I watched the unfolding campaign from Chicago. I was sorry to see Dole struggling against the incumbent president. In the spring of 1996, Bob’s wife, Elizabeth, called and asked me to come to Washington to help the campaign on policy issues. I agreed to do it on a part-time basis. I’d known Elizabeth since she had served in the Nixon administration. Strong and polished, she was an excellent partner for Bob.
Dole was struggling with the same problem that Gerald Ford had faced early on—he was a legislator by nature who had to make the transition to becoming a presidential candidate and an executive. There was so much to like and admire about Bob Dole the person, and certainly the legislator. But the traits that drew people to him and made him a lion in the Senate did not translate well to a candidate for president.
Having run for president three times, he was not always receptive to advice, especially from a campaign staff he hardly knew. On a flight aboard his campaign plane, Dole finally gave in to pleas from his aides to practice a speech with a teleprompter. So he proceeded to practice the speech by reading it—in silence. The staff stood there baffled while Dole practiced the speech in his head.
I spent my time on policy issues, working with longtime Minnesota congressman Vin Weber. Together we helped Dole craft a supply-side economic message by seeking input from some of the leading economic experts in the country, including Milton Friedman, publisher Steve Forbes, and Dr. John Taylor of Stanford University. The Dole proposal had as its centerpiece a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut for the American people. He argued that by letting people keep more of their own money, they could better stimulate the economy than the federal government could. Still, with the country seeming to be at peace and reasonably prosperous, Dole lagged behind Clinton.
In the late summer of 1996, languishing in the polls, Dole called me up one evening. He said he was going to announce me as the general chairman of his campaign. I laughed when I heard the idea, which seemed to have come out of nowhere. I reminded Dole that I had agreed to help out part-time on policy.
“Well, I’ve got to do it,” Dole insisted. “I have to show we’re doing something to shake up the campaign.” Again I resisted, since I knew who was running the Dole campaign—the candidate and his large paid staff of professional managers. By the end of the conversation I thought I had made myself clear that I could not do it.
To my dismay, Dole went ahead the next day and announced that I was his chairman. I subsequently learned that Dole already had a campaign chairman—New Hampshire governor Steve Merrill—who apparently had not been informed of the change. Graciously, Merrill contacted me and said he was willing to assist the campaign in any way possible.
Within a month, Dole’s supporters gathered in San Diego for a convention that they hoped would define his candidacy for the American people and dent Clinton’s lead in the polls. In San Diego, I noticed that the relatively new twenty-four-hour television era had turned Washington politicians into celebrities. Republican delegates treated the most recognizable faces in the party as if they were movie stars. I also noticed another change from my days in Congress. As the size of congressional staffs had increased, so had their power. In the old days one dealt directly with a member of Congress on policy issues. By 1996, one often dealt with a member of the congressman’s staff instead.2
The Dole campaign tried in vain to focus voters and the media on the character question the administration was battling. At one point, after citing a list of scandals and investigations against the administration, Dole blurted out, “Where is the outrage?” I understood his frustration. He felt the media was not holding the Clinton team to the same standard of behavior applied to other politicians.
The American people didn’t share Dole’s outrage, and President Clinton won reelection convincingly, though the final margin was closer than a number of the polls had suggested. Within weeks of Dole’s defeat, there were rumors about the leading contenders for 2000. One name surfaced early—George W. Bush, the governor of Texas.3
After the campaign I went back to the business world, serving on various boards of directors. As the collapses of Enron and WorldCom demonstrated a few years later, one of the important roles of outside directors is to try to look around corners and identify any problems with a company’s strategies or management. Because I held management to a high standard and asked a good many questions about operations, some CEOs considered me a difficult director. Others sometimes cheered me on. One CEO said to Joyce, “Don is a terrific director, but you sure as hell wouldn’t want more than one of them on your board.”
I became increasingly involved with a small start-up company in California named Gilead Sciences, Inc. Mike Riordan, a MD from Johns Hopkins University with an MBA from Harvard, started the company with a small venture capital investment. Eventually, Gilead produced one of the early AIDS treatment drugs. It later developed Viread (also called Tenofovir), the backbone of HIV treatment today, as well as Tamiflu, a flu drug. By March 1996, Gilead had moved from a market capitalization of zero to $1 billion, with $300 million in cash and several blockbuster drugs. Its stock was rising and the company was getting excellent reviews from security analysts.4 This was a tribute to excellent science and, as always in the pharmaceutical business, a dose of good fortune. It was also a tribute to people willing to risk their careers on a small start-up company and the thousands of investors willing to risk their money on a long shot.
I liked the idea of working with a small group of bright, talented young people in Silicon Valley as they started the enterprise from scratch. Gilead had terrific potential and some brilliant minds, but so did other start-up biotech firms. I agreed to join the board early on, and eventually became the chairman. I helped recruit a superb group of top-flight people to the board to broaden its perspective and attract investment.
Our board brought broad experience to the talented young management team. These board members, with their relationships around the world, helped guide Gilead in its transition from start-up to a more mature player in a highly competitive industry.
I also made a pitch for Condoleezza Rice, who had served in the George H. W. Bush administration and was the provost of Stanford University, to join the board of directors.
“[W]e’d better get ourselves in the queue before she makes any public decisions about her future,” I advised George Shultz.5
I pointed out that our company met in Foster City, California, a thirty-minute drive from Stanford. When I would see Rice at various events, I would jokingly pester her about joining Gilead’s board. I sent her notes trying to make the case. “Condi,” one began, “When are you going to call me up and say, ‘Gee, Don, I would be delighted to join the Gilead Board…. Those are good folks, it is an interesting business, it is nearby, it only meets four times a year, so the answer is yes!’”6
Rice expressed interest but did not commit. She had decided to go on the boards of larger and considerably more prominent firms, such as Chevron. It was not long before she began advising George W. Bush, whose presidential prospects seemed bright.
In 1999, Bush asked to meet with me when I was serving as chairman of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. The commission had been established by Congress to evaluate threats posed by ballistic missiles, particularly ones in the hands of rogue regimes. Bush was interested in the commission’s work. He mentioned that Shultz had suggested that we meet.7
My earlier encounters with the younger George Bush in the 1970s and 1980s had been brief. Perhaps it is my midwestern roots, but I confess to a not very wise or useful bias about those who enjoy the inherited benefit of prominent names. Getting to know George W. Bush was a good lesson against letting personal stereotypes color your thinking about people. The Bush I met in his suite at the Capital Hilton in Washington had taken difficult steps to change his life, was serving as governor of Texas, and was working hard to be elected president of the United States.
I found him to be unlike the picture
the press was drawing of him as uncurious and something of a slacker. He asked serious questions, was self-confident, and had a command of the important issues. Decidedly down-to-earth, with no inclination to formality, his demeanor was different from his father’s somewhat patrician manner. Sometimes, as I’d learn over the years, George W. Bush would have his feet up on his desk and be chewing an unlit cigar. He pointed out that he’d grown up in Midland, Texas. He had a toughness, and he told me that he stood apart from “that Eastern establishment.”8 I left our 1999 meeting impressed.
After the disappointment of the Dole campaign, politics didn’t tug on me as it once had, but national security issues did. I wasn’t formally advising Bush, but at Rice’s invitation I offered occasional thoughts.
Once, in a letter to Josh Bolten, who was then serving as the policy director for the Bush campaign, I offered some thoughts on national security. I warned against the idea of a “graduated response”—sending small numbers of troops and then escalating that number over time. “‘Graduated response’ didn’t work in Vietnam for President Johnson,” I observed. “If the U.S. is going to get into a fight, it is worth winning, and we should hit hard up front. Hoping for a measured, antiseptic war (immaculate coercion) to be successful,” I cautioned, “is the hope only of the unschooled.”9
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.10
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.11
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 r
elationship with me lacked warmth.12 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.
PART VIII
Leaning Forward
Austin, Texas
DECEMBER 22, 2000
The 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.
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