In My Time - Dick Cheney [35]
FROM THE OPENING OF the Senate Watergate committee hearings in May 1973 until the House Judiciary Committee voted out three articles of impeachment in July 1974, the flow of stories and leaks and charges went on day after day, week after week, month after month. The scandal unfolded like a novel, with one stunning revelation after another, most of them coming by way of the Washington Post. Many mornings Lynne and I didn’t want to wait for the newspaper to be delivered to our door, so one of us would leave our Bethesda house in the predawn hours and walk to a nearby street corner, where a delivery truck dropped off bundles of the Post. We’d extract a copy, leave a note for the paper boy telling him not to deliver us another one, and then head home to read about the unraveling of the Nixon administration. It was a sad and amazing spectacle, and as I watched the story unwind, I felt a sense of relief in being away from the whole thing.
Deciding to get out of government when Don Rumsfeld departed for Brussels was turning out to be one of my wiser choices in life. I had no idea that I was soon to be drawn back in.
A phone call was my first indication. It came on August 8, after I’d had dinner at the northwest Washington home of our friends Bill and Janet Walker. My family was in Wyoming, so the Walkers had invited me over, and we watched President Nixon announce that he would resign the next day. When I got back to my empty house in Bethesda, the phone was ringing. It was Lee Goodell, Don’s assistant, telling me that Don had been asked to come back to Washington by Vice President Gerald Ford. Would I meet his flight, she asked?
The next day I watched President Nixon’s farewell address on a television set in my H Street office. I watched the Fords walk him out to the helicopter and saw Gerald Ford sworn in at noon. Then I headed for Dulles International Airport, where Rumsfeld’s plane would soon be landing.
CHAPTER THREE
Backseat
While I waited for Rumsfeld’s flight, I was joined by a White House driver carrying a message for Don. The new president wanted Rumsfeld to head up his transition team. As we left the airport and headed for D.C. in the White House car, Don showed me the message and asked me if I would take a few weeks off from my job to help him out. It wasn’t a question I had to think twice about. A president had just resigned under the most extraordinary circumstances, another had been sworn in, and I had a chance to assist in the changeover.
As we drove into the White House complex through the southwest gate, I couldn’t help but think with amazement that I had left government eighteen months ago, and now here I was right back in it. I was fully aware that the fact that I had left before Watergate erupted was one of the reasons I was here, and the same was true of Don. He and I had one other advantage. We were both young and foolish enough to think there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do.
The transition office was in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, and I spent the next ten days there, writing and reviewing sections of the transition report. I wasn’t senior enough to be in the meetings with the president, but the orders I got secondhand were unequivocal and unmistakable: We were to stick to organizational and domestic matters. President Ford didn’t want any recommendations for changing foreign policy. He believed that continuity there was essential. Indeed, on the night before he became president, he had stepped outside his house in Virginia to announce that Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger would be staying on.
Perhaps the new president’s most pressing