In My Time - Dick Cheney [23]
RIGHT AFTER THE NEW year, I began work in—literally in—Bill Steiger’s office. With my desk right there I either monitored or participated in all his meetings and phone calls. He also included me along with his staff members at many of his committee meetings.
On January 14, 1969, President Johnson came to Capitol Hill, the site of his rise to power and so many of his triumphs, to deliver his last State of the Union message. Steiger was able to get me onto the floor of the House, and I stood at the back watching this impressive but rather melancholy ceremony unfold. The usually confident and dynamic president seemed restrained and ruminative as he spoke about what he had tried to accomplish and about how he hoped history would view him. I had the strong impression that in his mind he was already back at the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas.
A couple of days later, I was attending a meeting of the House Education and Labor Committee at which a Johnson administration official was testifying. I noticed that one part of his testimony directly contradicted something that the president had said in his speech. Bill Steiger wasn’t there at the moment, so I got a copy of Johnson’s text, circled the difference, and pointed it out to one of the committee staffers. He told me to show it to Al Quie of Minnesota, the ranking Republican in attendance that day. I walked up and slid it onto the desk in front of Quie. He looked up, and although he clearly had no idea who I was, he took the paper, read it, and then used it to ask the witness some very pointed questions. I savored the moment. It was the first time I had actually been engaged, in however peripheral and minor a way, in the great process that I was observing.
Of course most of the work of a congressional office is far less exciting and dramatic. One of my main assignments was Dutch elm disease, which by then had blighted much of the country, killing elm trees that had been a hallmark of the American landscape for centuries. By the late 1960s the epidemic had reached Wisconsin, and Steiger’s office was deluged with letters and calls, many of which I answered.
ON APRIL 21 President Nixon nominated Don Rumsfeld to be the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. OEO had been created by Lyndon Johnson as part of his Great Society program to provide grants and economic development aid to lower-income areas of the country. The announcement of Rumsfeld’s nomination was met with skepticism and surprise. Nixon had campaigned against OEO and Rumsfeld had voted against it. It was widely thought that Nixon wanted someone to oversee the dismantling of the agency, but that was a mistaken assumption.
Rumsfeld immediately asked Steiger to join the informal brain trust he was mobilizing to help him prepare for Senate confirmation. Because of the reading and work I had been doing for Steiger for the Education and Labor Committee, I was up to speed on OEO. Over a weekend I wrote a long memo about how I thought Rumsfeld should handle his confirmation hearings and how he might organize and manage the place once he was in charge. Steiger was very complimentary about the memo and asked if I would mind if he passed it along to Rumsfeld. Of course I had no objections. Then I heard nothing more about it.
AS LYNNE AND I knew well from our time at the University of Wisconsin, American college