In My Time - Dick Cheney [31]
WITH THE 1972 PRESIDENTIAL election now less than two years away, I began to do a little work on some campaign-related projects, mostly with Bart Porter, who, along with Jeb Magruder, had moved from the White House staff to the Nixon reelection committee. The campaign’s strategy was to keep the president above the fray while others blanketed the country making his case and singing his praises. Porter asked for my help setting up the recruitment and scheduling of these presidential surrogates, who would include Republican congressional leaders, cabinet officers, and administration officials.
I enjoyed the world of elective politics, and it was interesting to work with so many different people. Our roster of political surrogates read like a Who’s Who of heavy hitters. Our ranks of celebrities, however, were somewhat thinner. While the McGovern campaign was working with Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Shirley MacLaine, Carole King, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, and Quincy Jones, we were scheduling immensely talented but lesser-known luminaries such as Buddy Ebsen, Chad Everett, and Ruta Lee.
As the reelection operation began moving into higher gear, I had conversations with Porter about the possibility of my moving over to the campaign. It was an interesting idea. The campaign was clearly going to be where all the action was for the next year.
About this time the president announced a plan to fight inflation and named Rumsfeld to run the Cost of Living Council, the organization that would be in charge. When Rumsfeld asked me to go with him as an assistant director, he emphasized that the decision was mine to make and that he would fully understand if I chose to work with the campaign.
I sometimes think about how different things would have been if I hadn’t gone with him to the Cost of Living Council. Although the Committee to Re-Elect the President raised unprecedented amounts of money and delivered a landslide, it was a troubled and troubling place. All that money turned out to be the root of many evils, and both Porter and Magruder ended up serving prison sentences. None of this touched the surrogate and scheduling operations, but within a few years, association with the CRP would be an albatross on anyone’s résumé.
RICHARD NIXON’S REELECTION WAS far from a sure thing. It looked very much as though the war in Vietnam, which he had said when he was campaigning in 1968 he knew how to end, would be an issue again in 1972. Meanwhile, the hefty bills for Lyndon Johnson’s determination to fight the war in Vietnam and fund his Great Society at home had come due. The inflation rate that had hovered comfortably around 1.5 percent at the beginning of the 1960s had climbed to 5 percent. The unemployment rate had nearly doubled to 6 percent.
The Democratic majority in Congress was urging the president to use powers they had given him when they passed the Economic Stabilization Act, legislation that effectively authorized him to commandeer the economy by imposing controls on wages, prices, salaries, and rents. The Democrats voted these extraordinary powers confident that no Republican president, much less a solid free market one named Richard Nixon, would ever use them, and in the meantime, they could criticize him for not taking action. But Nixon took them up on their offer, and on Sunday night, August 15, 1971, he announced a freeze for ninety days on all wages and prices. The Cost of Living Council was created to monitor the freeze and to achieve an orderly return to the free market when the ninety-day period was over.
The freeze was simple enough. Nobody was to raise wages or prices. But the