In My Time - Dick Cheney [22]
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