Young Rumsfeld , By: Mann, James, Atlantic Monthly, 10727825, Nov2003, Vol. 292, Issue 4
[ This is the article, for what it's worth. I found it a little dull, except for the minor irony that Rumsfeld was sort of a Vietnam peacenik. ]
The Donald Rumsfeld of thirty years ago was a lot like the man we know today — a divisive figure who relishes bureaucratic combat, aims to shake up the established order, and is tenaciously committed to his own ideas and ambitions. But he was also a social moderate and a dove
During the midday hours of Wednesday, April 7, 1971, Richard Nixon was sitting in his office hide-away in the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, attempting to prepare himself for that night's prime-time presidential address to the nation. The subject, as usual, was Vietnam. And yet as Nixon went over the speech with his two top aides — Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser, and H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff — the conversation kept returning to a different topic: namely, what the President, with growing irritation, called the Rumsfeld problem." Nixon was thinking of getting rid of Donald H. Rumsfeld, a former congressman who was then serving on the White House domestic-policy staff. "I think Rumsfeld may be not too long for this world," he said, adding, a few minutes later, "Let's dump him."
The problem was that from Nixon and Kissinger's perspective, Rumsfeld was becoming a troublesome anti-war advocate. Rumsfeld had emerged at the center of a small group of Administration officials, all of them involved with domestic policy, who were asking in staff meetings why the Administration could not move more quickly to end the war. The internal opponents also included George Shultz, the director of the Office of Management and Budget; Clark MacGregor, the counselor for congressional relations; and John Ehrlichman, the special assistant to the President for domestic affairs.
"They don't know a god-damn thing about foreign policy!" Nixon had said to Kissinger on the telephone a day earlier. "They're only concerned about, frankly, peace at any price, really. Because all they're concerned with is, well, revenue-sharing and the environment and all that crap — which doesn't amount to anything, in my opinion." Kissinger had concurred, saying, "They don't know what we'll be hit with if this whole thing comes apart."
The Vietnam War had reached a new milestone the previous week: it had now claimed more American lives than the Korean War. Vietnam had thus become the fourth most lethal conflict in American history, after the Civil War and the two world wars. At home it was creating ever greater upheaval on college campuses, in the streets of major cities, and in American politics. That spring a new round of antiwar protests was building. The Democratic senator Edmund Muskie was gearing up to run against Nixon in 1972 and was challenging him on the war; polls showed that he was even with or ahead of the President. Even Republicans in Congress were becoming restive; earlier in the month nine Republican senators had met with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird at the home of Senator Jacob Javits, of New York, to plead for an end to the war.
For nearly two months Rumsfeld had been seeking some new role in the Administration in which he could influence policy on Vietnam. In the process he had become a particular annoyance to Kissinger. Rumsfeld's first attempt — in a memo to Nixon dated February 27, 1971 — was to propose the appointment of a special presidential envoy "to review and report on postwar Southeast Asia during the winding down of hostilities.'" The detailed memo left no doubt that Rumsfeld had himself in mind for this job. The special envoy could lay the groundwork for the postwar reconstruction of Southeast Asia, Rumsfeld argued; and he insisted that such an envoy would not intrude on Kissinger's turf as National Security Adviser. Rumsfeld told Nixon that making such an appointment "would focus attention and emphasis on Indo-China peace instead of Indo-China war." He was asking Nixon, in bureaucratic language, to give peace a chance.
Henry Kissinger was not about to yield any authority over Vietnam policy to this pushy politician. Kissinger's deputy, Alexander Haig, first postponed any response to Rumsfeld's Nixon memo for weeks, and then sent a reply saying that introducing a special envoy "would confuse our allies as to who was doing what." Undaunted, Rumsfeld broached the idea again in a one-on-one Oval Office meeting with Nixon. The President brushed him off and suggested instead that Rumsfeld broaden his foreign-policy experience with a brief mission overseas. "It might be better from your standpoint — I think you want to take a trip to Europe," he told Rumsfeld. The trip, ostensibly for the purpose of exchanging ideas with European officials about drug abuse, was scheduled for later that spring.
But Rumsfeld did not let go of Vietnam. On the morning of April 7 he pressed Kissinger, in the presence of other White House staff members, for an explanation of why the Administration couldn't move more quickly to bring the war to a close. Afterward Kissinger grumbled to the President that Rumsfeld had never quite said exactly what he wanted Nixon to do. He had never called specifically for Nixon to set a "date certain" for the end of the war (as Nixon's critics were requesting), and had spoken only vaguely of setting a date by which the United States would reduce its presence in Vietnam to a "residual force." It was this challenge at the staff meeting, and Rumsfeld's stance on Vietnam, that prompted Nixon to talk about firing him. The President also worried that Rumsfeld might quit first.
"He's ready to jump the ship," Nixon said at his later meeting with Haldeman and Kissinger.
"No, I don't think he's ready to jump," Haldeman replied. "And I doubt if he ever would, just because [staying on in the Administration] serves his interests more than not. But I don't think he's ever going to be a solid member of the ship." "He's just positioning himself to be close to The Washington Post and The New York Times'," Kissinger interjected.
Nixon returned to business. "Well, then let's dump him right after this," he said. "Good God, we're sending him and [the White House adviser Robert] Finch on a two-month holiday to Europe. Shit. For what purpose?"
"To get him out of town," Kissinger said, gently reminding his boss that Rumsfeld's "holiday" in Europe had originally been their idea.
Nixon tried to go back to rehearsing that night's speech, in which he would announce that he planned to withdraw 100,000 Americans from Vietnam by the end of the year, but would also explicitly refuse to set a date for the end of the war. Still, he couldn't put Rumsfeld out of his mind.
"Coming back to the Rumsfeld problem — I'm disappointed in Don, Bob," he told Haldeman a few minutes later. "Understand, I don't want to be disappointed, just because — I don't want somebody who's just with us, God damn it, when things are going good, you know what I mean? If he thinks we're going down the tubes, and he's just going to ride with us, maybe he's going to take a trip to Europe occasionally — then screw him, you know?"
What galled Nixon especially was that Rumsfeld, who was viewed as one of the Administration's most effective public speakers, refused to go out and defend the Nixon Administration to the American people. "He won't step up to anything," Nixon grumbled. "We have given him, time and time again, opportunities to step up, and he will not step up and kick the ball."
Haldeman agreed. "I used to think at one point he was a potential presidential contender, but he isn't," he said.
"He's like Finch," Nixon said. "They both have the charisma for national office, but neither has got the backbone."
Rumsfeld was one of several aides Nixon talked about dumping but never did. The President's irritation with him eventually subsided, and he remained in the Administration until its premature end. The Vietnam episode provides an illuminating glimpse of his work in the Nixon Administration and contradicts some of the simplistic perceptions Americans have since had of Rumsfeld.
During the following three decades Rumsfeld came to be viewed as an ardent hawk, a champion of U.S. military power. That perception does not fit the early phases of his career, when, as a fervent proponent of domestic reform, he was a moderate-to-liberal force within the Nixon Administration. His dovish views suited his political ambitions: the war was unpopular, and as an adviser on domestic policy, he had no personal or professional stake in winning it. Indeed, Rumsfeld, who throughout his government career has seemed to relish bureaucratic combat, may have viewed Vietnam as an issue on which he could challenge Kissinger's primacy within the government (something he later did with greater success in his more hawkish guise during the Ford Administration).
Over the years another assumption about Rumsfeld has taken hold: that he had no connection to the seamier side of Nixon's presidency — the bare-knuckle apparatus that waged combat with Nixon's political enemies. This assumption arose in part from the fact that Rumsfeld was appointed the ambassador to NATO and was thus thousands of miles away, in Europe, during 1973-1974, when the Watergate scandal crested and Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford, an old friend, who brought Rumsfeld back to Washington to take charge of the White House staff after Nixon's resignation, helped to foster this perception. "He wouldn't tolerate political shenanigans," Ford wrote in his memoirs, "and the men around Nixon knew he wouldn't, so to protect themselves, they kept him out of the loop."
Nixon's secret White House tape recordings reveal a more complex reality, however. Rumsfeld was not entirely divorced from Nixon's political operations. There is no sign that he was involved in any of the illegalities of Watergate, but he was willing to offer Nixon other help of a not particularly exalted nature — some dirt on political enemies, some covert ties with a prominent pollster. The Nixon tapes reveal that Rumsfeld often worked with and was a special favorite of John Mitchell and Charles Colson, Nixon's roughest political operators, who viewed Rumsfeld as savvier than other White House aides. Indeed, when Nixon first considered naming Rumsfeld the NATO ambassador, in the summer of 1971, Mitchell urged the President to keep him around until after the election, and Nixon decided Mitchell was right. "Let me say this — he has done some good political stuff for Mitchell," Nixon told Haldeman about Rumsfeld at one point. "He'll cooperate. NATO's fine, but it pulls him out of politics ... He's an operator." In short, the tapes demonstrate that Rumsfeld was not nearly so marginal a figure in Nixon's political apparatus as he was later portrayed.
Nixon and Rumsfeld seem to have formed a curious but strong bond early on. Rumsfeld saw Nixon as a mentor. In a series of lengthy one-on-one conversations in the White House, Rumsfeld repeatedly sought both to advance to a Cabinet job and to obtain Nixon's advice on his political career. Rumsfeld was, of course, gaining private tutelage from America's most skilled political infighter.
Nixon valued Rumsfeld too. From his perspective, Rumsfeld stood in a different category from Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger: as a former congressman, Rumsfeld was the only senior White House staff member who had repeatedly subjected himself, as Nixon had, to the hazards and potential public humiliations of running for elective office. Nixon's political defeats in 1960 and 1962 and his long, acrimony-filled career had left the President with not only a strain of self-pity but also a strong sense of personal identification with other politicians. Haldeman and Ehrlichman loathed Rumsfeld for his ambition and his self-promotion, but for Nixon these qualities did not count against Rumsfeld. Moreover, Nixon thought Rumsfeld was a good public face for the Administration and hoped to make use of him, especially to court voters on college campuses and in America's suburbs. "He's young, he's thirty-nine years old, he's a hell of a spokesman," Nixon said.
And yet their relationship remained largely private. In public Rumsfeld never seemed to be a central part of the Nixon Administration. Nixon discovered, to his frustration, that Rumsfeld was often too willing to challenge existing policy inside the White House and not willing enough to defend it in public. For Rumsfeld's part, he never managed to obtain the central role or the Cabinet appointment he wanted. As things turned out after Watergate, Rumsfeld was fortunate that he had never been closely identified with Nixon.
Donald Henry Rumsfeld's father, a Chicago real-estate broker, had moved his family around the country during a stint in the Navy in World War II and then returned to settle on Chicago's North Shore. Donald went to New Trier High School, where he was the star of the school's state-championship wrestling team. He went on to Princeton, where he became the captain of the wrestling team. One teammate, two years ahead of him, was Frank Carlucci, who would, like Rumsfeld, rise to the top of America's national-security establishment.
After college Rumsfeld spent three years in the Navy, where he became a pilot and a flight instructor and, yet again, a wrestling champion. According to Steve Neal, a Chicago Tribune reporter who chronicled Rumsfeld's early years, Rumsfeld hoped for a chance at the 1956 Olympics, but gave up because of a shoulder injury. In the late 1950s he worked as a congressional aide in Washington. Eventually he decided to run for Congress himself. He entered the 1962 Republican primary for a congressional seat from Chicago's northern suburbs, a heavily Republican district. His main rival was an Evanston insurance executive whose company had been under state investigation. According to Neal, one of Rumsfeld's campaign aides — the young Republican Job Stuart Magruder, who was later convicted of perjury in the Watergate scandal — made sure that Rumsfeld's rival was asked repeatedly about the investigation. Rumsfeld won the primary and captured the seat.
In Congress, Rumsfeld first began to reveal the distinctive style that would mark his career for decades. Fellow congressmen found that he hated clichés and enjoyed embarrassing in public those who lapsed into jargon-filled speech. He served on the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, and took a special interest in the space program; once, an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began telling members of the committee how NASA would do this project "in-house" and that project "in-house" and another project "in-house." Exasperated, Rumsfeld finally interjected, "What about the out-house?"
Rumsfeld's voting record was not unlike those of other Republicans from the northern suburbs: he was economically conservative but socially moderate; he supported civil-rights legislation; he was a leader in the drive to replace the draft with a volunteer Army. (Four decades later, after he became George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, two members of Congress who were opposed to military action against Iraq introduced legislation to reinstate the draft. Rumsfeld, drawing on his arguments from the 1960s, said that draftees had added "no value, no advantage, really" to the armed services. He was quickly obliged to apologize to veterans' groups.)
Rumsfeld also took a modest interest in foreign policy. In 1962 Richard Allen, the conservative Republican who later became Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser, helped to set up the Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank at Georgetown University. Rumsfeld was one of the center's earliest congressional allies. "We organized a little salon at night back when the members of Congress still had time to think and breathe," Alien says. "Rumsfeld would come over along with a little coterie of Republican and Democratic congressmen. And Rumsfeld and I formed a friendship. We didn't have any money; we drove Volkswagens and went to each other's houses and drank jug wine and ate spaghetti."
Rumsfeld's main achievement during this period was his role in a successful challenge to the existing political order on Capitol Hill. Following Barry Goldwater's humiliating defeat in the 1964 presidential election, some Republicans in the House of Representatives decided to push for new party leadership. The Republican minority leader at the time was Charles Halleck, of Indiana. Rumsfeld emerged at the head of this group of insurgents, which included Representatives Charles Goodell, of New York; Robert Griffin, of Michigan; Albert Quie, of Minnesota; and Roben Ellsworth, of Kansas. The group moved to dump Halleck and replace him with Gerald Ford, of Michigan. The effort succeeded, and Rumsfeld became one of Ford's closest advisers. For a generally conservative Republican congressman, Rumsfeld maintained some surprising friendships with Democrats. One of his closest associates in the House was Allard K. Lowenstein, a leader of the antiwar movement and perhaps the most liberal member of Congress at the time, who in 1967 led the fight within the Democratic Party to drop Lyndon Johnson as its presidential nominee. Rumsfeld and Lowenstein had served together as congressional aides in the late 1950s and once dreamed of buying a country newspaper.
During the 1968 campaign Rumsfeld performed one noteworthy bit of service for the presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Knowing that Rumsfeld came from Chicago, Nixon had asked him to help run a small Republican operation inside the Conrad Hilton Hotel during the Democratic National Convention there, in August. The twenty-eight-story Hilton was serving as the headquarters for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the leading Democrat, and for Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate; many Democratic delegates were staying there too. Working with several other Nixon supporters, Rumsfeld was supposed to serve as a spokesman for the Republican nominee, providing reporters with on-the-spot responses to Democratic accusations. In addition, Nixon, a lifelong voracious consumer of political intelligence, asked Rumsfeld to report back on what he saw and heard that week, both from the participants at the convention and from the protesters expected outside it. When violence erupted, Rumsfeld served as Nixon's lookout man.
In the afternoon and evening hours of August 28 the Chicago police chased antiwar demonstrators through downtown streets and attacked them with nightsticks. Some of the worst beatings took place along Michigan Avenue, directly in front of the Hilton. As he watched the bloodshed from his hotel window, Rumsfeld provided an account for Nixon and his aides, who were relaxing in Key Biscayne and preparing for his fall campaign.
"He would call up and say, 'They're breaking bones! Omigosh, look at that!'" recalls Robert Ellsworth, Nixon's national political director, who took Rumsfeld's calls from Chicago. "The information wasn't that politically useful, but it was titillating to the candidate. Nixon loved those details."
By 1968 Rumsfeld had been serving in Congress for nearly six years. He was ready for a change. After campaigning for Nixon throughout the country that fall, he hoped to be named chairman of the Republican National Committee if Nixon won the election. He didn't get the job. As would happen on other occasions throughout his career, Rumsfeld's driving, combative style had pleased the top man but had earned him powerful enemies among others near the top, particularly Haldeman. According to Ellsworth, Haldeman blocked Rumsfeld both from the party chairmanship (which eventually went to a more easygoing congressman, Rogers Morton) and from various top jobs in the Administration. Rumsfeld then sought to become head of the party's Research and Planning Committee but lost out on that post, too — to Representative Robert A. Taft Jr., of Ohio. In the process of leading the movement for Ford, Rumsfeld had antagonized some other party leaders in the House. By the early months of 1969 he seemed to be stuck, an up-and-coming congressman looking for the next rung to climb.
Three months after Nixon's inauguration a job finally opened up. Two Republican governors had turned down Nixon's invitations to head the Office of Economic Opportunity, an agency established during the Johnson Administration to run new programs aimed at eliminating poverty. Nixon offered the job to Rumsfeld, who had voted in Congress against many of those programs. The job "was less than what he wanted, but more than Haldeman wanted him to get," Ellsworth says.
Before taking the job Rumsfeld bargained hard. At a meeting with Nixon in Key Biscayne, he won assurances that he would be named not only head of the anti-poverty agency but also an assistant to the President, with Cabinet-level status and an office in the White House. The concurrent White House appointment turned out to be important, because it helped to overcome a legal obstacle: the Constitution bars a member of Congress from accepting any job in the federal government if the salary for that job has been increased during the congressman's time in office. While Rumsfeld was in Congress, the salary of the OEO director had been increased from $30,000 to $42,500. However, the Nixon Administration obtained a memorandum from its bright new assistant attorney general, William H. Rehnquist, explaining that the constitutional problem could be circumvented if Nixon agreed to pay Rumsfeld no salary for his work as the OEO director and $42,500 for his work as a White House adviser. Thus Rumsfeld got his first job in the Nixon Administration partly through the convoluted legal reasoning of the future Chief Justice of the United States.
One of Rumsfeld's first actions in the Administration was a seemingly minor personnel decision whose impact would reverberate for decades. Rumsfeld was looking for a right-hand man. He found and hired a twenty-eight-year-old Capitol Hill staff aide and graduate student named Richard Cheney. |
