Merrill—who apparently had not been informed of the change. Graciously, Merrill contacted me and said he was willing to assist the campaign in any way possible.

Within a month, Dole's supporters gathered in San Diego for a convention that they hoped would define his candidacy for the American people and dent Clinton's lead in the polls. In San Diego, I noticed that the relatively new twenty-four-hour television era had turned Washington politicians into celebrities. Republican delegates treated the most recognizable faces in the party as if they were movie stars. I also noticed another change from my days in Congress. As the size of congressional staffs had increased, so had their power. In the old days one dealt directly with a member of Congress on policy issues. By 1996, one often dealt with a member of the congressman's staff instead.
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The Dole campaign tried in vain to focus voters and the media on the character question the administration was battling. At one point, after citing a list of scandals and investigations against the administration, Dole blurted out, “Where is the outrage?” I understood his frustration. He felt the media was not holding the Clinton team to the same standard of behavior applied to other politicians.

The American people didn't share Dole's outrage, and President Clinton won reelection convincingly, though the final margin was closer than a number of the polls had suggested. Within weeks of Dole's defeat, there were rumors about the leading contenders for 2000. One name surfaced early—George W. Bush, the governor of Texas.
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fter the campaign I went back to the business world, serving on various boards of directors. As the collapses of Enron and WorldCom demonstrated a few years later, one of the important roles of outside directors is to try to look around corners and identify any problems with a company's strategies or management. Because I held management to a high standard and asked a good many questions about operations, some CEOs considered me a difficult director. Others sometimes cheered me on. One CEO said to Joyce, “Don is a terrific director, but you sure as hell wouldn't want more than one of them on your board.”

I became increasingly involved with a small start-up company in California named Gilead Sciences, Inc. Mike Riordan, a MD from Johns Hopkins University with an MBA from Harvard, started the company with a small venture capital investment. Eventually, Gilead produced one of the early AIDS treatment drugs. It later developed Viread (also called Tenofovir), the backbone of HIV treatment today, as well as Tamiflu, a flu drug. By March 1996, Gilead had moved from a market capitalization of zero to $1 billion, with $300 million in cash and several blockbuster drugs. Its stock was rising and the company was getting excellent reviews from security analysts.
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This was a tribute to excellent science and, as always in the pharmaceutical business, a dose of good fortune. It was also a tribute to people willing to risk their careers on a small start-up company and the thousands of investors willing to risk their money on a long shot.

I liked the idea of working with a small group of bright, talented young people in Silicon Valley as they started the enterprise from scratch. Gilead had terrific potential and some brilliant minds, but so did other start-up biotech firms. I agreed to join the board early on, and eventually became the chairman. I helped recruit a superb group of top-flight people to the board to broaden its perspective and attract investment.

Our board brought broad experience to the talented young management team. These board members, with their relationships around the world, helped guide Gilead in its transition from start-up to a more mature player in a highly competitive industry.

I also made a pitch for Condoleezza Rice, who had served in the George H. W. Bush administration and was the provost of Stanford University, to join the board of directors.

“[W]e'd better get ourselves in the queue before she makes any public decisions about her future,” I advised George Shultz.
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I pointed out that our company met in Foster City, California, a thirty-minute drive from Stanford. When I would see Rice at various events, I would jokingly pester her about joining Gilead's board. I sent her notes trying to make the case. “Condi,” one began, “When are you going to call me up and say, ‘Gee, Don, I would be delighted to join the Gilead Board…. Those are good folks, it is an interesting business, it is nearby, it only meets four times a year, so the answer is yes!'”
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Rice expressed interest but did not commit. She had decided to go on the boards of larger and considerably more prominent firms, such as Chevron. It was not long before she began advising George W. Bush, whose presidential prospects seemed bright.

In 1999, Bush asked to meet with me when I was serving as chairman of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. The commission had been established by Congress to evaluate threats posed by ballistic missiles, particularly ones in the hands of rogue regimes. Bush was interested in the commission's work. He mentioned that Shultz had suggested that we meet.
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My earlier encounters with the younger George Bush in the 1970s and 1980s had been brief. Perhaps it is my midwestern roots, but I confess to a not very wise or useful bias about those who enjoy the inherited benefit of prominent names. Getting to know George W. Bush was a good lesson against letting personal stereotypes color your thinking about people. The Bush I met in his suite at the Capital Hilton in Washington had taken difficult steps to change his life, was serving as governor of Texas, and was working hard to be elected president of the United States.

I found him to be unlike the picture the press was drawing of him as uncurious and something of a slacker. He asked serious questions, was self-confident, and had a command of the important issues. Decidedly down-to-earth, with no inclination to formality, his demeanor was different from his father's somewhat patrician manner. Sometimes, as I'd learn over the years, George W. Bush would have his feet up on his desk and be chewing an unlit cigar. He pointed out that he'd grown up in Midland, Texas. He had a toughness, and he told me that he stood apart from “that Eastern establishment.”
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I left our 1999 meeting impressed.

After the disappointment of the Dole campaign, politics didn't tug on me as it once had, but national security issues did. I wasn't formally advising Bush, but at Rice's invitation I offered occasional thoughts.

Once, in a letter to Josh Bolten, who was then serving as the policy director for the Bush campaign, I offered some thoughts on national security. I warned against the idea of a “graduated response”—sending small numbers of troops and then escalating that number over time. “‘Graduated response' didn't work in Vietnam for President Johnson,” I observed. “If the U.S. is going to get into a fight, it is worth winning, and we should hit hard up front. Hoping for a measured, antiseptic war (immaculate coercion) to be successful,” I cautioned, “is the hope only of the unschooled.”
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