That fall he acquired a surprising ally in the argument: Senator William J. Fulbright, whose devastating 1966 hearings against the Vietnam War were so subversive to the Establishment’s amour propre that CBS cut away to a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show rather than continue live coverage. Now Fulbright published an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. He allowed that recent revelations about the CIA might be true. “But I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we need most right now; these truths which must injure if not kill a nation.” What was needed was “restored stability and confidence.” What the press required was “voluntary restraint” to reaffirm the “social contract.” What the public most certainly did not need was the media’s present “inquisition psychology.”
In truth, though, the media were proving not very inquisitive at all. The Washington Post’s William Greider wrote in Esquire about the scanty coverage of the intelligence hearings, especially after the blanket coverage of Watergate, “There is a strong wish all over town, a palpable feeling that it would be nice if somehow this genie could be put back in the bottle . . . a nostalgic longing for the easy consensual atmosphere which once existed among the contending elements in Washington.” He noted how “the press essentially tugs back and forth at itself, alternatively pushing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, and then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.” And October, apparently, was a lapdog month.
Abzug’s revelations received hardly any coverage. General Allen’s testimony was buried in back pages (in the Louisville Courier Journal it was trumped by news of a religious community of 177 in Arkansas whose members pulled their children out of school to await the second coming of Christ). A stunning colloquy between Senator Walter Mondale, the liberal Democrat from Minnesota, and NSA deputy director Benson Buffham—
Mondale: “Were you concerned about its legality?”
Buffham: “Legality?”
Mondale: “Whether it was legal.”
Buffham: “In what sense? Whether that would have been a legal thing to do?”
Mondale: “Yes.”
Buffham: “That particular aspect didn’t enter into the discussion.”
—was not quoted anywhere at all, even by the New York Times, whose article on the NSA hearing ran on page eighty-one. As for the president, he followed the recommendation of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and closed down further inquiry into the NSA by extending executive privilege to the officials and telecommunications executives involved. This institutionalization of what had been a novel, and exceptionally controversial, legal doctrine in a brand-new presidential administration got no coverage, either.
A lot had changed since those English-muffin days when he said in his inaugural speech, “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.” Indeed, Ford had recently established a top-level White House working group, including Kissinger, Schlesinger, Rumsfeld, the CIA’s budget director, and one of Ford’s top legal counsels, to meet every single day and manage public relations to push back against the intelligence investigations. Perhaps that work explained why the investigating committees were so effectively rocked back on their heels by the next turn in the story.
Glamorous, globe-trotting Henry Kissinger had weathered his own Watergate storm—for bugging reporters and his own staffers—and remained the punditocracy’s beau ideal. He was fresh from his latest triumph in “shuttle diplomacy,” securing a preliminary peace framework between Israel and Egypt, when the indefatigable Otis Pike had the temerity to demand from him a memo by a State Department staffer named Thomas Boyatt that had apparently criticized the CIA’s poor intelligence regarding the crisis in Cyprus, where the U.S. ambassador, Rodger Paul Davies, had been machine-gunned to death the previous August. The Pike Committee’s chief counsel soon received a thundering phone call from the Times’ James Reston: “What the hell are you guys doing down there? Are you reviving McCarthyism?”
This, it turned out, was the administration’s public relations line—Pike was running a “McCarthyite inquisition,” as State Department official Lawrence Eagleburger said in his testimony before the committee. An editorial called “Pike’s Pique” noted that by calling “junior staff officers to testify under oath about what recommendations they made to the policy officials,” the congressman was reintroducing the practices that “almost wrecked the U.S. Foreign Service during the McCarthy period.” Then, since Kissinger forbade such junior staffers to testify, the Church Committee voted to subpoena Kissinger himself—and the Times’ editorialists called that “neo-McCarthyism,” too. Kissinger decided to testify before the Pike Committee the day after General Allen of the NSA, on October 30, though on his own terms: he summarized what he said was the thrust of Boyatt memo, still withholding the actual document from evidence—just the sort of Stennis-style compromise that, when Richard Nixon had proposed it during the crisis of October 1973, had sent tout Washington up in arms.
Ron Dellums, the socialist from Berkeley, who had once set up an exhibit of American war crimes in Vietnam outside his congressional office, took his turn to question Kissinger. Dellums cited Kissinger’s perch atop the shadowy “40 Committee,” which reviewed every covert U.S. intelligence operation; his overlapping jobs as national security advisor and secretary of state; and “testimony that you have participated in directing operations which were not fully discussed, analyzed, or evaluated by those authorized to do so”—and which had been “purposefully hidden.” He noted, “You have been involved in wiretaps of employees,” and thundered, “You now refuse information to Congress on a rather specious basis.”
Convinced he had the Establishment’s darling in his sights, Dellums moved in for the kill.
“Frankly, Mr. Secretary,” he said, “and I mean this very seriously . . . the method of your operation . . . may indeed be contrary to the law.”
Kissinger paused with a comedian’s art. He smiled: “Except for that, there is nothing wrong with my operation?” The hearing room erupted in laughter.
That was the clip that ran on the evening newscasts: a witty man humiliating a dour one. A quip had been all it took to turn the allegedly “McCarthyite” inquisition aside. Maybe people had had enough of inquisitions: suffering, the Washington Post had recently suggested—after My Lai, after Cambodia, after Watergate, after the year without Christmas lights, after Patty Hearst and all the rest—“a kind of deadening of moral nerve-ends, a near inability to be surprised, let alone disturbed.”
NEW YORKERS WERE SURPRISED AND disturbed.
In the middle of the month, after trustees of the teachers’ union pension fund refused a City Hall plea to help out by buying city bonds, lawyers drew up a bankruptcy petition (“The City of New York is unable to pay its debts or obligations as they mature”). Governor Carey announced an austerity plan he said went “to the limits of what we can apply to the city in terms of economies.” President Ford considered backtracking on the question of a bailout. Top advisors proposed he sign a package of loans for the city working its way through Congress. “Hell, no!” Donald Rumsfeld bellowed back at a cabinet meeting. He spoke for the mood of the room.
On October 29, at high noon, the president made a luncheon address at the National Press Club carried, unlike the Pike and Church committee proceedings, live on all three networks. He described the latest eleventh-hour stopgap to keep New York solvent, passed the previous week in Albany. He outlined Mayor Beame’s argument that “unless the federal government intervenes, New York City within a short time will no longer be able to pay its bills.” And he responded with William Simon’s and Ronald Reagan’s arguments: it was all New York City’s fault, for giving away candy it could not afford. And he wouldn’t stand for it.
“I can tell you, and tell you now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federa
l bailout of New York City to prevent default. . . . If they can scare the whole country into providing that alternative . . . it would promise immediate rewards and eventual rescue to every other city that follows the tragic example of our largest city.” He proposed bankruptcy proceedings in federal court instead. “Other cities,” he concluded, “other states, as well as the federal government, are not immune to the insidious disease from which New York City is suffering. This sickness is brought on by years and years of higher spending, higher deficits, more inflation, and more borrowing to pay for higher spending, higher deficits, and so on, and so on, and so on. It is a progressive disease, and there is no painless cure. . . . If we go on spending more than we have, providing more benefits and services than we can pay for, then a day of reckoning will come to Washington and the whole country just as it has to New York.” And when “that day of reckoning comes, who will bail out the United States of America?”
In the editorial offices of the New York Daily News the talk was of how the press conference reminded them of a line in the 1950 George Cukor screwball comedy, Born Yesterday: “Would you do me a favor, Harry?” deadpans Judy Holliday. “What?” replies Broderick Crawford. “Drop dead!” Someone scrawled a headline, as a joke. Someone else looked it over: “Holy Christ, yes! Put it in the paper.”
Next morning. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. It was accompanied by a photograph in which the formerly amiable butterer of English muffins appeared to be sneering.
It was the day before Halloween—and open season on New York. Newsweek’s cover starred Abe Beame, swaddled like a baby, Gerald Ford spanking him over his knee. Newsweek quoted Lester Maddox, the racist Atlanta restaurateur elected governor of Georgia in 1966 after having run blacks off his property with an ax handle, now an authority on municipal finance: “The thing I don’t like about New York is the tendency to reward bums and penalize hard work.” Newsweek columnist Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, wrote that the city shared an “instinct for self-destruction matched only by its exaggerated sense of self-importance.” Theodore White, who in his “Making of the President” series used to present the expansion of the liberal state as self-evidently wise, wrote in New York magazine, “New York City has now reached the point where it is entirely incapable of self-government,” and called the city’s political pressure groups “a giant Soviet.”
On this subject, the president was in sync with the mood of the nation. And yet somehow at exactly the same time it became open season on him.
Halloween fell on a Friday. On Saturday, news broke that the Ford campaign’s finance chair, David Packard, had resigned. Having set a goal in July to raise $10 million by the time of the Republican convention, with a little more than two-thirds of that time to go he had found only $600,000. The New York Times observed, “Mr. Packard’s resignation served to underscore the difficulty Mr. Ford appeared to have in getting his campaign under way—an unusual problem for an incumbent president.” Then, that Sunday, in Florida (site of the third presidential primary), at a dinner honoring the visiting president of Egypt, the tuxedo-clad president toasted “the people of Israel.”
In Washington, gossip circulated about extraordinary doings in the White House. On Monday night, all became plain. The president appeared in the East Room, with the entire White House press corps and the network cameras assembled before him, and revealed the biggest cabinet shakeup in the history of the Republic.
“Good evening. I have several announcements to make tonight”:
At the Department of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld for James Schlesinger. At the National Security Council, Brent Scowcroft for Henry Kissinger. Dick Cheney to replace Donald Rumsfeld as chief of staff, Elliot Richardson for Rogers Morton at Commerce. At CIA, George H. W. Bush for William Colby (later believed to have been fired for being too cooperative with Congress’s investigation of his agency)—on and on it went, like clowns stumbling out of a tiny car at the circus. Or maybe, Washington hands thought, more like something out of The Godfather. Someone thought to call the interlocking set of simultaneous bureaucratic assassinations the “Halloween Massacre.”
News of another bureaucratic assassination—or had it been a suicide?—had broken earlier in the day. For months the blood feud between the vice president and the conservative Republicans who despised him had transfixed the Georgetown villagers. In spring came rumors that Rockefeller might be dropped from the 1976 ticket. Then the president’s pal Mel Laird floated the idea of an “open convention” to choose the next running mate. If this was bait for Reagan fans, they gladly rose to it: in June a conclave of conservative senators said the idea “would be in the best interests of the Republican Party and the nation.” In July reporters grilled campaign manager Bo Callaway about why there were no pictures of Rockefeller at Ford-for-President headquarters. He admitted, “A lot of Reagan people are not supporters of Rockefeller, and I want it clear to them that we want their support whether they support Rockefeller or not.” Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican senator, then warned that dumping Rockefeller would “endanger the President’s support from the whole centrist bloc in the country.”
In the fall, to shore up Rockefeller’s political position, the president announced the vice president would appear before a series of public forums. Rockefeller landed in Tampa for the first one back on Wednesday, October 29. To the reporters badgering him on the tarmac, he claimed “I honestly don’t know” what the president would say in that evening’s address on New York’s fiscal situation, adding, “I have been totally supportive of President Ford’s position”—which was rich, given that barely two weeks earlier he had said a federal failure to bail out the city would be a “catastrophe.”
Then that Monday morning the White House released a letter from Rockefeller to his boss announcing, “After much thought, I have decided further that I do not wish my name to enter into your consideration for the upcoming Republican Vice Presidential nominee.” The Times quoted an unnamed White House official who said “that Mr. Rockefeller had been unable to make his peace with the right wing of the Republican Party. He was, therefore, regarded as a liability by the President Ford Committee.” Mac Mathias said it proved Ford had become “a captive of the Reagan right.”
ROCKEFELLER HAD WITHDRAWN FROM THE political field. And by the end of the night, the man whose Washington ascent he had sponsored, Henry Kissinger, had lost his perch atop the National Security Council, which had given him daily access to the president in the Oval Office.
The speculation immediately began: Was the Halloween Massacre about placating the right? But if so, why had Ford cashiered conservatives’ favorite cabinet officer, James Schlesinger? And what to make of the fact that the president’s new national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, was a trusted Kissinger deputy—“replacing Kissinger with Kissinger,” as one senator put it?
In the East Room, the reporters’ grilling commenced, sans mercy. First question: had Rockefeller “sacrificed himself on your political behalf, and have you in any way urged him to do so?” The president dissembled, convolutedly: “The decision by the Vice President was a decision on his own.”
And then, when another reporter soon asked the same question, he repeated the same thing, as if he had rehearsed it. And then, a few questions after that, when asked what reasons Rockefeller gave for his decision, Ford said Rockefeller’s letter, which in fact said virtually nothing, “speaks for itself.”
Someone asked if the reason was New York City. Ford responded, “Our differences over the handling of New York City are minimal”—then, like a mynah bird, repeated, “I think the letter speaks for itself.”
RON NESSEN KEPT A SIGN up in his office: “Watergate is harder to wash away than the spray of a skunk.” It helped explain one thing Gerald Ford was trying to accomplish with his bureaucratic coup, getting rid of Nixon holdovers. That backfired. The “Halloween Massacre” moniker recalled another shocking weekend firing—the Saturday Night Massacre. Jules Witcover called the press conferen
ce “worthy of Nixon at his most trapped mien” and said the president had just burned away “one of his few strengths—personal warmth and integrity.” Ford had hoped to finally establish an image as his own man—an accidental president no more. That backfired, too. A reporter had asked, “How do you make a high-level personnel shift of this kind, such a fast shift? Did you do this largely on your own.” Ford responded, “I did it totally on my own.” He was protesting too much—as the lead article in the next morning’s Washington Post, syndicated nationwide, made embarrassingly plain:
WASHINGTON—White House chief of staff Donald H. Rumsfeld, considered the master maneuverer of the Ford Administration, was widely credited Monday for being the silent architect of the President’s dramatic cabinet shakeup.
The soft-spoken, hard-driving former Illinois congressman emerged as the big winner of the Byzantine battle for power that went on behind the closed doors of the supposedly open Ford administration.
Not only did Rumsfeld wind up with an important cabinet post and equal access with Henry Kissinger to President Ford. He also left behind him in the White House as chief of staff his deputy, Richard Cheney, who is considered both highly capable and totally loyal to Rumsfeld. . . .
Rumsfeld left no fingerprints on any of his internal recommendations that helped produce the shakeup within the White House.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 73
