Known and Unknown (9 page)

Stevenson's speech that evening had more influence on me than any I had heard before. I knew I would next be serving in the Navy, but I was not certain whether I would stay in it and if not, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It might seem strange considering my later career that the one who so strongly sparked the idea of public service for me was a liberal Democrat and self-proclaimed egghead. But his comments came to me at a formative time in my life and a turning point for the country. With an armistice reached in Korea in 1953, America had just ended its involvement in a second war in a decade. Mounting concerns about communism, nuclear exchanges, and the possibility of more armed conflict were intensified by the first test of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs of World War II.

Stevenson put the future into an important and new context for me. He talked about the responsibility of citizenship in whatever path we might choose, and the stark consequences awaiting us all if we failed in our responsibilities. “If those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability,” he warned, “America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls.”
¹⁴

He reflected on the weighty responsibility of the American people in our democracy to be involved in helping to guide and direct their government. He said, “For the power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decisions which it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership which it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world.

“Your days are short here,” he added in closing, “this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem. You will go away with old, good friends. Don't forget when you leave why you came.” Stevenson's eloquent and inspiring words opened my mind to the need to look squarely and thoughtfully at each new experience, and to know I'd have to answer to myself at each leave-taking.

I
tended at a still young age to be deliberative when it came to important decisions. I was one who tried to weigh the pros and cons, to look at things from different points of view, and then to make a careful choice. A woman can have a wonderful way of changing all that.

Upon graduating from college, I was ready for the Navy. Having been entranced with the idea of flying at an early age, I requested and was assigned to the naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida. Since there were no female students at Princeton in those days, and I studied or worked most of the time, and with little money, I had had practically no dates. So I thought it would be a fine thing to go off to the Navy unattached. But then there was Joyce.

We had kept in touch since high school, and I had seen her briefly on holidays when we both happened to be home. She was attending the University of Colorado and had an active social life there, with many friends and suitors. And my idea of going off to the Navy and hoping Joyce might wait around ran straight up against the news that she was having romances out West. So I invited her to come out to Princeton during her spring vacation and then again for my graduation.

The morning after I arrived back home in Illinois from graduation, while having breakfast with my parents, I thought about my immediate future. On the one hand was the prospect of being a happy bachelor in the Navy, young and unattached. But then a moment of total clarity presented itself. Without discussing it with anyone, I rose from the table. “I'll be back in a bit,” I told my parents.

I went to find Joyce and asked her to marry me. There was little buildup, little suspense, and at ten o'clock in the morning, it wasn't very romantic. But it felt right. I didn't know who was more surprised when I proposed—Joyce, me, or her parents. When she told her folks the news, Joyce's dad summed up the prevailing mood. “I'll be damned,” he said, shaking his head.

Getting engaged the day after you got home from college may seem almost quaint now. Even in the 1950s things were starting to change.
I Love Lucy
hovered at the top of the Nielsen ratings for its six seasons, starting in 1951, but tensions burbled under the surface of Lucy and Ricky's happy home life. Back then, their interracial relationship was unusual, as was Lucille Ball's performing while pregnant. The word “pregnant” was not considered appropriate for use on television. The stars themselves divorced when the show ended. Rock and roll was viewed with suspicion by the establishment—Elvis Presley was threatened with arrest for obscenity by the San Diego police if he moved his body during his performances. Marilyn Monroe emerged as a new, modern movie star whose sex appeal and real-life dramas threatened to overshadow her acting. But it would take some years before these changes were brought home to Joyce and me. Our experiences were far removed from the glitter and glamour of popular music and films.

I did have one brush with the spotlight, however. While I waited for my flight-training class to begin in Pensacola, I was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, New Jersey—now as a newly engaged twenty-one-year-old. Soon after I arrived, Atlantic City was hosting the 1954 Miss America Pageant. These lovely young contestants were in need of escorts to the pageant ball. The pageant's sponsors looked to the men of the United States Navy for help. When a call went out for forty-eight young officers to serve as escorts for the Miss America contestants, I felt it was my patriotic duty to volunteer. I was assigned to that year's Miss Indiana.

As it happened, 1954 was the first year that they televised the Miss America Pageant, so it received a good deal of publicity across the country. The big news was that the actress Grace Kelly would appear. Joyce's friends were among the viewers that night. Watching their television sets, more than one of them was heard to inquire, “Isn't that Don Rumsfeld dancing with that beauty contestant?” As one might imagine, it was not long before that news made its way to Joyce. Thankfully she took it all in stride—as she has been able to take a great many things in stride over the many decades that followed.

Marion Joyce Pierson and I were married on December 27, 1954. As of this writing, I have spent more than 80 percent of my life with the pretty girl with twinkling eyes I first met at the age of fourteen. Newly married, Joyce and I would tackle Navy life together. Our first of many houses was a standard-issue cinder-block box at the end of the runway at NAS Whiting Field—a tiny place with a kitchen and bathroom on one side of a small sitting area and a bedroom on the other.

During flight training, I flew SNJs, the kind of single engine propeller aircraft now found only in air museums. My father was concerned about my flying, having seen a number of aircraft crash during the war. He had a point. Sadly, we lost several friends over those years. Still, I loved everything about flying—the freedom, the speed, the excitement. “More than anything else the sensation [of flying],” Wilbur Wright reportedly said, “is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.” I knew what he meant. I felt like I could have continued on as a naval aviator for the rest of my life.

My strong hope had been that I would be assigned to single-engine aircraft, preferably as part of an aircraft carrier–based fighter squadron. But the month I completed my carrier qualification and was headed to advanced training, the Navy had not met its quota of multiengine seaplane pilots, so that is where I was slotted. It was the bad luck of the draw. I tried to get my assignment changed, but the Navy needed multiengine patrol-plane pilots, and that was that. It was an early lesson in the reality of dealing with a large bureaucracy.

I then asked to be transferred back to Pensacola to serve as a flight instructor, since that was the only way I could get back into single-engine aircraft, even if it was the training command. My request was granted, but just as Joyce and I were preparing to leave, my orders were changed. I was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, where one of my assignments was to train for the 1956 Olympics in wrestling. After winning the All-Navy Wrestling title and qualifying for the final Olympic tryouts, however, my shoulder separated while wrestling at the Naval Academy. My Olympics hopes, such as they were, were over.

My disappointment was overtaken by a much more important event. On March 3, 1956, at Portsmouth Naval Hospital, our first child, Valerie Jeanne, was born, and our small family soon moved to Florida, where I began my assignment as a naval flight instructor. Later I was selected to be an instructor of flight instructors. At the age of twenty-four I was the youngest in the group and the most junior in rank. It was an excellent assignment and an honor, but it wasn't the carrier duty I wanted.

Toward the end of my three-and-a-half-year commitment, I requested a transfer from the regular Navy to the Naval Reserve, where I would be able to keep flying as a “weekend warrior” but would also be able to pursue a career in the private sector. I loved flying, so much so that I probably would have been happy if I could have found a civilian job as a crop duster or a bush pilot in Alaska. But I also had responsibilities, and they were brought home to me almost immediately when Joyce came down with hepatitis from a flu shot with a dirty metal needle before the days of disposables. It took the better part of a year for her to get well. With a very sick wife, no job, no health insurance, and an infant child, we went back to Chicago and moved in with Joyce's parents, and later with my parents, while I looked for work.

With the help of the Princeton alumni job placement office, I started interviewing. I was offered several starting jobs with corporations in Chicago. Then I heard that a first-term U.S. congressman from northeastern Ohio, David Dennison, was looking for an administrative assistant.

My earlier impression of Washington, D.C., had not been a good one. After my college graduation, Joyce and I had traveled there to attend a wedding. While there we went to a session of the U.S. Senate. Both of us, with our interest in politics and government, were expecting to witness great matters of state being debated. As it turned out, there was almost no one in the U.S. Senate chamber. The aged Senator Carl Hayden—who had been the last territorial sheriff of Arizona before it became a state—was presiding, and from time to time was dozing off. Only one other senator was on the floor: Wayne Morse of Oregon, who was talking about music. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster they were not that day.

 

I
had never met a congressman before I met Dave Dennison, and he was exactly what I'd hoped a congressman would be. He was a thoroughly decent human being—honorable, intelligent, sincere, and hardworking. Though I had no legislative experience, I think he identified with me. We had both been wrestlers, and his brother also had served as an instructor of naval flight instructors. After my interview, I excitedly told Joyce, “I would pay to be able to work for this man.”

From the start, Dennison and I had a good working relationship. I was called on to organize and follow up on meetings with constituents, write legislative briefs, newsletters, press releases, and scripts for his radio program. Though he seemed content with my performance, I found the job difficult. I had not written anything since college, except for an occasional letter home. I had spent the previous three-and-a-half years flying airplanes and had literally never worked in an office in my life. The closest I had come was when I mopped the floors of a dress shop every week to make money while I was in high school. During those first challenging months I felt like I was scrambling every day. Almost every night I would go home with my stomach in knots.

In 1958, Dennison was up for his first reelection. He asked me to move my family to Ohio to help. It was a tough year for Republicans. A nasty recession was underway, and with President Eisenhower in the White House, Republicans were getting most of the blame. On top of that, Dennison's opponent accused him of unethical practices. He criticized the Congressman for having had his wife temporarily on his congressional payroll (for a brief period, performing responsibilities for which she was fully qualified) and for leasing a portion of his law office as his congressional district office. Each was legal, but Dennison's opponent made it sound like corruption. He fought against the allegations, but in a bad year those charges tipped the scale. All through election night we agonized, watching the down-to-the-wire contest. In the end, the congressman lost the election by 967 votes, about one switch vote per precinct. Seeing an able, honorable congressman lose his seat by such a narrow margin for what was unfair criticism was crushing.

After Dennison lost, I went to work for Congressman Robert Griffin, a Republican from Michigan. I also enrolled in Georgetown Law School. But Dave Dennison called me back to Ohio to help him try to win back his congressional seat. Joyce was pregnant again at the time, but she was also a tough battler for causes and people she believed in. When I asked her about going back to Ohio and getting involved in another tough political race, she quickly replied, “Let's do it.” She gave birth to our second daughter, Marcy, while we were on the campaign trail in Warren, Ohio, in March 1960.

Once again, Dennison's dedication wasn't enough to turn the tide, and he lost by a narrow margin, while Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon in the race for president. I was now 0 for 2 in political campaigns. I felt like I'd had enough of politics for the time being, so we returned home to Illinois, ready to start doing something else, or so I thought.

I had been settled at the Chicago-based investment banking house A. G. Becker for about a year when a rare opportunity presented itself. In late 1961, the incumbent Republican congresswoman in our district, Marguerite Stitt Church, announced that she was not going to seek reelection. Her husband, Ralph, was first elected to Congress in 1934, when I was two years old, and when he died in 1950, his wife was elected to the seat and held it subsequently.

Since the seat was open for the first time in almost three decades, it was seen as an opportunity for both parties that was not likely to be open again for the foreseeable future. The Republican candidate had an advantage because the district, while fairly diverse, had been Republican for a long time. Twelve or thirteen candidates announced they would run for the GOP nomination. Among them were several prominent local figures, each with a decent chance of winning.

I had toyed with the idea of running for Congress now and again. One of the people who encouraged the idea was New Jersey Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen, who represented the Princeton area. When I worked on Capitol Hill, he asked me to lunch. While we were talking, he asked when I was going back home. He did not think I should spend my career as a congressional staffer, but instead suggested that I might return to Washington one day as an elected official. It seemed unusual that a senior member of Congress would take such an active interest in a young staffer's career. His suggestion stuck in my head.

If I wanted to run in my home district, this might be the only chance I'd have in several decades. I was twenty-nine years old. I had never held elected office. I had been away from my home district for ten years, since 1950, when I left for college. I did not seem to have anything that could even remotely be considered a political base.

My parents thought the idea of running for Congress was almost unbelievable. Having lived most of his life in Chicago, Dad had the impression that politicians were crooks. My mother didn't see how someone my age could possibly succeed Mrs. Church, who was forty years older. I was the longest of long shots. The savvy political reporter for the
Chicago Sun-Times
predicted I would run seventh out of seven.

I did have a few things going for me, however, the most important of which was our many friends from school in the area. The campaign team we put together was like a reunion. But it was not, to be sure, in any sense a finely honed operation. In our initial meeting around a table in our kitchen, we had a long discussion about strategy and position papers. Then, just as the meeting broke up, someone asked, almost as an afterthought, “Won't we be needing some money?” Laughing at how inexperienced we were, we each put in fifty dollars and managed to scrape together the formidable sum of four hundred dollars.