In My Time - Dick Cheney [50]
At the Texas State Fair during the 1976 presidential campaign with my aide, Foster Channock. (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)
I was pretty good at hiring and apparently not bad at firing, either, since I was so often given the responsibility. Along the way I had to relieve the White House social secretary, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the agriculture secretary, Ford’s campaign manager, and a few others of their duties. My method was direct: no hints, cold shoulders, or slow, agonizing departures. Those were not good for anyone—neither the president nor the person being fired. Anyone failing to serve the president’s interests, intentionally or not, simply needed to move along.
One internal problem that never did get entirely fixed was in the speechwriting shop, which had remained the preserve of Bob Hartmann even after his relocation from alongside the Oval Office. During the transition from Nixon to Ford, in part because Bob was involved and in part because we had no alternative clearly in mind, we had passed too quickly over the question of where to place authority for speechwriting. As a result, it had never become fully integrated with the policy and political elements of the White House staff. It went its own way, following its own agenda and its own rules. The rule that Hartmann tried hardest to impose, for example, held that a speech draft could not be reviewed by staff until the president had seen it, and after that no changes could be made because, of course, the president had already seen it.
Even in the very last week of the 1976 campaign, when you would expect every man with an oar to be rowing in the same direction, we were still having to deal with this problem. In late October we were flying with the president to Pittsburgh, where he was to deliver a policy speech the next morning. A familiar disagreement over competing drafts prompted Hartmann to fire Pat Butler, one of the junior members of his staff. Bob and I had it out, right then and there—rather loudly as I recall—while Pat went off to ponder the prospects of a young man who had just been fired aboard Air Force One. When things quieted down, the speech question was settled in my favor, and I told Pat that if Hartmann had fired him, then I was now rehiring him, and throwing in a raise.
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I LED THE WHITE HOUSE staff for a total of fourteen months. I stepped into the job just as the ’76 campaign was beginning to dominate our schedule, and thinking back on those days, the memories are mostly of being with President Ford on Air Force One or in a motorcade or some hotel suite somewhere.
We got off to a good start by squeaking out a victory in the New Hampshire primary. Even more crucial than the prize of seventeen out of twenty-one delegates was the gain in morale. New Hampshire was widely considered Reagan country. Despite the widely anticipated and projected results, Ford had defied expectations and shown that Reagan was not unbeatable after all. It was Ford’s first electoral victory anywhere outside of greater Grand Rapids, and it was Reagan’s first electoral defeat anywhere.
In fact, as it turned out, one of the things we had going for us in New Hampshire was the widespread assumption that we had no chance there. The state’s governor, Meldrim Thomson, had