Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Ford had looked on with growing consternation as Reagan appealed to the Republican southern delegates. Anticipating this move by Reagan and taking Ford at his word that he would not seek election in 1976, Nelson had courted Barry Goldwater, assuring the 1964 Republican standard bearer of his basic conservatism. Goldwater was convinced: “Rocky and I see more eye to eye on foreign policy than I and Ford do,” he said. “I think [Rockefeller] makes me look like a dove, to tell you the truth.”3

  Nelson was trying to use the Ford White House to gain the limelight. Ford had inadvertently given him the vehicle for achieving his ambition: oversight of the Domestic Council, an advisory organization that was the domestic equivalent of the foreign affairs-oriented National Security Council. Given Ford’s lack of experience in executive administration, Nelson thought he would end up in charge of the government. “I’m going to run the White House,” he said.4

  But Nelson underestimated the men Ford had around him. One of the first conflicts was over Nelson’s efforts to restore the office of the president’s science adviser, which had been terminated by Nixon. This office had national-security implications that were tied to the sensitive issues of software for aerial guidance systems and other advanced computer technology, satellite communications and aerial photography, sea mining, the procurement of energy resources, and the development of nuclear weapons. It also had domestic implications, involving environmental and health regulations, artificial intelligence (computer technology), communications systems, and the increasingly lucrative field of biomedical technology.

  The structure of the science adviser’s office was important for it to work, and Nelson submitted his recommendations to Ford. His recommendations soon came back through the Domestic Council in altered form, as only one of three options for the president and dubbed “the Kennedy plan” to discredit it with Ford. Nelson knew who was blocking him: Donald Rumsfeld, Al Haig’s replacement as White House chief of staff.

  After a sharp exchange, Nelson took the proposal back to the Domestic Council, having redrafted it in option form that enhanced his own position. Three months later, Ford adopted the proposal—as a recommendation to Congress that carried Ford’s, not Nelson’s, name. Although that was a normal practice, it was difficult for Nelson Rockefeller to swallow.

  Those three months gave Rumsfeld time to beat back Nelson’s attempt to control the Domestic Council. Nelson tried and failed to fire two of Rumsfeld’s allies. Worse, the council’s executive director, James Cannon, who had been one of Nelson’s most trusted aides in New York, deferred to Rumsfeld’s leadership.

  Desperate, Nelson turned to the president. His usefulness in the council was over, he warned Ford. But the president would not intervene. Rumsfeld remained in control of the staff.

  Nelson then tried an end run. He set tasks for the council much like he had with the Rockefeller panels and the Commission on Critical Choices: Groups of experts worked on various problems and drafted recommendations for policies. Nelson decided to take the council on the road for a well-publicized series of town meetings around the country. Television and radio gave him publicity as an unusually active vice president grappling with the nation’s problems. “It was a beautifully organized operation,” he said.5

  He pressed on in other fronts, as well. From the CIA hearings, Nelson produced a verbatim transcript, a digest, and a book of policy recommendations. He also rushed to print Edward Teller’s energy report to the Commission on Critical Choices a full two years before the commission’s own multivolume report would be released.

  Teller’s report left little doubt that the vice president’s concerns over domestic issues went beyond the concerns of a political officeholder. As he did in South America, Nelson was carefully monitoring the development of North American energy policies covering oil, gas, uranium, and such hydroelectric projects as the James Bay dams on Cree Indian land in Quebec. And as with Latin America, Nelson’s vision of an energy policy ran smack into opposition from indigenous forces.

  Teller’s report was really a blueprint for Nelson’s energy program. Teller compared the threat OPEC posed to American business’s access to oil with that posed by the Axis powers during World War II. Teller’s proposals, which were adopted by Ford, replaced Nixon’s voluntary conservation and price controls with deregulation of prices for natural gas moving interstate. The objective was to stimulate gas and oil production, increase nuclear power, and promote the strip-mining of coal. It also had the taxpayer share the oil companies’ financial expenses for exploration and research.

  One month after Nelson released Teller’s report, 3,000 National Guardsmen occupied the Black Hills in South Dakota, where uranium exploration had reached the lands of the Sioux. Purportedly there for “maneuvers,” the Guardsmen were followed by sixty FBI agents, who poured into the vicinity of the nearby Sioux Pine Ridge reservation. The following month, Richard Wilson, the tribal council chairman, signed away one-eighth of the reservation—mostly Black Hills land claims—to the National Park Service, aggravating a tense situation. The reservation had already been bloodied by murders of American Indian Movement (AIM) supporters following AIM member Russell Means’s 1974 defeat by Wilson in an election replete with so many irregularities that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission had recommended, futilely, a new election. Then came the trials of AIM leaders for Wounded Knee, including a riot in the courtroom involving police beatings when the judge ordered the room cleared after spectators (including Lutheran bishops) refused to stand as he entered.

  By June 26, 1975, as Wilson signed away 800,000 acres, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had drilled 6,000 test holes throughout 65,000 acres of recently leased land in the Black Hills, and had located an estimated five to six million pounds of uranium.6

  That same day, an FBI attempt to carry out a warrantless arrest of one of Wilson’s opponents triggered a shoot-out that left two agents and one Indian dead, 200 Guardsmen placed on alert, and what the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission later characterized as “a full-scale military-type invasion of the reservation” by 170 agents using armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and M-16 rifles. The FBI’s investigation of the shooting turned into a nationwide dragnet of suspected AIM activists. A reign of terror gripped the 4,000-square-mile reservation of the Oglala Lakota Sioux nation as federal and state agencies put into effect coordinated “sweeps” through the reservation, similar to the Pentagon’s “garden plot” domestic counterinsurgency plan effected two years before at Wounded Knee.7 As vice president and vice chairman of the Domestic Council, Nelson shared responsibility in the administration’s overseeing of the FBI’s activities against AIM.

  In September, Nelson Rockefeller came as close as he ever would to becoming president. Only two feet from President Ford in Sacramento, California, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm, a member of the murderous Charles Manson gang, was arrested carrying a loaded Colt .45 she intended to use to kill the president. Nelson was in New York to make speeches when he suddenly found Secret Service agents hustling him out of reach of the public. “What is the Manson gang?” Nelson asked as his plane streaked back to Washington.* Nothing seemed to break his confident stride. Nothing, that is, until the fateful day in the Oval Office when President Ford decided to shift direction to placate the right wing of his party.

  BENDING TO BIBLES

  In late October, Nelson Rockefeller entered the Oval Office for his regular private meeting with the president. Nelson had suggested these weekly consultations when he took office. He did not need them to gain access to Ford; the president’s door was always open to him, he said. He needed the meetings to offer the president his frank opinions about the nation and the world. Ford, he believed, valued their sessions. Now he learned otherwise.

  Ford was feeling the heat. He was slipping badly in the polls, and the Right was putting the blame on Rockefeller, charging that his liberal image was losing the South’s Bible Belt for Ford. Reagan, who was wooing the South, would be better for the tic
ket, they argued.

  “I have been talking with my political advisers,” Ford said after a long silence, “and I think it would be, as much as personally I feel badly about it, it would be better if you were not on the ticket and if you would withdraw.”

  If Nelson was shocked, he did not show it. “Fine,” he said quietly. “I will write you a letter.”

  Ford said that would be wonderful.8

  Nelson flew to Pocantico for the weekend. He needed the distance from Washington to put his political life into perspective. One thing was clear, however. The looming presence of the Republican right wing was edging him off center stage.

  On Sunday, Nelson received a phone call. The president was on the line from Jacksonville, Florida. Was Ford reconsidering?

  “Do you think you could have that letter by Monday?” Ford asked. “I have got some other changes I am making and the story has leaked.”

  “Well, of course it would leak,” Nelson later told Ford speechwriter Robert Hartmann, “because those who were promoting it were bound to leak it fearing he might change his mind.”9

  Nelson called a press conference to announce his withdrawal from the ticket. Not elegant dinners, or wealth, or energy programs, or Domestic Council town meetings, or Commissions on Critical Choices or the CIA, or courting the South, or even Barry Goldwater could have prevented this day. All he could do was preserve his dignity by maintaining control over at least the words of his own resignation letter, in exchange for agreeing to save Ford and himself embarrassment.

  “The decision by Vice President Rockefeller was a decision on his own,” Ford told the press. “Under no circumstances was it a request by me. It was a decision by him.”10

  After a decent but short interval, Ford carried out his purge of Rockefeller power from the Cabinet. Henry Kissinger was fired as national security adviser, James Schlesinger was fired as defense secretary, and William Colby was fired as CIA director, as Nelson and Kissinger had desired; but this action, too, involved a deft political weakening of another Rockefeller like-thinker, George Bush, by appointing him head of the scandal-ridden spy agency.

  Kissinger accepted the coup on one condition: His aide, Brent Scowcroft, would have to be named his successor. Otherwise, he would resign as secretary of state, too.11 Ford agreed.

  Nelson would always claim that his removal from the 1976 Republican ticket was a deliberate effort to sabotage Gerald Ford’s presidency. He saw Rumsfeld leading the Nixon wing and allying it with the Far Right, backing Reagan to stop the Rockefeller wing of the party and bring down Ford in the process. Rumsfeld’s move to the Pentagon to take Schlesinger’s place as defense secretary would not remove his influence on the White House; Rumsfeld kept in daily touch with his successor as White House chief of staff, Dick Cheney. The bureaucratic repression of Nelson’s initiatives remained in force. Nelson’s bound volume of policy recommendations from the Domestic Council, including welfare reform and national health insurance, succumbed to a conservative budget. Nelson had hoped Ford might use them to launch the 1976 campaign; instead, they gathered dust.

  So Nelson pressed on the national security front. If he could not assert his leadership—and his right to be Ford’s running mate—in domestic affairs, he would surely shine in foreign policy. In the National Security Council, where he was vice chairman, Nelson raised the existence of the Soviet navy to the level of an imminent threat to ocean and Caribbean shipping lanes for American oil companies. He implied that the Soviets had plans for a classic naval confrontation. Nelson posed the issue on elevated terms, moving it beyond the terms of corporate access to oil and other world resources, to the higher realm of an ideal that could rally the American people: “freedom of the seas.” The sense of being heir to the British Empire and needing access to oil was never far from Nelson’s mind. He later explained:

  In our studies on the Commission on Critical Choices, we came to the conclusion that the freedom of the seas … which the British preserved for how many hundreds of years, and which we preserved … was a position which could be challenged by the Soviet Navy’s development.… This was a very serious matter for the future, particularly as we were becoming increasingly dependent on the foreign imports of oil and strategic materials.12

  Nelson used this point to pressure Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary at National Security Council meetings. “I would speak, and speak very frankly … where I did not think he [President Ford] was being properly served.”13 Nelson wanted increased expenditures for naval arms.

  He also wanted deeper resolve by the president for the CIA’s secret war in oil-rich Angola. In 1975, Ford, on Kissinger’s advice, had authorized $32 million for the CIA’s covert war in Angola to overthrow the Soviet-backed MPLA government.14 Once again, as in the Congo and Southeast Asia, the CIA used animosities among tribal peoples to accomplish this end. The rationale for the heavier U.S. commitment was that Castro had sent 2,800 Cuban volunteers to Angola on the MPLA’s request in response to the intervention by the CIA and South African armed forces in support of the MPLA’s rivals. Ford, however, was worried about being caught in a public flap over this deepening military and financial commitment in another Vietnam-like escalation, spreading a civil war that allied the CIA with apartheid South Africa. Exposure of this secret war on the side of South Africa, coming on the heels of revelations about how the CIA’s “secret war” in Laos had contributed to U.S. entanglement in Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War, could cost him many votes. Besides, the CIA’s Angolan forces did not fight well, and the South African attack in southern Angola had been met by an additional 10,000 well-armed Cubans who were hurriedly flown in. In January, the South Africans withdrew. The U.S. Senate, angry over Kissinger’s defiance of its constitutional inquiries, passed the Tunney Amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill, prohibiting the use of defense funds in Angola for anything but gathering intelligence. On February 9, Ford signed the bill into law.

  It was hard for Nelson to take, serving under someone as inexperienced in exercising superpower muscle as Jerry Ford. Riding in his limousine from a White House meeting one morning, Nelson lamented, while gazing absently through the window, “He’s sure no Roosevelt.”15

  By June 1976, the rest of the country suspected the same. Ford, despite feeding his vice president to the sharks, had not placated the Right or kept Reagan from winning the South. The economy was moving into a recession, and Rumsfeld had still not released $16 billion in defense contracts that could win votes. The campaign was suffering, as well as the government. The Republican party—his party—would suffer, too, if things were not straightened out. Still believing he was the best choice for Ford’s running mate, if not for president, Nelson caught the glint of an opportunity: He would run the White House.

  “I figured that he [Ford] was going to come around,” he said later, “which politically, of course, he should have. I mean, it was obvious with Reagan on the other side that I was the best balance that he had and I got him the votes anyhow from our northeastern states. But by that time I had decided that it was impossible for me to continue in the administration the way the caliber of people was slipping.… There was tremendous unrest in the cabinet and he was going to lose most of the good people.… The only way this could be stopped would be for me to go in as his Chief of Staff.”16

  In short, Nelson was targeting Rumsfeld’s old job, now occupied by Dick Cheney. His goal was to rejoin the ticket, and he believed that Ford was desperate enough to go for it. Nelson even made Cheney’s removal his price. “The only condition I would stay and go on the ticket with him would be if I could run his organization for him.” This condition, if accepted, effectively meant that Rockefeller would run the cabinet while Ford campaigned. “Mr. President,” he said, “it is against my interest, but I offer my services to you to take over as Chief of Staff and organize your White House and organize your cabinet for you.”17

  Ford thanked Nelson, but said he did not plan to change the structure.18 When Ford did not b
ring the matter up again, Nelson had the final answer. It was to be the last time he would act out the overconfidence of the rich and powerful.

  COWBOY HUMILIATIONS

  Once again, Republican leaders gathered at a historic site of the conquest of the American West: Kansas City, Missouri, a center of the cattle industry. Reagan had made a crucial error. He had announced that Pennsylvania’s moderate Senator Richard Schweiker would be his running mate before the convention had assembled. Ford had some people in mind for his vice president, but he decided not to announce his choice until after the balloting for the presidential nomination.

  In Kansas City, Reagan found his old nemesis, Rockefeller, waiting for him. Nelson commanded not only the large New York delegation, but the larger New England votes. “Reagan thought he had the nomination. I knew he didn’t because we had a very good organization and our New York State Chairman [Richard Rosenbaum] was first elected Chairman of the New England Chairmen and then Chairman of all the Chairmen.”19 Rosenbaum kept the large Pennsylvania delegation, led by Schweiker’s close friend, Drew Lewis, in Ford’s camp. With moderates afraid of Reagan because of his Far Right backers and Southerners put off by Reagan’s choice of Schweiker, Ford won. He then named Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate. Nelson was left with the humiliation of nominating Dole before the convention on national television with a microphone that went dead. When the same thing happened to Dole, Nelson again saw a Cheney-Rumsfeld conspiracy.

  The final insult came at the convention finale. Even though the nominations had been completed, Nelson insisted he would follow Ford up to the podium instead of Ford’s new running mate, Dole. Resting his case on the state protocol for the reigning vice president, he confronted Cheney, venting months of frustration:

  “Look, you so and so, I know what has been going on and I have been taking this all the way through, and now it is over. You tell the President for me what has happened here. You tell him about turning down the mike when I made my speech, and you tell him I’m not going to Vail and I am not going to have anything further to do with his campaign. I have fulfilled my duties. He has now got a new Vice President. And I am finished. You can take full credit with Mr. Rumsfeld for what has happened.”20