Known and Unknown (22 page)

Ford did want to distance himself from what was seen as the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon, but instead of changing personnel, he attempted to change the White House's management structure. Ford attributed the misjudgments in Watergate to having everything filtered to the President through his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. My view was different. I believed the problems that plagued Nixon's administration were not caused by how decisions were made but by the decisions themselves. The chief of staff system was reasonably efficient and had been developed in the Eisenhower administration, which did not come to the same unfortunate end as Nixon's. To change the perception of an insular White House and a rigid “Berlin Wall,” Ford settled on what he called the “spokes-of-the-wheel” approach. To this day, I shudder at the phrase. The idea was that a large number of his staff and cabinet—the spokes—would report directly to him—the hub—instead of having a chief of staff coordinate the process.

However laudable the intent, the spokes-of-the-wheel approach was an unworkable way of managing the modern White House. Ford enjoyed interaction and give-and-take with a wide and varied group of people, and that was helpful, but this organization approach essentially allowed any senior staff or cabinet official to walk into the Oval Office at any time to discuss any subject. Many would end up leaving such a meeting with what they sincerely believed to be presidential authorization but without the necessary coordination with other White House staff or cabinet members who had responsibilities in the matters discussed with the President. An open door policy could work for a member of Congress, or even for a vice president whose staff is small, but a president has too many demands on his time to listen to every staff member's suggestions, wade through every disagreement, and then ensure that the relevant personnel are involved, or at least informed.

With Ford having done little to settle the differences that were already growing between the Ford and Nixon camps in the White House, I expected the difficulties to be plentiful. I knew that a dysfunctional White House such as the one that was evolving would be a dangerous place.

But this advice, like a number of the recommendations of our transition team, was too late. And at least for a while it seemed that there was no need for the President to do anything different from what he was doing. He was liked by the press, by members of Congress, and by the public. A headline in
Newsweek
magazine summed up the prevailing conventional wisdom with the words: “the sun is shining again.”
²⁰
Ford became president on August 9, and his honeymoon reached its apex on September 1, 1974, when a Gallup poll gave him an approval rating of more than 70 percent. It was as if the country had taken a look at the honest, open Ford and breathed a sigh of relief. No more distrust, no more suspicions. That proved short-lived.

 

O
n September 8, 1974, one month after he took office, with no advance notice to the country, Ford made a decision that left nearly everyone who heard it stunned. Those of us who knew Ford well—and who had heard his periodic expressions of sympathy for Nixon—probably should have at least suspected that he might consider the possibility of a pardon. Nonetheless, it had never occurred to me. In fact, at Ford's first cabinet meeting a few weeks earlier, he seemed to rule out the idea and said the subject should not even be discussed.
²¹

As he announced the pardon, totally out of the blue on a Sunday morning, Ford referred to Nixon and his loyal family, saying, “Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part.”
²²
The President spoke about Nixon's plight with obvious sincerity and sympathy—the charges against him being a “sword” over his head. But it was a sympathy that the public did not share at that moment. For myself, I still felt respect for Nixon and for the many accomplishments of his administration, but I also felt disappointment over how his presidency had ended. He had not been truthful with the nation, which had caused grave harm to our country.

The stunning news shook Ford's inner circle. The press secretary he had just recruited and announced, Jerry terHorst, resigned in protest. Among the general public, the pardon provoked a vicious reaction. Many Americans at the time believed that Nixon had been involved in the cover-up and was getting away with it. Ford's own motives came under scrutiny, with the suggestion that the pardon might be the result of a secret deal. Al Haig's continuing presence as White House chief of staff seemed to give credence to the allegation, since Haig had been involved in persuading Nixon to step down. Suddenly a suspicious figure, Ford plummeted precipitously in the opinion polls.

Knowing Ford as well as I did, I was convinced he would not have been part of a deal with Nixon.
²³
Instead, I thought this had been a decision that Ford had made without consulting very many others and without carefully considering how and when it might best be done and what the impact might be on him personally. Accepting that the pardon was the right thing to do—and by now even many of Ford's harshest critics have since conceded that it was—there is little question but that it could have been handled in a better manner.
^*
For one, Ford might have surfaced the notion with key leaders in the House and Senate, to keep them from being stunned. He might have talked it over with a trusted group of aides to ensure his announcement and tone were properly calibrated and supported by his staff. But he appeared to have done none of those things.

Nixon did little to help. His six-paragraph statement accepting the pardon stopped short of admitting any guilt in the Watergate matter. “No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation,” he said. He might have tried harder to find some.

 

A
s those decisions were made, my focus was elsewhere. I had already returned to Brussels on August 22, 1974—the day after the transition team submitted our report and the day before our daughter Valerie departed for her first year of college. While I followed what was happening in Washington, D.C., I also had my hands full at NATO with the ongoing Cyprus crisis.

Then, on September 16, 1974, my father died at the age of sixty-nine. He was not only my father, but also a close friend. I sometimes called him George, as you would a pal. When I married Joyce, he was my immediate choice as my best man.
²⁵

His death was a blow, even though it was not altogether unexpected. Alzheimer's had started to set in when he was in his early sixties. The disease can be toughest on the spouse, and it was certainly hard for my mother. They had had a lifetime love affair. When Dad's condition deteriorated, my sister, Joan, and I encouraged Mom to make the difficult decision to move Dad to a nearby nursing home, for his safety. For the last year of his life, Mom spent most of every day there with him, even though he no longer recognized her.

When I traveled to the States from Belgium, I would stop in Washington to handle my NATO business and at the end of the day fly to Chicago to see my parents. My father's brain was working in ways that made him agitated. But sometimes while I was with him there would seem to be a small spark of recognition. He would smile and I would think, or at least hope, he might have had a moment of clarity and happiness as he recognized me or my mother. But just as quickly as that moment came, it was gone. When I left him I would wonder to myself if what I had taken to be recognition had been there at all.

I was at my parents' home outside Chicago preparing for my father's funeral service when I received a call from the White House operator, who then brought President Ford on the line. His voice was full of warmth and concern. The President said he wanted to express Betty's and his sympathies to me and to my family.

Then he went on to say, “I know this is not an ideal time,” but if I was up to it he had some rather urgent business that required my attention. He said that he had decided he needed to replace Al Haig as chief of staff after all. He made it clear that he wanted me to take the post. Ford said he was having problems managing some of the staff, including his longtime aide Bob Hartmann.
²⁶
He was a seasoned newspaper man who had worked closely with Ford since 1968 and had become Ford's chief of staff when Ford became vice president. Hartmann's role had now changed drastically, and the President said Bob was having difficulty adjusting to it. I sensed that Ford was working hard to spare Hartmann's feelings.

Ford knew that I had a strong desire and intention to stay at NATO and, equally, to not work again in the White House, having been there for four years previously. But the President asked me to come to the White House to talk with him about it before I returned to Brussels.

On September 22, 1974, I found myself back in the Oval Office. President Ford said again how sorry he was about my father. He knew I had always looked up to him as a man of integrity, much as Ford had to the man who raised him. Ford's biological father had left his mother when he was a baby; his stepfather, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Sr., raised the boy as his own, even giving his stepson his name. For a moment it didn't matter that I was talking to the President of the United States in the Oval Office. We were two friends talking fondly about the men who shaped us.

Eventually he turned to the business at hand. Things had not been going well for the President, and he knew it. It was not only the negative reaction to the pardon, although the immediate damage from that decision was difficult to overestimate. The economy was worsening. Relations with Congress had soured. The Rockefeller nomination as vice president was not well received by a large number of conservatives and was being delayed in the congressional confirmation process by an exhaustive investigation into his personal finances. On top of all that, the Republican Party's prospects in the upcoming 1974 midterm elections were at best gloomy, which did not bode well for Ford's agenda.

The President now conceded that his spokes-of-the-wheel approach was not working and would not work. The Hartmann faction was unfriendly with the Haig faction, and others in the White House seemed caught in between. Only a few weeks after informing the country that Nixon's White House chief of staff, Al Haig, would stay on indefinitely, Ford would have to do something he never liked to do—change his mind.

The President said that while he could not be seen as abandoning outright his very public decision to reject the Nixon-Haldeman staffing system in favor of his spokes-of-the-wheel approach, he agreed that he would move toward a proper staff system gradually. His solution was, at the outset, to call whoever replaced Haig the “chief coordinator.” I was not impressed with that idea, because it would signal to others in the White House that the new chief of staff was not actually in charge of the staff. But I understood Ford's reasoning.

The President went on to say that if I took the post, it would be only temporary, perhaps six months or so. He added that if a cabinet position became open that I found interesting, that would be an option. After an hour and a half of going through the pros and cons, it was time to make a decision. In the end Ford made it an issue of patriotism. He was the President of the United States, and he insisted he needed me to do the job.
²⁷

Finally, as I continued to express reluctance, Ford smiled. “Come on, Rummy,” he prodded. “Say yes. I have a golf game.”

I smiled back at him. “Okay,” I said, “I'll do it.”
²⁸

Joyce, as usual, took the news in stride, though she was sad to leave her friends in Belgium. “This time,” she jokingly said, “I'm not going to try to save the world.” She was hoping to just get through the next few months, so I could help the President get settled in, and then we might go home to Illinois.
^*

O
n my first day back in the White House, I moved into the chief of staff's West Wing office, where Haldeman had presided during the height of the Nixon years and where Haig later, with Henry Kissinger, worked near miracles to hold the United States government together.

Many in the White House remained spooked by Watergate and its ghosts. In the months since Nixon's departure, listening devices were still being found in the Oval Office and elsewhere in the White House complex. As I started to get settled in my new office, my secretary opened a desk drawer and found a tape with a note attached, designating it as “Presidential Tape—March 8, 1971.” I immediately delivered the tape to Phil Buchen, the new White House counsel, and even insisted that he sign a receipt as evidence that we had turned the tape over as soon as it had been discovered.
¹
Only the day before that, a safe had been discovered in the cupboard next to the fireplace in my new office.
²
An uninventoried safe in Haldeman's office could have had anything in it—papers relating to Watergate, more Nixon tapes, possibly evidence that could lead to new indictments. The mystery of the Haldeman safe was heightened when we discovered that no one knew how to open it. Wanting to make sure the safe was transferred from my office and properly handled, I asked my stalwart assistant, Dick Cheney, to accompany the safe and ensure that everything went by the book.

After all the drama, Cheney reported back that under the supervision of Secret Service agents, the safe had been blown open with explosives and was found to be empty. Still, the time and energy we wasted in taking the necessary precautions on this and many other matters were but an example of the ongoing costs of Watergate. It also helped me begin to realize that Ford's pardon of Nixon, irrespective of the unfortunate way it was handled, might have been the right decision. The President never would have been able to move his own agenda forward as long as Nixon's prosecution was in the offing.

In those early months, former President Nixon's difficult adjustment to his San Clemente exile came up on my radar screen repeatedly. After he left the presidency, Nixon was extremely ill and hospitalized on a number of occasions with near fatal blood clots. Frank Gannon, who was helping Nixon with his memoirs, confided in me his hope that Nixon would live long enough to bring the book to completion.
³
One of Nixon's aides during the transition, his former press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called me several times to discuss Nixon's predicament. During one call he told me that children on the beach were throwing “dog dirt,” to put it nicely, at Nixon's home.
⁴

One problem we encountered with regard to Nixon involved the growing number of people on the federal government payroll who had found their way to San Clemente. No one knew how to handle arrangements for a resigned president, but we had agreed in consultation with the Congress to allot the former president a small staff to ease his transition. We thought the number of staff hovered around twenty, but like all things involving the government, the numbers kept getting bigger. I learned during my first week on the job that Nixon's staff had ballooned to more than sixty, meaning that the number our staff had been giving the press was wildly inaccurate. If that became public, I feared it would look like Nixon was establishing a mini-presidential operation. As I discussed the matter with Ford, who was as amazed as I was to hear of it, he said that we had to help Nixon figure out a different arrangement.
⁵
I knew the “we” meant me. I had several difficult conversations with Ziegler, and we were able to persuade Nixon's senior staff to reduce the size of their payroll.
⁶

 

A
s I settled into my office, I returned to my usual routine. Most of the day I worked at a stand-up desk. I found it an easier way to keep focused over my twelve-to fifteen-hour days. I had a Dictaphone at the ready, into which I would dictate memos that my staff transcribed and sent out. In the Nixon administration, these memos were typed on yellow paper—giving rise to their nickname: yellow perils. At the Ford White House my memos became known as snowflakes, presumably because they were now printed on white paper and fell on the staff like a blizzard. The memos were my way of reaching out to those in the organization, to keep work moving along, and to communicate the President's instructions. Oral comments can be forgotten or pushed down the priority list. With written memos I could assign a task, keep a copy, and track the progress.

I also followed the advice I had given President Ford earlier, when he assumed the presidency, by promptly bringing in some new faces to work with the talent that was already there. One of them, of course, was not all that new to me. By this time, Cheney and I had worked together in three different assignments—the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Cost of Living Council, and the Nixon White House. But our time in the Ford White House would prove to be our most challenging yet.

Echoing my practice with Cheney, I encouraged every senior staff member to find a deputy they could trust, who could help take some of the load off them, and, if possible, over time become interchangeable with them. This made some uncomfortable. Many in senior roles prefer to guard their access to the president and are reluctant to give authority to a deputy. I thought we all needed to remind ourselves that none of us were indispensable.

When I asked Dick to serve as my top assistant (he would later become deputy chief of staff ), he reminded me about a couple of arrests he had had for drinking and driving after he got out of college and was working on power lines in Wyoming. The arrests had come up in his FBI background check when he came to work for me in the Nixon administration in 1969, and after discussing them with him, I had hired him anyway. Dick pointed out that serving as my assistant in the Ford White House would be a far more visible position. He did not want the President or me to be surprised when the clearance process turned up his arrests again, and said he'd understand if either Ford or I thought it might prove an impediment to his being hired. Shortly thereafter I briefed the President on the issue.

“Do you think this is the guy you need for the job?” Ford asked.

“I do,” I replied.

“Then bring him aboard,” Ford said. That settled that.

Throughout the hectic months that followed, Dick helped to make a nearly impossible job often enjoyable. Our back-and-forth banter was our way of getting through the difficult and hectic times. No assignment was too small if it eased the burden on the President. We weren't always saving the world. Indeed, one early problem that Dick and I were involved with was trying to find a way to keep the sun off Ford's neck when he was working in the Oval Office. It took days for the proper curtain to be found.
⁷

On the first occasion that I scheduled Cheney to substitute for me on a trip with the President, I dictated a note to Cheney joking, “I perjured myself and told [the President] that Cheney was a tremendously able guy in whom I had complete confidence.”
⁸
Ford and Cheney had different personalities, and at first I was not sure how they would gel. The President was a gregarious sort who liked to smoke a pipe and tell stories. Cheney was cerebral; on trips he was perfectly happy reading a book or, more likely, a series of work-related memos. When the two of them returned I asked the President how the trip had gone. “Dick is great!” Ford replied. He admired Cheney's businesslike manner. “He comes in, he's got ten items to cover, he covers them and he leaves.”
⁹
I was pleased that the two seemed to get on so well, because I was hoping Cheney not only would be able to take more of the burden off of me, but also might eventually replace me.

Cheney and I agreed that we needed to tighten the ship for the administration to be successful. We couldn't afford a sluggish bureaucracy or a string of independent operators. Naturally our approach tended to make the sluggish bureaucrats and independent operators less than pleased.

We decided to trim the size of the White House staff. By the time Nixon left, it had more than doubled, from about 220 people to 510, not counting the additional hundreds of so-called detailees who were theoretically on loan to the White House from the departments and agencies, most of them from the Department of Defense. Lyndon Johnson had also made extensive use of the practice. Whenever I visited the West Wing during Nixon's second term, while I was serving at NATO, I would see people in the hallways and meetings and wonder who they were—and what in the world they were supposed to be doing.

Always wary of comparisons to Nixon's imperial presidency, Ford endorsed my proposed belt tightening—at least, most of the time. It was a quite different story when I briefed him on my plans for a similar reduction of the First Lady's staff in the East Wing. He seemed fine with it—that is, until I suggested that he broach the subject with Betty that evening.

“Oh no, Don,” Ford said with a chuckle. “This is your plan. You go up and settle it with her.”
¹⁰

I then suggested to Cheney that he might be the best one to raise the subject with the First Lady, but he knew exactly what I was up to. Despite our reputations as taskmasters, neither Cheney nor I had the persuasiveness to successfully turn the indomitable Betty Ford. “Predictably,” President Ford later noted, “the size of the East Wing staff hardly changed at all.”
¹¹

Other challenges were more nettlesome than staff size. One involved Henry Kissinger. As I feared from the day Ford announced Kissinger would stay on in both of his posts, Ford's approach to Kissinger was at times deferential. Kissinger often arrived late for Oval Office meetings with the President, sometimes by as much as twenty or thirty minutes. Perhaps tardiness had not been an issue in the waning days of the Nixon presidency, but things had to be different now.

After Kissinger failed to arrive at the scheduled time three days in a row, I raised the matter with Ford, who had also taken notice. The President suggested we change the meeting time to accommodate Kissinger. That was the wrong approach. Ford's tolerance of repeated late arrivals by his cabinet or staff sent a bad signal.
¹²
I told Kissinger and his staff that things had to change, which they did, at least with respect to the President's schedule.

Going back to my time in the Nixon administration, I had noticed that the National Security Council was not well connected to the cabinet and the rest of the White House staff. But foreign policy decisions had consequences outside the State Department and NSC bureaucracies. They often involved Congress, the press, complicated legal issues, as well as other departments and agencies. Ford's economic advisers needed to have an opportunity to weigh in on international economic issues. Ford's press secretary needed to be able to communicate to the public the administration's foreign policy actions and decisions. Perhaps because foreign policy had become largely his sole domain during the tumultuous years of Watergate, Kissinger was not accustomed to coordinating with others. Further, with Kissinger holding two of the three national security posts, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was marginalized. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that Ford and Schlesinger did not work well together. On any number of occasions I made an effort to see that Schlesinger was included in major decisions, urging Ford to see him. I was only partially successful.
^*

The one-sided national security process led to at least one major embarrassment for the Ford administration. In 1975, the prominent Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Washington to attend a banquet put on by the labor federation, the AFL-CIO, in his honor. Solzhenitsyn was one of the most powerful voices of opposition in the Soviet Union. Because he told the truth about the Marxist system—his book The
Gulag Archipelago
denounced the evils of totalitarianism in the sharpest terms—he was a constant irritant to the Soviet leaders. Key conservative senator Jesse Helms tried to arrange a meeting between Solzhenitsyn and President Ford as a sign of America's support for the dissident's efforts.
¹⁴

Kissinger vehemently opposed the meeting. He felt the symbolism of the President meeting with Solzhenitsyn could set back U.S.-Soviet relations, which he was trying to bolster in the lead-up to a meeting in Helsinki scheduled for the following month. Kissinger was even reported to have characterized Solzhenitsyn as a “threat to world peace.”
¹⁵

Cheney and I urged Ford to meet with the Soviet dissident.
¹⁶
Cheney put together a memo stating the reasons. “[T]he decision not to see Solzhenitsyn is totally out of character for the President,” Cheney pointed out. “More than any President in recent memory, he's the man who's willing to see anyone, talk to anyone and listen to anyone's views, no matter how much they may differ from his own.” I was impressed with the memo. Up to that point Cheney had dealt mainly with domestic issues, but now he was engaged with foreign policy as well.

At first Ford sided with his secretary of state, as was his tendency on foreign policy matters. Kissinger, of course, was not trying to hurt Ford. He was providing his advice as a secretary of state. He wasn't a politician. Nor was he as tough on the Soviets as some others in the administration. And because Ford only rarely consulted with the obvious counterpoint to Kissinger—Secretary of Defense Schlesinger—the President often heard only one set of views.

Ford's refusal to meet the most famous dissident in the world led to an outcry that extended well beyond the conservative movement. Realizing his mistake, Ford belatedly agreed to the meeting. But Solzhenitsyn at that point declined the invitation, embarrassing the White House even further. Political columnists Rowland Evans and Bob Novak chronicled the damage in a column in the
Washington Post
titled, “Snubbing Solzhenitsyn.” They blamed the public relations debacle on a “lack of informed political consultation, gross insensitivity, equivocal explanations, [and] just plain bad manners.”
¹⁷
It was hard to disagree with that assessment.