Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [77]
I attended the regular White House senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room that morning.* Several expressed curiosity about the piece in the Post. There were differing ideas as to how to deal with the article. Some wanted to confront it as a news story that needed to be managed—in other words, as a public relations problem. My instinct was to get to the root of what had happened and get the situation resolved. Years later, Chuck Colson recalled my comment in the meeting: “If any jackass across the street [at campaign headquarters] or here [in the White House] had anything to do with this, he should be hung up by his thumbs today. We’d better not have anything to do with this. It will kill us.’”22 I don’t remember if that was precisely what I said, but if anything that was an understated version of my thinking.
Despite the drumbeat of news stories that began to appear in the Post on that subject, the Watergate break-in was not uppermost in voters’ minds during the 1972 presidential campaign. However, I did notice troubling signs when the Watergate matter came up in conversations. Joyce and I attended a meeting in the fifth-floor auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building for those Nixon had selected to serve as surrogate speakers for his campaign, including many from his cabinet and key members of Congress, such as Goldwater, as well as Joyce and some other cabinet wives. Ehrlichman offered the group what seemed to me to be tortured responses to some of the questions being raised in the newspapers about Watergate and the campaign. After the meeting I advised Joyce never to repeat Ehrlichman’s recommended talking points, because I felt they did not have the ring of truth. Joyce had had the same reaction.23
The Watergate issue proved little more than a nuisance in 1972. Concerns about a close election were misplaced. Nixon won in a landslide, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. His stunning 23 point margin—60.7 percent to 37.5 percent—was one of the most decisive presidential victories in U.S. history. The President’s reaction to his overwhelming victory was not what most people might have expected. It certainly wasn’t what I expected.
The morning after his reelection, Nixon held a cabinet meeting. I assumed the purpose would be to thank everyone for their help in the campaign, and to talk a bit about his goals for his second term.24
The meeting started off well. Nixon walked into the White House cabinet room to an enthusiastic standing ovation. The President beamed and urged us to take our seats. But the applause continued. For a moment, as he soaked in our congratulations, Nixon paused and gripped the back of his chair in the middle of the large oval table.
Whatever celebratory emotions he may have felt at that moment quickly dissipated. He spoke with his usual precision. He did thank us all for our work, but then quickly moved on to abstract policy discussions. Referring to the most prominent campaign issue, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the President said that he had complete confidence that his administration would bring peace. “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks,” he said.25
He remarked at length on what he said was his favorite period of history, which oddly enough was the British parliamentary debates of the 1850s. He mentioned Winston Churchill’s father. “He was a brilliant man,” Nixon said, “whose career was ruined by syphilis.”
He talked about the rival British prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Gladstone was in office longer, Nixon observed, but Disraeli had a more brilliant record. The President informed us that Disraeli once described Gladstone’s government as “an exhausted volcano.” This was a roundabout way for Nixon to make what I took as