In My Time (24 page)

My biggest frustration with President Carter arose while I was serving as secretary of defense. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were working to get U.N. Security Council approval of a resolution authorizing the use of force to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1990–91. We found out that former President Carter was actively lobbying against the U.S. position. He had contacted heads of government with seats on the Security Council and urged them to oppose our resolution. His intervention was ineffective—and also totally inappropriate for a former president.

Many years later, long after they had both left office, President Ford developed a strong friendship with the man who had handed him the only electoral defeat in his long career. He used to take a certain delight in letting me know that he disagreed with my rather harsh judgment of his successor. Near the end of his days, President Ford spent a good deal of time planning the details of his state funeral. He must have had a good laugh setting down the arrangements for the burial near his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, which required the Cheneys
and the Carters, together with the Rumsfelds, to spend the afternoon in close quarters.

THE PENDULUM CAN SWING fast in presidential politics, and it looked as if 1980—only six years after Nixon’s resignation and four years after Jimmy Carter’s election—was going to be a very good year for Republicans. Ronald Reagan was the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination, and nearly every Republican officeholder was now a Reaganite, including many of us who had supported Jerry Ford four years earlier.

President Ford had briefly considered the possibility of making another run for the White House. Early in the year he asked a group of us who had worked for him to visit Palm Springs, California, to discuss the subject. Among those attending were Jack Marsh, Stu Spencer, and Bob Teeter. We spent the better part of a day discussing the possibility of mounting a campaign at this relatively late date and his prospects of capturing the GOP nomination.

At the end of the day, he said he wanted to sleep on it. The next morning when he reconvened the group of advisors, he announced that he really did not want to be a candidate in 1980. He said that he simply wasn’t prepared to subject himself to the rigors of another national campaign. By this time he had acquired a very nice home on a golf course in the desert near Palm Springs and built a new home in the mountains in Beaver Creek, Colorado. He was earning a good living in the private sector. I always believed that he felt an obligation to consider the possibility of mounting a campaign in 1980, in part because he was still smarting from the closeness of his defeat in 1976, and in part because he really didn’t like the idea of Ronald Reagan as the nominee. But when he focused on what a national campaign would require of him, he had little interest.

IN WYOMING I HAD worked hard to build a strong political base and to head off any serious opposition, and I pretty much succeeded. I had no Republican challengers in 1980, and the four-man Democratic
primary was won by Jim Rogers, a bartender from Lyman, a small town in the remote southwest corner of the state. Rumor had it that he had meant to run for the state legislature but checked the wrong box when filing his papers. I had to go through the motions of a campaign—fund-raising, advertising, and making public appearances—but I coasted to an easy victory with 69 percent of the vote.

One of my campaign re-election brochures, 1980.

In 1976 I had played a major role in the Republican convention in Kansas City. I had a spacious suite next to President Ford’s and cars and drivers to whisk me around. But in 1980, as a freshman congressman, I was only one member of the Wyoming delegation. Reflecting our state’s population and general role in the proceedings, we were assigned a motel about half an hour outside Detroit, and if I didn’t catch the delegation bus each morning, I was looking at a fifty-dollar cab ride.

The 1980 Detroit convention was basically a coronation for Ronald Reagan. Although there had been several candidates for the party’s nomination, the former California governor’s victory was never really in doubt. For one brief moment in Detroit, I found myself back in the action, when attention turned to our nominee’s choice of a vice presidential running mate. A number of Reagan’s top advisors, foremost among them campaign manager Bill Casey, believed that a Reagan-Ford ticket would be the strongest possible combination. In the Ford camp Henry Kissinger, Jack Marsh, and Bryce Harlow were among those urging President Ford to give serious consideration to joining his former rival’s ticket.

Bryce Harlow in particular was a strong advocate of a Reagan-Ford ticket. The little-known Harlow, who had first served in the Eisenhower administration, was one of the wisest, most respected, and most influential men in Washington for three decades. In 1976 he believed that Ford would win if he could put the wounds of the nomination fight behind him and invite Reagan to join his ticket. Harlow considered the electoral logic no less compelling four years on. Reagan and Ford were the unrivaled leaders of their wings of the Republican Party. At the time, before Carter’s extreme unpopularity and Reagan’s great appeal
were fully appreciated, a Reagan-Ford ticket looked like the best way to bring the party together and enter the race with a united front.

On the third day of the convention, I was invited by Howard Baker and John Rhodes, the Senate and House minority leaders, to join them and representatives of Governor Reagan and President Ford at the Renaissance Hotel to discuss the proposal. President Ford had made it clear that he would consider the vice presidency only if there was an agreement giving him significant responsibilities in a Reagan-Ford administration. At the meeting Bill Casey indicated they were willing to go a long way toward meeting the Ford demands, including giving the former chief executive a major role in foreign policy, the budget, and personnel. I realized that what was being discussed all but amounted to a co-presidency, with the president and vice president dividing and sharing the powers of the office.

I was stunned at the extent to which Bill Casey, and presumably Governor Reagan, were willing to share the power of the president. After the meeting Bob Teeter and I joined Baker and Rhodes in discussing the proposal. It was clear that none of us thought the arrangement being discussed was even remotely workable. There can be only one president at a time, and certain presidential powers cannot be delegated.

Fortunately, later that evening the Reagan people arrived at the same conclusion and offered the second spot on the ticket to George H. W. Bush, who readily accepted. On reflection, I don’t think President Ford had any intention of being vice president a second time. He often told me over the years that the months he spent as vice president were the most miserable of his career. I think he deliberately made demands that he fully expected to be rejected and that he was surprised at how far Reagan was prepared to go to persuade him to accept the vice presidential nomination.

AFTER THE 1984 ELECTION, Speaker O’Neill, at the recommendation of Bob Michel, appointed me to a seat on the House Intelligence Committee.

With fellow members of the Wyoming congressional delegation, Al Simpson and Malcolm Wallop at a campaign rally with President Ronald Reagan in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1984. (Photo by David Kennerly)

I regarded my assignment as an honor—though I realized it was not an honor that all members sought. The committee requires a
tremendous amount of time, work, and study. Because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, much of the work can’t be delegated to staff members and the material can’t be duplicated or distributed outside the committee’s high-security offices. That means going over to the offices in person and spending hours reading the reports that pour in daily from all over the world and the detailed analyses prepared by the professional staff. Further, the very nature of the committee’s work requires absolute confidentiality and secrecy. There can never be a press conference to claim credit or even a passing mention in a newsletter to constituents with respect to most of what a member on the Intelligence Committee does.

I burrowed into the work, spending many hours in the offices. The committee staff responded to my interest by giving me even more material. I was fascinated by all the information, which was sometimes conflicting, and by the challenge of assimilating and assessing it.

I visited the various intelligence agencies—the CIA headquarters at Langley were just a few miles from our house in Virginia—and many of the private sector companies that produced the equipment that was such an important part of the intelligence business. I went to a National Reconnaissance Office ground station to watch the real-time downloads of feeds from the worldwide network of intelligence satellites.

One night in the Nevada desert, I became one of the first civilians to see the new F-117 stealth fighter. I was flown on a small shuttle plane into a completely blacked-out facility, where a jeep with driver and guide met me and drove me to a hangar—a huge, dark shadow against the desert sky. Inside, in the center of the vast and empty football-field-length interior, was one of the most magnificent—and weirdest—sights I have ever seen: a stealth fighter. Today the sleek, delta-shaped aircraft are familiar through photos and films and video games, but that night in the desert it was still a complete secret, and I was literally in awe.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was small: ten Democrats and six Republicans. The chairman when I went on the committee was Lee Hamilton of Indiana, a Democrat for whom I have
a great deal of respect. Bob Stump of Arizona, the ranking Republican, was solid, dependable, and totally reliable. Henry Hyde of Illinois, who succeeded Stump, was a close personal friend, someone I had known and respected for more than a decade.

At one point I became ranking member on the Programs and Budget Authorization Subcommittee, where I was ably assisted by two talented staffers, Marty Faga and Duane Andrews. My position allowed me to survey the entire range of our intelligence activities and operations and to get a practical sense of how things worked—and how they didn’t work. This was knowledge that would turn out to be very useful when I became secretary of defense and later vice president.

During my time on the Intel Committee, we dealt with Soviet adventurism in the Middle East and Latin America, and the regional aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan. On one Intel trip we went to the Khyber Pass in Pakistan and met with several leaders of the Afghan mujahideen. We also met with Pakistani president Zia in Islamabad. At home the committee had to deal with some very serious and very sensitive espionage cases. Edward Lee Howard was a CIA officer who defected to Moscow with the names and covers of many agents all around the world. And the Walker family—retired navy officer John Anthony Walker and his older brother and son and a friend—sold our secret naval codes, thus allowing the Soviet Union to read secret military communications.

There was an intriguing coda to my time on the Intelligence Committee. In May 1987 I received a call from the legendary CIA counterintelligence director James Jesus Angleton. He said that he had something of vital importance to tell me and that it could be conveyed only in person. I knew that Angleton’s resignation from the CIA in 1975 had enabled him to avoid prosecution on charges of illegal surveillance, and I knew that he had a reputation for being obsessed by the belief that the Soviets had managed to infiltrate a mole into the highest levels of American government. But many who had worked with Angle-ton regarded him as brilliant, and I wanted to hear what he had to say.

I called Henry Hyde, the Intel Committee’s ranking Republican, and invited him to sit in on the meeting. A few days later, before our
scheduled meeting, Jim Angleton died. I never learned what it was he wanted to tell me.

I WAS REELECTED IN 1986 with 69 percent of the vote. I hadn’t had tough opposition, but I had worked hard in the campaign and was looking forward to a postelection elk hunt with my friend Al Simpson and his sons, Colin and Bill. Our lottery applications for elk tags had been successful, and I had packed my bags for the flight home when I got a call from Bob Michel. Apparently I was the only member of the House Republican leadership still in Washington during that postelection period, and Bob wanted me to attend a hastily called meeting at the White House. On November 12, when I arrived at the West Wing, I was ushered into the Situation Room in the basement. The majority and minority leaders of the Senate, Bob Dole and Robert Byrd, were there, along with Speaker Jim Wright and key members of the administration’s national security team. The whole thing had the air of a crisis about to unfold, and I suspected I wouldn’t be going elk hunting.