In My Time - Dick Cheney [38]
But for the most part, the new people were green. And being green in Washington—as I had discovered when I thought I had solved the Alaska OEO grant problem by locking the paperwork up in my desk—can create problems. The mechanism, for example, by which material and memos were circulated for comment and review before going to the president was still entirely in the hands of Nixon holdovers. The new Ford staffers, many of whom were still isolated across the street from the White House in the Old Executive Office Building, didn’t even realize that they were out of the information loop.
One obstacle to bringing order to the White House in the early months was President Ford’s preferred model of White House organization, a design he described as the “spokes of the wheel” model, which was based on the way he had structured his congressional and committee staffs. The idea was to have eight or nine senior advisors each reporting directly to him, without any one having authority over the rest. It was a collegial style of doing business that had served him well for twenty-five years on the Hill as a representative from Michigan, and he assumed it would work in the White House. There was also a widespread belief that Watergate had been caused in part by Bob Haldeman’s domination of the White House staff, and Ford saw “spokes of the wheel” as a healthy break from the past. The problem was that it soon became clear it didn’t work. It took a while, but the president finally agreed that he needed someone on the staff who could wield real authority, a conclusion that all his successors have ratified.
In the last days of the Ford administration, among the gifts given me by my staff was a bicycle wheel with all the spokes destroyed except one, and it came with a plaque: “The ‘spokes of the wheel,’ a rare form of management artistry as devised by Gerald Ford and modified by Dick Cheney.” When the Carter people came in, I passed it along to my successor, Hamilton Jordan.
My desk in the West Wing was a cubbyhole outside Don’s office, nothing to impress visitors, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. Don was the toughest boss I’d ever had—or ever would have. He demanded a high level of performance, and if you came through, your reward was more work. He expected loyalty, but he also knew it is a two-way street. And you could count on his word. Don had assured me when I accepted the job as his deputy that he would do everything he could to give me a real piece of the action, to see that I had regular access to the president, and to share as much as possible his own responsibilities. And that’s exactly the way it worked out. From the beginning I was in the Oval Office almost every day, sometimes with Don and sometimes not. Partly to dramatize the change of leaders and partly just to introduce himself to the American people, Ford made many trips around the country. Don and I quickly figured out that given all there was to do, it didn’t make much sense for both of us to accompany the president. Within weeks I was traveling with the president on my own.
One problem we had was allocating and optimizing the president’s time. His longtime executive secretary, Mildred Leonard, had run the Ford congressional office for a quarter century, and she still felt free to commit him to seeing anyone who called her and passed her muster. One time, as I was leaving the Oval Office with a high-level foreign official, we had to make our way through