In My Time - Dick Cheney [28]
Louie Nunn went through the roof, and Rumsfeld found himself in a meeting with Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, who had taken Nunn’s call. Ehrlichman conveyed the governor’s particular unhappiness that some interloper named Cheney had undercut his authority, and he suggested sending a White House team to investigate, a step Rumsfeld argued against. Because the basic question was whether the operation was illegal, Rumsfeld suggested sending the FBI. I was not surprised when I heard that the FBI reached the same conclusion I had, and the veto override stood.
ON APRIL 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese had been stockpiling ammunition and staging troops for the war in South Vietnam.
Meeting President Nixon for the first time with Don Rumsfeld in the Oval Office in 1970. I had seen President Johnson at his last address to a joint session of Congress in January 1969. I’d also seen President Kennedy when he visited the University of Wyoming in 1962, and President Harry Truman in 1948 when he’d done a whistle stop tour campaigning through Nebraska, but Nixon was the first president I’d ever met. (Official White House Photo)
Shortly after that, on May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen, sent into Kent State University after protestors burned down the ROTC building, shot and killed four students and wounded others. A hundred thousand protestors, mostly students, descended on Washington, causing enough apprehension that the Secret Service arranged to ring the White House complex with D.C. Transit buses parked so closely together that no one could squeeze between them. Someone decided that it would be a good idea if some young White House staffers could be found to go out beyond the wall of buses, talk to some of the demonstrators, and judge their mood.
And so it was on a mild May afternoon that Rumsfeld and I, our jackets and ties left in the West Wing, walked the few blocks to the National Mall. We had a few intense discussions with protestors along the way, but this was not a threatening crowd. As we got close to the long Reflecting Pool, we noticed a commotion, as though someone had fallen in. On closer inspection we could see that a few young women, naked from the waist up, were cavorting in the shallow water and being cheered on by a fast-growing audience.
We soon realized that one of the cavorters worked for us at OEO. We had inherited her as a photographer in the press office, and she had made an impression as a free spirit even before the day she photographed the ceremony in which Rumsfeld awarded a grant to the Navajo Tribal Council. She arrived dressed head to toe as a Native American in a costume straight out of a thirties Hollywood western, complete with a fringed beaded dress and feathers in her hair.
Now here she was, topless in the Reflecting Pool. In those days, there were free spirits everywhere, it seemed, even in a bureaucracy like the OEO.
IN SEPTEMBER 1970 Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, died of a heart attack while hosting a summit of the Arab League. President Nixon appointed an official delegation to his funeral that included Rumsfeld, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Elliot Richardson, veteran diplomat Robert Murphy, and the distinguished lawyer and banker John McCloy.
Rumsfeld called and asked if I would like to accompany him as his staff member. I’d have to pack a bag and get out to Andrews Air Force Base, which was easy to do, but the fact that I didn’t have a passport was a bit of a problem. The solution was to get a letter on State Department letterhead signed by the country director for Egypt. Dated September 30, 1970, it certified that I was an employee of the U.S. government and that I’d been born in Lincoln, Nebraska. It also said I was “the bearer of Office of Economic Opportunity Identification card No. 6427, which bears a photograph.” I folded the letter neatly and tucked it inside my coat pocket, not sure it would work if put to the test, but more than willing to take the risk.