Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [105]
“Look, I’m running,” Ford said with a strength and decisiveness that pleased me. “It will be a tough race, but I’m not going to pull a Johnson [and bow out]. It will be bloody right down to the last gong if Reagan runs.”1
I had raised the troublesome issues I saw with him many times: a poorly coordinated speech shop; an unmanageable vice president; a marginalized secretary of defense leading to an unbalanced NSC; press leaks; and the like. He knew that I thought his White House needed significant changes if he were to have a successful presidency, fend off the Reagan challenge, and win in the general election.
Apparently change was on the President’s mind as well—but instead of the administrative fixes I had been proposing for months, he was thinking of personnel changes.
“You know, there are funny things you think of just before you go to sleep,” he said. He told us he had gotten so angry at Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger over a recent dustup Schlesinger had had with a senior Democratic congressman who was a close friend of Ford’s that he told Cheney and me that he was considering replacing Schlesinger with Rockefeller and naming George H. W. Bush as his vice president. I had listened to President Nixon muse on various occasions about possible cabinet shake-ups during his administration. These generally proved to be simply ideas tossed out to see how others would react. And indeed, as Ford talked, he sounded like he was thinking more about after the election, if he won his own term.2 What Ford did not know at the time was that I was planning one last-ditch effort to convey my sense of urgency to him.
In Ford administration lore, the events that soon followed became known as the Halloween Massacre. According to some press accounts, I played a driving role, arranging for the President to dispatch all of my enemies in one swoop so that I could be vice president. The massacre mythology, in fact, became one of the building blocks of my image in some quarters as a master behind-the-scenes operator. The facts of those next few days tell a far different and less tidy human story.
Since the day I arrived as chief of staff, I had been planning to leave the White House by 1975. The President and I had originally discussed my staying for six months. It had now been a year. After almost two decades in government service, I was ready to leave and find a way to pay for college tuitions for our children. I began to talk to a few close friends back home in Chicago about what I might do in the private sector when I left the administration. At the same time, I cared about President Ford and wanted him to succeed.
Over the course of several weeks, I prepared a memorandum for the President that became a lengthy and somewhat repetitious collection of the same advice and recommendations I had been making since the day he took office. I took Cheney into my confidence and asked him to look at it. He not only agreed with the sentiments, but added his own touches, and said he would like to sign on to it as well. The memo grew to be almost thirty pages long, and I thought hard about whether and when to give it to the President. One of the rules I developed as a chief of staff was, “Don’t accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the President that you are free to tell him what you think ‘with the bark off’ and you have the relationship and the courage to do it.” I ultimately decided that I owed it to Gerald Ford to follow my own rule.
I tried to prepare Ford for what was coming. On the evening of Thursday, October 23, when Cheney and I met with him, the President had a cold and seemed discouraged. I gave him a draft of our memo to review, so he could prepare to discuss it, since it was long. Because of the sensitive nature of the document, I asked him to read it and give it back to me personally the next morning, so there wouldn’t be a copy in the White House staffing system.
As Ford thumbed through it, I explained to him that the concerns expressed in the memo