Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [126]
I was at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from the surgery when Dick Cheney called me from Air Force One. He and the President were on their way to the Kansas City convention. Because of the operation, I wasn’t able to talk yet, so Joyce took the call. Dick asked how I was doing, and then passed along a message from the President.
“Tell Don that we’re going to win the nomination and keep him in his job,” Cheney said. It was a graceful way to tell Joyce and me what I already believed. I was not going to be Ford’s vice presidential choice. His selection turned out to be a friend from my days in Congress, Bob Dole of Kansas.
At the convention, President Ford defeated Governor Reagan on the first ballot by 117 votes. A narrow victory for a sitting president, but it was preferable to the alternative.
With the economy in recession, the pardon of Nixon still a sore point, and a long, heated primary campaign just over, Ford started the fall campaign behind the Democratic candidate, Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter, by thirty points in the polls. This was just two years after many of the most prominent political reporters and experts in Washington had proclaimed the then likely Ford-Rockefeller ticket as virtually unbeatable.2 But Ford wasn’t giving up. With the assistance of Cheney, a Texas politico named Jim Baker, and the excellent campaign team they put together, Ford battled his way back into contention.
On September 23, 1976, in Philadelphia, Ford and Carter met for their first presidential campaign debate. Most voters thought Ford won that encounter. He seemed knowledgeable and likable, while Carter appeared vague on the issues.3
It was on foreign policy that the second debate, and perhaps the election, turned. During the encounter, reporter Max Frankel began to ask Ford a question, “Mr. President, I’d like to explore a little more deeply our relationship with the Russians…. We’ve virtually signed, in Helsinki, an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe…”
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” the President declared.
Frankel was visibly startled. “I’m sorry, could I just follow—did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it’s a Communist zone?”
Ford would not back down. “I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”4
I understood what Ford was thinking. Every year during the Cold War, members of Congress would commemorate Captive Nations Week. This was an opportunity to express America’s solidarity with those who lived in nations trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Ford, along with other congressmen representing districts with large numbers of Eastern European immigrants and their families, would recognize Captive Nations Week by describing the nations in the Eastern Bloc as being captive to the Soviet Union, and by adding that we refused to concede that those nations would be permanently subjugated. “Permanently” was the operative word Ford had left out in his response to Frankel in the debate. Without the context of Captive Nation’s Week, it came across as if the President was naïve about foreign policy, and that he did not know or would not admit that the Soviet Union was subjugating the Eastern Europeans, of which he was of