In My Time - Dick Cheney [81]
But then came allegations of drinking and womanizing, and Tower’s prospects sank. On Thursday, March 9, 1989, the day of the Senate vote on the Tower nomination, I got a morning phone call from John Sununu, President Bush’s chief of staff. The White House knew it didn’t have the votes for confirmation, Sununu said, and the president wanted to move forward quickly with a choice for the job who could be confirmed and get to work. Could I come by the White House and offer some advice on a Plan B?
Sununu wanted to meet at four in the afternoon, but I had a conflict, an appearance on the television show Evans & Novak that I had agreed to tape. I said I would stop by the White House afterward. At the Evans & Novak taping, the Tower nomination’s imminent defeat and the question of whom the president would turn to next were the main topics. Neither Bob Novak nor Rowland Evans asked me who I thought the next nominee would be, but as I sat listening, cameras rolling, they discussed the next steps with each other. With an air of great authority, Novak declared, “I’ve got it, guaranteed, it’s going to be Bobby Inman!” After the announcement of my nomination the next day, Evans and Novak had to scrap the show and scramble to tape a new one. Novak, whom I liked a lot, despite his irascibility, later said that he was furious with me, but, in my defense, it’s worth noting that nobody had asked for my prediction.
After the taping I headed down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill to the White House, where I met with Sununu and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft in John’s office in the southwest corner of the West Wing, the same office I had occupied when I was chief of staff more than a decade earlier. By this time John Tower’s nomination had been voted down, 53 to 47, and Brent began the conversation by asking my advice on possible replacements. “What about Rumsfeld?” I asked. Don had been secretary of defense before and was a man of enormous talent. That idea was quickly rejected, though, because there was a history of hard feelings that had been made worse by the New Hampshire primary in 1988. Rumsfeld had endorsed Bob Dole the weekend before the primary, which George H. W. Bush then won. I never heard Bush say anything negative about Rumsfeld, but Sununu made it clear at this meeting that Rumsfeld was a nonstarter.
Not long into the conversation, Scowcroft asked me directly, “What about you? Would you consider it?” I wasn’t completely surprised. I had begun to catch on that there was something going on here beyond just consulting me for my views. We talked about the job of secretary of defense, its importance, and the president’s priorities for the department. I told them I needed some time to think about it and to talk to my family, and we agreed I would call Sununu in the morning to tell him whether I wanted to take the next step. If I did, they would arrange for me to see the president. This was a pretty standard way of handling big personnel decisions such as this one. A president’s staff never wants to put him in the position of offering someone a job until they know his offer will be accepted.
Lynne and I were scheduled to have dinner that night at La Colline restaurant, near the Capitol, with old friends from Wyoming, Tom and Marta Stroock. Tom had recommended me for admission to Yale thirty years earlier, and despite my less than stellar record there, we’d stayed close friends. I wasn’t able to talk about the White House meeting at the dinner, and I couldn’t talk about it with Lynne on the way home, either. As the House Republican whip I had a car and driver, and I didn’t want to discuss something this sensitive in front of anyone except my family.
When we got home and I finally told Lynne, she was suitably impressed with the poker face I’d managed through the evening. Our daughter Mary, home from Colorado College on spring vacation, told us that while we had been at dinner, she had answered a call from a White House operator. Secretary of State Jim Baker was trying to reach me. As the three of us sat around the