In My Time - Dick Cheney [56]
The trouble came with a question to the president from Max Frankel of the New York Times. It concerned America’s dealings with the Soviets, and Frankel implied that the Helsinki Accords constituted acceptance of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. That hit a sore spot with Ford, who felt that Helsinki had been misrepresented, and in the course of his answer the president declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” When Frankel pressed him again, the president clarified his answer some: “The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
Watching this on television from the green room behind the stage, I thought it sounded odd, but I didn’t expect it to be much of a problem. In fact, when the full ninety minutes were up, I thought that apart from that one misstep, Ford had put in another solid performance. Not long afterward, however, when Stu Spencer and I paid the usual post-event call on the press corps, I knew something bad was up when my friend Lou Cannon of the Washington Post saw me and called out, “Hey, Cheney, how many Soviet divisions are there in Poland?”
The president’s slip-up, which some were already calling the “liberation” of Eastern Europe, was the only story of the night. Our field poll conducted during the debate registered no adverse impact from Ford’s statement. But the press and the Carter campaign were working on that, and by the next day we were hurting badly. As we boarded Air Force One for the hour-long flight to Los Angeles, I was sure that nothing short of a retraction would do. Ford would simply have to admit that he misspoke, offer a clarification, and get this thing behind us.
The moment we were in the air, I made straight for the president’s cabin and laid it on the line. He was unconvinced, insisting it was an innocent mistake that voters wouldn’t hold against him—of course the leader of the free world understood that Soviet forces were not in Eastern Europe by invitation. When Ford sent me away, I went for reinforcements and came back with Stu Spencer, who helped explain to the president that this was bigger than he thought.
Okay, Ford finally agreed. He’d try to clear it up at the next stop. But even the statement he offered soon afterward at the University of Southern California and yet another statement the next morning to a San Fernando Valley business group did nothing to get us out of the fix we were in. Someone had to tell the president that his two “clarifications” were just not clear enough. He needed to face the problem and the press directly, and it had to happen immediately, before he left Southern California.
When Spencer and I finally got him cornered and the president agreed to meet the problem head-on, we were in the mayor’s office at the city hall in Glendale. Ford had just addressed a rally outside, and I’d been back talking to reporters, who were enjoying all of this a little too much. By now they were writing about almost nothing else. I told the president that we could set up the press in the back parking lot and he could clean things up once and for all right there.
Even then he needed persuading, but we didn’t let up, until finally he said, “Oh, all right, I’ll do it.” As press secretary Ron Nessen shepherded the press into place, we went carefully over what Ford was going to say. When it was time to go out, I was still worried that he wouldn’t be as blunt and direct as the moment required, so I said, “Mr. President, do you have firmly fixed in your mind what it is you want to say?” He spun around on me and said, jabbing a finger in my chest with every word, “Poland is not dominated by the Soviet Union!” The tension broke with a good laugh, and his performance with the press a few moments later showed the candidate at his best.
There was no getting around the setback