Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [65]
As our discussion on OEO was ending, I told the President that I’d recently returned from a second trip to Southeast Asia. Referencing Johnson’s credibility problems on the war, I suggested that Nixon examine carefully the American military’s bombing of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese targets in neighboring Laos. The Johnson administration’s silence on the issue left the American people unaware of the bombing campaign. Our friends in the region—the governments of Laos and Cambodia—insisted that American officials not reveal that they had given approval to bomb in their countries. Had it become public, Laos and Cambodia would have had to protest the very activity they had approved. The problem, as I told Nixon, was that while our friends were cooperating they were protecting themselves. By continuing a secret bombing campaign, Nixon would not be protecting himself.
“President Johnson got into trouble for not telling the truth,” I noted. “Your administration does not want to fall into the same pattern.”
Nixon listened intently and nodded. I hoped the message got through.
Having agreed to the President’s request, we encountered an unanticipated problem that put my nomination in question. The Constitution prohibits individuals from receiving a government salary outside Congress if the salary for that position was increased during their time in Congress. While I had been serving, Congress had raised salaries for federal posts, including the director of OEO, which made me ineligible to receive the new salary for that position. Nixon’s legal staff discovered the issue and asked the Justice Department to look into the matter. A young assistant attorney general arrived at my house on a Sunday afternoon to discuss a possible solution. The suggestion was that I not receive a salary as director of the OEO and instead be paid as an assistant to the president in the White House. At the President’s suggestion, I was also to be made a member of the President’s cabinet. I can still picture that lanky lawyer sitting at our small dining table, discussing the issue. As it turned out, I owed the start of my service in the executive branch of the federal government to the fine legal mind of William Rehnquist, a future chief justice of the United States.4
During my early months at the Office of Economic Opportunity, I had my first protracted encounter with the national media, and the episode left an indelible impression on me. On September 22, 1969, I opened the Washington Post to a column by Jack Anderson. Anderson was a syndicated columnist, appearing in nearly one thousand papers across the country. His pieces sought to offer a glimpse of Washington to average Americans, and he especially enjoyed targeting politicians and government officials. That morning I was in his crosshairs.
The column’s title caused a sensation: “ANTI-POVERTY CZAR EMBELLISHES OFFICE.”5 “Anti-poverty czar Donald Rumsfeld has wielded an economy ax on programs for the poor,” Anderson wrote. “He has used some of the savings to give his own executive suite a more luxurious look, thus reducing the poverty in his immediate surroundings.”
Anderson’s column, which reached as many as forty million readers, could not have come at a worse time. I was trying to forge relations with the agency’s employees, many of whom were skeptical or downright hostile to Republicans. I also wanted to try to give the OEO some credibility among its critics as being well run, to try to earn support in Congress.
Anderson’s column damaged those efforts badly, painting a portrait of me as a stereotypical fat-cat Republican, in stark contrast to my predecessor in the job, President Kennedy’s wealthy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who was portrayed as being sensitive to the mission of OEO. “Under Sargent Shriver, the anti-poverty director’s office was unique in government,” Anderson noted. “There were no carpets, and the furnishings were prim.” Anderson’s claims included the following:
To be prepared should his