Known and Unknown (111 page)

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As the Watergate problems grew, and as the Yom Kippur crisis escalated, top aides like Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, and Al Haig (who had replaced Haldeman as White House chief of staff ) exchanged diplomatic notes under Nixon's signature. At one point, senior officials decided to raise the Defense Condition level—a decision made at the height of the crisis when an embattled President Nixon was reported to be asleep.

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As a consequence of this serious dispute, Greece withdrew its forces from NATO's military command structure. They were readmitted in 1980.

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Nixon noted in his memoir that “Don Rumsfeld called from Brussels, offering to resign as Ambassador to NATO and return to help work against the impeachment among his former colleagues in Congress.” My guess is that Haig may have told Nixon this to try to lift his spirits.
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Ford turned down contract offers to play professional football for the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers to attend Yale Law School.

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Senator Edward Kennedy was one of the harshest critics of the pardon, skirting close to accusing Ford of complicity in Watergate: “Do we operate under a system of equal justice where there is one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty? It is the wrong time and the wrong place and the wrong person to receive a pre-indictment pardon. And it has led many Americans to believe that it was a culmination of the Watergate coverup.” It was not the first or only time Kennedy was wrong. In 2001, Ford received the profile in Courage award from the John F. Kennedy Library, and Senator Kennedy praised him in quite different terms.
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I was pleased to learn that I would be succeeded at NATO by the distinguished diplomat David K. E. Bruce. Bruce had been the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Britain during World War II and had had the unique distinction of having served as ambassador to Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Bruce's appointment signaled Ford's serious commitment to the alliance.

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Three weeks after I became chief of staff, I told the President he needed to meet alone with Schlesinger to get his “unvarnished” views on arms control negotiations with the Soviets before he issued guidance to Kissinger, who would be conducting the talks. I discovered a week later that Ford had decided to just call his secretary of defense and inform him of the guidance that he had given to Kissinger, who by then had already departed for Moscow.
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There are conflicting reports on exactly when this event took place—Jude Wanniski states that it was in December 1974 and that Dick Cheney and I were both there. In 2004, Wanniski gave a different account on an internet blog. Memory can be a tricky thing. As it happens, my calendar indicates the dinner was on September 16, 1975, and I have a personal note about Art sketching the curve that night on a napkin.
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Rockefeller considered himself the head of the Domestic Council, which Nixon had created in 1970. Theoretically, the Domestic Council would do for domestic policy what the National Security Council did for the President's national security policy.

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The President was absolutely correct on this issue. At one meeting, Ford asked if anyone was in favor of giving New York City a bailout before it defaulted. I replied not just no—but hell no.
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For example, one luncheon included Gertrude Himmelfarb, Edward Banfield, Herbert Storing, and Thomas Sowell.

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Ford once explained to me the reasons for his initial reluctance. When Nixon asked Ford to become vice president, Nixon told Ford that he wanted his favorite cabinet member, John Connally, to be the Republican standard-bearer in 1976, presumably after Nixon's full eight years in office.

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Moore later said she was blinded by radical political views. Her concession would have been small consolation had she killed the President. She was released from prison in 2009.
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Ford describes the scene in a similar fashion in his autobiography: “Kissinger and Rumsfeld were stunned by the sweeping nature of these changes. Both expressed doubts.”
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President Ford had another reason for wanting me to take the post. He wrote: “Defense, I told Rumsfeld, was the place he ought to go. With his experience and ability, he could convince Congress to appropriate necessary funds for the military.”
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In 1963, I had spoken out against President Kennedy's appointment of Paul Nitze to be secretary of the Navy when I was in Congress. I had read of some of the recommendations of a panel he had chaired, which I considered too conciliatory toward the Soviets. After I learned that he had been asked to chair the committee specifically to try to improve the recommendations, I apologized to him. We became warm friends.
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Bush obscured the situation somewhat in his own book by putting the allegation in the words of an unnamed “former House colleague,” who told him, “‘I think you ought to know what people up here are saying about your going to the CIA…. They feel you've been had, George. Rumsfeld set you up and you were a damned fool to say yes.'” By repeating the myth instead of setting the record straight, Bush in effect endorsed it.
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Bush contended that it was President Ford's decision to exclude him from consideration for vice president. Bush is quoted as saying, “I told Ford I'm not going to do that, but if you want me in this job enough you will make the caveat.”
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In a 1977 interview Rockefeller said, “The third thing that I have no proof of but I have no way of explaining the event that ensued except by surmising what I will say to you and that is that Rumsfeld had something on the President that he could use and that the President for whatever reason did not want to come out. And therefore it was virtually if not in actual fact a blackmail situation.”
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By the next day Kissinger had cooled down. After a meeting with the President, he said, “Don, I want you to know that I believe you handled the matter last night just right…. We would have ended up in a pissing match within the government, and we don't need that.” He concluded saying, “I owed you that and wanted you to know it.” Kissinger could be a fierce bureaucratic battler, but he also was a man of integrity who would admit when he had erred.
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As was tradition for nominees, I was introduced to the Senate Armed Services Committee by the two senators from my home state: Senator Charles Percy, a Republican from my old congressional district, and Senator Adlai Stevenson III, a Democrat. I had known Senator Percy for many years, and Senator Stevenson was the son of the man who had so sparked my interest in public service some two decades before.

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Ford was so angry that he uncharacteristically started questioning the personal fortitude of members of Congress. I cautioned Ford against that kind of rhetoric. I told him that was the kind of thing LBJ would say. “There is something about that chair,” I said, pointing to the one behind his desk, “that makes presidents begin to act and talk in a way to make them seem tough.” I urged Ford instead to approach his critics like Eisenhower did—in sorrow rather than in anger, and to rise above them rather than to sink to their level.
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Around the time I was born, a
New York Times
reporter, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Stalin era. Some of his articles were headlined: “industrial success emboldens soviet in new world policy,” “red army is held no menace to peace,” and “stalinism solving minorities problem.” Duranty's reports from Moscow denied allegations that Stalin's regime had starved its citizens—“There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be”—and offered uncritical reporting on Stalin's show trials of political dissidents (“You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs”). Though much of the reporting proved to be false—and precisely in line with what Stalin wanted the world to believe—Duranty's Pulitzer has never been revoked.
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Helms later said he voted against my confirmation to register his protest against President Ford for firing Schlesinger instead of Kissinger.

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I called lawyers at the Pentagon and at the Department of Justice to ask for assistance. Contending that the demonstrators were protesting at a private residence, not on government property and that they had a permit to do so, both sets of lawyers unhelpfully said it was not a matter for the U.S. government—even though the only reason the protesters were at our house was because of my position as secretary of defense.

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In fact, when I was still serving as ambassador to NATO, Schlesinger had asked me if I would be willing to be considered for the post of secretary of the Navy, which I had declined, not wanting to leave NATO then.

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Clements' wife was the Republican National Committeewoman from Texas.

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When I became secretary of defense I was a captain in the Navy reserve. Since I concluded I would not be able to activate myself in the event the President called up the reserves, I transferred from the active reserve to the standby reserve.

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William “Gus” Pagonis, then a major in the Army office of legislative affairs, was given the unpleasant assignment of going up to Capitol Hill that night to retrieve what turned out to be the Army's incorrect press release. Pagonis went on to be a three-star general who served years later during the Gulf War and saw firsthand the M-1 tanks in action.

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Marshall's assessment pointed out areas where the United States retained advantages over the Soviet Union: for example, in the quality of its missiles and in the potential for significant improvements in missile capability. The Soviets, however, were poised to move ahead in the areas of air defenses and civil defense preparedness. They had constructed elaborate underground systems beneath large housing projects, where a significant fraction of their urban industrial population could find shelter in the event of a nuclear conflict. Even if large numbers of their citizens were killed in a nuclear conflict, the Soviets were making the investments necessary to survive as a country. Communist leaders did not reach the top posts in the Soviet Union by worrying about the lives of a few hundred thousand of their people.
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The Hughes briefing on Cuba, on February 6, 1963, had been carried on national television. Hughes' use of aerial photographs taken from U-2 spy planes was considered revolutionary at the time. By the time Hughes was working with me, the technology had developed to the point that we had satellite images as well. With new high-resolution cameras, we had to be cautious. They made an overwhelming case, but making them public would have revealed sensitive information about our surveillance capabilities to the Soviets.

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I also had the briefing presented to our NATO allies. At my request, the NATO Secretary General appointed a Danish intelligence officer to develop a NATO-classified version of my briefing and then take it to all of the NATO capitals. My goal was to encourage our allies to increase their own defense budgets, which were declining. Our success in getting the Europeans to increase their defense expenditures was modest, but we did slow their decreases.

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The first SALT, signed in 1972, included a ban on antiballistic missile systems that could bring down an enemy's nuclear ballistic missiles after they were launched. To begin development of a missile defense system, President George W. Bush and I led the effort to repeal the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001.

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Cruise missiles did not have a natural constituency even in the U.S. military, which made them susceptible to being bargained away in arms negotiations. One reason for this was that no one military service clearly benefited from expenditures for them, and the funds for them would have to come from one of the service's budgets. As a result, no military service was ready to argue for the program at the expense of their other budget priorities. That left me as one of the few advocates for cruise missiles at the time within the Pentagon.

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As he had in August 1974, President Ford asked me and many others for a list of people to consider for vice president. I suggested George Shultz, Mel Laird, John Connally, Howard Baker, Bill Brock, Jim Buckley, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Scranton.
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His most notable combat experience occurred during World War II when, in August 1943, as part of the 93rd Bombardment Group, Brown took part in a famous bombing raid against the Ploesti oil refineries in Romania, which were providing oil to Nazi Germany. Eleven planes in his bombardment group, including the lead plane, were shot down during that dangerous mission. Brown was credited with helping to bring back the surviving aircraft safely.