In My Time - Dick Cheney [48]
There was also the crucial matter of the vice presidency. Rockefeller had been very loyal to the president, but I believed he would be a huge liability in the upcoming battle with Ronald Reagan. The only way Ford could win was by capturing part of the conservative base that leaned toward Reagan. That would be impossible if his running mate were Nelson Rockefeller, the same man who had tried to stop Barry Goldwater in 1964. And if it became known that Rockefeller would not be on the ticket, we could expect a number of Republican leaders to support Ford with an eye to being chosen as his running mate.
I wasn’t shy about making my point of view known, but having handed over the campaign portfolio to me, Don was more focused on improving the internal functioning of the White House. He began working on what turned out to be a very long memo to the president, urging him to remedy such matters as lack of accountability on the part of White House staff and lack of coordination across policy areas. I had some ideas for it too, and it grew into a pretty frank document.
In order to convey how seriously we viewed the situation and to give the president complete freedom to make necessary changes, we both wrote out and signed resignation letters. This wasn’t a matter of saying unless you accept our recommendations, we will quit; rather, we were telling Ford that if his idea of changes included moving us out, we’d make it easy for him.
Near the end of October 1975, the president caught a bad cold and spent a couple of days upstairs in the White House residence instead of coming to work in the West Wing. Don and I took advantage of the opportunity to go see him and lay out our concerns and recommendations. It was clear that the president himself had come to some of the same conclusions, and within days he would carry out a sweeping set of changes.
He personally told Rockefeller that he would not be on the ticket in 1976. The vice president was obviously disappointed, but he remained loyal to the president to the end and delivered New York’s delegates to Ford at the convention. Henry Kissinger agreed to step down as national security advisor while continuing as secretary of state—there being no question that he retained the full confidence of the president as his chief foreign policy advisor. His deputy, Brent Scowcroft, moved into the NSC job.
Jim Schlesinger was relieved of his position as secretary of defense. Although Jim was a very talented man with an impressive résumé, he had not endeared himself to the president. As we were pulling out of Vietnam, miscommunication between the Pentagon and the White House had resulted in an announcement that all Americans had been safely evacuated from Saigon, when in fact sixty-one marines remained on the grounds of the embassy. The president had never forgotten that embarrassment, nor had he ever forgiven Schlesinger for launching a verbal assault on the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. After Congress had rejected our defense budget, the president asked Schlesinger to make an unapologetic case for it, but Ford was stunned when he got reports of his defense secretary going after the chairman, George Mahon of Texas. Mahon was a longtime colleague of Ford’s on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and one of his dearest friends.
Schlesinger did not go quietly. The president later told me that his parting with Jim was one of the most unpleasant sessions he ever had.
Another change came at the CIA, where Director Bill Colby had become something of a liability because of all the controversy surrounding allegations of wrongdoing by the agency. Bill had begun his intelligence career in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He was the station chief in Saigon during most of the Vietnam War. In 1973 Nixon chose him to replace Schlesinger when he moved Jim from the CIA to the Pentagon. Now Bill clearly knew another change was coming. In fact, I had a feeling he was