Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [115]
I asked Goldwater how he thought my nomination was being received. “Don, it’s going to be fine,” Goldwater replied. “I have been talking to some of the senators.”
“Do you foresee any problems?” I asked.
“There are a few who have questions,” he conceded. Some, for example, were worried that as the youngest secretary of defense in history, I wouldn’t be tough enough to hold my own against Kissinger.1
“Well, what are you saying to persuade those folks?” I asked him.
“Don, I’m telling them the truth,” Goldwater responded, his voice a soft growl. “I’m telling them that you’re going to be the best damn secretary of defense they’ve ever seen, and that if you aren’t, I’ll kick your ass up between your shoulder blades.”
On Wednesday, November 12, 1975, I entered room 1114 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which was named for my old Illinois colleague in the Congress, to testify at my confirmation hearing to become the nation’s thirteenth secretary of defense.* The hearing was dominated by the urgent national security issue of the day: the Cold War. Millions of Americans have since come of age without knowing the fear of a nuclear exchange between two superpowers. But as I went through the confirmation process, the Soviet Union posed what was widely considered, as President Kennedy had put it, a “clear and present danger.”
In anticipation of a possible nuclear attack, a number of American homes were built with bunkers in which families could seek refuge from nuclear fallout. Children practiced survival drills in schools in the event of a nuclear strike. The U.S. Capitol building had so-called safe areas stored with supplies of food in the event of an attack. Many public officials believed, as I did, that the Soviet Union’s ambitions were aggressive, its agents were global, and its supporters were on the offensive.
While America had been preoccupied in Southeast Asia, the Soviets had broadened their empire-building efforts to nearly every continent of the world. The Soviets still held a firm grip on the occupied nations behind the Iron Curtain. They were funneling arms to nations and to anti-democratic revolutionary groups in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Around the time of my confirmation, the African nation of Angola took center stage. Supported by money and weapons from the Soviet Union and thousands of Cuban troops, Marxists threatened to seize control of the country. In late November 1975, President Ford and Secretary Kissinger made a strong public push for official support of pro-Western forces in Angola. Congress responded by doing exactly the opposite. They passed an amendment effectively prohibiting the United States from providing assistance to Angola.2 Ford was outraged.†
Without American assistance to fend off the Marxist rebels, Angola became a Communist dictatorship. More worrisome, the Soviet Union came away believing it had a free hand on the continent of Africa, and possibly elsewhere. Nations friendly to America began to wonder, as the South Vietnamese and their neighbors had, whether American assurances of aid and security were reliable. Indeed, within the next few years, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Grenada, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan would come under Communist domination. “The general crisis of capitalism is continuing to deepen,” Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed in 1976.4
A period of heightened concern over espionage preoccupied our allies in Europe. Intelligence officials saw Soviet influence behind desertions in the Dutch army. There were concerns about reports that Soviet sleeper cells in Western Europe were waiting to be activated by Communist powers in the Warsaw Pact.5 “There is afoot an enterprise of demoralization of armies on a French and European level,” the French Secretary