In My Time - Dick Cheney [26]
Rumsfeld came into the meeting and talked for half an hour, completely enthusiastic about OEO’s starting to make a real difference in the lives of the poor. This was not a man who had been sent to dismantle the agency. As soon as he left, a young woman came in. “Is there anybody here named Cheney?” she asked. I raised my hand and she motioned me out of the room and down a couple of corridors. “Mr. Rumsfeld would like to see you,” she said, opening a door and ushering me in.
Rumsfeld was seated at a desk and poring over a thick file. He didn’t look up, so I had a chance to observe his office. It had windows on two sides, none of them too clean, as I remember it. There was a desk, a sofa, and a coffee table that had clearly seen better days. A couple of cans were strategically placed under dark spots on the ceiling.
Finally he looked up and pointed at me. “You, you’re congressional relations,” he said. “Now get the hell out of here.”
Back in the corridor, it took me a minute to process what had just happened. It was harsher than my first encounter with Don Rumsfeld, but this time I had been offered a job. Accepting it would mean delaying my return to Wisconsin and the work on my Ph.D., but I told myself that it was only for a year, and I’d have a chance to be where the action was, where things were getting decided. I set out down the hall to find the congressional relations office, not realizing what a life-altering decision I was making. I didn’t know I was saying goodbye to the academic world forever and signing up for a forty-year career in politics and government—but it was exactly the right call.
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THE OEO CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS office was small and leaderless, and although I was still a congressional fellow, I found myself working with the House and Senate in Washington as well as with governors and legislatures across the country. The state-level relationships were frequently more complicated—and far more testy—because many governors felt that OEO’s reason for being was to make things difficult for them. Governors had the right to veto OEO programs, and the director of the agency had the right to overrule those vetoes. This situation guaranteed a lively and contentious time.
One morning soon after I arrived, I got an irate call from the governor’s office in Juneau, Alaska, about an OEO grant that was in the works. If it went forward, I was warned, the governor would veto it and we would have a real mess on our hands. I assured the voice on the phone that I would look into the situation, and after a few calls, I found the individual in our building responsible for the grant. I asked him to bring me the package so I could study it. Half an hour later, it had been delivered by hand and was locked in my desk drawer, where I intended it to stay until I could sort things out.
A couple of days later Juneau was back on the phone. The grant, which was still locked in my desk, had just been announced, and the governor was about to hold a press conference condemning the project and proclaiming his veto. I learned that there were multiple copies of the grant package and that my request for one of them had triggered an alarm that led to the speeding up of the announcement. Thus in my first days I learned a valuable lesson about dealing with bureaucracies: There is always more than one copy.
One morning I got a call from Bill Bradley, who said that Rumsfeld had asked him to meet with me. Bradley’s arrival at OEO, another example of Rumsfeld’s Princeton connection, had created a minor stir. Although he was in only his second season as forward for the New York Knicks, Bradley’s background as an Olympic champion and Rhodes scholar had already made him a national figure, and his interest in politics was widely known.