Nearly everybody liked the Rumsfelds, the former high school sweethearts from Chicago who lived in a tiny house in Georgetown with three young children and a dog named Otto and threw spaghetti parties in their backyard.1 “They were so much fun,” remembers one longtime friend and former neighbor. “They never had any money, but they were great to have around.” Columnist Joe Kraft affectionately nicknamed the young Republican congressman “Boy-Boy.” “It was because he was just so boyishly exuberant,” recalls Polly Kraft.
Kraft was a liberal, a former Kennedy speechwriter who ultimately landed on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. But Rumsfeld, at least in those days, never had trouble making friends across party lines. This was partly due to the effect of his good-natured wife, Joyce, who commanded widespread affection and loyalty.2 Ever since his arrival in 1962 as a thirty-year-old congressman from an affluent Chicago district, he had cultivated friendships across party lines and with journalists such as Kraft, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the up-and-coming CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather. A keen wrestler in his college days, one of Rumsfeld’s closest friendships was with a fellow wrestler, antiwar activist and Democratic congressman Allard Lowenstein, later tragically murdered by his gay lover. His fellow Illinois Republican boy-wonder politician, Charles Percy, who later served in the U.S. Senate from 1968 to 1984, long remembered that Rumsfeld had dropped everything in the middle of a campaign to rush and offer assistance to the Percy family on the awful day when Percy’s daughter Valerie was found murdered in the family home. For a personal problem, Rumsfeld could be counted on as a friend in need.
At the carefree Georgetown gatherings, when the popular young host was not demonstrating his ability to perform backflips with his pipe in his mouth, he liked to quote a profile published during his first congressional campaign that described Rumsfeld as “distinguished by his total lack of social, financial and political standing in the district.” He loved that line so much he would still be quoting it in 2003,3 but it was far from the truth. In his first congressional campaign, no less than fourteen chief executives of major national corporations, as well as powerful lawyers and academics, endorsed him.4
This potent support derived from the fact that Rumsfeld grew up in Winnetka, one of the wealthier suburbs on Chicago’s North Shore, “where all the CEOs lived,” according to one former resident. George Rumsfeld, his father, a real estate salesman, managed the local office of a realtor firm. His mother, Jeanette, worked as a substitute teacher. The Rumsfelds “were not exactly in the same club” as their well-heeled neighbors, recalls William Cohea, former pastor of the Winnetka Presbyterian Church, “but they were well known. His uncle was a professor at Northwestern University.” New Trier high school, which Rumsfeld attended, was famous for its excellence and therefore attracted the sons and daughters of the local elite. By the time he began running for Congress as a twenty-nine-year-old, the young man who had attended Princeton on an ROTC scholarship, which he followed with three years in the navy, had forged relationships that would still be serving him half a century later.
“When I met him for the first time, he was eighteen,” says Cohea, “and all he talked about was going into politics.” Following his military service, Rumsfeld started on the bottom of the political ladder, working as a congressional staffer. But after managing a losing campaign for one of his bosses, he moved back to Chicago to work in an investment bank, buying a house in Glenview—within calling distance of the grand Winnetka mansions. It was not long before opportunity knocked.
Early in 1962, Marguerite Stitt Church, his local congresswoman, announced her retirement. The thirteenth Illinois district, which included much of the North Shore, was one of the most solidly Republican in the nation, so the crucial race was the Republican primary. Rumsfeld filed for the primary—one of several eager aspirants. He was sponsored, according to a well-connected former Winnetka resident, by Art Nielsen, son of the founder of the TV ratings company and a local power broker who rounded up support among neighborhood corporate heavyweights such as Dan Searle, heir to the G.D. Searle drug company.
Before commencing his campaign, the ambitious young politico had one very important personal decision to make. What, actually, were his political views? According to local Republican sources, Rumsfeld sought outside help in settling the issue. Approaching the chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, Francis X. Connell, he asked whether he should run as a conservative or as a moderate. For the young Rumsfeld, ideology was a matter of tactics. In any event, Connell seems to have advocated a conservative approach, advice that would have momentous effects far into the future.
State representative Marion Burks was the initial favorite, and was expected to receive the popular Mrs. Church’s endorsement. But Rumsfeld’s chances suddenly improved when the Chicago Sun-Times, which had already endorsed Rumsfeld, headlined a story that money in an insurance company of which Burks was chairman had gone missing. The ambitious twenty-nine-year-old (he turned thirty in July 1962) had recruited an equally youthful team of helpers, including an MBA student from the University of Chicago named Jeb Stuart Magruder, later jailed in the Watergate scandal for his role in the Nixon administration’s criminal dirty tricks operation. “I already had experience from the 1960 Nixon campaign in Kansas City, so it was natural for me to get involved,” Magruder, now a minister of the Presbyterian Church, told me in 2006.
Rumsfeld himself affected a statesmanlike attitude during the campaign, never mentioning the allegations against Burks, while Magruder and other Rumsfeld operatives reportedly arranged for someone to raise the issue at every one of Burks’s meetings, disregarding his repeated protests of innocence.5 “I did what I did best,” the seventy-two-year-old Magruder replied when I asked him about his role. “I don’t remember much about Burks.” In his 1974 memoir, An American Life, a younger Magruder recalled, “We did everything we could to keep the [Burks] issue alive. Don never mentioned it in public, but whenever Burks spoke we would send our people to pepper him with questions about the scandal.” The allegations were a total smear; Burks retired as a respected circuit court judge.6 But meanwhile Rumsfeld had won the primary.
His margin was huge, more than two to one, a spectacular victory for a political neophyte, but in one sense it proved a poisoned chalice. “That was the one and only election contest Rumsfeld ever had to face,” a veteran of Illinois politics pointed out to me. “In that district, once he was in, he could keep on getting reelected till the end of time, barring the proverbial discovery of a dead girl or live boy in his bed. But he thought he knew everything about politics after that one race, and had nothing more to learn.”
Congressional Republicans had yet to evolve into the grim partisans of the Newt Gingrich era and beyond, so Rumsfeld managed to serve six years in the House, predictably reelected by his affluent constituents without acquiring any ideological label more striking than that of a conventional conservative, loyal to his business sponsors and the routine prejudices of their class. Militant anticommunism came with the territory—this, after all, was the party of Joe McCarthy, whose witch-hunting days had ended only seven years before young Rumsfeld’s election to Congress.
Soon after taking his seat in Congress, Rumsfeld issued a fierce denunciation of a Kennedy administration nominee for a Pentagon post as “soft” on the communist foe. The individual had attended a National Council of Churches meeting at which pacifist ideas had been debated. The statement proved only to demonstrate Rumsfeld’s ignorance of the wider world, for the man he attacked was none other than Paul Nitze, whose entire government career had been devoted to highlighting the Soviet threat.7
Rumsfeld later apologized to Nitze for his ill-founded abuse, but other positions carved out by the ambitious young legislator were to remain as enduring themes for years to come. In response to John F. Kennedy’s ringing call for an expedition to the moon—“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”—Rumsfeld, unmoved, joined five fellow right-wing house Republicans in a public complaint that the administration was ignoring “the main thrust of the Soviet space aim, which is to dominate inner space thru the ability to exercise control over the surface of the earth.”8 It was a theme he never let go. Forty years later, he was pouring out $9 billion a year to defend inner space with the missile defense program, even though by then the Soviets were long gone from the surface of the earth.
Aside from such public announcements, Rumsfeld was exercising a craft in which he was already displaying great ability: backroom intrigue. In 1965 he played a leading role in a maneuver that displaced the House Republican floor leader, a venerable party stalwart named Charles Halleck, known as “Two Cadillac Charlie,” in favor of a younger though equally conservative congressman from Michigan named Gerald R. Ford.9 “Getting rid of Halleck and putting in Jerry Ford was the best thing he ever did in Washington,” said Charles Bartlett, a veteran political reporter who came to know the Rumsfelds when they first arrived in Washington. “Everyone knew Halleck had to go, but most of those Republican congressmen were just sitting on their hands.” Nevertheless, this power play exposed another feature of Rumsfeld the politician, one that served him ill in the career of which he dreamed: his tendency to leave a trail of embittered enemies behind him. Glorious though the Halleck victory may have been, especially for the future of Jerry Ford, it left Halleck’s good friend Congressman Leslie Arends of Illinois deeply displeased. Arends was not only the Republican whip but also the dean of the Illinois Republican delegation. Even worse, an attempt in January 1969 to unseat Arends from his post as whip failed, which meant that Rumsfeld had now directly provoked a powerful enemy in his own backyard. Bob Michel, a colleague from the Illinois Republican delegation, told him that he would never get a leadership post so long as Arends was around. “Well,” Rumsfeld reportedly replied, “I better see if I can get a job with the administration.”
The newly elected Richard Nixon had retrieved the White House from the Democrats in the 1968 election largely as a result of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War launched and pursued by his Democratic predecessors. While his mandate may have been to end the war, his agenda was to reverse some of the socially progressive initiatives of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson had promised to create a “Great Society” in which poverty would be abolished thanks to a host of programs that catered in various ways to the needs of the poor, including Head Start, aimed at needy preschoolers, and the Federal Legal Services Program, which enabled poor people to litigate their rights. These programs were under the central supervision of the Office of Economic Opportunity. It was politically impossible for Nixon to do away with the poverty programs, though he disliked them intensely, and he was looking for a politically reliable operative who would at least rein them in. Offered the job, the thirty-five-year-old Rumsfeld used the fact that several other candidates had already rejected the job to bargain successfully for cabinet rank and the title of assistant to the president.
In Congress, Rumsfeld had proudly proclaimed himself a foe of the War on Poverty. “I voted to revise the poverty and the Model Cities programs,” he boasted to his well-heeled constituents during the 1968 campaign. “I oppose the rent supplement program…I opposed increasing the Federal Debt limit…I joined a group of Republicans to cut Federal spending $6.6 billion.”10 Thus, when his appointment was announced, liberals quaked at the prospect of this rabid ideologue taking over the chicken coop. But of course, now that he had his own little empire, Rumsfeld was not about to dismantle it.
Rumsfeld’s stewardship of the antipoverty effort was to do much for his subsequent reputation. The fact that he kept the agency going while mouthing supportive statements about its mission was taken to indicate that he was no hard-line right-wing ideologue, but an open-minded individual ready to fight for a liberal cause when it was justified. In fact, Rumsfeld’s record at the antipoverty agency fits neatly into the same pattern as those of his subsequent jobs. That is to say, he devoted most of his energies to imposing his unchallenged political control on the organization while cultivating an illmerited reputation for administrative competence. Hence, among his first acts was the creation of an internal security unit in OEO headquarters charged with sniffing out “revolutionaries” who might be funneling government funds to “subversives.”11
The management team assembled by Rumsfeld at the dawn of his administrative career was to show remarkable longevity. A third of a century later many of them were still by his side, either directly in his employ or close at hand to proffer advice and counsel. Kenneth Adelman, for example, was an accomplished amateur Shakespeare scholar and ardent supporter of Israel who later carved out a niche as an authority on defense matters. Adelman was joined by his wife, Carol, who, decades later, would find herself recommending personnel choices for Rumsfeld’s Pentagon when he took over in 2001. Frank Carlucci was a diminutive lawyer who later reaped a multi-million-dollar fortune as a defense contractor as well as serving in a variety of high-level national security posts.
Most fateful of all was the addition of a young and so far undistinguished man from Casper, Wyoming, Richard Cheney. Arriving in Washington in 1968, Cheney had found service as the political equivalent of a field hand in the office of a Republican congressman before landing in the office of the newly appointed head of the poverty program. Rumsfeld had actually rejected Cheney when the self-effacing youngster had earlier applied for a job in Rumsfeld’s congressional office, but there now began a relationship that would endure for decades to come, with fateful consequences for the country and the world.
Observers of this relationship in its early years were in no doubt as to its internal dynamic: Rumsfeld ruled; Cheney served. As Jerry Ford’s sharp-tongued amanuensis, Robert Hartmann, observed a few years later, Cheney’s “adult life had been devoted to the study of political science and the service of Donald Rumsfeld.” A serious student of political power, he “derived both his employment and his enjoyment from it. Whenever his private ideology was exposed, he appeared somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld, or, for that matter, Genghis Khan.” Hartmann, a former newspaperman, summed up Cheney as a “presentable young man who could easily be lost in a gaggle of Jaycee executives. His most distinguishing features were snake-cold eyes, like a Cheyenne gambler’s.”12
To the extent that the Rumsfelds’ social circle took note of the dour young assistant and his buxom spouse, a former drum majorette with literary pretensions named Lynne, it was to remark on Cheney’s subservient attitude to his ebullient boss. “Flunky” is the word that most often comes up in reminiscences of the period. “Cheney was so much Don’s faithful assistant, with Don so clearly the mentor, I can’t believe that relationship ever changed,” insists one friend who remained close enough to be invited to all of Rumsfeld’s formal swearing-in ceremonies.
But the relationship did change. Eventually, the student of political science calculated, like the gambler to which he was compared, that he had learned enough to play his own hand. It was a turning point that, as we shall see, came as a shock to the man who had always considered himself the senior partner, but the relationship eventually reestablished itself on a different course. Even so, asked about Cheney in a 2006 interview, Rumsfeld struck a slightly patronizing note: “I used to think of him as a promising young man, when I hired him…. It was so many years ago, 1969. I hired him as my—one of my special assistants…. He’s a very talented fellow.”13
Hartmann, in a penetrating character sketch, describes Rumsfeld as “expansive and, when it suited him, all smiles.” The smiles were no doubt a contributing factor in Rumsfeld’s popularity on the Washington scene, but for Rumsfeld, career came ahead of friendships. His relationship with Al Lowenstein ended when Rumsfeld, unwilling to court Nixon’s disfavor, endorsed his old friend’s opponent in a congressional race in 1970. Lowenstein lost and never forgave his former wrestling companion.14 Rumsfeld made a similar call in the case of Terry Lenzner—today one of Washington’s most successful private investigators, but then a trenchantly progressive young lawyer. Lenzner was director of an OEO subsidiary, the Federal Legal Services Program, an effort designed to give poor people the means to pursue litigation.
The right-wingers hated Legal Services with an especially vitriolic passion, their attacks spearheaded by Governor Ronald Reagan of California, and the even more conservative Governor Claude Kirk of Florida. In November 1970, Rumsfeld announced he had fired Lenzner and his assistant because the pair were either “unwilling or unable” to carry out his policies. This justification was swiftly rebutted by Lenzner, who described it as “mere cover up.” He charged that the real reason for his dismissal lay in the baleful opposition of Reagan, Kirk, and others who were “determined to keep us from suing special interests close to them on behalf of the poor.”15
In subsequent accounts, Rumsfeld and his supporters sought to portray Lenzner as a wild-eyed radical who plastered his office walls with posters of Che Guevara and whom no responsible administration could continue to employ. But, at the time, Rumsfeld’s action was greeted with stormy opposition not just from activists but also from the legal community at large.
The day before he fired Lenzner, Rumsfeld met with the president of the American Bar Association, an Arkansas attorney of impeccable establishment credentials named Edward L. Wright. Twenty-four hours later, he simultaneously issued two press releases, one announcing Lenzner’s dismissal, the other reporting on his meeting with Wright. The obvious inference was that the ABA endorsed the firings, a point Rumsfeld sought to emphasize by mentioning his meeting with Wright. Wright was having none of it: “Since the releases were issued concurrently,” he shot back, “an impression was created that I had knowledge of the dismissals. This is untrue.” He added that the bar association did not support or endorse the firings.16
This awkward maneuver was to prove more typical of Rumsfeld’s style than that of the deftly competent Machiavelli later touted by friends and enemies alike, a telling clue to what would be his failure ever to achieve elective office again. In the backroom politics of the Nixon court, however, where Rumsfeld’s style found many admirers, it was a different story. In his diary for May 21, 1970, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, recorded how he and Rumsfeld had been summoned by Nixon to discuss how to handle the problem of disloyalty in the cabinet and among the staff. The president was in favor of “cracking down hard,” but Rumsfeld “made point you have to establish record of trying to work things out before you fire someone.” Nixon liked this kind of thinking, and, as Haldeman noted, “Wants Don Rumsfeld brought more into the inner councils.”17
It seems Rumsfeld fit right in. “At least Rummy is tough enough,” President Nixon remarked in March 1971. “He’s a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.”18
Rumsfeld appealed to Nixon because, as one seasoned Republican operative explained to me, “Don understood that Nixon liked protégés with an Ivy League background from silk-stocking districts, and he knew how to appeal to that. George Bush Sr. was another protégé; he got Nixon to make him U.N. ambassador because he promised to fight his own class at the U.N. on behalf of Nixon.” Thanks to the silently turning tape recorders in the White House basement, we can eavesdrop on counseling sessions between the mentor and the protégé from Winnetka. On July 22, 1971, for example, Nixon held forth to Rumsfeld on the topic of Spiro Agnew, his vice president, who had publicly expressed some crass comparisons between American blacks and Africans while on a trip to Africa, claiming that African blacks were “smarter.”
Nixon: “It doesn’t help. It hurts with the blacks. And it doesn’t help with the rednecks because the rednecks don’t think any Negroes are any good.”
Rumsfeld: “Yes.”
Nixon: “Coming back and saying that black Americans aren’t as good as black Africans—most of them, basically are just out of the trees. Now, let’s face it, they are. My point is, if we say that, they [opponents] say [here Nixon drops into a Southern drawl], ‘Well, by God.’ Well, ah, even the Southerners say, ‘Well, our niggers is just better than their niggers.’”
Rumsfeld laughs.
Nixon: “Hell, that’s the way they talk!”
Rumsfeld: “That’s right.”
Nixon: “I can hear ’em.”
Rumsfeld: “I know.”
Nixon: “It’s like when our black athletes, I mean in the Olympics, are running against the other black athletes; the Southerner may not like the black, but he’s for that black athlete.”
Rumsfeld: “That’s right.”
Nixon: “Right?”
Rumsfeld: “That’s for sure.”
Nixon: “Well, enough of that.”19
In August 1971, Nixon found new employment for his “ruthless little bastard.” The colossal expenses of the Vietnam War had sapped America’s global economic supremacy to the point where the United States was forced to abandon the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float and potentially opening the door to runaway inflation. Scenting opportunity in this debacle, Nixon decided to impose wage and price controls on the American economy while simultaneously expanding the money supply. Thus the American people, their pockets bulging with cash to spend on price-controlled goods, would coast toward Nixon’s 1972 reelection in a suitable mood of financial gratitude. Rumsfeld, while protesting to the president how philosophically opposed he was to the whole idea, took on the job.
While Rumsfeld did much to gain approval in the eyes of his mentor, Nixon, he also managed to provoke some dangerous antagonisms, which, paradoxically, were to serve him well in the years to come. The point of contention was Vietnam. Having gained the White House on a pledge to end the war via a “secret plan,” Nixon’s policy, as crafted with the help of Henry Kissinger, was to try to win the war by expanding it into neighboring Southeast Asian countries. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger hoped to negotiate an overall geostrategic arrangement with Russia and China as part of a Vietnam settlement. This was not necessarily a popular option on the right, which bridled at the notion of regulating global affairs hand in hand with the communist enemy. “The conservative position was we should get out,” recalls Rumsfeld’s old friend Richard Allen, who later served as Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser.
By 1971, Rumsfeld was letting it be known that he was one of those opposed to the policy of holding the line in Vietnam, an attitude that, by extension, constituted a critique of the Kissinger line. Why not move toward a quick end to the war? he began suggesting at staff meetings. Concurrently, he began angling for a high-level post in charge of postwar reconstruction in Southeast Asia, a part of the world Henry Kissinger very much regarded as his own.
Thus was born the notion that Rumsfeld had in his younger days been something of a dove on Vietnam. At the time, no one in the Nixon inner circle seems to have thought that Rumsfeld was acting out of anything approaching principle.
“He’s ready to jump the ship, Rummy,” Nixon remarked to Haldeman and Kissinger following an April 7, 1971, staff meeting at which Rumsfeld had once again proved obstreperous.
“No, I don’t think he’s ready to jump,” responded Haldeman. “And I doubt if he ever would, just because [staying on in the administration] serves his interests more than not.”
“He’s just positioning himself to be close to the Washington Post and the New York Times,” added Kissinger.20
“You have to remember,” notes Richard Allen, “that these people didn’t trust anybody. They didn’t even trust their wives. They used people. Nixon knew that Kissinger was betraying him at every dinner party he went to, but he figured he would be able to let Kissinger take the fall if things went down the tubes.”
Nixon and his closest advisers took Rumsfeld’s consuming ambition as a given, and perceived his maneuverings in that light. At one point Haldeman grumbled in his diary that Rumsfeld had agreed in a meeting with John Ehrlichman, another senior Nixon aide, that he would return to Illinois to run for the Senate, but had then promptly reneged, telling Nixon that he insisted on a senior administration post for a year. “Typical Rumsfeld,” noted Haldeman, “rather slimy maneuver.” John Ehrlichman, Haldeman’s equally formidable colleague, stated in his memoirs that “the senior staff grew to realize that the ambitious Rumsfeld would decline every assignment that did not enhance his personal goals.”
Finally, they got him to accept an overseas post as the U.S. ambassador to NATO in Brussels. As things turned out, it was a golden parachute, fortuitously proffered at a time when the Nixon machine was headed for a very hard landing. After fixing up a job for his faithful flunky Cheney with Bruce Bradley, an investment banker and squash-playing friend from his congressional days, Rumsfeld packed up the family and headed for Europe.
Among Rumsfeld’s more famous utterances has been his derisive reference to “Old Europe,” inspired by French and German reluctance to support the invasion of Iraq. For statesmen with long memories, such displays came as something of a shock. “He’s an enigma to me,” sighs a former very senior official. “I’ve known Don Rumsfeld for thirty-five years and I still have no idea what he really thinks. I first knew him when he was ambassador to NATO. Do you know, in those days he was rabidly pro-European. His closest colleague was the French ambassador!”
Rabidly pro-European sentiments were not especially popular in Washington at that time, especially not in the offices of Henry Kissinger, who dominated U.S. foreign policy, serving simultaneously as both secretary of state and national security adviser. Kissinger, irked at European reaction to issues such as American support of Israel, let it be known that he was “disgusted” by the allies’ behavior.21 Rumsfeld, clearly, felt no need to join in the official chorus of disapproval. Had Kissinger’s team been watching more closely, they might have noted a budding Rumsfeld friendship with a frequent visitor to Brussels, Paul Nitze, the preeminent cold warrior, whom Rumsfeld as a callow young congressman had once denounced as “soft.”
The most important feature of Rumsfeld’s time in Brussels, however, was where he wasn’t. “Fortune,” noted Robert Hartmann in reviewing Rumsfeld’s role in the turbulent events to come, “often favors those who have the rare gift of being in the right place at the right time. Even rarer, however, is the knack of being somewhere else. Donald Rumsfeld possessed both.”22
An old friend and former colleague of Rumsfeld, who spent so much time discoursing on the subject at a Washington restaurant that lunch gradually morphed into an early dinner, explained this “uncanny knack” in these terms: “Don looks at everything from the point of view of his own position. So no issue is so important that he will not be able to avoid it if there’s a downside. He has a very, very high-level radar system that gives him a sense of incoming lethality so he can stay away. He is very good at keeping his fingerprints off things.”
In Brussels, Rumsfeld was safely distanced from the stench of Watergate and its associated crimes that was beginning to swirl around the Nixon White House. Over the course of the next year and a half it would waft many of Rumsfeld’s erstwhile colleagues off to the jailhouse, and eventually force Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. During all this time the ambassador to NATO was happily consorting with his new French friends, or engaging in such carefree pursuits as running with the bulls in Pamplona in the mode of Ernest Hemingway. He even sought out some distant German cousins, who, at the time, thought him a “genuinely nice man.”23
Despite such carefree diversions, Rumsfeld’s eye never shifted very far from Washington and the ongoing decline of his mentor. Afterward, he described how he learned that Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency from the International Herald-Tribune while on holiday on the French Riviera, whereupon he flew back to Washington to see what he could do to help Jerry Ford.
Others contest this impression of disinterested detachment. “Don’t believe it,” laughs one former political associate. “When Don was at NATO, he was always flying back to Washington and spending a lot of time with Mel Laird [the former Wisconsin congressman who served as secretary of defense and then as a senior White House official under Nixon]. Laird had been very close to Ford when they were both in the congress. As Nixon got in worse trouble Don came back more and more often, positioning himself for an appointment after Nixon fell. I think Laird promoted him to Ford.”
Thus Rumsfeld was well prepared for Nixon’s departure, and was immediately on hand to proffer Ford advice on the transition. Ford’s initial honeymoon came to a jarring end when he pardoned Nixon, but Rumsfeld, displaying his useful knack for being somewhere else, missed that political earthquake, having nimbly skipped back to what he said were urgent duties in Brussels.
At last, untainted by any of the scandals that had brought down Nixon and were already weakening Ford, Rumsfeld rode back into town as the rescuer, sliding into the White House as chief of staff to the president, retrieving Cheney from his private employment, where he had been parked, to serve once again as his assistant. (Interestingly, Cheney had reservations about returning to service, consulting his employer Bruce Bradley as to whether becoming deputy chief of staff at the White House was a good career move. Bradley gently assured him that it probably was.) Now at last Rumsfeld had real power, yet his ambition was evidently not even briefly satisfied. Within weeks of his moving into the West Wing, newspaper columnist Jack Anderson was already reporting that “Donald Rumsfeld won’t be around the White House more than six months” because Ford intended to send “the able Rumsfeld” to run the Pentagon.
Those who remembered the new chief of staff winning favor with Richard Nixon for his ruthlessness and general political skills were either in jail, spending their waking hours with their lawyers, or at least hoping to hang on to their White House jobs.24 He himself had no public comment on the criminal activities recently rampant in the building. In fact, few people had much idea of what Rumsfeld thought about anything. He had been compiling a little book of aphorisms—“Rumsfeld’s Rules”—which he began circulating in 1974. Such nostrums as “In the execution of Presidential decisions, work to be true to his views, in fact and tone,” may have excited little comment (apart from quiet derision among colleagues), but they certainly gave no insights on what Rumsfeld thought about the constitutional earthquake through which the Republic had recently passed.
“How did Rumsfeld react, for example, over the discovery of the White House taping system?” remarked the old friend toward the end of our very long lunch. “He made no comment, on that or any other significant event, but I happen to know he was utterly disgusted with Alexander Butterfield [the patriotic White House official who told congressional investigators about the taping system] for having spilled the beans.”
Butterfield was fired in March 1975. This move could only win the applause of the many Nixon holdovers still infesting nooks and crannies of the White House bureaucracy and who were reassured to find that their jobs were secure under the new regime, for whom Rumsfeld was, as one Ford loyalist sardonically observed, “the prodigal returned.”25 Jerry H. Jones, for example, had been a staff member in the field division of the notorious CREEP—Committee to Re-Elect the President. Jones had gone on to serve as deputy to Alexander Haig during the latter’s reign as chief of staff. Following Haig’s replacement by Rumsfeld, Jones bobbed up again like a cork on the bloodstained political waters as staff secretary to the president. Twenty-five years later, when Rumsfeld moved into his spacious E Ring suite at the Pentagon for the second time as secretary of defense, Jones was simultaneously taking up quarters in the Pentagon personnel office down the hall. Rumsfeld always liked to have familiar faces around him.
As with any job he occupied, Rumsfeld moved swiftly to get control of the levers of power. Ford’s old friend and adviser Robert Hartmann was deftly edged out of his office immediately next door to the Oval Office by means of a Rumsfeld-inspired redecoration scheme. While announcing that the title of “White House Chief of Staff,” rendered infamous under the iron-fisted regime of H. R. Haldeman, was being discarded, Rumsfeld swiftly arranged matters so that he exercised the powers, even without the title (he modestly styled himself assistant to the president) of that office.
Survivors of the Ford White House tend to concur with the assessment of William Seidman, chief of Ford’s Economic Policy Board, who insisted to me that Rumsfeld had been “an incredibly talented and efficient chief of staff.” However, as Seidman, the man later called in to clean up the catastrophic disaster of the savings-andloan crisis in the Reagan era, explained in a 2006 interview, Rumsfeld had his mind on a lot more than running the White House efficiently: “Like a lot of people in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to be president. He figured the way to get there was to get to be Jerry Ford’s vice president, and move on from there.” Recalling the power struggle of thirty years ago with crystalline clarity, Seidman described how “the Rumsfeld plot” faced two obstacles. First of all there already was a vice president. Nelson Rockefeller, the fabulously wealthy former governor of New York, had been named to the post by Ford not long after Nixon’s resignation. Second, the chief of staff position was not considered a suitable stepping-stone to the vice presidency. He needed something more impressive on his résumé. To achieve his goal, Rumsfeld would not only have to get him himself appointed to run a major department, but also get Ford to drop the existing vice president from the ticket. “Not an easy thing to do,” observed Seidman, “especially as Ford was the most loyal person in politics.”
In pursuit of his first objective, securing a major cabinet slot, Rumsfeld, according to Seidman, scanned the list of possibilities and concluded that the Department of Treasury would suit him fine. Of course there already was a secretary of the treasury, William E. Simon, but soon there began to appear a spate of news stories, sourced to unnamed White House officials (including a detailed column by Rumsfeld’s friend Joseph Kraft), announcing confidently that Ford had lost confidence in Simon and was about to fire him. “Simon was going nuts,” remembered Seidman, and was on the point of resigning. The campaign only came unstuck when the journalist Charles Bartlett discovered that Jerry Ford had no desire to fire Simon, and began making inquiries to find out who was spreading the malicious leaks. Washington journalists are, of course, ready to protect their sources unto death, but their peers can as often as not find out who is behind a leak anyway. It did not take Bartlett long to discover that the anti-Simon leaker was none other than Dick Cheney, clearly acting on behalf of Rumsfeld. “I sat down and wrote a piece detailing the whole story,” Bartlett told me, “then I called Rumsfeld and read it to him and said, ‘This is going out in ten minutes.’ There was a silence at the other end and then he said, ‘This will stop, right now.’ I said, ‘That’s not good enough. First, I want to see a picture of Ford and Bill Simon on the front page of the New York Times, and second, I want you to call Simon immediately and tell him he has the president’s full confidence.’ And he did both those things.” Rumsfeld’s first effort to create a cabinet vacancy for himself had been run aground.
The Ford White House was a maelstrom of intrigue and backbiting, with various factions openly sabotaging both one another’s and the president’s initiatives. Rumsfeld featured openly in a multitude of leaks as a contender for power with other major figures such as Henry Kissinger or Vice President Rockefeller. Whereas disputes between Rumsfeld and Kissinger appear to have been a function of rivalry for power, Rumsfeld and Rockefeller “simply loathed each other,” recalled a former White House aide who dealt with both men, “far beyond what the professional competition would have predicted. [Rumsfeld] had wealth issues.” Relations were not helped by Rockefeller’s habit of poking his head around Rumsfeld’s office door and saying, “Don, you know you will never be president.”
“Rumsfeld always reminded me of the Wizard of Oz,” chuckled Seidman, an astonishingly energetic eighty-four years old, as he recalled the distant days of the Ford White House. “He thought he was invisible behind the curtain as he worked the levers, but in reality everyone could see what he was doing.” Another former Ford White House official recalled Rumsfeld as “very hard to do business with.” Musing further, the official strove to define his old colleague’s effect on people he worked with. “I’d say intimidating—he has a way of making people uneasy and off-balance.”
One crisis that flared up in May 1975, however, stood out as a significant milestone in Rumsfeld’s career, for it marked the first time that he played a role, albeit a minor one, in sending men to their deaths. It happened just a few short weeks after the fall of Saigon and the final defeat of the United States in the Southeast Asian wars. Cambodia, of course, had also fallen to the cruel and intransigent Khmer Rouge, who seized an American merchant ship, the SS Mayaguez, which had strayed into Cambodian territorial waters and imprisoned the crew.
For Ford and his close advisers, including Rumsfeld, this brazen affront to American power so soon after the humiliating retreat from Saigon was an opportunity to show some muscle. A rescue force was hurriedly dispatched, but they suffered heavy casualties while assaulting an island in the mistaken belief that the captured crewmen were being held there. The intelligence was false. While the battle raged, the crew was picked up from a Thai fishing boat. They had been released unharmed shortly after their capture. Altogether, forty-one American servicemen and an unknown number of Cambodians died in the incident, all for nothing.
The political calculations driving the White House response proved correct. Time magazine expressed the general media mood in its cover story: “Ford Draws the Line”—over a dramatic picture of marines storming out of a helicopter.26 It has become conventional wisdom that the United States, at the time of the defeat in Southeast Asia, was already swinging back to the right after the progressive euphoria of the Watergate era. But in 1975 the American people were still in a fairly radical mood. Opinion polls registered strong distrust of presidents and skepticism of military commitments abroad.27 An April 1975 Gallup survey found only 37 percent willing to send troops if England were attacked, while similar help to Israel drew the support of only 11 percent. A February poll that year opposed increasing the defense budget, as requested by Ford, 46 to 43 percent. As we shall discover, however, there were potent forces ready and willing to reverse these sentiments, forces that offered Rumsfeld a natural home.
In the meantime, the differences between Kissinger and Rumsfeld were about a lot more than differing perceptions of the public mood. Rumsfeld, for example, had discovered that Kissinger routinely recorded all his phone calls. At an opportune moment, he revealed the secret to President Ford. Hence, in the midst of a foreign policy discussion with his national security adviser, Ford playfully interjected, “Henry, Don tells me that you’re taping all of this.” Kissinger simply continued speaking, ignoring the accusation faithfully preserved in Kissinger’s transcripts. In another conversation, Ford quoted an observation made by Rumsfeld. “Don’t listen to that man, Mr. President,” retorted Kissinger angrily. “He’s running for president in 1980.”28
Many in the White House understood that Rumsfeld, whatever his 1980 plans, was maneuvering to be nominated as Ford’s vice presidential running mate in 1976. By September 1975, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were reporting that “a 34-year-old Presidential aide named Dick Cheney” was “increasingly taking charge of the day-to-day White House business” while his “boss and mentor” Donald Rumsfeld was deepening his involvement in the Ford reelection campaign. “And that,” reported the columnists, “is widely viewed in upper reaches of the administration as a means to one end: putting Rumsfeld on the 1976 ticket as Vice President.”29
Of course, there already was a sitting vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, with every expectation of being on the ticket, assuming, of course, that Ford himself would be the Republican nominee. But Ford’s campaign for the nomination was showing signs of trouble. Local organization in key states was in disarray, important state party chairmen were not being contacted, and so on. Meanwhile, on the right, there was the menacing specter of California governor Ronald Reagan, well financed and organized and remorselessly assailing the centrist policies of Ford and his “liberal” vice president, Rockefeller.
How could the efficient Donald Rumsfeld, supposedly the overseer of the campaign, be permitting his president’s political fortunes to fall into such dire straits? Seidman, a high-ranking official with a nose for intrigue, concluded that the chief of staff was engaged in a supremely Machiavellian maneuver: the more Ford’s nomination chances sank in relation to Reagan’s right-wing challenge, the more the “liberal” Rockefeller would be seen as the millstone that must be jettisoned. By the late summer of 1975, a year away from the election, Rumsfeld was getting close to overcoming the obstacles in his path. One evening in September, Seidman happened to overhear two of Ford’s closest political allies and advisers, Senator Bob Griffin and Federal Reserve Board chairman Arthur Burns, discussing the president’s perilous situation. “It was getting dark, and I don’t think they realized I was in an armchair at the end of the room,” Seidman told me cheerfully. “They were saying, ‘the way Reagan’s going, Ford will not be nominated unless we dump Rockefeller from the ticket.’ Ding! Rummy had gained the first of his objectives.”
At the end of October, everything fell into place. It was known as the “Halloween massacre,” the political coup de grace that earned Rumsfeld his reputation as a supreme bureaucratic warrior, even if few then or since have understood the full scope of his maneuvers. In short order the White House announced that Rockefeller had “voluntarily” withdrawn from the 1976 ticket, Henry Kissinger had lost his post as national security adviser, CIA chief William Colby had been fired, as had defense secretary James Schlesinger. Colby was replaced by George Bush, then serving as ambassador to China. Replacing Schlesinger at the Pentagon was Rumsfeld, at forty-three, the youngest man ever to hold the job.
“Ford had two principal goals,” recalled a former senior official from the Ford White House. “One was to get rid of Jim Schlesinger,” the arrogant defense secretary who made no secret of his disdain for the president. “It had been clear for months that he had to go. The other was to get rid of Colby,” the CIA chief enmeshed in widening congressional probes of the agency’s misdoing. “Bill was a broken man by that point, almost dysfunctional. He had turned into a total creature of Congress. On the other hand, the whole thing certainly did seem to promote Rumsfeld. Remember, he and Ford were close friends,” continued the former official.
Two people never forgave Rumsfeld for his role in this massive intrigue. One of them was Vice President Rockefeller, who detected the chief of staff’s manipulative hand behind his displacement. As he correctly divined, Rumsfeld played a major role in persuading Ford to jettison his allegedly liberal vice president as a means of warding off the looming far-right threat of Ronald Reagan in the upcoming Republican primaries.
The other lifelong enemy acquired by Rumsfeld was George Herbert Walker Bush. When Ford was originally pondering whom to nominate as vice president in 1974 (with his accession to the presidency, the post was vacant), he polled Republican senators and congressmen. The senators’ majority for Barry Goldwater could be discounted as sentimental, but the congressional Republicans opted for their former colleague George Bush, then serving as ambassador to China. As it happened, Ford chose Rockefeller, but Bush was obviously a front-runner if the slot again became vacant.
“Bush had thought he would get Commerce” in a reshuffle, one old friend and political adviser of the former president told me. “That way he could come back from Beijing and burnish his economic credentials for any future White House run.” But instead, Bush found himself shunted off to the woods of northern Virginia as director of the CIA. This was considered a “nonpolitical” position, precluding the occupant from any future political career. To put the seal on this political emasculation, Bush was asked at his confirmation hearings to pledge that he would not politicize the CIA by running for office in 1976. Cornered, Bush did as he was asked.
“Bush thought Rumsfeld planted that question,” the friend revealed. “George Bush is the most polite of men, never speaks ill of anyone. In all the time I’ve spent with him, I’ve only ever heard him speak with bitterness about two people. One was Dick Snelling, the governor of Vermont who broke his word without warning on supporting him for the nomination in 1980. The other was Donald Rumsfeld. Real bitterness there. Makes you wonder what was going through Bush 43’s mind when he made him secretary of defense.”
As it was, Bush swallowed his bile and retreated to CIA headquarters with good grace while Rumsfeld, at his swearing in as secretary of defense on November 20, 1975, heard himself warmly described by President Ford as “the most able public servant I have ever known.” In a mere two and a half years, he had emerged from the diplomatic exile to which he had been consigned by Haldeman and Nixon, banished his enemies, achieved the extraordinary feat of displacing a sitting vice president, and installed himself as the chief of the most powerful department in the U.S. government.
Not long after Rumsfeld had departed for the Pentagon, the Library of Congress sought the papers he had generated as chief of staff, but the archivists could find few pieces of paper bearing his actual signature. “He wanted to leave no tracks in the snow,” said Bill Seidman at the end of a long afternoon’s conversation. “That way there was nothing anyone could use against him. Remember, the name of the game in this town is to get to be president.”