Known and Unknown (33 page)

I was slow to endorse anyone for the presidency in 2000. A complicating factor for me was that early on I had two friends in the race, Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Dole, so I preferred to stay out of the Republican primary battle.

There was, however, one presidential candidate running that year who I was quick to support: New Jersey senator Bill Bradley was waging an uphill campaign against Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Having invited Bradley thirty years earlier to work with me at the Office of Economic Opportunity, my interest in his career had continued. When he announced his campaign against Gore, I sent him a contribution. I believed the thoughtful and honorable Bradley would make a considerably better president than Gore, whom I saw as lecturing and wooden. And so my first presidential campaign contribution in 2000 was to a Democrat, although I let Bradley know that I would not be with him in November.

Throughout the early part of the year I watched Bush with interest as he racked up primary victories, knocking out each of his rivals, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, a man with a hair-trigger temper and a propensity to fashion and shift his positions to appeal to the media. In May 2000, after the primaries were over, I joined a number of former national security officials at an event to endorse Bush. In attendance were Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, as well as Colin Powell and others. Together, we stood behind Governor Bush as he announced his plans for reducing the size of America's nuclear missile arsenal while deploying a missile defense system. The decisions about how to accomplish his objectives, Bush said, would fall to his secretary of defense.
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Unlike many presidential nominees, Bush selected an excellent running mate. He made a reasoned, sober choice of a well-known figure who might not offer him much near-term political advantage but who would be both a source of sound counsel and well prepared to assume the presidency if necessary. It was a surprise when Dick Cheney's name was announced—and in this case a pleasant surprise. Cheney was no longer my young assistant but the respected candidate who Joyce and I hoped would become the next vice president of the United States.

At Cheney's request, I traveled to Danville, Kentucky, in October 2000 to attend the debate between the contending vice presidential candidates, Cheney and Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. It was an excellent debate between two fine, experienced, honorable, well-prepared public servants. I thought Dick got the better of it. His quiet competence was reassuring, and it was strengthened by his good humor, which most Americans had not seen.

In November, Joyce and I were invited to be with Dick and Lynne in Austin, Texas, for the election returns. By then I had lived through a good number of very close elections. The 1958 congressional campaign I managed was lost by an eyelash. In the 1960 presidential election, the balloting had seesawed all night between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Eight years later Nixon had barely defeated Hubert Humphrey, and in 1976 we didn't know if Ford had won or lost until the next morning. But the 2000 presidential election night lasted for more than a month, and it only lurched to a conclusion on December 12, 2000, when George W. Bush officially became the president-elect.

 

I
certainly was supportive of the new President and Vice President, but at sixty-eight years old I thought at most I might help out on a part-time basis if asked, as I had with President Reagan. I was engaged with a variety of activities, including serving on the boards of the RAND Corporation and the National Park Foundation, as well as on several corporate boards. In December 2000 alone I attended six different board meetings in New York, Chicago, California, and Zurich, and was traveling periodically to Washington for government commission meetings. Joyce and I had agreed I would pare down some of my business activities over the next year and spend most of my time at our home in Taos, New Mexico, where our family tended to gather. “We are moving into our rural period,” Joyce confidently announced to friends at our fiftieth high school reunion earlier in 2000.

As the Bush transition kicked into gear, I was still serving as chairman of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization. We were examining how our patchwork of national security institutions dealt with issues in space—bringing me full circle to the issue I had first dealt with as a new member of Congress back in 1963, serving on the space committee.

I was at a meeting of the Space Commission in Washington in late December when Cheney called me. He told me he wanted to get together and that he preferred our meeting to be confidential; he would send a car and driver to bring me to the Madison Hotel downtown, where Cheney and the President-elect were meeting with people being considered for senior administration positions. I was taken into the hotel through the basement so that I would not encounter reporters or hotel staff.
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I assumed Cheney wanted my thoughts on candidates being considered for various national security positions. But as we started to talk, I realized Dick was wondering if I would consider coming into the administration. He asked my views about two posts—CIA director and secretary of defense—saying the President-elect felt both were in need of attention, and that reforming them would be a priority for the administration. Cheney told me that Bush had not yet made decisions on who would lead either department. He had in mind several candidates for each post, and my name was on both lists.

After discussing the two departments, Cheney asked, “Don, if the situation is right and that's where the President-elect finally comes out, do you think you would be willing to take on a full-time assignment?”

That idea had not occurred to me before our conversation. I said I would have to think about it and talk to Joyce.

“Fair enough,” Dick said. “Think about it, and if things develop, we'll want you to talk to the President-elect.”

Later that evening, Cheney, trying to reach me, telephoned Joyce. She told Dick what she had told me: She would be up for whatever I might decide to do. When Cheney called me again, he said, “Don, I talked to the President-elect, and he'd like to meet with you down in Austin on Friday.”

Cheney gave me a sense of how the administration was shaping up. It was already known that Colin Powell was going to be secretary of state. John Ashcroft was to be announced soon as attorney general. Condi Rice would be the national security adviser.

Apparently Bush was interested in my experience in government, my record in business, and my credentials with conservatives. But with the selection of Cheney as vice president and Paul O'Neill as treasury secretary, there was already talk of Bush relying on retreads from the Ford administration. I would be seen as yet one more.

Then, of course, there was the other matter. It was no secret to Governor Bush that his father's relationship with me lacked warmth.
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Cheney said that at one point, when he was the head of Governor Bush's vice presidential search committee, my name had been raised as a potential running mate. But as Cheney put it, in his usual understated way, the Bush family “did not salute” the idea.

Still, Cheney was confident that President-elect Bush would make his own decisions about whether I was right for a position in his administration. “My preference is for you to go to DoD,” Cheney said, adding, “You are Condi's and Colin's top choice for the job.”

It was starting to look like Joyce's and my “rural period” might be postponed.

DECEMBER 22, 2000

T
he Bush-Cheney team was scrambling through their abbreviated transition period. When I was asked to meet with Bush on December 22, some of the people being considered for key positions were cycling through Austin.

The George W. Bush I encountered at the governor's mansion three days before Christmas was very much the man I had met previously: inquisitive, interested in national security issues, and comfortable with himself. A disciplined man who kept precisely to a fast-moving schedule, he was not much for small talk, which suited me fine.

I congratulated the President-elect on his victory, and he thanked me for my support during the campaign. “I know Dick told you I wanted to visit about a few things,” Bush said. In particular, he was expecting to hear my thoughts on the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

I was still surprised by Governor Bush's request to see me. He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father. I thought it spoke well of him that he was interested in meeting me himself to draw his own conclusions. Our meeting that December would be only the second substantive conversation we had ever had.

Bush first asked to hear my views about the Defense Department.
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I ventured that the Department seemed to have drifted somewhat since the end of the Cold War. President Clinton had not seemed to have a comfortable relationship with the military, due in part to the accusation that he had evaded military service during the Vietnam War. Clinton's early foray into defense policy on the issue of gays in the military exacerbated the problem, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by its then chairman General Colin Powell taking the rare step of publicly exposing a disagreement with the President.
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Once burned, Clinton seemed to have left the department largely to its own devices.
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That presidential remove, I suggested, had had consequences. It provided the senior officials in the Pentagon the latitude to operate relatively free of top-level strategic direction. Under those circumstances, moreover, various members of Congress were better able to promote their particular interests, sometimes at the expense of sound national policy. In the combatant commands, four-star admirals and generals had wielded considerable power, and for years had been called, I thought inappropriately, commanders in chief. To my thinking, the United States had only one commander in chief, and it was the elected president.
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“The task for the incoming secretary of defense will be to implement what you promised throughout the campaign,” I said. “You will need to fulfill your pledge that ‘help is on the way' for the United States military.” If the President-elect hoped to achieve the goals for the Department of Defense that he had outlined over the course of his campaign, he would need a secretary of defense willing to adjust the arrangements that many in the Pentagon had grown comfortable with—that of a light-touch administration that sanctioned their activities from a respectful distance. The task for his new secretary would not be to simply tweak existing policies and practices at the margins.

Bush nodded in agreement. He had outlined ambitious plans for the United States military, emphasizing his view that it needed to accelerate its transformation toward agility, speed, deployability, precision, and lethality. Bush did not strike me as one who worried about ruffling feathers, but he had not served in Washington and had never had to tangle with a bureaucracy as entrenched and powerful as that of the Defense Department, the defense contractors, and congressional interests closely tied to the status quo. I cautioned that military officers as well as career civilian officials in Defense and throughout the executive branch would be wary of reforms that impinged on their acquired authority.

I highlighted an additional challenge to the President-elect. Many members of Congress wanted further cuts to the Defense Department budget. I was convinced the budget needed to be increased significantly to correct the shortfalls of the prior decade and to ensure a military force suitable for our nation's strategic requirements. America's armed forces had been reduced by more than half a million personnel. The defense budget had been cut by $50 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars from the time President Clinton took office in 1993. Yet while defense investment had been reduced sharply, as Bush had noted in his campaign, military deployments had tripled.

I raised other issues with him that I believed the department faced,
including: the requirement to begin testing and deploying ballistic missile defenses; improvements to homeland security; a strengthened effort on information warfare; and the urgent need to improve our country's intelligence capabilities.
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Some of these issues, particularly missile defense, had become polarized. I thought Governor Bush's record of reaching across the aisle to Democrats in the Texas state legislature boded well for garnering bipartisan support for national security programs.

In short, our conversation reflected my belief that the Department of Defense had some longstanding problems and that fixing them would unquestionably require breaking some crockery and bruising more than a few egos. I was direct about this with Bush. He was an experienced executive and politician and knew that what he had promised on the campaign trail with respect to defense policy was important and needed, but that it carried political risk—for the President and for his secretary of defense.

Bush considered those thoughts, and seemed to appreciate them. Unlike our previous meeting, he asked few questions. He appeared to be more interested in having me talk. He next asked my views on the CIA. Having previously served as secretary of defense, I assumed that if the President-elect was thinking about me for a position in his administration, it would most likely be at the CIA.

I thought Bush and the members of the National Security Council would need to exert a stronger hand in setting the intelligence community's priorities, to ensure they reflected the administration's policy objectives. How would the Agency, for example, balance its resources among collecting intelligence on rogue regimes pursuing weapons of mass destruction, analyzing trends in global warming, collecting energy price information, and considering the threats from AIDS or cyberwarfare? Would the CIA spend more or less resources hunting down war criminals in the Balkans or trying to track down terrorists? These were decisions on priorities that would need clear direction from the President and his senior advisers. My experience had led me to believe that direction had been lacking.

“Turbulence in the intelligence community has been a problem,” I told him. There had been six CIA directors and seven directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1987 and 2000. “If a corporation changed its management almost every other year,” I said, “it would go broke—and it ought to.” Bush laughed. I suggested that he nominate someone who could remain in the position long enough to make substantial progress.

Bush asked how I felt about taking a role in his administration. “I'm not eager to go back into government,” I replied, “but I would consider it if you thought I could be helpful.” However, I advised, there were a number of things he would need to be aware of before coming to a decision.

I cautioned him that after more than two decades in the private sector, running two Fortune 500 companies, serving on a number of boards of directors, and being involved in a number of nonprofit activities, my personal situation was complex and my business responsibilities were extensive. While not connected to major defense contractors, I did have ties to a number of companies, some of which did business, however loosely, with the federal government. Extracting myself from all of those relationships would be difficult—not to mention costly.

I also informed him that like many families across America, ours had not been immune to the problem of drug addiction. Two of our children, Marcy and Nick, had found themselves caught up in that personal torment, and the experience had been heartbreaking and difficult for Joyce and me. But by December 2000, Marcy and Nick were both in recovery. Marcy had been clean for more than a decade and was active in the community of recovering addicts. I wanted the President-elect to be aware of this, so I shared our family's experience with him, as I had with Cheney, who had known our children since they were little. Bush listened with understanding.
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“You might be better off considering candidates who had fewer complications in their lives,” I suggested to him. Bush said he appreciated my position and asked me to forward to him or Cheney the names of people I thought might be appropriate for DoD or CIA. I promised to do so.

Before our meeting ended, I had one other thought I wanted to share. I had observed over the past few years that there were ways of behaving that could invite one's enemies to act aggressively, with unintended but dangerous consequences.
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The American withdrawal under fire from Somalia in the early 1990s was an example. In like fashion, American leaders did not act forcefully in response to al-Qaida's fatal attack on the USS
Cole
in Yemen in 2000. The cumulative effect, I cautioned, suggested to our enemies that the United States was not willing to defend its interests. “Weakness is provocative,” I said to the President-elect, who nodded in agreement. “But so is the perception of weakness,” I added.

As I saw it, a decade of hesitation and half measures had undermined our national security. The incoming administration would need to give the country strategic direction and build up our defenses and intelligence capabilities. Anyone assuming those posts would need to have that in mind.

I wanted Bush to know that if he selected me I would not intend to simply preside over the department or agency. “Governor, if I were to serve in your administration I would be leaning forward,” I said. “If you would be uncomfortable with that, then I would be the wrong man for the job.”