In My Time - Dick Cheney [45]
A few days later, I was working aboard Air Force One when I found myself confronted by an extremely agitated secretary of state. Just who did I think I was, going off on my own to meet with one of “his” ambassadors? He was furious over this breach of hierarchy. And in no uncertain terms he told me that whatever nefarious things were going on with my secret meetings and back channels, they were completely unacceptable. He wanted a stop to it at once. The president would hear about this. Cooper ought to be fired on the spot. And so on.
It took some doing, but I got Henry calmed down and explained that the president had asked me to see the ambassador because he’d been thinking ahead to next year’s primary elections. John Sherman Cooper had been involved in Kentucky Republican politics since the 1920s, had been one of the state’s United States senators for more than three terms, and had served as an ambassador under Eisenhower before Ford had made him a diplomat several months before. Kentucky’s thirty-seven delegates would be up for grabs in the upcoming primary, and where Republican politics in the Bluegrass State were concerned, the man to see was John Sherman Cooper. So it was all perfectly innocent, and I assured Henry that I wasn’t doing any diplomatic maneuvering behind the master’s back. That ended my upbraiding, and it turned out that my perilous mission to the Warsaw suburbs was worth it. With a lot of good advice from Cooper, President Ford managed a come-from-behind victory in the Kentucky primary.
Actually, the closest I ever came to acting as a diplomat in those days was in my occasional role as mediator between Henry and others in the administration. One day in early 1976, the offending party, as Henry saw it, was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Pat was our ambassador to the United Nations and as his counterparts there could attest, was not the sort to keep his complaints to himself. Both men knew how to work the press too, and for some time had been taking shots at each other through unattributed quotes fed to James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times.
The final straw came on the last day of January. I’d gone with the president to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was going to kick off the 1976 bicentennial celebration with a speech in the old colonial House of Burgesses. Ford was in the very chamber where Patrick Henry, protesting the Stamp Act, had denounced King George III. But instead of sitting in the gallery witnessing this moving and historic event, I was upstairs in a cramped, stuffy closet where a White House phone line had been installed, listening to Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have at it. I must have spent an hour in that closet refereeing the fight, with my brief interjections mostly only allowing the smoke to clear so they could both reload and take aim again. It all ended with Moynihan’s resignation.
ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING, our thoughts were never very far from the impending presidential election. Ford had announced on July 8, 1975, that he would run for a full term in 1976. Although that was a fairly early start for an incumbent’s campaign, here again he was on new ground, and none of us doubted that we were going to need every bit of that time to get things up and running. Ford had never run for office outside Michigan’s 5th District, so we would have to build a national political organization virtually from scratch in less than twelve months.
The ’74 midterm elections, reflecting the fallout from Watergate and the pardon, had been a train wreck for the Republican Party and the new president. Looking