In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  What did wear us down month after month was the portrayal of the president as a hapless, clueless bumbler. The ridicule in the media really took off after the president, deplaning on a rainy day in Salzburg, Austria, slipped on the wet stairs and tumbled to the tarmac. After that, even a very ordinary spill on the ski slopes became a subject of scrutiny and hilarity for the press corps. For the public, the sight gag was immediately understandable, and there was little to be gained by pointing out that Jerry Ford, the former star athlete, had remained a strong and graceful man well into middle age. He was far more athletic than any of his predecessors since Theodore Roosevelt, and the fact that the press witnessed the occasional spill was partly because he was so active.

  The bumbler image had become one of those stock jokes that was too good to let go of. Before long, it became a mainstay of the weekly comedy show Saturday Night Live. The president took it all good-naturedly and even played along with the jokes on occasion, but I could never say the same about my own attitude. I thought it was deeply unfair, and it still bothers me when I think about it. The image of President Ford as some sort of dimwitted stumbler hurt badly in the general election, and the press was not above keeping the gag going just for that reason.

  Of course, it didn’t help that our rival for the Republican nomination looked so surefooted and was always camera-ready. I had my first glimpse of Ronald Reagan in October 1974 when both he and Ford were attending a black-tie dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. I was in the room when the president received him beforehand. The two of them settled into deep armchairs in front of the window of the presidential suite with a nighttime backdrop of high palms and the lights of the Hollywood Hills.

  I remember thinking that the former movie star cut a very impressive figure. Tanned and tailored in a way I’d never seen matched in Washington, this was a guy who knew how to carry himself. People as far back as the 1950s had sized up Ronald Reagan as presidential material and now for the first time, I could see why. On that evening in 1974, neither man knew for sure what 1976 would bring for them and their presidential ambitions, and they cordially chatted about everything except the possibility that they would soon be rivals.

  Our initial strategy in the White House was to try to put pressure on Reagan not to challenge the president in the first place. It seemed worth attempting because even well into 1975 no one knew for sure whether Reagan would get into the race. We kept in touch with him through intermediaries, chiefly Tom Reed, who had been California’s Republican national committeeman and would become air force secretary. Tom was a Ford man but he knew Reagan well, and the Reagan people listened to him. The same was also true of Stu Spencer, a campaign strategist who had helped Reagan win the governorship and was now signed up with Ford.

  AS THE 1976 ELECTION played an increasingly important part in our day-to-day lives, Rumsfeld assigned me responsibility for campaign-related activities.

  In Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin at Camp David, with President Ford (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

  As I looked at the task ahead, I became convinced there was no way Ford could win election without first making some fairly dramatic changes in his administration. Part of the problem, as I saw it, was that in the national security area we were still operating with the same structure and personnel we had inherited from the Nixon administration.

  In the Cabinet Room of the White House with President Ford and his National Security Council, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, CIA Director George H.W. Bush, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones. We were dealing with the crisis in Lebanon in the summer of 1976. (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

  The president had never clearly established the perception that he was in charge of national security policy. Henry Kissinger’s continued position as both secretary of state and national security advisor created the impression that he had more control over foreign policy than the president did.

  There was also the crucial matter of the vice presidency. Rockefeller had been very loyal to the president, but I believed he would be a huge liability in the upcoming battle with Ronald Reagan. The only way Ford could win was by capturing part of the conservative base that leaned toward Reagan. That would be impossible if his running mate were Nelson Rockefeller, the same man who had tried to stop Barry Goldwater in 1964. And if it became known that Rockefeller would not be on the ticket, we could expect a number of Republican leaders to support Ford with an eye to being chosen as his running mate.

  I wasn’t shy about making my point of view known, but having handed over the campaign portfolio to me, Don was more focused on improving the internal functioning of the White House. He began working on what turned out to be a very long memo to the president, urging him to remedy such matters as lack of accountability on the part of White House staff and lack of coordination across policy areas. I had some ideas for it too, and it grew into a pretty frank document.

  In order to convey how seriously we viewed the situation and to give the president complete freedom to make necessary changes, we both wrote out and signed resignation letters. This wasn’t a matter of saying unless you accept our recommendations, we will quit; rather, we were telling Ford that if his idea of changes included moving us out, we’d make it easy for him.

  Near the end of October 1975, the president caught a bad cold and spent a couple of days upstairs in the White House residence instead of coming to work in the West Wing. Don and I took advantage of the opportunity to go see him and lay out our concerns and recommendations. It was clear that the president himself had come to some of the same conclusions, and within days he would carry out a sweeping set of changes.

  He personally told Rockefeller that he would not be on the ticket in 1976. The vice president was obviously disappointed, but he remained loyal to the president to the end and delivered New York’s delegates to Ford at the convention. Henry Kissinger agreed to step down as national security advisor while continuing as secretary of state—there being no question that he retained the full confidence of the president as his chief foreign policy advisor. His deputy, Brent Scowcroft, moved into the NSC job.

  Jim Schlesinger was relieved of his position as secretary of defense. Although Jim was a very talented man with an impressive résumé, he had not endeared himself to the president. As we were pulling out of Vietnam, miscommunication between the Pentagon and the White House had resulted in an announcement that all Americans had been safely evacuated from Saigon, when in fact sixty-one marines remained on the grounds of the embassy. The president had never forgotten that embarrassment, nor had he ever forgiven Schlesinger for launching a verbal assault on the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. After Congress had rejected our defense budget, the president asked Schlesinger to make an unapologetic case for it, but Ford was stunned when he got reports of his defense secretary going after the chairman, George Mahon of Texas. Mahon was a longtime colleague of Ford’s on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and one of his dearest friends.

  Schlesinger did not go quietly. The president later told me that his parting with Jim was one of the most unpleasant sessions he ever had.

  Another change came at the CIA, where Director Bill Colby had become something of a liability because of all the controversy surrounding allegations of wrongdoing by the agency. Bill had begun his intelligence career in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He was the station chief in Saigon during most of the Vietnam War. In 1973 Nixon chose him to replace Schlesinger when he moved Jim from the CIA to the Pentagon. Now Bill clearly knew another change was coming. In fact, I had a feeling he was relieved to step down. George H. W. Bush was brought back from China to take his place.

  Elliot Richardson, ambassador to the United Kingdom, was made secretary of commerce and later replaced in London by Counselor to the President Anne Armstrong. Rogers Morton, who had been secretary of commerce, became both a counselor to the
president and Ford’s campaign manager.

  The president clearly wanted Rumsfeld to replace Schlesinger at the Defense Department, but Don did not immediately agree. On the Sunday before the president was to announce the cabinet changes, he still had not heard back from Don. En route to Florida for a summit meeting with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Ford called me up to his cabin on Air Force One. He told me to get Don on the phone and get him to agree to take the Defense job, which I did. I leaned pretty hard on Don to say yes, and he finally relented. Twenty-five years later, I would again find myself, on behalf of another president, urging Don Rumsfeld to serve as secretary of defense.

  The next morning, as the president prepared to announce all of these changes to the press, he reviewed a stack of note cards with questions likely to come up, including one about the incoming chief of staff that somebody had slipped in for a laugh. It asked, “Mr. President, just who the hell is Richard Cheney?”

  MY PROMOTION TO WHITE House chief of staff brought a minor flurry of media attention, but it didn’t last long and that was fine with me. I had come to know and like a lot of the reporters covering President Ford, and to this day I count some of them as friends. But I had never been much impressed by presidential aides who cultivated a high public profile, and I didn’t intend to become one of them. When the Secret Service assigned me the code name “Backseat,” I took it as a real compliment.

  In the White House, the top staff guy is still a staff guy, which is why, when President Ford offered to attach cabinet status to my job, I turned it down. I also tried to turn down having a White House car and driver pick me up in the morning and take me home at night. I liked driving my VW Beetle, though it was missing a front fender since I had been clipped by a Mrs. Smith’s pie truck in one of the traffic circles that make driving in D.C. a real adventure. But Jack Marsh, the Ford White House’s wise man, convinced me that with the hours I was working and all I had to do, I should take advantage of the extra time I’d gain each day for work if I weren’t driving myself.

  The main reason I wanted to keep a low profile was so that I could be an honest broker. If the chief of staff is out giving interviews every day and advocating a particular point of view, he loses credibility with those in the administration who disagree with him. Cabinet members begin looking for ways to go around the system instead of going through the process. They need to know that you’ll go to the president and present their views fairly and won’t tilt it to get a particular outcome.

  By the time I became chief of staff, Ford was so used to having me around that there wasn’t much of a transition involved. I’ve sometimes wondered if he realized exactly how young I was when he put me in charge of his White House. One time when he felt that his son Jack, then in his early twenties, needed an adult talking-to, the president asked me to sit the young man down for a Dutch uncle session. He wanted me to share with Jack the wisdom of my years—overestimating, I think, how much I really had of either. Another time, I brought my folks into the Oval Office for a photo, and afterward the president went on and on about how remarkable it was that my father was in such fine shape for a man his age. I think he assumed Dad and Mom were senior citizens. I didn’t bother to tell him that they were both younger than he was.

  I didn’t feel the need for a deputy of my own when I succeeded Rumsfeld, but I did hire some really smart assistants, including Jim Cavanaugh, Mike Duval, Terry O’Donnell, Jerry Jones, Jim Connor, and Red Cavaney. There was also a very young man who has a special place in memory among Ford White House alumni. Foster Chanock was only twenty-three, but he helped me with just about everything I did, from follow-through on presidential orders to the analysis of issues and trends in the ’76 election. He had graduated from the University of Chicago, where he, like most of his classmates, had been a man of the left. But some postgraduate travel in Eastern Europe opened his eyes. Foster started out as a gofer, and before long, with his unflagging energy and brilliant mind, he was participating in some of the toughest decisions we had to make. He was one of the finest, most talented people I knew in those years. His death from cancer in 1980 left me and many others to wonder about all that might have been.

  At the Texas State Fair during the 1976 presidential campaign with my aide, Foster Channock. (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

  I was pretty good at hiring and apparently not bad at firing, either, since I was so often given the responsibility. Along the way I had to relieve the White House social secretary, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the agriculture secretary, Ford’s campaign manager, and a few others of their duties. My method was direct: no hints, cold shoulders, or slow, agonizing departures. Those were not good for anyone—neither the president nor the person being fired. Anyone failing to serve the president’s interests, intentionally or not, simply needed to move along.

  One internal problem that never did get entirely fixed was in the speechwriting shop, which had remained the preserve of Bob Hartmann even after his relocation from alongside the Oval Office. During the transition from Nixon to Ford, in part because Bob was involved and in part because we had no alternative clearly in mind, we had passed too quickly over the question of where to place authority for speechwriting. As a result, it had never become fully integrated with the policy and political elements of the White House staff. It went its own way, following its own agenda and its own rules. The rule that Hartmann tried hardest to impose, for example, held that a speech draft could not be reviewed by staff until the president had seen it, and after that no changes could be made because, of course, the president had already seen it.

  Even in the very last week of the 1976 campaign, when you would expect every man with an oar to be rowing in the same direction, we were still having to deal with this problem. In late October we were flying with the president to Pittsburgh, where he was to deliver a policy speech the next morning. A familiar disagreement over competing drafts prompted Hartmann to fire Pat Butler, one of the junior members of his staff. Bob and I had it out, right then and there—rather loudly as I recall—while Pat went off to ponder the prospects of a young man who had just been fired aboard Air Force One. When things quieted down, the speech question was settled in my favor, and I told Pat that if Hartmann had fired him, then I was now rehiring him, and throwing in a raise.

  __________

  I LED THE WHITE HOUSE staff for a total of fourteen months. I stepped into the job just as the ’76 campaign was beginning to dominate our schedule, and thinking back on those days, the memories are mostly of being with President Ford on Air Force One or in a motorcade or some hotel suite somewhere.

  We got off to a good start by squeaking out a victory in the New Hampshire primary. Even more crucial than the prize of seventeen out of twenty-one delegates was the gain in morale. New Hampshire was widely considered Reagan country. Despite the widely anticipated and projected results, Ford had defied expectations and shown that Reagan was not unbeatable after all. It was Ford’s first electoral victory anywhere outside of greater Grand Rapids, and it was Reagan’s first electoral defeat anywhere.

  In fact, as it turned out, one of the things we had going for us in New Hampshire was the widespread assumption that we had no chance there. The state’s governor, Meldrim Thomson, had said as much a few weeks before the vote, when he was campaigning for Reagan and had pretty much guaranteed a Reagan victory. Even if that statement were true—which it may well have seemed when he made it—the last thing you want to do is talk about a sure thing or convey an impression of overconfidence. Ford was in the unique position of entering an election battle as both an incumbent president and an underdog, and we tried to make an advantage out of being both.

  An unbroken string of early primary victories turned things around, and suddenly Ford was the clear front-runner. By late March we had won decisively in Florida and Illinois, and we were sure that if Reagan didn’t get a win of his own very soon, he would be out of the running. Sure enough, he dug in hard in Nort
h Carolina, borrowed money for a statewide TV broadcast, and came out six points ahead of us in the primary on March 23. With that victory under his belt, the contest was now moving into Texas, Georgia, and Indiana, and suddenly it was his turn to run the table. We stayed on our feet with a couple of narrow and much-needed wins—including Kentucky, thanks at least in part to the advice I received from John Sherman Cooper in Warsaw. All through the late spring and summer, and right up to the Republican convention in August, the nomination battle was being fought house to house and vote by vote, making us scratch and claw for every last delegate.

  Whenever the president or I wanted to know how we stood in the hunt for delegates, the man with the answer was Jim Baker. Back then James A. Baker III was as new to national politics as I was. The Houston attorney and former marine had cut his Republican teeth in Texas working for his good friend George H. W. Bush. Jim is the kind of guy you want around when things get tense and complicated, and even in the mid-seventies, anyone watching him in action at the President Ford Committee could observe the calm and shrewd turn of mind that future presidents, including Reagan himself, would depend upon. As our man in charge of delegate hunting, Jim was part of a core group that also included pollster Bob Teeter, political director Stu Spencer, and admen John Deardourff and Doug Bailey. Jim was in charge of every detail and knew the precise state of play at any given moment; he knew who was with us and who was against us and who was uncommitted.