Known and Unknown (28 page)

Six days after Reagan's victory in North Carolina, I met with the President and Kissinger in the Oval Office to discuss this very issue. Kissinger disagreed with any public admission of the unpleasant facts I was marshaling; namely, that after nearly three decades in the Cold War, the U.S. military capability trend lines relative to the capabilities of the Soviet Union were adverse to us, and the Soviets' overall capability was now roughly equivalent to ours. Absent a clear and sustained shift in our defense investment, the trend lines, favorable to the Soviets, would put them in a position of superiority in the years ahead.

“The impression that we are slipping is creating a bad impression around the world,” Kissinger avowed. I also wondered at the time if he took Reagan's criticism personally, since he had presided over most national security issues for the past seven years.
¹⁹

“But it's true,” I rebutted.

“Then we have to define our goals,” Henry said. “It is inevitable that our margin since '60 has slipped. Are we trying to maintain the same margin as we had in 1960 or to maintain adequate forces?”

“We have been slipping since the '60s from superiority to equivalence,” I countered. “And if we don't stop, we'll be behind.”

I believed Reagan's incendiary claim that America was the “number two” power was not yet technically correct, but it was clear to me that absent increases in our overall defense investment, his assertion would eventually become true.

Kissinger's immediate goals and mine were in conflict here. Kissinger wanted the perception of American superiority to aid his negotiating positions and to reassure our allies, and for the strong diplomatic position it would provide as he worked on arms agreements with the Soviets. In contrast, I needed us to acknowledge the truth of the U.S. decline in our relative capability so that the American people and Congress would support the increases in defense investments necessary to reverse the adverse trends.

President Ford listened intently to our back-and-forth discussion. This was the type of spirited, open exchange that was healthy and needed, and which had been missing on foreign and defense policies in the past.

“I don't think [I] should say we are slipping,” Ford finally decided. “I can say we need to redouble our efforts. I don't want to say we are getting behind. I'll say we have a challenge, we have rough equivalence and we've got to keep up.” The President also decided to criticize the Democratic Congress for its reductions in defense spending.

“I think the posture to take is that Reagan doesn't know what he's talking about and he's irresponsible,” Kissinger advised.
²⁰

Even though Kissinger was bothered by the California governor's unrelenting attacks, I thought Reagan was making a critically important point. The only thing irresponsible would be to dismiss it.

 

K
issinger and I also found ourselves in different corners on his negotiations with the Soviets over a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).
^*
The debates over the arms-control agreement sometimes made me feel, as I later described it, “like the skunk at the garden party.”
²¹
Ford hoped to sign a second treaty before the end of his term and, I suspected, before the presidential election in November.

I was concerned that the Soviet Union had not proven to be true to its word in previous negotiations. The Soviets were not forthcoming about the level of their defense expenditures. They also appeared to have been violating at least the spirit of the first SALT by concealing missile silos and other military infrastructure. All of this was to say nothing of their aggressive activities on several continents that threatened international peace and security and seemed designed to undermine American interests.

I was certainly comfortable delaying a new treaty if a satisfactory resolution to my concerns could not be reached. This of course had the effect of making me the administration's hawk, and positioning me as out of step with Kissinger and his allies, Rockefeller and Scowcroft. My reluctance to sign on to Kissinger's positions in obtaining an agreement without the Department of Defense's support proved frustrating for him. Kissinger was used to the Pentagon's opposition to his proposals, but they had not been much of a problem for him in the past given the tepid relationship between Ford and Schlesinger. He was unhappy that I was putting doubts into the President's mind, and he accused me of using delaying tactics to scuttle his negotiations with the Soviets. “Rumsfeld was skillful at deflecting every controversial issue into some bureaucratic bog or other,” Kissinger noted later, giving more weight to what he considered my bureaucratic skills than the substantive merit of my arguments.
²²
He thought that was a criticism of me. I felt it was a compliment when it came to the risk of an arms control agreement that, in my view, was not in our country's best interest.

The discussions within the administration over SALT were even more difficult for me in light of my relationship with Rockefeller. At one meeting in mid-February 1976, we listened to a long presentation by Kissinger on the status of the SALT negotiations, which Rockefeller responded to by banging the table in approval.

When I laid out the Department of Defense's position, Rockefeller kept interrupting me. He had a well-developed practice of trying to throw people off with bullying tactics. Now that he was a lame-duck vice president, he was even more caustic. A couple of times, as I was speaking, he snapped, “Don, what's your point?”

Exasperated, I finally said, “Mr. Vice President, I've been listening for one hour and fifteen minutes, and I am proceeding in my own way to lay out my points.” And I continued to do so. Rockefeller's behavior laid bare the tensions over the hoped-for deal with the Soviets favored by the liberal wing of the party, for which Rockefeller was the poster boy.

A key, if controversial, issue in the debates over SALT was the fate of America's cruise missiles.
^*
Cruise missiles varied in ranges, could be armed with nuclear or conventional warheads, and could be launched from land, sea, or air. Their unusual flexibility made them particularly attractive as a weapons system. It also made them a serious complicating factor in negotiations to limit the size of our nuclear arsenal.

America had a measurable lead in cruise missile technology. The Soviets would have to expend large amounts of their resources to keep up with us, so the Soviets wanted us to promise to curtail our cruise missile development in a SALT II treaty. An agreement could have been achieved if Ford had been willing to acquiesce to these demands. Kissinger and Rockefeller, and others eager to sign a treaty with the Soviets, were ready to agree to that. I was uncomfortable agreeing to limit an advantage, the exact nature of which, at that time, we could not predict.
²³

In one meeting Kissinger tried to blame the Joint Chiefs for intransigence on the cruise missile issue. They were not the impediment, I told him—I was.
²⁴
I urged the President to delay any treaty that required restricting our cruise missile technologies as part of the deal. The Defense Department needed more time to assess the merits of the treaty's specific provisions before agreeing to them.

That Kissinger and I had differing views on the arms treaty with the Soviets posed a problem for Ford. The President needed support from the conservative wing of his party and a few hawks in the Democratic Party, like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, to get a treaty ratified in the Senate. If the Joint Chiefs testified against the treaty or the Secretary of Defense resigned because he could not support it, its prospects for ratification would be dim.

Ford made clear to me that he was unhappy with our position in the Defense Department. Undeterred, Ford approached the Soviets with a proposal to continue negotiations while pushing the final status of cruise missiles for a separate discussion at a later date. Brezhnev rejected Ford's suggestion outright, calling it a “step backward.” The Soviet leader wrote in March 1976 that “someone is deliberately trying to put roadblocks on the way to reaching an agreement.”
²⁵
I had little doubt who the Soviet leader meant by “someone.” The U.S.-initiated talks collapsed.

American public opinion leaned heavily in favor of arms reductions. Those who didn't support agreements with the Soviets tended to be characterized in the press as advocates of confrontation with the Communist empire. Paradoxically, I thought Soviet aggression and confrontation could become more likely if we passed a SALT II treaty that conceded too much. The Soviets might be emboldened by our weakness.

 

I
n 1979, two years after he had left office, Gerald Ford came to visit me in Chicago. I drove to the airport to pick him up. He was bringing Joyce and me one of the golden retriever puppies from his dog, Misty. He also had just completed his memoir,
A Time to Heal.
Sitting in the backseat of the car on the way to my house, Ford handed me an autographed copy of his book.

Placing his other hand on my arm, he said gently, “Don, you are not going to like everything in this.”

I asked why.

“Because I placed responsibility for our failure to get a SALT agreement on you and Brezhnev,” he replied.

I smiled. “Well, Mr. President,” I said, “I can live with that.”

T
he year 1976 saw not only the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but also a surprisingly close presidential election. The attraction of a virtually unknown candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Jimmy Carter, resonated with many voters in a way that it might not have in any other year. His simple promise, “I'll never lie to you,” appealed to a country still furious over Watergate and Vietnam.

Gerald Ford, despite being burdened by the characterization of his tenure as the Nixon-Ford presidency, had become a solid, decisive executive. He was no longer the surprised occupant of a shattered, discredited presidency that he had to rebuild. Now it was his office, and he wanted to keep it.

Reagan's run for the Republican nomination continued to gain traction. He was winning a number of states and putting Ford on the defensive. At one point, the President's close advisers considered the possibility that President Ford might lose the Michigan primary. It was never discussed publicly, of course, but if Ford were rejected by Republican voters in his home state, the embarrassment could leave the President little choice but to consider dropping out of the race. Fortunately Ford won the Michigan primary convincingly.

Ford and Reagan then engaged in a series of primary duels, each in search of the magic number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination. By the time of the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where one of the two would be nominated, it looked like Ford would win, and the process of selecting a replacement for Rockefeller began.
^*

For the third time in three years, I found myself being discussed for the vice presidential nomination. Ford again asked me to fill out the extensive paperwork, including the dozens of pages of disclosure forms required for background and financial checks. I knew well that I made no more sense as a running mate for Ford than I had the last time he'd considered me.

Some weeks before the Republican convention, my mother sent me a newspaper article that indicated that the medical therapy of choice for tonsillitis in the 1930s was radiation treatment, which could lead to cancerous thyroid tumors. She told me that I had been radiated for tonsillitis when I was a child. After I read the article, I showed it to the White House doctor, who examined me and said he saw no problem. Several weeks later, as I was shaving, I noticed a bulge in my throat. Knowing that it could be a malignant tumor, I decided to schedule surgery before the Republican National Convention was to begin on August 16, 1976, further eliminating me from serious vice presidential contention.

I was at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from the surgery when Dick Cheney called me from Air Force One. He and the President were on their way to the Kansas City convention. Because of the operation, I wasn't able to talk yet, so Joyce took the call. Dick asked how I was doing, and then passed along a message from the President.

“Tell Don that we're going to win the nomination and keep him in his job,” Cheney said. It was a graceful way to tell Joyce and me what I already believed. I was not going to be Ford's vice presidential choice. His selection turned out to be a friend from my days in Congress, Bob Dole of Kansas.

At the convention, President Ford defeated Governor Reagan on the first ballot by 117 votes. A narrow victory for a sitting president, but it was preferable to the alternative.

 

W
ith the economy in recession, the pardon of Nixon still a sore point, and a long, heated primary campaign just over, Ford started the fall campaign behind the Democratic candidate, Georgia's governor, Jimmy Carter, by thirty points in the polls. This was just two years after many of the most prominent political reporters and experts in Washington had proclaimed the then likely Ford-Rockefeller ticket as virtually unbeatable.
²
But Ford wasn't giving up. With the assistance of Cheney, a Texas politico named Jim Baker, and the excellent campaign team they put together, Ford battled his way back into contention.

On September 23, 1976, in Philadelphia, Ford and Carter met for their first presidential campaign debate. Most voters thought Ford won that encounter. He seemed knowledgeable and likable, while Carter appeared vague on the issues.
³

It was on foreign policy that the second debate, and perhaps the election, turned. During the encounter, reporter Max Frankel began to ask Ford a question, “Mr. President, I'd like to explore a little more deeply our relationship with the Russians…. We've virtually signed, in Helsinki, an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe…”

“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” the President declared.

Frankel was visibly startled. “I'm sorry, could I just follow—did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it's a Communist zone?”

Ford would not back down. “I don't believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union,” he said. “I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”
⁴

I understood what Ford was thinking. Every year during the Cold War, members of Congress would commemorate Captive Nations Week. This was an opportunity to express America's solidarity with those who lived in nations trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Ford, along with other congressmen representing districts with large numbers of Eastern European immigrants and their families, would recognize Captive Nations Week by describing the nations in the Eastern Bloc as being captive to the Soviet Union, and by adding that we refused to concede that those nations would be permanently subjugated. “Permanently” was the operative word Ford had left out in his response to Frankel in the debate. Without the context of Captive Nation's Week, it came across as if the President was naïve about foreign policy, and that he did not know or would not admit that the Soviet Union was subjugating the Eastern Europeans, of which he was of course well aware.

I immediately knew it was a disaster. I called Cheney and urged him to get the President to correct himself fast. Apparently Cheney and Scowcroft had already tried repeatedly but failed. The next day, Ford agreed to issue a clarification, but the damage had been done.

 

T
wo weeks later a Pentagon public relations fiasco brought the Department of Defense to the center stage of the campaign, if only briefly. I had formed a close working relationship with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General George Scratchley Brown, who had a distinguished military career.
^*
But unlike many military officers who reach high posts in the Pentagon, Brown had little patience with bureaucratic procedures and little political polish. He tended to say what he thought, including things that, on reflection, might have been better left unsaid.

In April 1976, Brown had what he assumed was a private conversation with a cartoonist. He mused that the Shah of Iran, a U.S. partner, had an insatiable appetite for weapons because he had “visions of the Persian Empire.” He said that the military capabilities of Great Britain were “pathetic,” with nothing more than “generals and admirals and bands.” Brown gave a few other choice opinions, including some offensive comments about U.S. support for Israel. Many months later, a few weeks before the presidential election, his remarks made their way to the press. I winced when I read them.
⁵

Jimmy Carter demanded that Brown be reprimanded. Ford called me and said we needed to decide quickly on whether to keep Brown or fire him, making it clear he leaned to the latter.
⁶

“Let me try to handle it,” I said. “Give me one more news cycle, and I will see if I can put this behind us.” I called in Brown and told him that the President and I both believed the things he said had been inappropriate, but that Ford had given me a brief opportunity to see if I could help the situation.

I proposed that we go down to the Pentagon press room and give a brief statement, making clear that we understood the comments were regrettable. Brown agreed and we headed to the lion's den.

I told the Pentagon press corps that General Brown's comments were inappropriate, and that “the absence of a reprimand should not be taken as an endorsement of obviously inelegant phraseology.”
⁷

Brown stepped forward after a reporter asked, “Is there any suspicion at all in your mind that there may be something political about the timing in all this? What do you think?” The reporter posed this question since Brown's comments had not appeared in the press until six months after he said them, right before the presidential election.

“I'm not in a position to judge,” Brown replied. “I do think it's a little strange…” I had no idea what Brown was about to say next, but I had a sinking feeling it wouldn't do him any good. So I stepped up next to him, put my arm around him, and with a big smile I said, “He's not in a position to judge, he's exactly right, I agree with him completely.”
⁸

General Brown and the assembled reporters broke out in laughter. And with that, I ended our press conference, and the General and I made our escape. The story died, George Brown remained as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the remainder of his full term, and a fine officer's career was not tarnished by an early dismissal or presidential reprimand.

 

O
n the night before the 1976 presidential election, Joyce and I attended a dinner at the home of the legendary publisher of the
Washington Post
, Kay Graham. Another guest at the dinner was the Democratic National Committee and Carter campaign chairman, Bob Strauss. As the evening drew to a close, the Strausses and the Rumsfelds were leaving the dinner at the same time.

“You know, Don,” Bob said, “the only thing worse than losing tomorrow would be to have it go on one more day.”

I knew what he meant. The election contest—from the beginning of the Reagan challenge to the general election fight against Carter—seemed to have gone on forever.

It was not until the early hours of the morning after the election that NBC finally declared Governor Jimmy Carter the winner. The closeness of the result—two percentage points in the popular vote—made Ford's loss even more painful. After campaigning tirelessly, the President's voice gave out on election night. As a result, Betty Ford had to read his telegram of congratulations to President-elect Carter, with the Ford family gathered around them.
⁹

I felt terrible about the election loss—for a friend and a fine leader. I had no doubt that Ford would have proven to be a superb president in the next four years if he'd been elected. His margin of defeat was so narrow that almost anything might have changed the outcome. I couldn't help but wonder what might have been if he had made a fresh start when he first came in with visible high-level personnel changes that would have established a distinctive Ford presidency in the public's mind, or if Ford had selected someone other than Rockefeller as vice president, or if the Nixon pardon had been handled differently. Or what if he had achieved a politically expedient SALT agreement with the Soviets? Or if he had avoided the mistake about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the debate? But that was not how Gerald Ford thought. He looked forward, not back.

On November 5, 1976, three days after the election, Ford held a cabinet meeting. “I don't want any eulogies,” he said. “We had a good team, and I was proud of you.” Ford said we had an obligation to the American people to carry on the same efforts until his last day in office, on January 20, 1977. After about thirty minutes, the meeting ended with a round of warm applause.
¹⁰

Gerald Ford could be proud of his tenure as president, brief though it was, for many reasons. He was an honest, open, hardworking statesman who had the qualities the nation desperately needed to exorcise the ghosts of Watergate and Vietnam. He was a steady commander in chief during the Cold War who pushed for greater defense investment. The presidency as an institution was in jeopardy after Nixon's resignation, and Ford had righted the foundering ship of state. Backlash over the Watergate scandal might have resulted in hasty, unwise restrictions on executive powers that could have had lasting adverse repercussions for our country, but President Ford prevented that from happening. He preserved the integrity of the office and handed it intact to his successor.

 

A
s saddened as I was over Ford's loss, I was more troubled by the man who would replace him. Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor from Georgia, would become president of the United States. On November 22, 1976, President-elect Carter asked to meet with me at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to brief him and his national security team on defense matters.
¹¹
Although I believed Carter was an intelligent man, and one who cared about the country, I worried that he seemed not well prepared for the presidency.

At our meeting, the Georgia governor was pleasant, and I saw a few flashes of his famous grin. He opened our meeting with a list of items he wanted to discuss, including the budget, decisions pending at the Defense Department, and an assessment of the military balance and trends.
¹²
Throughout the meeting Carter relied on notations on a piece of paper in front of him. There was little extemporaneous give-and-take.