Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [442]
* There was a story circulating at that time about a meeting the President had with a group of industrialists. After issuing an optimistic prognosis for the country, Kennedy said, “If I were not President, I would be buying stock right now.” “Sir, if you were not President,” a man at the end of the table retorted, “I would be buying stock too.”
* For a rich lesson in Texas politics and U.S. history, it is worth listening to the historian Michael Beschloss’s compilation of LBJ’s secretly recorded tapes in Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 and Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965.
* The supermajority needed to stop a filibuster was changed from 67 votes to 60 votes in 1973.
* In the House 80 percent of Republicans voted in favor, compared to 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, the numbers were similar—82 percent of Republicans in favor versus 69 percent of Democrats.
* My Democratic opponent was a businessman, lawyer, and former vice president of the University of Chicago. He called me “more negative than Goldwater” and concluded that the “Goldwater-Rumsfeld attitudes and voting records are negative, irrelevant, and unsuited to our times. They seem to me doctrinaire and extreme.”24
* The following Christmas, Ford graciously gave me a copy of his book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Portrait of the Assassin (Ford had served on the Warren Commission that had investigated the Kennedy assassination). Ford inscribed it: “To Don Rumsfeld in appreciation of your fine friendship and wonderful loyalty and to express my deep gratitude for your assistance, cooperation and leadership in the rugged days of 1965.”
† These efforts eventually took shape in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.
‡ We were friends outside work as well. Bill Steiger, Pete Biester, and their wives became close friends of Joyce’s and mine. The Biesters lived a few blocks from us, and our children went to the same schools. Steiger had had solid experience in the Wisconsin state legislature as well as excellent political instincts. It was a real loss when he died shortly after his fortieth birthday in 1978, from complications of Type 1 diabetes.
* In his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln pointed out, “And so I think my friend, the Judge, is equally at fault when he charges me at the time when I was in Congress of having opposed our soldiers who were fighting in the Mexican War…. You remember I was an old Whig, and whenever the Democratic party tried to get me to vote that the war had been righteously begun by the President, I would not do it. But whenever they asked for any money, or land warrants, or anything to pay the soldiers there, during all that time, I gave the same votes that Judge Douglas did.”20
† On June 2, 1965, I testified before the Joint Committee on the Organization of the Congress and raised a series of questions about the balance in responsibility between the executive and legislative branches of government.22
* Thurmond made a strong pitch for his favorite candidate, a rising star in the conservative wing of the party: California Governor Ronald Reagan. Since Reagan, like Nixon, hailed from California, the ticket would lack geographic balance. Congressman John Rhodes of Arizona also threw out a name no one else had mentioned: Congressman Gerald Ford. But Ford, like Reagan, had few backers among GOP elders.
* I was later named cochairman of the Republican truth