Known and Unknown (24 page)

 

N
ot having expected to become president, Gerald Ford had to grapple repeatedly with tough questions without the tested support system most new presidents have already established over the course of their campaigns. Ford didn't have a tested policy team or a national platform. On the other hand, Ford was also unusually free of the constraints of special interest groups and political supporters who generally help a candidate get elected, and as a result have had a hand in shaping his policies.

I thought we might have something of an opportunity if we invited America's most innovative thinkers to meet with Ford to discuss major issues that were sometimes lost in the day-to-day details of being president. Dr. Robert Goldwin, a former dean of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, who had served with me when I was at NATO, agreed to come back to the White House to serve as a special consultant to the President. Dubbed the administration's intellectual in residence, Goldwin arranged meetings for Ford with leaders from academia on topics ranging from welfare, unemployment, and crime to global hunger.
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The President engaged in the discussions Goldwin arranged with enthusiasm and insight. Ford's open and friendly manner, combined with the fact that he did not have a conniving bone in his body, caused him to suffer unfairly from suggestions that he was dumb. Or, as Lyndon Johnson once put it, “That's what happens when you play football too long without a helmet.”
⁴¹
But that most certainly was not the case. Ford was a graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale Law School. He had served on the House Appropriations Committee for twenty-three years and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the federal budget.

In light of the caricatures of Ford that were gaining traction in the press, I thought Ford needed to give the American people a sense of the direction he wanted to take the country.
⁴²
What did he want his presidency to be about? What were his policies and priorities? If Ford didn't seize the initiative to define his presidency, I feared that others were going to define it for him.

Cornelius Crane Chase was the son of a Manhattan book editor and a concert pianist. When he was a youngster he was expelled from two private schools, and he worked odd jobs, such as cab driver, motorcycle messenger, busboy, and produce manager. But it was as a television performer that Cornelius Chase, better known by his nickname Chevy, found his calling. Chase became a nationwide celebrity for his humorous caricature of President Ford as a well-meaning but clumsy oaf who couldn't seem to get anything right. Chase's popular parody on
Saturday Night Live
did damage to the President's image throughout his presidency. Even though Ford and others on the staff tried to laugh it off, the attacks hurt politically.

The episode that cemented that aspect of the President's image occurred when we were on a trip to Salzburg, Austria, in June 1975 to meet with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. As Air Force One arrived at the airport, it was raining. The mobile steps that had been wheeled up to aircraft's door had not been fitted with nonskid safety strips. As the President and Mrs. Ford exited the plane, a crew member handed the President an umbrella. Ford took the umbrella with one hand and thoughtfully took Betty's arm with his other. This, of course, meant Ford did not have a hand on a railing.

Joyce and I were exiting the same stairs behind them when I saw the President slip and fall down the last few steps. Ford bounced up quickly, but that hardly mattered. I knew the widely televised stumble was going to be a disaster. The picture of Ford's fall appeared on page one of what seemed like every newspaper in the world and was replayed on television over and over again. In the face of this embarrassment, Ford could have blamed any number of people. But Ford, true to form, wasn't mad at anyone but himself. The Salzburg stumble was, of course, a gift to Chevy Chase. “He [Ford] had never been elected…so I never felt that he deserved to be there to begin with,” Chase later said. “That was just the way I felt then as a young man and as a writer and a liberal.”
⁴³

The truth was that Ford was very likely the best athlete to serve in the modern presidency. As president, he swam regularly, played golf, and was an accomplished skier and an aggressive tennis player. He had a bad knee from his football days, and like all of us, he stumbled from time to time. Unfortunately when he stumbled, it was for all the world to see.

The President had real strengths and one of Ford's most important assets was the First Lady. Betty Ford was a gracious, lively, and entertaining woman whom the President clearly adored. She helped set the standard for modern first ladies by talking openly about controversial public issues, a role that traditionally was not considered the province of a president's wife. Mrs. Ford expressed her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, for example, and for legalized abortion. She talked openly about her battle against breast cancer, as she did in later years about her struggle with alcoholism.
⁴⁴
All of this was unorthodox stuff for the mid-1970s. Not everyone who supported President Ford welcomed Betty's outspoken views. Some even thought it made the President look weak, because he couldn't seem to “control his wife,” as was said back in those days. A few urged me to ask Ford to encourage Betty to withhold some of her opinions.

I had a different perspective as a husband of an independent woman and a father of two independent-minded daughters. It seemed to me you'd be yelling into the wind to suggest that somebody like Betty Ford ought not say what she believed. From a political standpoint, Mrs. Ford's remarks probably even helped the President. The First Lady's frankness about her personal struggles no doubt encouraged many Americans to seek treatment for similar problems and made them feel less alone. Years later, the treatment center for addiction that bears her name has been a lifeline to thousands and a living testament to her courage and candor. Further, her husband's obvious comfort with Betty's directness highlighted the Fords' respectful as well as devoted relationship. Mrs. Ford, in fact, proved so popular that Republicans printed up campaign buttons that read “Betty's Husband for President!” Still, Ford's presidency would continue to be buffeted by Chevy Chase's parodies or some other extraneous factor. We were losing ground. Time was short, and Ford needed to make the presidency his own.

 

W
hen Ford became Nixon's vice president, he had all but ruled out a run for the presidency.
⁴⁵
But by the spring of 1975, he had changed his mind.
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Ford was growing more confident in the office. He was becoming a more skillful executive everyday.

Several months later, I was with Ford in California when his presidency almost came to an abrupt end. On September 5, 1975, we were heading for a meeting with California's governor at the state capitol in Sacramento. As we were walking, a woman aimed a gun only a few feet from the President.
⁴⁶
A Secret Service agent spotted her, wrestled the gun from her hand, and forced her to the ground. “It didn't go off,” she kept saying, as police swarmed in to arrest her. “It didn't go off. Can you believe it?”
⁴⁷
The would-be assassin was Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of the notorious mass murderer Charles Manson.

A few weeks later, on September 22, 1975, we were in San Francisco for a full day of events. After a speech at the AFL-CIO, we left the building by a freight elevator, which had doors that opened from the top and bottom. When we stepped out, the top door malfunctioned and came down hard. Ford, the tallest person among us, was struck on the head. He went down in a crouch, briefly stunned, then stood back up. He seemed fine, although the blow had left a cut on the bald spot above his forehead. It looked like a red neon sign. I suspected we had just made Chevy Chase's night.

We resigned ourselves to another round of jokes and made our way toward the lobby when I suggested the President walk fast and not shake hands. Ford agreed and walked briskly toward the back door of his limousine. We proceeded to the St. Francis Hotel, where his doctor treated the wound with cold packs. Before long, it was time to head to the airport. The mark on his head was less noticeable at this point, but I still wasn't taking any chances. Again, I recommended he head straight to the car, which he did. This time, as we came out of the building, we heard the crack of a gunshot. The President ducked.
⁴⁸
Standing just behind him, I ducked as well. A Secret Service agent pushed Ford into the backseat of his limousine. I followed the agent, and we landed on top of the President, on the floor of the car, as it sped off.

As our motorcade continued to speed to the airport, I heard Ford's muf-fled voice from below. “C'mon, Rummy, you guys get off,” he urged. “You're heavy!”

It was the second assassination attempt in less than a month. This time the would-be assassin was Sara Jane Moore. A Marxist radical, she had been picked up by the local police a day earlier on an illegal handgun charge but had been released.
⁴⁹

Moore was standing across the street, about forty feet from the President, when she fired. An alert bystander, Oliver Sipple, saw the revolver and reached out to deflect her aim.
⁵⁰
The bullet came within inches of the President's head—and my own—striking the wall of the hotel behind us. “I do regret I didn't succeed, and allow the winds of change to start,” Moore said immediately after the shooting. “I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos.”
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When we arrived on Air Force One, we could not take off immediately because we had to wait for the First Lady, who had been on a separate schedule. No one had told her what had happened, so when Betty came onboard, she asked the President innocently, “How did they treat you?”
⁵²

After the events of the day were described, she was as calm as her husband. In fact, they handled the situation so well that we were even able to take a moment to lighten the mood somewhat. As the Fords laughed, I chimed in that I thought I deserved a good deal of credit for handling the event so skillfully that “not one single person noticed that the President had bumped his head again.”

As much as we wanted to make light of the situation, however, we knew it was deadly serious. The President's natural response was to be brave and defiant in the face of would-be assassins.
⁵³
But it never left my mind that twice in a matter of weeks, two deranged individuals got close enough to President Ford to kill him.
⁵⁴

In October 1975, I was with the President in Connecticut when yet another incident occurred. As the presidential motorcade moved through Hartford en route to the airport, the local police department failed to block one of the intersections at the base of a hill. When the President's car was crossing that intersection, a car with four teenagers rammed into the side of the presidential limousine. Those of us seated in the backseat—the President, our host, and me—were thrown to the floor.

Taking no chances, the Secret Service followed their normal procedure and had the motorcade start up fast to get the President out of possible further danger. As we sped away, the lead car in the motorcade had to stop suddenly to avoid a pedestrian. Our limousine slammed into the rear of the lead car, again jostling us around in the backseat. Then, as we stopped suddenly, the Secret Service car behind us, which had been racing to keep up, slammed into the back of our car. We were thrown around in the backseat for the third time.

While no one was seriously injured, the near comic chain reaction seemed to be a metaphor for an administration whose troubles were piling up. Coming off the midterm elections, which were bad for Republicans, we had every reason to believe that 1976 was going to be another tough election year. There were even some suggestions in the press that the GOP was an endangered species on a trajectory of perpetual decline.
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The administration was not performing up to its potential. I felt an urgent need to get it on a better track.

O
n October 22, 1975, Dick Cheney and I met with the President in his study, just outside the Oval Office. We discussed some possible scenarios for the 1976 campaign if, as expected, Governor Ronald Reagan were to challenge Ford in the Republican primaries. There was also discussion of the unpleasant possibility that Ford might lose the nomination, which gave him another chance to decide if a nasty primary contest was really something he was up for.

“Look, I'm running,” Ford said with a strength and decisiveness that pleased me. “It will be a tough race, but I'm not going to pull a Johnson [and bow out]. It will be bloody right down to the last gong if Reagan runs.”
¹

I had raised the troublesome issues I saw with him many times: a poorly coordinated speech shop; an unmanageable vice president; a marginalized secretary of defense leading to an unbalanced NSC; press leaks; and the like. He knew that I thought his White House needed significant changes if he were to have a successful presidency, fend off the Reagan challenge, and win in the general election.

Apparently change was on the President's mind as well—but instead of the administrative fixes I had been proposing for months, he was thinking of personnel changes.

“You know, there are funny things you think of just before you go to sleep,” he said. He told us he had gotten so angry at Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger over a recent dustup Schlesinger had had with a senior Democratic congressman who was a close friend of Ford's that he told Cheney and me that he was considering replacing Schlesinger with Rockefeller and naming George H. W. Bush as his vice president. I had listened to President Nixon muse on various occasions about possible cabinet shake-ups during his administration. These generally proved to be simply ideas tossed out to see how others would react. And indeed, as Ford talked, he sounded like he was thinking more about after the election, if he won his own term.
²
What Ford did not know at the time was that I was planning one last-ditch effort to convey my sense of urgency to him.

In Ford administration lore, the events that soon followed became known as the Halloween Massacre. According to some press accounts, I played a driving role, arranging for the President to dispatch all of my enemies in one swoop so that I could be vice president. The massacre mythology, in fact, became one of the building blocks of my image in some quarters as a master behind-the-scenes operator. The facts of those next few days tell a far different and less tidy human story.

Since the day I arrived as chief of staff, I had been planning to leave the White House by 1975. The President and I had originally discussed my staying for six months. It had now been a year. After almost two decades in government service, I was ready to leave and find a way to pay for college tuitions for our children. I began to talk to a few close friends back home in Chicago about what I might do in the private sector when I left the administration. At the same time, I cared about President Ford and wanted him to succeed.

Over the course of several weeks, I prepared a memorandum for the President that became a lengthy and somewhat repetitious collection of the same advice and recommendations I had been making since the day he took office. I took Cheney into my confidence and asked him to look at it. He not only agreed with the sentiments, but added his own touches, and said he would like to sign on to it as well. The memo grew to be almost thirty pages long, and I thought hard about whether and when to give it to the President. One of the rules I developed as a chief of staff was, “Don't accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the President that you are free to tell him what you think ‘with the bark off' and you have the relationship and the courage to do it.” I ultimately decided that I owed it to Gerald Ford to follow my own rule.

I tried to prepare Ford for what was coming. On the evening of Thursday, October 23, when Cheney and I met with him, the President had a cold and seemed discouraged. I gave him a draft of our memo to review, so he could prepare to discuss it, since it was long. Because of the sensitive nature of the document, I asked him to read it and give it back to me personally the next morning, so there wouldn't be a copy in the White House staffing system.

As Ford thumbed through it, I explained to him that the concerns expressed in the memo were not just Cheney's and mine—many on the White House staff had problems with the way the system was working. On the one hand, we all thought highly of President Ford personally. We believed it was important for the country that he win the election. However, we were worried that the administration was not working as it should be, and that that might make his reelection impossible.

Parts of the administration were moving in different directions and at different speeds. The White House gears were grinding against each other, causing unnecessary friction in interpersonal relationships. This was not the fault of the individuals involved. I told Ford squarely that I believed it was the result of the way he had organized the White House.
³

“This is not very encouraging,” Ford said.

“Well, hell, it's not,” I replied. “But it's solvable.”

With that, Dick and I took our departure.
⁴

The President gave the draft memo back to me the next morning, a Friday. He told me he wanted to see Cheney and me Saturday morning, and then Kissinger and me later the same afternoon. He added that what he had in mind for that meeting would require that I get along very well with Kissinger.
⁵

Later that evening, I told Ford that after our morning meeting he might not want to go ahead with whatever he was planning, since I was considering leaving the administration. Ford didn't yet know that Cheney and I had decided we would attach letters of resignation to the finished memo.
⁶
We wanted the President to know that we couldn't serve him properly under the current circumstances.

Saturday, October 25, was a beautiful Indian summer day. Cheney and I went into the Oval Office shortly after eleven to review our completed memo with the President. We had pulled together a list of eight major issues we believed put Ford's administration and reelection in jeopardy, including the President's reputation as a nice person but an ineffective chief executive, administrative disorder in the White House, and a lack of clear priorities.

I set out specific suggestions to improve the running of staff meetings, the calendar, and scheduling—all issues that had caused the President headaches for the past year but which he had been reluctant to allow me to fix. Among other things, our memo outlined: possible scenarios for the upcoming presidential primary campaign and fundamental problems in the administration; problems with the workings of the National Security Council; and the need for better coordination with the speech shop and with the Vice President.

Because we wanted to underscore the seriousness of the memorandum and its recommendations, we included the following:

There was nothing in the memo I had not said to the President a number of times before—and of course, he had seen an earlier draft on Thursday evening. But the weight of all of it together in a single memo, along with our resignations, got his attention. Ford did break into a broad smile as he read the P.S. I had attached at the end: “If you can take this load and still smile, you are indeed a President.”
⁷

Ford handed the memo back to me and told us that he had to think about it. He went on to discuss normal administrative issues, as if this was any other morning meeting.
⁸
Cheney and I left the Oval Office not knowing what would happen next.

A few hours later I went back in to meet with the President and Kissinger, as scheduled. Ford seemed relaxed and confident. We sat on the couches, he in his chair in front of the fireplace. After a few pleasantries, the President calmly announced he had decided to make some major personnel changes. He informed us he had decided to replace Bill Colby as CIA director with George H. W. Bush, whom he would bring back from China, where he was serving as the U.S. emissary. He planned to nominate Elliot Richardson to be secretary of commerce, to replace the ailing Rogers Morton. Then he told Kissinger that he would be surrendering his role as national security adviser but remain secretary of state. The President added that he would be asking Dick Cheney to be the new White House chief of staff. Then he looked at me. “Don,” he said, “I want you to replace Jim Schlesinger as secretary of defense.”

After reciting this list of major moves, Ford stopped and looked at us to gauge our reactions. There was a long pause. I don't recall that Henry or I had a word to say, which was something of a first for both of us. “In truth,” Kissinger later wrote, “there was not much to say, since the President did not invite any discussion.”
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But within a few minutes, Kissinger found his voice. He expressed his concern that removing him as national security adviser could diminish his authority in international relations. He thought he would no longer be seen as a White House insider close to the President, and that it could look like he was being demoted. He made an impassioned plea that his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, be the one to replace him on the NSC to avoid that appearance.

The President looked at me. “What's your reaction?” he asked.

I was taken aback. The memo I had given him earlier contained numerous examples of how he might improve things in the White House for the better. However, while I had argued for fashioning a Ford team early in his presidency, such a dramatic shuffling of his cabinet this late was not among my recent suggestions. Still, I did not doubt that the memo Cheney and I had presented to him may have played a role in getting Ford to move—albeit in the President's own direction. “That's a pretty big load,” I said. “I want to think about it.”

After talking it over with Joyce, I went to the President the following day and told him I did not think I should go to the Defense Department. I said the time to have made major changes in his cabinet had been soon after he had taken office. Now he was within a year of the upcoming 1976 presidential election, and a Democratic-controlled Senate would need to confirm his nominees. The dramatic changes could smack of desperation. I also cautioned against removing Schlesinger. I told the President I thought that Schlesinger was a darn good secretary of defense and that I didn't know of a national security issue about which I disagreed with him. Were I at the Defense Department, I told him, I would likely be advocating policies similar to those Schlesinger had been pressing.

Ford pointed out that Schlesinger and Kissinger did not get along, and he believed that Kissinger and I would have a more collegial relationship.
^†
I said that if I were in the Pentagon, I would have no problem agreeing or disagreeing with Kissinger and having the President resolve any differences.

I reminded Ford that he and Kissinger had not sufficiently included Schlesinger in the interagency process. I told him that whoever might go to Defense would need to have an opportunity to give the President the Defense Department's views and recommendations. I was also concerned that Brent Scowcroft might not be an independent national security adviser because he had worked so closely with Henry. But Kissinger was suggesting he might resign if Scowcroft did not replace him in that role.
¹¹

Ford's assurances did not convince me I should accept the nomination. If I decided to stay in government, I was ready to have a substantive, policy-oriented position, as opposed to a staff post in the White House. On the other hand, I knew the decision to replace Schlesinger would likely be portrayed in the press as a palace coup and that could be damaging to both the President and me. But Ford was not taking no for an answer. He clearly intended to take charge of his administration.

Before deciding, I spoke to Kissinger and expressed concern that if I went to the Department of Defense, it might prove difficult for him. Kissinger had made a habit of reflexively blaming the Pentagon for leaks adverse to him and the State Department. I told him that I probably couldn't control leaks any better than Schlesinger, and that I was concerned he would go haywire on every leak he saw in the press. “You see a couple of those and you will flip out and the President will be misserved,” I said. “It strikes me that the only person you could have over there would be a perfectly submissive person…. I have never learned to kiss fannies very well, and I don't intend to start now.” Kissinger assured me that that would not be the case, and that he thought we could work together well.
¹²

I asked Ford's permission to discuss the issue with Cold War strategist Paul Nitze. When I was ambassador to NATO, Nitze had come to Brussels periodically to brief the North Atlantic Council on the strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and would stay at our guest house. I came to think of him as a man of many dimensions, immense talent, and long experience.
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There were few who understood the Cold War and the dangers posed by the Soviet Union better. Coincidentally, as I later learned, Nitze had been the one person who James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, consulted before agreeing to leave Franklin Roosevelt's White House to serve as secretary of the Navy (a post Nitze would later fill).