In My Time (9 page)

Before heading back to Madison, I decided to see D.C., a city I knew was still reeling from the riots and fires following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., only four months earlier. Twelve people had been killed, hundreds injured, and President Johnson had called in fourteen thousand federal troops to restore order. But as I crossed over the Potomac on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and caught my first glimpse of Washington, the turmoil I’d seen on the evening news dissolved into the background. Off to my right were the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, white and gleaming in the summer haze. They were an impressive sight, as was the White House, when I drove by it, and the Capitol, shining at the top of the hill. I did a slow loop around the Capitol building, trying to take it all in, then drove down Independence Avenue along the Mall and headed out of town. I was back in Madison for Sunday lunch.

LYNNE AND I BOTH passed our preliminary exams, putting us a step closer to our Ph.D.s, and by mid-September we were unpacking our books and papers, a few clothes, and Liz’s crib in the Annandale apartment. Not long after we arrived, I had a meeting scheduled on Capitol Hill. I put on the only suit I owned, an electric blue one that had caught my eye at Jon-N-Jax Men’s Shop in Laramie, kissed Lynne and Liz goodbye, and caught the bus on Little River Turnpike. Forty-five minutes later, I was downtown in front of the Old Post Office at Eleventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

I was still a long way from the Capitol, but since I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do a bus transfer, I decided to walk. Within a few blocks, I realized that my suit, which had been fine for winters in Wyoming and Wisconsin, didn’t function so well on a sweltering September day in Washington, D.C. I was also wearing shoes made of Corfam, a
kind of synthetic leather, and they began to produce a swamp-like climate zone of their own.

Half an hour and an uphill mile or so later, completely drenched, I was in Wisconsin Congressman Bill Steiger’s office in the Longworth House Office Building. I was there to see his chief of staff, Maureen Drummy, whom I’d met when she worked at the National Center for Education in Politics. She was one of the few people I knew in Washington, and I’d come to seek her counsel about the congressional fellows program, which, from her vantage point in Steiger’s office, she had seen in operation. Kind and generous as always, she overlooked my disheveled state and gave me her best advice. During the ten-week orientation that began the program, I’d have a chance to participate in seminars and listen to speeches by congressmen and senators. The idea was not only to look for members I might like to work for and arrange interviews with their offices, but also to figure out what they expected of fellows and to see if it matched what I wanted to do.

One of the most impressive orientation speakers was a young Republican congressman named Don Rumsfeld, from Illinois. I had never heard of him before, but I learned he had a great reputation for allowing—in fact, demanding—his fellows’ participation in the work of the office. By the time he had finished speaking to us, I had decided that this was the man I wanted to intern for.

I arrived early for my interview with Rumsfeld in the Cannon House Office Building and was ushered in to meet with him exactly on time. And exactly fifteen minutes later I was ushered out. In answer to his invitation to tell him something about myself, I had talked about how I was working on my doctoral dissertation on congressional voting patterns and planned to return to the University of Wisconsin at the end of my fellowship in order to pursue a career as a professor of political science. He described the setup of his office and mentioned the need for someone who could write press releases. After a little more back-and-forth, he stood up, extended his hand, and said, “This isn’t going to work, but thanks for coming in.”

The next thing I knew, I was standing in the corridor outside his
office. I didn’t have a swelled head, but since I had gotten my act together, I’d become a fairly good judge of what was going to work for me and what wasn’t, and this interview had ended in a pretty surprising way. Thinking back on it now, I realize I didn’t have the foggiest idea what a congressman needed, and Rumsfeld was probably right to view me as a fuzzy-headed academic. He had sized up the situation within the first few minutes and knew he was wasting his time. There was nothing personal about it. I just wasn’t what he was looking for. While some people might have spent some time chatting and softening the blow, that was not how Don Rumsfeld did things.

I wasn’t feeling so magnanimous as I walked back over to Bill Steiger’s office in Longworth. I recounted my experience to Maureen Drummy, who smiled sympathetically and then proposed the perfect solution. She suggested I sign on with Bill Steiger when the fellowships started in January.

WORKING FOR BILL STEIGER was a brilliant idea that had been hiding in plain sight. I had gotten to know him while I was working for Governor Knowles. He had been elected to the state legislature shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, and the first time I saw him I understood the stories about the new assemblyman being mistaken for an intern. He was young and looked younger, and he had formidable political skills. I watched him campaign with Governor Knowles, and seeing how he loved meeting people and what a phenomenal memory he had for their names and concerns, I wasn’t surprised when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. Although he was still in his first term, Bill’s obvious intelligence, easy personality, and deep integrity had already made a strong mark on his colleagues. He was known in the APSA program for placing his fellow’s desk in his own office. The months I spent working for Bill Steiger were the best introduction I could have possibly had to the Congress of the United States.

Members of my family had been Democrats going back quite a way. My grandfather Cheney had been a Democratic committeeman
in Sumner, Nebraska. My grandfather Dickey considered it a point of pride that I’d been born on FDR’s birthday. But I was moving into Republican ranks, and as I did, I got a kick out of teasing my folks about it. “Sure will be sorry to see Nixon win the election,” I wrote to them on October 28, 1968. “Never can tell—Humphrey might edge him out yet.” But he didn’t, of course. On November 5, Nixon pulled it out by half a million votes, 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent, and became the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

A few weeks later, while Lyndon Johnson was still president and Nixon was president-elect, the APSA fellows were given a special tour of the White House. After going through the public rooms of the mansion, we went over to the West Wing. This was truly hallowed ground, and I can still remember looking inside the Oval Office—the guards wouldn’t allow anyone to cross the threshold—and seeing President Johnson’s desk. It was in front of the windows at one end, and to the left of it was a low, white-painted console housing three TV sets so the president could watch each of the national networks’ news broadcasts. There were also two news tickers, with glass tops to mute the teletype clacking and the bulletin bells, so the president could have everything fresh from the Associated Press and United Press International. These were interesting examples of modern technology, but I was most impressed by the small box with three buttons that was next to the large phone console on the president’s desk. The guard explained that they were for ordering coffee, Coke, or Fresca (LBJ’s favorite) for the president and his guests.

RIGHT AFTER THE NEW year, I began work in—literally in—Bill Steiger’s office. With my desk right there I either monitored or participated in all his meetings and phone calls. He also included me along with his staff members at many of his committee meetings.

On January 14, 1969, President Johnson came to Capitol Hill, the site of his rise to power and so many of his triumphs, to deliver his last State of the Union message. Steiger was able to get me onto the floor of the House, and I stood at the back watching this impressive but rather
melancholy ceremony unfold. The usually confident and dynamic president seemed restrained and ruminative as he spoke about what he had tried to accomplish and about how he hoped history would view him. I had the strong impression that in his mind he was already back at the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas.

A couple of days later, I was attending a meeting of the House Education and Labor Committee at which a Johnson administration official was testifying. I noticed that one part of his testimony directly contradicted something that the president had said in his speech. Bill Steiger wasn’t there at the moment, so I got a copy of Johnson’s text, circled the difference, and pointed it out to one of the committee staffers. He told me to show it to Al Quie of Minnesota, the ranking Republican in attendance that day. I walked up and slid it onto the desk in front of Quie. He looked up, and although he clearly had no idea who I was, he took the paper, read it, and then used it to ask the witness some very pointed questions. I savored the moment. It was the first time I had actually been engaged, in however peripheral and minor a way, in the great process that I was observing.

Of course most of the work of a congressional office is far less exciting and dramatic. One of my main assignments was Dutch elm disease, which by then had blighted much of the country, killing elm trees that had been a hallmark of the American landscape for centuries. By the late 1960s the epidemic had reached Wisconsin, and Steiger’s office was deluged with letters and calls, many of which I answered.

ON APRIL 21 President Nixon nominated Don Rumsfeld to be the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. OEO had been created by Lyndon Johnson as part of his Great Society program to provide grants and economic development aid to lower-income areas of the country. The announcement of Rumsfeld’s nomination was met with skepticism and surprise. Nixon had campaigned against OEO and Rumsfeld had voted against it. It was widely thought that Nixon wanted someone to oversee the dismantling of the agency, but that was a mistaken assumption.

Rumsfeld immediately asked Steiger to join the informal brain trust he was mobilizing to help him prepare for Senate confirmation. Because of the reading and work I had been doing for Steiger for the Education and Labor Committee, I was up to speed on OEO. Over a weekend I wrote a long memo about how I thought Rumsfeld should handle his confirmation hearings and how he might organize and manage the place once he was in charge. Steiger was very complimentary about the memo and asked if I would mind if he passed it along to Rumsfeld. Of course I had no objections. Then I heard nothing more about it.

AS LYNNE AND I knew well from our time at the University of Wisconsin, American college campuses were being rocked by demonstrations. In 1969 congressmen and senators, besieged by angry constituents who wanted them to do something, began to consider proposals that would cut off federal funds to colleges and universities that didn’t move against the protestors. Bill Brock, a young congressman (and future senator and cabinet member) from Tennessee, was concerned that cutting off federal funds could seriously damage American education, and he organized a group of twenty-two Republican congressmen, including Steiger, to visit campuses across the country in order to understand better what was happening. Steiger took me with him to one of the group’s organizational meetings, and it was there I met George H. W. Bush of Texas, who would play a big role in my life. He was smart, personable, and a war hero, altogether a very impressive person.

Steiger was in the group that was to visit the University of Wisconsin, and I was chosen to advance the trip. I’d been at the university so recently that I was familiar with the situation in Madison. There had been protests in February in support of black students’ demands for a black studies department. When police were unable to cope with the demonstrators’ hit-and-run tactics, Governor Knowles sent in two thousand troops from the National Guard. Their appearance swelled the ranks of the protestors to some ten thousand. Guardsmen used tear gas and smoke bombs. Students rampaged through campus, destroying
property. The protest finally abated, but not the unrest behind it, and a few weeks before the congressional visit in May 1969, students threw rocks and bottles at police trying to shut down a party on Mifflin Street. The police responded with clubs and tear gas, and it was three days before peace was restored.

On the night the congressmen arrived, Students for a Democratic Society was holding a campus rally with the controversial Black Panther firebrand Fred Hampton as the guest speaker. A friend from one of my political science classes was one of the SDS organizers, and I had asked him if he could arrange for us to attend. I can say without hesitation that we were the only people there wearing jackets and ties. We got some hostile looks and a little verbal abuse, but once we took our seats nobody paid us much attention. Everyone was too busy shouting support for the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of the speakers leading up to the guest of honor.

Hampton turned out to be a skillful orator and a very charismatic individual. He distanced himself from the students who wanted a black studies department, declaring that revolution had to be the goal—and violence the means. He worked the crowd into a frenzy by shouting about how satisfying it was to “kill pigs” and how much more satisfying it was to kill a lot of them. I noted to myself that Hampton was fascinating to listen to—as long as you ignored the content of his message.

The congressional group interviewed students ranging from the editor of the
Daily Cardinal,
the campus newspaper, which was egging on the demonstrators, to a group called Hayakawas, who were protesting the protests and had named themselves after S. I. Hayakawa, the English professor who had famously stood up against demonstrators at San Francisco State College (San Francisco State University today). They also attended a faculty meeting that was held every week on campus. It was a gathering of senior professors, who tried to keep their meetings private and had largely succeeded. Although I had been a student at the university for three years, I’d never known about the group. When I came to campus with the visiting congressmen, the chairman of the
political science department got us an invitation to sit in on one of their sessions.