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By Root 1937 0

that President Ford announced in his State of the Union message on January 15, 1975. Among them was a $16 billion cut in taxes. He would advocate tax relief again at the end of 1975, insisting on fiscal discipline as well. That didn’t come naturally to the liberal Democrats who dominated the House of Representatives, but they were dealing with a president who had recently been one of their own. Jerry Ford had served on the House Appropriations Committee starting in the Truman administration and he knew the budget as well as any modern president before or after him. I once heard him correct a staff member on how many rangers were employed by the National Park Service. Late in his term, when the time came to brief the press corps on the new budget—a task usually falling to the top people at the Office of Management and Budget—the president decided to handle it himself. He laid out his priorities, his numbers, and his reasoning, then submitted to cross-examination by the press corps. The relevant policy aides and cabinet members were all there and ready to supply any details he needed. Later on, deputy OMB director Paul O’Neill told me that after witnessing a couple of these performances, many of the experts became scared of being called on. They realized that if Jerry Ford didn’t know the answer they probably wouldn’t either.

Having been on the receiving end of it for so many years, President Ford was well acquainted with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, conferring the veto power. Few presidents have put it to better use. In all he sent back sixty-six pieces of legislation to Congress, preventing billions of dollars in unnecessary spending and helping lay to rest any assumptions on Capitol Hill that the executive branch had been cowed into submission by Richard Nixon’s impeachment crisis.

The president also laid down a rule for the executive branch stating that with very few exceptions there would be no new spending initiatives. We called this mandate “No New Starts,” and it fell to me to be the enforcer. I had to defend this policy many times, and against no one more often than the vice president.

Quite apart from his personal advantages, which had instilled in him little fear of large price tags, Nelson Rockefeller had been governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. In that capacity he had conceived and executed a series of huge projects. When President Ford placed him in charge of domestic policy, new federal initiatives seemed to the vice president like the natural order of the day.

Ford held a weekly meeting with his vice president, and Rockefeller often used the time to lobby for his latest ideas. Listening to a few of those pitches myself, I could see why Ford liked and admired this man, who had natural charm and a forceful personality. After his meetings with the vice president, Ford would often call me into the Oval Office, hand me Rockefeller’s latest proposal, and say, “Dick, what do we do with this?” And each time I would reply, “Well, Mr. President, we’ll staff it out.” This meant that the idea would be circulated for general review, including a cost assessment by OMB, and that it would invariably come back with the answer that the proposal had been found inconsistent with our policy of No New Starts.

That got the job done, but in time Rockefeller came to feel frustrated with limits that struck him as arbitrary and unimaginative. Despite the serious assignments Ford gave him in such matters as reassessing CIA programs and methods, in the end Rockefeller seemed to feel, as other vice presidents had before him, that the work of the office hadn’t measured up to the title.

Ford was always sensitive to Rockefeller’s situation, having counted his months as vice president as a generally miserable experience. But Rockefeller never blamed Ford for his disappointments in office. He decided that the cause of his troubles was elsewhere—with Don Rumsfeld and that deputy of his. In my case, I suppose it must have been a little galling to see his grand ideas sandbagged by some staff aide who was exactly half his