by Dick Cheney
When Don came back from his meeting in the Oval Office, he brought the president with him. Ford was extremely pleasant and gracious, which I knew took some effort because he was clearly preoccupied with the condition of his wife, Betty, who had undergone surgery for breast cancer the day before. What I remember most about that first encounter was how quickly and completely Jerry Ford accepted me. I was thirty-three years old, just six years out of graduate school, with a résumé that wouldn’t necessarily rise to the top of anyone’s pile. All I really had going for me was the good opinion of Don Rumsfeld.
In the Oval Office on April 28, 1975, with President Ford and Don Rumsfeld, two men who changed my life. (Official White House Photo/David Kenner)
And suddenly I had the confidence of the president of the United States. At the time I felt very lucky and grateful to them both, and the feeling has never changed.
When Don and I started work on Monday morning, it was clear that the task at hand was enormous. We made a preliminary decision not to get bogged down in any of the projects that were already under way or any of the turf wars or personnel problems that were beginning to reach critical mass in the West Wing. Our job was to concentrate on laying the groundwork for future efforts by reorganizing and staffing the White House. It was obvious that many of the carryover Nixon people needed to go so that we could put a fresh face on the new administration.
Jerry Ford was very different from Richard Nixon—to put it mildly—and it was important that the administration reflect the man it served. At the same time it was important not to be indiscriminate, unfair, or vindictive. Nixon had attracted many able and exceptional men and women, and it would be unfair to them and a disservice to the country to make them suffer from guilt by association. One of them, speechwriter and communications expert Pat Buchanan, chose to quit, and we were sorry to lose him. Others like Red Cavaney, Jerry Jones, and Terry O’Donnell agreed to stay on in key posts. The point was to make decisions on individuals and on the merits. After all, if everyone who had worked for Nixon were to be automatically terminated, Don and I would have to be among the first to go.
We knew that many of the new people coming on with Ford had little or no experience in the executive branch, and we didn’t think that on-the-job training in the White House was a good idea. One of the bright exceptions was Jack Marsh, whom Ford had named counselor to the president, with cabinet rank. Jack had served in Congress for eight years as a Democratic representative from Virginia. Nixon had appointed him assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, and when Ford was named vice president, he brought Jack on board as his national security advisor. In the Ford White House, Jack would take on many difficult assignments and handle them all with skill. He was a pillar of strength for the president—and for me.
But for the most part, the new people were green. And being green in Washington—as I had discovered when I thought I had solved the Alaska OEO grant problem by locking the paperwork up in my desk—can create problems. The mechanism, for example, by which material and memos were circulated for comment and review before going to the president was still entirely in the hands of Nixon holdovers. The new Ford staffers, many of whom were still isolated across the street from the White House in the Old Executive Office Building, didn’t even realize that they were out of the information loop.
One obstacle to bringing order to the White House in the early months was President Ford’s preferred model of White House organization, a design he described as the “spokes of the wheel” model, which was based on the way he had structured his congressional and committee staffs. The idea was to have eight or nine senior advisors each reporting directly to him, without any one having authority over the rest. It was a collegial style of doing business that had served him well for twenty-five years on the Hill as a representative from Michigan, and he assumed it would work in the White House. There was also a widespread belief that Watergate had been caused in part by Bob Haldeman’s domination of the White House staff, and Ford saw “spokes of the wheel” as a healthy break from the past. The problem was that it soon became clear it didn’t work. It took a while, but the president finally agreed that he needed someone on the staff who could wield real authority, a conclusion that all his successors have ratified.
In the last days of the Ford administration, among the gifts given me by my staff was a bicycle wheel with all the spokes destroyed except one, and it came with a plaque: “The ‘spokes of the wheel,’ a rare form of management artistry as devised by Gerald Ford and modified by Dick Cheney.” When the Carter people came in, I passed it along to my successor, Hamilton Jordan.
My desk in the West Wing was a cubbyhole outside Don’s office, nothing to impress visitors, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. Don was the toughest boss I’d ever had—or ever would have. He demanded a high level of performance, and if you came through, your reward was more work. He expected loyalty, but he also knew it is a two-way street. And you could count on his word. Don had assured me when I accepted the job as his deputy that he would do everything he could to give me a real piece of the action, to see that I had regular access to the president, and to share as much as possible his own responsibilities. And that’s exactly the way it worked out. From the beginning I was in the Oval Office almost every day, sometimes with Don and sometimes not. Partly to dramatize the change of leaders and partly just to introduce himself to the American people, Ford made many trips around the country. Don and I quickly figured out that given all there was to do, it didn’t make much sense for both of us to accompany the president. Within weeks I was traveling with the president on my own.
One problem we had was allocating and optimizing the president’s time. His longtime executive secretary, Mildred Leonard, had run the Ford congressional office for a quarter century, and she still felt free to commit him to seeing anyone who called her and passed her muster. One time, as I was leaving the Oval Office with a high-level foreign official, we had to make our way through a crowd of Grand Rapids Rotarians eagerly waiting to see their “Jerry.” Such informal drop-bys had been routine on Capitol Hill, and Mildred saw no reason to change things now. The president understood that this couldn’t continue, and at his request, we arranged a suite of offices for Mildred on the second floor, where she continued to handle the mail from his old congressional district.
A much more serious staff problem was presented by Bob Hartmann. Bob was much closer in age to the president than either Don or I and had gone to work for him in 1966, after twenty-five years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. His manner was brusque on good days and abrasive on bad ones, and if others found him difficult to deal with, that was fine by Bob. He was comfortable in that role and even cultivated it. Bob had been Ford’s principal advisor and speechwriter in the vice president’s office, and particularly in the latter position, had done some very fine work. Ford’s truly memorable swearing-in remarks and his statement explaining Nixon’s pardon were examples of Hartmann at his very best.
Unfortunately, when he wasn’t writing speeches, Bob’s contributions to the overall enterprise were mixed at best. His certainty that he was the man to continue running the show after August 9 led him to make a move that was admirable only in its audacity. Amid the confusion that followed Nixon’s sudden departure, Bob simply moved his things into the office directly adjacent to the Oval Office. The space, which included a door opening directly into the Oval Office, had been vacated only hours earlier by Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods. With that beachhead secure, Hartmann was hard to manage. He adopted the practice of stepping through his door into the Oval Office when the president was away. He would go through the inbox to treat himself to an exclusive look at all the presidential business and add new material as he saw fit.
One of our major management goals was to make sure that all the paperwork going to and from the president’s desk passed through the staff secretary’s office. This would enable us to keep records of everything the presid
ent had seen and signed and to make certain that documents given to him were circulated and vetted among senior officials. In addition, as another check, I reviewed everything going in and out of the Oval Office. But Bob’s connecting door gave him a way around the system. We discovered this when documents that the president returned to the staff secretary included some that no one else had ever seen before. Bob’s visits to the Oval Office could also be discerned in the appearance of some strategically leaked information in a newspaper item by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Finding an internal memo whose drift he had not cared for, Bob simply conveyed its contents straight from the president’s desk to the appreciative hands of Washington’s most read columnists.
President Ford had a lot to attend to in late 1974, including the continuing controversy over the pardon, which he tried to tamp down by testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. I accompanied him to the Hill and sat with Jack Marsh in the hearing room in the Rayburn Building as the president told the committee members and the nation, “There was no deal. Period. Under no circumstances.” I hadn’t been involved in the debate or discussions leading up to the pardon, but it was—and remains—my firm conviction that he granted it because he believed it was the right thing for the country.
Also on his plate was the confirmation of a new vice president, a bad economy, and the unraveling of America’s effort in Vietnam. For him to move forward on these many fronts, it was clear to me that the chief of staff had to get a handle on the day-to-day operations of the White House, and that was never going to happen as long as Bob Hartmann remained just a few unobstructed steps from the Oval Office.
I urged Don to suggest to the president that he needed a private office where he could work and think in more relaxed and comfortable surroundings than the magnificent but very formal Oval Office. President Nixon had used a spacious private hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building. But why, Rumsfeld and I argued, trudge all the way over there when the perfect space was only a few steps away through a convenient connecting door? Ford quickly warmed to the idea. All that remained was to decide who would break the news to Hartmann, and Ford accepted our recommendation that, while either of us could do it, only he could make it stick. And that is how the problem was solved. When the president of the United States asks if you wouldn’t mind making room for him, the only answer is the one Bob gave. He vacated what is arguably the second most prime piece of real estate in the Western Hemisphere as quickly and efficiently as he had commandeered it. And by any measure it was a very soft landing, just down the hall into the spacious office between Rumsfeld and Kissinger. A few years later, Bob Hartmann’s new digs became the West Wing office of the vice president, and it has remained so ever since.
Hartmann’s move marked an immediate improvement in the functioning of the staff system that Rumsfeld and I were trying to put into place. We now had better control over the paper flow and the foot traffic. Now the only way for staff to enter the Oval Office was through the main door, where all visitors would be met by Nell Yates, who had served in the White House since Eisenhower, and by Terry O’Donnell, the president’s personal aide, who reported to me and to Rumsfeld. Ford instantly recognized the smoother-running operation, although he continued to maintain a modified separate track for aides like Mildred and Bob. In fact, until the end of his term, he kept a separate box on the credenza behind his desk for materials they brought to him. He had spent twenty-five years looking after the interests of Michigan’s 5th Congressional District, and he never shook the habit even when bigger things came along. The practice was an understandable and even admirable example of his loyalty.
BEFORE DON AND I had moved into the chief of staff suite in the West Wing, the president had presided over an economic summit to discuss ways of combating inflation, which was now running at 12 percent. The program that came out of it involved a surcharge and budget cuts, but little is remembered about them because Bob Hartmann and his staff persuaded the president that he needed some sort of special appeal to capture the attention of the American people and enlist them in the struggle to hold down the cost of living. They created a theme and gave it a slogan, “Whip Inflation Now,” which provided the acronym WIN, emblazoned on campaign-style buttons that we were all expected to wear—up to and including the president himself. More WIN buttons were ordered in anticipation of the campaign’s rollout in a televised address to a joint session of Congress.
On October 7, a week after Rumsfeld and I arrived and the day before the president was to launch the WIN program, Alan Greenspan, our new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, came to me to express his deep concern. I took him to see Don, who, never faint of heart, urged the president to postpone his trip to Capitol Hill.
The last-minute intervention didn’t succeed, and twenty-four hours later, wearing his WIN button on his lapel, the president delivered the speech naming inflation as “public enemy number one” and calling for a tax surcharge combined with a cut in federal spending and government services. That would be strong medicine at any time. But administering it without even the slightest sugarcoating less than a month before the midterm elections—when every congressman and one-third of the senators in the audience would be submitting themselves to the voters—was just asking for trouble.
The press and the Democrats fastened on the packaging and dismissed the whole thing as half-baked and PR-driven. The president was offended, and instead of retooling the presentation and getting rid of the buttons, he doubled down a few days later at the convention of the Future Farmers of America in Kansas City. In this speech, which was also televised nationally, he urged the young people to be bargain hunters, to “save as much as you can,” and—the pièce de résistance—to “clean up your plate before you get up from the table.” Around the Ford White House, the FFA address was forever after known as the “lick your plate clean” speech.
With no political traction or public support, the WIN campaign was quietly abandoned. The buttons and “lick your plate clean” lived on only as inside jokes among the staff and the press. Before long, President Ford was good-natured enough to take a little teasing about them. I’d nearly forgotten about the WIN campaign until Inauguration Day in 1977. President Ford had come over to say goodbye and take one last look around the Oval Office. After he returned to the residence, where the Carters would soon be arriving for coffee before driving to the Capitol, I stayed behind to help gather the last of his personal effects. I opened one of the drawers in his desk and found it filled with red and white WIN buttons as fresh as the day they had been minted at the very beginning of the administration.
The WIN embarrassment was only one of the burdens we carried into the 1974 congressional elections. The greatest, by far, was Watergate and President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. But there was also a growing view in the press that Jerry Ford, though he might be a very decent and well-meaning man, just wasn’t up to the job of president.
Unfortunately, Ford’s easygoing manner and casual demeanor supplied some ammunition for this attitude. After a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colorado, press attacks on the issue of competence took on a new edge. The president, at the end of a long and grueling campaign swing, crowned the homecoming queen of La Mesa Junior College and bestowed presidential kisses on her and her court. Finding that task a pleasant one, he kissed all the young women again and then delivered a rambling speech. This shaky performance inspired a snide piece in New York magazine, with Ford depicted on the cover as Bozo the Clown.
The November elections dealt us a big setback. The Democrats ultimately picked up forty-nine House seats and four in the Senate, adding to their already decisive majorities in both chambers. This left the new president with a tough hand to play. As a man whose experience on Capitol Hill reached back to 1949, he knew better than any of us that legislative successes were going to be few and far between.
It was in the wake of our loss that Don Rumsfeld and I had dinner one night at the Two Continents restaur
ant in the Hotel Washington with economist Art Laffer, a creative guy who certainly captured my imagination with a curve he drew on the back of my napkin. What it showed was that you can raise taxes only so high before people become disinclined to work. On the other hand, it’s possible to create incentive—and economic growth—with tax cuts. The Laffer Curve subsequently became one of the hallmarks of supply-side economics. I wish I had known how historic my napkin would become so that I could have saved it.
The idea of cutting taxes certainly suited the times, because the country was now heading into a recession. The president called his economic team together for a two-day meeting in Vail, Colorado, where he was spending his Christmas holidays with the family. The team at the time included assistant for economic affairs Bill Seidman, Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Greenspan, who was fast becoming first among those equals. Alan combined economic expertise with an appreciation of practical politics. No less important, he had a real knack for capturing large and complicated ideas in a few well-chosen words. The president liked him and put a lot of stock in his judgment. After I became chief of staff, I would take Alan into the Oval Office, as Don had before me, for lengthy discussions of economic policy.
The Vail meeting generated many of the policies that President Ford announced in his State of the Union message on January 15, 1975. Among them was a $16 billion cut in taxes. He would advocate tax relief again at the end of 1975, insisting on fiscal discipline as well. That didn’t come naturally to the liberal Democrats who dominated the House of Representatives, but they were dealing with a president who had recently been one of their own. Jerry Ford had served on the House Appropriations Committee starting in the Truman administration and he knew the budget as well as any modern president before or after him. I once heard him correct a staff member on how many rangers were employed by the National Park Service. Late in his term, when the time came to brief the press corps on the new budget—a task usually falling to the top people at the Office of Management and Budget—the president decided to handle it himself. He laid out his priorities, his numbers, and his reasoning, then submitted to cross-examination by the press corps. The relevant policy aides and cabinet members were all there and ready to supply any details he needed. Later on, deputy OMB director Paul O’Neill told me that after witnessing a couple of these performances, many of the experts became scared of being called on. They realized that if Jerry Ford didn’t know the answer they probably wouldn’t either.