Known and Unknown

by Donald Rumsfeld

“Well, it’s settled,” she said simply. She liked the OEO idea even less than I did, since it meant leaving Congress to run an agency I was ambivalent about at best. But she concluded immediately that I was unlikely to leave a meeting with the President of the United States without committing to accept the job.

  The reserved Nixon spent his decades in politics having to push himself to be in the public eye. Even while supposedly relaxing in sunny Florida, he was formal and businesslike. As I noticed in our earlier meetings, he could be less than easy in his personal interactions. When Nixon met Joyce, for example, he acknowledged her with a smile. “Don,” he said, “I’m glad to see you brought your daughter.” Nixon would repeat that quip on more than one occasion.

  If not warm and easy in personal relationships, on a professional level President Nixon proved persuasive. As we met in Florida in April 1969, Nixon told me he needed me to take the OEO job. “The agency needs to be run right,” he said. “And you’ll have my full support.” As I made my case for not taking the post, Nixon kept telling me he did not agree and that I was the right man for the job. He left the impression that he had a personal interest in my future. And when the President told me he needed my help, I found it hard to keep up the fight. Nixon persuaded me to take on an assignment I didn’t want, at an agency I had voted against, with a mission that Nixon didn’t like, for a purpose that was still unclear.

  As our discussion on OEO was ending, I told the President that I’d recently returned from a second trip to Southeast Asia. Referencing Johnson’s credibility problems on the war, I suggested that Nixon examine carefully the American military’s bombing of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese targets in neighboring Laos. The Johnson administration’s silence on the issue left the American people unaware of the bombing campaign. Our friends in the region—the governments of Laos and Cambodia—insisted that American officials not reveal that they had given approval to bomb in their countries. Had it become public, Laos and Cambodia would have had to protest the very activity they had approved. The problem, as I told Nixon, was that while our friends were cooperating they were protecting themselves. By continuing a secret bombing campaign, Nixon would not be protecting himself.

  “President Johnson got into trouble for not telling the truth,” I noted. “Your administration does not want to fall into the same pattern.”

  Nixon listened intently and nodded. I hoped the message got through.

  Having agreed to the President’s request, we encountered an unanticipated problem that put my nomination in question. The Constitution prohibits individuals from receiving a government salary outside Congress if the salary for that position was increased during their time in Congress. While I had been serving, Congress had raised salaries for federal posts, including the director of OEO, which made me ineligible to receive the new salary for that position. Nixon’s legal staff discovered the issue and asked the Justice Department to look into the matter. A young assistant attorney general arrived at my house on a Sunday afternoon to discuss a possible solution. The suggestion was that I not receive a salary as director of the OEO and instead be paid as an assistant to the president in the White House. At the President’s suggestion, I was also to be made a member of the President’s cabinet. I can still picture that lanky lawyer sitting at our small dining table, discussing the issue. As it turned out, I owed the start of my service in the executive branch of the federal government to the fine legal mind of William Rehnquist, a future chief justice of the United States.4

  During my early months at the Office of Economic Opportunity, I had my first protracted encounter with the national media, and the episode left an indelible impression on me. On September 22, 1969, I opened the Washington Post to a column by Jack Anderson. Anderson was a syndicated columnist, appearing in nearly one thousand papers across the country. His pieces sought to offer a glimpse of Washington to average Americans, and he especially enjoyed targeting politicians and government officials. That morning I was in his crosshairs.

  The column’s title caused a sensation: “ANTI-POVERTY CZAR EMBELLISHES OFFICE.”5 “Anti-poverty czar Donald Rumsfeld has wielded an economy ax on programs for the poor,” Anderson wrote. “He has used some of the savings to give his own executive suite a more luxurious look, thus reducing the poverty in his immediate surroundings.”

  Anderson’s column, which reached as many as forty million readers, could not have come at a worse time. I was trying to forge relations with the agency’s employees, many of whom were skeptical or downright hostile to Republicans. I also wanted to try to give the OEO some credibility among its critics as being well run, to try to earn support in Congress.

  Anderson’s column damaged those efforts badly, painting a portrait of me as a stereotypical fat-cat Republican, in stark contrast to my predecessor in the job, President Kennedy’s wealthy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who was portrayed as being sensitive to the mission of OEO. “Under Sargent Shriver, the anti-poverty director’s office was unique in government,” Anderson noted. “There were no carpets, and the furnishings were prim.” Anderson’s claims included the following:

  To be prepared should his budget-cutting efforts prove tiresome, he had added a bedroom to his executive suite. Expensive lamps now give a soft, restful glow to the walls that were once lit by fluorescent tubes…. And as evidence of his new Cabinet rank, Rumsfeld has added the ultimate in executive status symbols: a private bathroom.6

  One could see why the piece was irresistible to critics. It was undoubtedly given to Anderson by an insider who didn’t like the reforms I was implementing to make OEO more efficient and leaner. There was only one problem: Anderson’s story was not true. In fact, as far as I could tell, not a word of that column was accurate, with the exception of the correct spelling of my name. Anderson had not bothered to make a simple phone call to confirm his facts or even to ask for a comment.

  I had learned in managing Congressman Dave Dennison’s 1958 campaign how even the appearance of wrongdoing could be terribly damaging. A newspaper article, no matter how false, can stick to a public figure for decades. The old axiom about the press is that a politician should never engage in battle with an opponent that buys ink by the barrel. But I had to do something. So I dictated a four-page response that addressed the Anderson column point by point, including:

  QUOTE: “Anti-poverty czar Donald Rumsfeld has wielded an economy ax on programs for the poor…”

  COMMENT: 1969 FY expenditures were $1.7 [billion]. The Nixon Administration request for $2.8 billion…is still pending before Congress. That is not an “economy ax.”

  QUOTE: “Expensive lamps now give a soft, restful glow to the walls that were once lit by fluorescent tubes.”

  COMMENT: The fluorescent tubes are still there. Three lamps, GSA issue, are not in Rumsfeld’s office, but in the reception area on the 8th floor. There is not a lamp in Rumsfeld’s office, either expensive or cheap, restful or not restful.

  QUOTE: “And as evidence of his new Cabinet rank, Rumsfeld has added the ultimate in executive status symbols: a private bathroom.”

  COMMENT:…There is no private bathroom. There are two bathrooms on the 8th floor where Rumsfeld’s office is located—one for ladies and one for men. Rumsfeld uses the latter.7

  After my secretary typed up my response, I invited Anderson to read it and to take a tour of my office. After he saw with his own eyes that his entire piece was false, I was under the naïve impression that he would correct his column with the same fanfare that his original column received. But, quite the contrary, he informed me that while he regretted the error, he had recently inherited his column from longtime columnist Drew Pearson. Anderson said he feared that if he admitted he had run a totally false column, some of newspapers in the syndicate for his column might drop it.* Obviously, he was more concerned about his paycheck than the damage the article did to me or the truth.

  The episode was like a body blow and left me with a deep caution of the press. Years later, when I le
ft government and moved back to Chicago in 1977, the Anderson story would still haunt me. Joyce and I would run into people who, while generally friendly and complimentary, wondered why I had built that fancy bedroom and private bathroom at the expense of the poor.

  Our plan was to have OEO serve as a laboratory for experimental programs, not as an entity that managed large operations in perpetuity. For example, OEO had tried a number of innovative approaches to education. Under my predecessors, to their credit, OEO had launched an experiment providing school vouchers for parents. The plan had the support of my friend Milton Friedman.9 Friedman and I believed that school vouchers could lead to an improvement in public education by giving parents choices rather than forcing them to send their children to a particular school.10 OEO also had supported an experiment in performance contracting for teachers, an idea that was bitterly opposed by the politically active teachers’ unions.

  I also served on a committee President Nixon established to encourage and guide school desegregation policies as required by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. The committee was originally chaired by Vice President Agnew, which offered an early glimpse for me of Agnew in a substantive setting. I did not come away impressed. He soon lost interest in the issue, did not seem particularly knowledgeable on the substance, and rarely came to the meetings. The chairman-ship was assumed by another member of the committee, the Secretary of Labor and a rising figure in the Nixon administration, George Shultz. Shultz quickly became a friend. Also a Princeton graduate, and a former Marine, he was not flamboyant—though rumor has it that he has a tattoo of a Princeton tiger on his backside.

  The President thought well of Shultz. Nixon had a collection of favorites who would go up and down in his level of interest, depending on his priorities at the time. Early on, at least, Shultz was one of them. “Keep your eye on Shultz,” Nixon told me at our meeting in Key Biscayne. “He’s going to be a star.”

  Shultz skillfully moved the heated debates about school desegregation away from emotionally charged, confrontational discussions toward more practical approaches. Our effort to peacefully desegregate schools in the South, supported by the President, deserves to rank high in the Nixon administration’s domestic record.

  In addition to dealing with policy matters at the Office of Economic Opportunity, we often had to face the raw public emotion provoked by the thorny social issues of the time. A day at OEO without a protest, a demonstration, or a bomb threat was a good day. There were times when my courageous secretary, Brenda Williams, would have to move her desk in front of the door to prevent protesters from breaking into our office on M Street.

  On one occasion in November 1969, some fifty people barged into a conference room during a staff meeting, protesting the hiring policies of the Legal Services program. Terry Lenzner, the program director, escorted the group to a room on another floor so our meeting could continue. A pugnacious young Democrat, Lenzner had captained the Harvard football team some years before. He was not one to back down from trouble. When Lenzner tried to leave the group, the protesters blocked the door, effectively holding him captive.

  I was notified of the problem and went down to the room. Wedging myself in past those blocking the doors, I took Lenzner’s arm and told him we were leaving.11 I then told the protesters they had the right to express their views, but we were not going to conduct the government’s business under threats or intimidation, and that if they didn’t leave the building, they would be arrested. That, of course, was exactly what some of them wanted. I obliged them and called in the local police. I was later told that I had caused the arrest of a major fraction of the graduating class of Howard Law School. As it turned out, among them was a young law student by the name of Jerry Rivers, later better known as Geraldo Rivera. It was but one example of the hostility and divisions that some of the OEO programs had caused in the country.

  Considering the many issues in the agency’s purview, I had to delegate enormous amounts of responsibility to keep OEO operating. As a congressman, I had not had a large staff. But at OEO I understood well the importance of having talented assistance. Among others, the group I recruited and worked with included Christie Todd Whitman, a future governor of New Jersey and later administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); Bill Bradley, then the talented New York Knicks basketball star and a future U.S. senator; Ron James, who later became a senior official in the Department of the Army; and Max Friedersdorf, an outstanding director of congressional relations in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations.

  Two others stand out. Frank Carlucci, for one, was an enormously capable man I lured from a promising career in the Foreign Service. I first knew Carlucci when we were on the varsity wrestling team at Princeton during the early 1950s. Frank went from there to the U.S. Navy and then the State Department, where he led an initiative that reduced the number of personnel at the U.S. mission in Brazil by a large fraction. His ability to move into an entrenched operation and reorganize it caught my attention.

  Another excellent decision was hiring a serious young man from Wyoming. After interviewing with me six months earlier, Dick Cheney had gone to work for my good friend Congressman Bill Steiger of Wisconsin. I knew Steiger was impressed with his work. When I was nominated as the director of OEO, Steiger suggested that Cheney write a strategy memo to assist me in my confirmation hearings. It focused on what I sensed and heard was needed for a successful OEO: better accountability. Once I was confirmed by the Senate, I asked Carlucci to call Cheney and bring him aboard as my special assistant. Cheney had been thinking of returning to the University of Wisconsin to complete his doctorate in political science, but he took the job. Together, Carlucci, Cheney, and I—three future Republican secretaries of defense—labored to fix a cornerstone of Johnson’s Great Society.

  The well-worn recent media caricature of Dick Cheney as a rigid ideologue is unfamiliar to those of us who know him well. I’ve known him from his start in the federal government. At first Cheney was one of the many bright young staffers around the OEO office, but in short order he proved indispensable. The words steady and unflappable were frequently applied to him—and with good reason. Dick was an enormous help as we wrestled with the many heated controversies in which OEO had become embroiled over its short life. In fact, the more difficult the situation, the more Dick seemed to like it.*

  Because of OEO’s mission and its position as the centerpiece of the Johnson antipoverty legacy, many prominent people were interested in its activities and agreed to serve on its advisory board. One of them was Sammy Davis, Jr., often introduced as “the world’s greatest entertainer.” Sammy and I became friends. One memorable night the entertainer came to visit us at our small row house in Washington. It was only twenty-eight feet across; the second floor had two small bedrooms. We took the door off the upstairs closet so we could fit in a small crib when our son, Nick, was born.

  “This is a nice place,” Sammy said, when he entered our front room. “Let’s see it.”

  “You just did,” Joyce replied with a smile.†

  Some months later, Joyce and I were in Nevada, where I was giving a speech. It happened that my trip coincided with Sammy’s hundredth performance at the Sands Hotel & Casino. After his spectacular show, Sammy told Joyce and me he would not be performing the next night and wanted us to go to dinner with him. He said he would arrange for us to see the best entertainer in Las Vegas which, considering Sammy’s fame, was quite a compliment. So that evening we went to the International Hotel and were seated at a front row table—Sammy, his lovely wife Altovise, Joyce, and me.

  Before long, the entertainer whom Sammy had extolled came onstage. Wearing a sequined jumpsuit and alternating between the ridiculous and the sublime, he promptly took command of the large audience. He sang songs of every genre, and that evening I became an Elvis Presley fan.

  I could see that Elvis was a masterful showman. The audience was enthralled. Periodically
he would take a silk scarf, wipe his brow, and toss it to the screaming crowd. At one point he threw a long, scarlet scarf in our direction. Sammy’s wife caught it and handed it to Joyce.

  After the show, Sammy took us backstage to Elvis’ dressing room. The room was filled with all sorts of people—fans, friends, members of his entourage, and showgirls. Eventually Joyce and I became separated in the crowd. After a while, she spotted me in what had to have been an unexpected place—standing in a corner of the room talking intently with the king of rock and roll.

  After Sammy introduced us, Elvis pulled me aside. He wanted to discuss what I thought was an unlikely subject—the United States Army. Some years earlier he had served with the Third Armored Division in Germany for seventeen months. He wanted to share his thoughts about the armed forces and the pride he had in his service. Something of an admirer of Nixon, he was also interested in discussing the administration. Around that time, Presley had sent a letter to Nixon asking to help with the illegal narcotics trade. This led to the famous meeting between Elvis and the President in the Oval Office of the White House.

  I imagine there weren’t a lot of people in Elvis’ normal circle with whom he could have a serious conversation about the military. I was impressed that years after his service he still cared so much about the Army. It certainly wasn’t the sort of conversation I expected to have when I walked into his dressing room, but it was a welcome reminder that patriots can be found everywhere.*

  During my tenure as director of OEO, we were successful in saving and strengthening some worthwhile programs by reallocating funds to them from less successful projects. We spun off functioning programs to other federal departments. We didn’t perform miracles there, though I believe we did some good for the poor and for the country.

  Even though many well-intentioned people at the agency worked hard to find solutions to the problems of poverty, easy answers were in short supply. During those tough times I could always count on Joyce to provide some good-humored perspective. She knew how often I would come home feeling disappointed that a program had not worked out better.