In My Time - Dick Cheney [29]
This was my first time ever outside the United States. Stepping off a plane with “United States of America” written on the side at the Cairo airport and then driving into the crowded streets of this ancient city was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Teeming with people in normal times, Cairo was packed to overflowing with mourners who had arrived from all over the country for the funeral. We stayed in a top-floor suite at Shepheard’s Hotel on the banks of the Nile, and after the principals in our party left to participate in official ceremonies, the other staffers and I gathered on the balcony. A helicopter flew overhead, carrying Nasser’s body to the headquarters of his Revolutionary Command Council on Gezira Island in the middle of the river. As the helicopter passed there was a wave of noise, a wall of high-pitched trilling coming from the crowd such as I had never heard before. By the time the body was placed on a caisson and the funeral cortege started across the Qasr al Nil Bridge, the police had lost all control of the mourning crowd. We watched people surging toward the coffin, mad with grief. Later we learned that many had been killed.
I also learned later that Rumsfeld had been down in the crowd. Ignoring all official warnings, he had followed the coffin carrying Nasser’s body across the bridge. He made it back to Shepheard’s, none the worse for wear, and the next evening our group drove out to the Mena House hotel. Rumsfeld, Elliot Richardson, and I rented camels, and wearing our dark business suits, rode out to the pyramids.
The plane ride home turned out to be just as memorable as those few days in Egypt. I got a chance to spend several hours listening to Robert Murphy and John McCloy talk and reminisce, and I realized that I was hearing history. Murphy had been an ambassador in many key posts, and he had known Nasser well. His memories, his insights, and his thoughts about how this death would impact American relations across the Middle East were fascinating. McCloy, who had been assistant secretary of war during World War II, had helped shape the postwar world as president of the World Bank and U.S. high commissioner in Germany. He was one of the “Wise Men,” the storied handful of advisors whose counsel was sought by presidents from Truman through Nixon.
Between the two of them, they had about a hundred years of diplomatic and military history and experience. Murphy described being in the room when General Omar Bradley called to fire General George Patton and relieve him of his command of the Third Army. McCloy talked about his time in the horse cavalry in the days before World War I. Listening to them was like having the history book you’re reading come to life and tell you its story.
IN DECEMBER 1970 RUMSFELD turned over the reins to Frank Carlucci and left OEO. In his nineteen months there, he had imposed management criteria and intellectual standards, ending programs that were failing and encouraging those that showed promise with the idea of eventually spinning them off. He kept the agency going and succeeded in getting it reauthorized, while he and the team around him tried mightily to carry out the president’s charge “to ask new questions and find new answers.” One of the ideas the agency tried to nurture was for school vouchers that would introduce an element of competition into education. The fierce opposition from the teachers’ unions at the idea that we would even test such a program was instructive. People with entrenched interests often like the status quo. You can find good ideas but not necessarily be able to implement them.
At OEO I also learned about the unintended consequences of government intervention in the marketplace. I remember, for example, one OEO proposal that promised to help migrant workers by moving them from Florida to South Carolina and teaching them to grow azaleas. It sounded great until someone asked how many azalea growers there already were in South Carolina and how many azalea growers South Carolina could realistically support. The answer was that the market