In My Time - Dick Cheney [73]
My biggest frustration with President Carter arose while I was serving as secretary of defense. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were working to get U.N. Security Council approval of a resolution authorizing the use of force to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1990–91. We found out that former President Carter was actively lobbying against the U.S. position. He had contacted heads of government with seats on the Security Council and urged them to oppose our resolution. His intervention was ineffective—and also totally inappropriate for a former president.
Many years later, long after they had both left office, President Ford developed a strong friendship with the man who had handed him the only electoral defeat in his long career. He used to take a certain delight in letting me know that he disagreed with my rather harsh judgment of his successor. Near the end of his days, President Ford spent a good deal of time planning the details of his state funeral. He must have had a good laugh setting down the arrangements for the burial near his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, which required the Cheneys and the Carters, together with the Rumsfelds, to spend the afternoon in close quarters.
THE PENDULUM CAN SWING fast in presidential politics, and it looked as if 1980—only six years after Nixon’s resignation and four years after Jimmy Carter’s election—was going to be a very good year for Republicans. Ronald Reagan was the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination, and nearly every Republican officeholder was now a Reaganite, including many of us who had supported Jerry Ford four years earlier.
President Ford had briefly considered the possibility of making another run for the White House. Early in the year he asked a group of us who had worked for him to visit Palm Springs, California, to discuss the subject. Among those attending were Jack Marsh, Stu Spencer, and Bob Teeter. We spent the better part of a day discussing the possibility of mounting a campaign at this relatively late date and his prospects of capturing the GOP nomination.
At the end of the day, he said he wanted to sleep on it. The next morning when he reconvened the group of advisors, he announced that he really did not want to be a candidate in 1980. He said that he simply wasn’t prepared to subject himself to the rigors of another national campaign. By this time he had acquired a very nice home on a golf course in the desert near Palm Springs and built a new home in the mountains in Beaver Creek, Colorado. He was earning a good living in the private sector. I always believed that he felt an obligation to consider the possibility of mounting a campaign in 1980, in part because he was still smarting from the closeness of his defeat in 1976, and in part because he really didn’t like the idea of Ronald Reagan as the nominee. But when he focused on what a national campaign would require of him, he had little interest.
IN WYOMING I HAD worked hard to build a strong political base and to head off any serious opposition, and I pretty much succeeded. I had no Republican challengers in 1980, and the four-man Democratic primary was won by Jim Rogers, a bartender from Lyman, a small town in the remote southwest corner of the state. Rumor had it that he had meant to run for the state legislature but checked the wrong box when filing his papers. I had to go through the motions of a campaign—fund-raising, advertising, and making public appearances—but I coasted to an