In My Time - Dick Cheney [33]
A year after I heard President Nixon tell the Khrushchev story, he imposed another price freeze, apparently hoping in the midst of Watergate for some political benefit. But he didn’t get it. Among other things, the freeze made raising animals for market unprofitable. A Texas hatchery drowned forty-three thousand baby chicks. Pigs and cows were slaughtered—and the president announced an early end to his 1973 effort to freeze prices.
By this time I had grown wary of government economic control. At the start of my tenure at the Cost of Living Council, when I had been immersed in getting things going, I hadn’t had much time to think about it, but by now I realized that every day millions of people were making millions of economic decisions, and it didn’t matter how smart we were or how many regulations we wrote. There wasn’t any way we could intervene without doing more harm than good.
These thoughts confirmed my innate skepticism about what government could and couldn’t do. We could write checks, and we could collect taxes. We could run the whole military and defense side of things. But when something as big and ham-handed as the federal government tries to run something as complex and dynamic as the American economy, the result is sure to be a train wreck.
AT CLC RUMSFELD CONTINUED his usual pace, in early, out late, and cramming more into his average day than many manage in a busy week. And he was sending out hundreds of small notes, requests for information or demands for action that were so numerous we called them “snowflakes.” His secretary, Brenda Williams, would type them up in memo form for forwarding to the relevant departments or individuals. Lest the whole place be overwhelmed, however, she would bring the snowflake memos to me first, so I could try to put them in some kind of realistic priority, based on my knowledge of what Rumsfeld really wanted and needed. I would decide which ones should be sent and which could probably be safely ignored. Brenda kept copies of both in separate files.
One morning my direct line from Rumsfeld rang. “Get down here now,” he said. When I rushed in, Brenda was already there. Rumsfeld was looking at two substantial piles of paper on his desk. I could see that they were the carbon copies of the snowflakes and I could figure out what the two piles represented—what we’d sent and what we hadn’t.
After a moment of silence, he said calmly, “I just want you to know that I know what you’re doing.” That was it. And that was all. We were dismissed and we returned sheepishly to our desks—and continued exactly as before. But we had shared what I think of as a classic Don Rumsfeld moment. He had somehow figured out what we were doing. He didn’t say that we had been wrong. And he didn’t tell us not to do it anymore. But he wanted us to know that he knew. So he told us and let us draw our own conclusions.
ON JUNE 12, 1972, George Shultz, who had been director of the Office of Management and Budget, was sworn in as secretary of the Treasury. On his first day in his new office, Secretary Shultz scheduled a meeting with the CLC senior staff. He closed the door, sat down, and said, “Okay, gentlemen, the first thing we’re going to do is get out of these controls.”
And that is what we did. We put together a strategy for moving into Phase Three (which would depend on voluntary self-restraint by business and labor regarding increases in prices and wages), and, finally, into Phase Four (which was intended to complete the return to the free market). Rumsfeld and I left the Cost of Living Council before these strategies were fully implemented. Others would oversee the process by which a massive interference with the American economy ended nearly three years after it had begun. Or mostly ended.