Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [148]
Cheney gave me a sense of how the administration was shaping up. It was already known that Colin Powell was going to be secretary of state. John Ashcroft was to be announced soon as attorney general. Condi Rice would be the national security adviser.
Apparently Bush was interested in my experience in government, my record in business, and my credentials with conservatives. But with the selection of Cheney as vice president and Paul O’Neill as treasury secretary, there was already talk of Bush relying on retreads from the Ford administration. I would be seen as yet one more.
Then, of course, there was the other matter. It was no secret to Governor Bush that his father’s relationship with me lacked warmth.12 Cheney said that at one point, when he was the head of Governor Bush’s vice presidential search committee, my name had been raised as a potential running mate. But as Cheney put it, in his usual understated way, the Bush family “did not salute” the idea.
Still, Cheney was confident that President-elect Bush would make his own decisions about whether I was right for a position in his administration. “My preference is for you to go to DoD,” Cheney said, adding, “You are Condi’s and Colin’s top choice for the job.”
It was starting to look like Joyce’s and my “rural period” might be postponed.
PART VIII
Leaning Forward
Austin, Texas
DECEMBER 22, 2000
The Bush-Cheney team was scrambling through their abbreviated transition period. When I was asked to meet with Bush on December 22, some of the people being considered for key positions were cycling through Austin.
The George W. Bush I encountered at the governor’s mansion three days before Christmas was very much the man I had met previously: inquisitive, interested in national security issues, and comfortable with himself. A disciplined man who kept precisely to a fast-moving schedule, he was not much for small talk, which suited me fine.
I congratulated the President-elect on his victory, and he thanked me for my support during the campaign. “I know Dick told you I wanted to visit about a few things,” Bush said. In particular, he was expecting to hear my thoughts on the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.
I was still surprised by Governor Bush’s request to see me. He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father. I thought it spoke well of him that he was interested in meeting me himself to draw his own conclusions. Our meeting that December would be only the second substantive conversation we had ever had.
Bush first asked to hear my views about the Defense Department.1 I ventured that the Department seemed to have drifted somewhat since the end of the Cold War. President Clinton had not seemed to have a comfortable relationship with the military, due in part to the accusation that he had evaded military service during the Vietnam War. Clinton’s early foray into defense policy on the issue of gays in the military exacerbated the problem, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by its then chairman General Colin Powell taking the rare step of publicly exposing a disagreement with the President.2 Once burned, Clinton seemed to have left the department largely to its own devices.3
That presidential remove, I suggested, had had consequences. It provided the senior officials in the Pentagon the latitude to operate relatively free of top-level strategic direction. Under those circumstances, moreover, various members of Congress were better able to promote their particular interests, sometimes at the expense of sound national policy. In the combatant commands, four-star admirals and generals had wielded considerable power, and for years had been called, I thought inappropriately, commanders in chief. To my thinking, the United States had only one commander in chief, and it was the elected president.4
“The task for the incoming secretary of defense will be to implement what you promised throughout the campaign,” I said. “You will need to fulfill your pledge that ‘help is on the way’ for the United States