Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [80]
The neighborhood schools in Belgium taught in French and Flemish. None of them would pass a building code anywhere in the United States. Sharp hooks protruded from walls, the rooms were in disrepair, students were crammed in. Their school, École Hamaïde, where Marcy and Nick went, emphasized the idea that education was a serious business. Every morning the headmistress, dressed in black and wearing a stern look on her face, would formally shake every child’s hand as they entered the building—sending the message that it was time to get to work. But at the end of the day, she would bid each of them farewell with a smile and a hug, signaling it was time to have fun again. The school taught responsibility. The students performed the cleaning tasks, not a team of janitors. Joyce and I often have reflected that in that old building our children received what was very likely the best education any of them ever had.
Not all of the aspects of my new post were unqualified advantages. For a time, Joyce and I didn’t have a car in Brussels while our car was being shipped over from Washington. As ambassador I had the services of a car and a driver for official business.
I discovered later that someone at the Department of State had sent an agent from the inspector general’s office to quiz the embassy drivers about our use of the government car for personal errands. Some at the State Department apparently did not like a political appointee in a post that they felt should be held by a career Foreign Service officer, and they thought that anything they could find that might pose an embarrassment was to their advantage.1
There had been a pattern of such traps being set for political appointees by some members of the permanent bureaucracies. I first saw this at OEO with the false leak to the press about my alleged office “redecoration.” In Brussels, I also learned later that someone in the Department of State had authorized the building of a swimming pool and a tennis court at the NATO ambassador’s residence where we were living. Envisioning a headline about Rumsfeld’s efforts to turn the ambassador’s residence into a posh resort, I canceled their plans as soon as I learned about them.
My predecessor as ambassador, David Kennedy, had served at NATO less than a year, and the post had been vacant for over eight months prior to his arrival. I would be Nixon’s third ambassador to NATO. This alone suggested to the alliance that the administration’s interest in it was at best modest. In advancing our country’s priorities, I knew I was going to need all the help I could get. And I found guidance from what some might consider an unlikely source: the French. In my experience, France’s perplexing, and sometimes irritating, public opposition to American policy initiatives seemed more often to be nationalist public relations for the French domestic audience than expressions of real policy differences. Charles de Gaulle, for example, had withdrawn France from NATO’s military command structure in 1966 and forced it to take its headquarters—along with the American and allied forces stationed there—out of France. The act was more a political ploy than a real demonstration of French independence from NATO. The move infuriated then President Johnson. Johnson instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ask President De Gaulle if his actions toward the forces also meant that we would have to take home all of the American servicemen buried in cemeteries across France who had fought and died for that country’s liberation from the Nazis. This was President Lyndon Baines Johnson at his best.
When I arrived at NATO, however, it was clear that the French saw the alliance’s value, and wanted a somewhat greater voice in its activities, while still staying apart from the military command structure. I was most