In My Time (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being an uncommitted delegate had its benefits, including friendly notes and phone calls from the president, who was just checking in to see how you were doing. One afternoon we flew the entire Pennsylvania delegation down to Washington for cocktails with the president. A woman from Brooklyn, who kept switching sides, wanted a White House meeting with Ford, if that wasn’t asking too much. Too much? Why of course not, she was assured. And could she bring her whole family? By all means. The president was hoping she’d ask.

The quest for delegates was on everyone’s mind as we neared the Republican convention. One night a crazed intruder jumped the White House fence and raced across the North Lawn with a three-foot length of pipe in his hand. He ignored shouted orders to stop, disregarded a warning shot fired in the air, and left the Secret Service with no choice but to shoot to bring him down. In the ensuing chaos, as sirens from every corner of town converged on the White House, one of the older Secret Service agents was heard to say, “Gentlemen, if that fellow we just shot was an uncommitted delegate, we’re in deep trouble.”

I even did some delegate scouting myself a few weeks before the convention, including a trip to Mississippi to try turning a few votes there in Ford’s direction. Harry Dent, a longtime South Carolina politico and one of the key staffers who had organized the South for Nixon in 1968, believed we had a shot to take the Mississippi delegation. Mississippi operated under the “unit rule,” so if we got a majority of the votes of their delegates, we’d get the votes of their entire delegation. Not everyone on the campaign took Harry’s advice to heart, but I did, and it paid off.

He got me invited to two key events. The first was a meeting of the southern state Republican chairmen in North Carolina. I had the chance to meet them all and make a strong case that they ought to support Gerald Ford. Dent also advised me that it would be well worth my time to make a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, to attend a meeting of all the Mississippi Republican convention delegates. I had the chance to spend time with their chairman, Clarke Reed, and I spoke to the assembled group. As a conservative stronghold, Mississippi was leaning Reagan, and we wanted to show them we would fight for their votes.

When I got off the plane at National Airport back in Washington, I heard the news that Ronald Reagan had announced that if he were nominated, liberal Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker would be his running mate. Reagan’s selection of Schweiker had been a gambit to take Pennsylvania’s delegates away from Jerry Ford. I made a quick call to Drew Lewis, the Ford campaign chairman in Pennsylvania. He assured me I didn’t have to worry. He would deliver Pennsylvania for Ford. I knew we should take advantage of the moment and lock down Mississippi.

I went directly to the Oval Office and recommended that President Ford place a call to Clarke Reed. He did and the timing could not have been better. Clarke had just heard that Reagan had selected a northeastern liberal to be his running mate. Even in the anger of the moment, Clarke had trouble bringing himself to give up on Reagan. But Ford wouldn’t let him buy any more time and leaned on him hard until he
got a commitment. Two days later Air Force One appeared in the skies over Jackson, and with a final direct appeal to delegates from the president himself, Mississippi was ours. We had managed to deny Reagan the extra delegates he was hunting in Pennsylvania and had nailed down our own additional votes in Mississippi.