Young Rumsfeld, part 2/2
Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming, the son of a career civil servant with the Department of Agriculture. He was a football star and a class president at Natrona County High School, where he dated the state-champion baton twirler, Lynne Vincent. He won a rare scholarship to Yale University, but dropped out within two years. "I didn't relate to Yale at all," he later explained. "I had some romantic notions about wanting to get out and see the world — or at least traveling all around the West."
Cheney moved back west to be what he later called a "lineman for the county," building power lines on construction crews in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. Eventually he returned to college, at the University of Wyoming; married Lynne Vincent; and went off with her to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he became a doctoral candidate in political science and she became a doctoral candidate in English. He was eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War but obtained deferments, first as a student and then as a parent, after his and Lynne's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born, in 1966. (More than two decades later, when he was questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee about those draft deferments, Cheney offered a memorable reply: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." He said he would have been happy to serve if he had been called, and that he felt the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a noble cause.)
Cheney went to Washington in 1968, on a fellowship from the American Political Science Association that enabled him to work for a member of Congress. One of the congressmen with whom he interviewed for a job was Rumsfeld — but the future Vice President failed to impress the future Defense Secretary. The applicant was neither particularly eloquent nor dynamic. "It was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life," Cheney recalled in a 1986 speech. "The truth is, I flunked the interview. After half an hour it was clear to both of us that there was no possibility that I could work for him."
Cheney landed in the office of William Steiger, of Wisconsin. He was working there in the spring of 1969 when he noticed a note on Steiger's desk from Rumsfeld, looking for advice and help in his new OEO job. Cheney spotted an opportunity. Over a weekend he wrote an unsolicited memo for Steiger on how to staff and run a federal agency. The following week Steiger passed the memo on to Rumsfeld. A few weeks after reading it Rumsfeld called Cheney and offered him a position as his special assistant.
It was the beginning of Cheney's long apprenticeship with Rumsfeld. Over most of the next seven years in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Cheney served as Rumsfeld's doorkeeper and top administrator in Washington. He proved to be quiet, discreet, and efficient. Those working for Rumsfeld soon discovered that the way to get things done was to go to Cheney. Rumsfeld's style was to run day-to-day operations by remote control, issuing edicts and obtaining information through his special assistant. As that assistant, Cheney gradually took on an importance of his own. "When you gave something to Dick," one OEO veteran recalls, "it happened. It got done."
They were a complementary pair, each offering traits the other didn't have. Rumsfeld was full of energy; Cheney was low-key. Rumsfeld overflowed with words and ideas; Cheney, the laconic westerner, never used a word beyond what the situation required. Rumsfeld always seemed to want more: more turf, expanded missions, a bigger job. Cheney appeared to the world as unfailingly modest and patient. Rumsfeld challenged people head on, and in the process made many others nervous or resentful. The self-effacing Cheney, in contrast, usually managed to leave adversaries thinking that whatever had happened to them was merely the business of government and nothing personal. Rumsfeld loved to shake up the established order; Cheney conveyed an air of reassurance and stability.
Yet despite their contrasting styles, the two men tended to think alike. They would work together, on and off, over more than three decades without any strong differences of opinion emerging between them.
Cheney was merely one of several future leaders working at the OEO in those years, at a time when the eradication of poverty was given much higher priority than it would be later on. Rumsfeld also recruited Frank Carlucci, his friend and wrestling teammate from Princeton, to serve as one of his top aides. Thus, curiously enough, during the Nixon Administration three of America's future Secretaries of Defense — Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney — were working alongside one another in an agency dedicated to social change. The OEO's employees in the late 1960s and early 1970s also included Bill Bradley, the future senator and presidential candidate; Christine Todd Whitman, the future governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator; Mickey Kantor, the future U.S. trade representative; Jim Leach, the future congressman; and Terry Lenzner, the future investigator and staff member for the Senate Watergate Committee. John D. Rockefeller IV was one of the earliest recruits of Volunteers in Service to America (VTSTA), the OEO program that served as a domestic version of the Peace Corps; VISTA assigned Rockefeller to West Virginia, where he later settled down and was elected first governor and then U.S. senator.
Many of these people had been attracted by the idealism of the agency's mission. When Lyndon Johnson established the OEO, in 1964, he told Congress, "For the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty." In addition to VISTA the agency had in its early years started up the Job Corps, for disadvantaged youth; legal services for the poor; and Head Start, the education program for preschool children.
In the OEO's first three years, under the Democrats, as its personnel began to organize and speak up for the poor, the agency aroused intense opposition from governors, local officials, and the business community. The strongest opposition arose when lawyers for the anti-poverty program in California helped to represent migrant farm workers in disputes against agricultural interests, and Governor Ronald Reagan in response tried to cut off OEO funding for the legal-aid program.
During the 1968 campaign Nixon had promised to bring the OEO to heel. According to Leonard Garment, Nixon's White House counselor and former law partner, Nixon's main objective for the agency was "getting control of all the meshugenehs who were driving governors and other people crazy."
Thus Rumsfeld was stepping into a potentially poisonous situation — taking over an agency that had been created by the Democrats and was filled with enthusiastic young employees but was despised by the President for whom he worked. He quickly moved to curb some of the OEO's excesses.
Nevertheless, within a few months Rumsfeld became a staunch and surprisingly tough advocate for the antipoverty agency. This was his first job in the executive branch, and from the very start he demonstrated a particular talent for defending his bureaucratic turf. To get what his organization needed he quietly pushed the White House and the budget officers, and he also learned to go outside the Administration, to Congress and the press, to counter resistance from within the Administration. He was trying to do his best for the agency, hoping to make it succeed.
In a speech to the National Press Club seven months after taking charge of the OEO, Rumsfeld even defended the concept of federally funded legal services, saying that "justice for the poor" was part of his agency's mission. By this point he was beginning to be seen as a rare moderate, even progressive, voice within the Administration, and was becoming a target of the conservatives. At the press conference that followed this speech, the very first questioner asked Rumsfeld about reports that he was viewed "with open hostility" in the Nixon White House.
The following year Rumsfeld sponsored a notable initiative that would eventually become a cherished cause of American conservatives: tuition tax credits. It was the first salvo in an education controversy that has persisted for decades. Rumsfeld argued that with tax credits or vouchers, "poor parents would be able to exercise some opportunity to choose, similar to that now enjoyed by wealthier parents, who can move to a 'better' public school district or send their children to private schools."
In a memo to Nixon about the tax-credit idea, Rumsfeld said he thought he could convince Jewish groups that their fears about a violation of the separation of Church and State were "groundless." However, Rumsfeld went on, "the education lobby .. is clearly correct in perceiving the potential threat that these experiments pose to their comfortable world." That memo encapsulated Rumsfeld's brash style, his overconfidence in his persuasive powers, and his eagerness to upset the existing order.
By late 1970 Rumsfeld had decided that it was time to move on. He had managed to keep the OEO from being gutted by the Nixon Administration, but his conservative friends were telling him that he had already stayed in the OEO job too long and that it was becoming a political liability. He also had hopes for a bigger job in the Administration.
Soon after the 1970 congressional elections, in which the Republicans did poorly, Nixon and his team began talking about an Administration shake-up. Rumsfeld figured prominently in the maneuvering. Haldeman wrote in his diary for November 7, 1970, "Decided major personnel changes. [George] Romney out [as secretary of Housing and Urban Development], Rumsfeld to replace him.'" But Romney refused to leave, and although Nixon and his aides talked about firing him, the President couldn't bring himself to do so. Rumsfeld was moved instead to the White House full-time, as a senior adviser, leaving him on hold for a future Cabinet-level position and postponing the question of exactly what he would do while he waited.
Throughout 1971-1972, while Rumsfeld was serving on the White House staff, he had a series of intermittent private talks with the President about his own future and about American politics, American foreign policy, and the state of the world. Those long, meandering conversations, preserved in Nixon's tape recordings, provide a remarkable insight into the two men.
Rumsfeld continued to speak up for moderate-to-liberal causes that ran against the generally conservative drift of the Administration. His work at the OEO had given him a constituency and, for a time, a sense of purpose. "We need to be able to communicate with the young and the black and the people who are out, even though we don't get their vote," he told Nixon in one private conversation in March of 1971.
Nixon decided that Rumsfeld's liberalism could be put to good use, winning support in places where the Administration was weak. "I think Rumsfeld doing, frankly, two [kinds of] people, suburbia and young, sounds awfully good," he told Haldeman. "Forget the environment, farting around with the old folks, the Negroes, and everything. Right now there has to be organized — I want to get something done on college youth."
Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's political stances were hard to separate from his intense ambition, which was served by the idea that his progressive views could help the Administration attract support from the political center. Rumsfeld's plea in behalf of "the young and the black and the people who arc out" was made immediately after the President asked him for his opinion about Vice President Spiro Agnew. Nixon wondered why Agnew was so unpopular.
RUMSFELD: The Vice President's demeanor ... tends to tell people
that he's not communicating with them. Look at his background.
He came to this straight out of Maryland.
NIXON: Pretty hard to go straight out of Maryland to the top.
RUMSFELD: You better believe it! My goodness. I mean, I had three
times as much experience in government as he did.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Rumsfeld would have liked the President to dump Agnew and run on a Nixon-Rumsfeld ticket in 1972.
The principal item on the agenda in these conversations was Rumsfeld's career. Nixon was engaging in one of his favorite pastimes: dispensing political advice. At the time of their talks both men assumed that Rumsfeld would eventually run for the Senate from his home state of Illinois. The main question was what jobs or experience would help him win a Senate seat. Nixon encouraged him to do something in foreign policy.
"Believe me, in any big sophisticated state, and yours is a big sophisticated state, it's about the world," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "It's not about their miserable little subjects." He recounted his own experience as a representative from California, becoming active in the House Un-American Activities Committee and in the investigation of Alger Hiss, so that when he ran for the Senate from California, in 1950, he was considered a foreign-policy "expert" and voters looked up to him.
Rumsfeld agreed that he'd like to be involved in foreign affairs, because "that'd give me a credential." Nixon suggested that Rumsfeld might consider a job in the Defense Department, but warned him away from becoming a secretary of the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force. "The service secretaries, well, they're just warts," the President said. "I like them as individuals, but they do not do important things."
Nixon also outlined which countries and regions of the world might help to further the career of an aspiring politician and which ones wouldn't. "The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe," Nixon explained. "Latin America doesn't matter. Long as we've been in it, people don't give one damn about Latin America, Don." Stay away from Africa, too, Nixon warned. As for the Middle East, getting involved there carried too many potential hazards for a politician. "People think it's for the purpose of catering to the Jewish vote," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "And anyway, there's nothing you can do about the Middle East."
But although he repeatedly dangled the possibility of an assignment overseas or some big new domestic post, Nixon offered nothing specific. "We always expected you to go to a Cabinet spot," he told Rumsfeld in March of 1971. "I still expect you to, but yet the damn thing just hasn't opened up." Four months later he apologized again. "What we talked about is not going to materialize," he told Rumsfeld. Romney was going to stay on in the Cabinet, and so was Transportation Secretary John Volpe, who occupied another job to which Rumsfeld might have been appointed.
While he waited, Rumsfeld did what he could to please the President — and that meant helping out with White House political operations. He worked with Mitchell and Colson, the key figures in Nixon's political apparatus. One bit of help Rumsfeld volunteered was to use his old Princeton ties for secret contact with the Gallup organization, which Colson felt had "dovish" instincts. "We have decided that we'll try Rumsfeld working with Gallup," Colson told the President in July of 1971. "He went to school with George [Gallup] Jr. at Princeton." Nixon and Colson were eager to try to influence the results of major polls, notably Gallup and Harris, perhaps getting the pollsters to phrase their questions or present their results in ways that were helpful to Nixon. "I mean, if the figures aren't up there, we don't want them to lie about it," Nixon explained to Colson at one point. "They can trim them a little one way or another."
There is no evidence in the Nixon tapes that Rumsfeld tried to sway the outcome of Gallup polls. He did, however, manage to glean some advance information about upcoming Gallup-poll results, giving Nixon a few days to prepare. Rumsfeld appeared to realize that he was asking Gallup to go beyond the traditional independent role of a pollster. At one White House session in October of 1971 Rumsfeld urged Nixon to keep these contacts with the Gallup organization top-secret.
RUMSFELD: Say, I want to just report, sir, about my conversation
with George Gallup.
NIXON: Oh yeah, you went to school with him, didn't you?
RUMSFELD: I did. And I kind of want to be awful careful about
telling people around the building that I'm talking to him.
Because all he's got in his business is his integrity.
Rumsfeld then informed Nixon that soon-to-be-released poll results would show that the President's popularity had recently gone up.
Nixon and Haldeman seemed to believe that their contacts with the Gallup organization were paying off in subtle ways. On the eve of Nixon's trip to China, Haldeman told the President that a Gallup poll would be timed to help Nixon. "I can't believe that Gallup would tell Rumsfeld that he would hold a poll," Nixon exclaimed. "Because Gallup was always, 'Jesus Christ, I call them as I sec them.'" Haldeman explained that Gallup wasn't rescheduling the poll itself but merely altering when the results would be made public. "He would wait and release it next month, after you got back," he explained.
Rumsfeld busied himself in other ways. When he and Robert Finch went on their European tour, in the spring of 1971, they focused primarily on the issue of drugs; but Rumsfeld also brought a bit of political dirt home to Nixon. Speaking of the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Rumsfeld said that one U.S. ambassador "gave us a pile of bad stuff about Muskie and his extracurricular activities."
Nixon immediately perked up. "What kind of extracurricular activities?" he asked. "Business? Women?"
Rumsfeld apparently hadn't thought to be quite as inquisitive as Nixon. "I took it to be business or women," he replied vaguely. Thus he carefully passed on the ambassador's message without getting involved in the details, leaving them for the President to pursue on his own if he wished. (Nothing ever came of the allegation, which, it appears, was without substance.)
For Rumsfeld, the amorphous job of White House counselor was frustrating. He had no agency or department to run, and no particular mission. He kept pushing Nixon for some specific task. "You once told me I should do something in a line area, and I agree," he told the President. "I like that. There is a problem, potentially, with a guy floating around the White House." If he was going to stay in the White House, he suggested, he should have a specific title or portfolio.
Nixon's top aides had disliked Rumsfeld since the start of the Administration, and especially resented him after he became a full-time White House aide. "The senior staff grew to realize that the ambitious Rumsfeld would decline every assignment that did not enhance his personal goals," John Ehrlichman later wrote.
At one time or another Rumsfeld tossed out possibilities to Nixon: Secretary of Commerce, an emissary to Latin America, or "something in the trade area," as well as special envoy for postwar reconstruction in Vietnam. He also appears to have asked friends to put in a good word for him with the President when a job opened up as ambassador to Japan. Nixon groused to Haldeman that someone had suggested "maybe I could talk him into" the Tokyo job. 'I'm not going to talk him into doing anything," Nixon said. "If Rumsfeld wants to be an ambassador, let him say so! But Jesus Christ, Bob, what the hell — I don't think Rumsfeld can do Japan, you know, because I don't think he'd be tough enough [for] our side, the side of business, you know what I mean?"
Finally, in the summer of 1971, Nixon settled on what he could offer. He suggested the possibility of Rumsfeld's becoming U.S. ambassador to NATO. Rumsfeld was interested. "It would certainly fill a gap in my background," he told the President.
Yet Rumsfeld was wary. Nixon's first appointee as NATO ambassador had been Ellsworth, who was handed the job after a brief stint in the White House during which he ran afoul of others in the Nixon Administration. Rumsfeld told the President that when Ellsworth became NATO ambassador, "it looked as if he was being dumped." Rumsfeld didn't want his own appointment to NATO to be handled "in a way that it looked like I was being kicked upstairs." Don't worry, Nixon replied.
Nixon, it turned out, was even more hesitant. Six days after the President had broached the NATO job to Rumsfeld, his own top aides urged him to delay the appointment until after the re-election campaign. Haldeman relayed to the President the advice from Mitchell: "He said he'd strongly urge, don't let him go to NATO, he is a very valuable property here ... John thinks it's ridiculous to send him on foreign missions."
The solution was to postpone the NATO appointment for more than a year, until Nixon's second term. In the meantime, the President found other work for his restless young adviser. That fall Nixon named Rumsfeld to run the new Cost of Living Council, which temporarily kept him busy. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld went on serving as a go-between with the Gallup organization, giving speeches for the Administration, and doing other political chores.
Nothing was made final until after Nixon's re-election. By that time the White House aides with whom Rumsfeld was regularly at odds would have been happy to get him out of the Administration entirely. Haldeman recorded in his diary that in a meeting with Ehrlichman on November 20, 1972, Rumsfeld had appeared to agree to go back to Illinois and run for the Senate. "But then when he got in the meeting with the president, he said no, that just wouldn't do, that he had to have an Administration job for a year, which was a complete shock to the President and Ehrlichman," Haldeman claimed. "Typical Rumsfeld, rather slimy maneuver." Rumsfeld finally prevailed on Nixon to give him the NATO ambassadorship.
The following year Haldeman and Ehrlichman both lost their White House jobs as the Watergate scandal grew ever wider. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld was safely off in Europe, far removed from the taint of the Nixon White House. Eventually the details of his service for Nixon would largely be forgotten; few would remember the era long ago when Donald Rumsfeld was a dove, more interested in issues of postwar reconstruction than in war itself.
Over the years an assumption about Rumsfeld has taken hold: that he had no connection to the seamier side of Nixon's presidency. Nixon's secret White House tape recordings reveal a more complex reality, however.
Nixon's top aides disliked and resented Rumsfeld. "The senior staff grew to realize that the ambitious Rumsfeld would decline every assignment that did not enhance his personal goals," John Ehrlichman later wrote.
One of Rumsfeld's first actions in the Nixon Administration was to hire a young aide named Richard Cheney. So began a long apprenticeship. Those working for Rumsfeld discovered that the way to get things done was to go to Cheney.
"The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "Latin America doesn't matter." Stay away from Africa, too, he warned. "And," he said, "there's nothing you can do about the Middle East."
This article is adapted from his book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, to be published in April. |
