Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [92]
Ford did want to distance himself from what was seen as the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon, but instead of changing personnel, he attempted to change the White House’s management structure. Ford attributed the misjudgments in Watergate to having everything filtered to the President through his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. My view was different. I believed the problems that plagued Nixon’s administration were not caused by how decisions were made but by the decisions themselves. The chief of staff system was reasonably efficient and had been developed in the Eisenhower administration, which did not come to the same unfortunate end as Nixon’s. To change the perception of an insular White House and a rigid “Berlin Wall,” Ford settled on what he called the “spokes-of-the-wheel” approach. To this day, I shudder at the phrase. The idea was that a large number of his staff and cabinet—the spokes—would report directly to him—the hub—instead of having a chief of staff coordinate the process.
However laudable the intent, the spokes-of-the-wheel approach was an unworkable way of managing the modern White House. Ford enjoyed interaction and give-and-take with a wide and varied group of people, and that was helpful, but this organization approach essentially allowed any senior staff or cabinet official to walk into the Oval Office at any time to discuss any subject. Many would end up leaving such a meeting with what they sincerely believed to be presidential authorization but without the necessary coordination with other White House staff or cabinet members who had responsibilities in the matters discussed with the President. An open door policy could work for a member of Congress, or even for a vice president whose staff is small, but a president has too many demands on his time to listen to every staff member’s suggestions, wade through every disagreement, and then ensure that the relevant personnel are involved, or at least informed.
With Ford having done little to settle the differences that were already growing between the Ford and Nixon camps in the White House, I expected the difficulties to be plentiful. I knew that a dysfunctional White House such as the one that was evolving would be a dangerous place.
But this advice, like a number of the recommendations of our transition team, was too late. And at least for a while it seemed that there was no need for the President to do anything different from what he was doing. He was liked by the press, by members of Congress, and by the public. A headline in Newsweek magazine summed up the prevailing conventional wisdom with the words: “the sun is shining again.”20 Ford became president on August 9, and his honeymoon reached its apex on September 1, 1974, when a Gallup poll gave him an approval rating of more than 70 percent. It was as if the country had taken a look at the honest, open Ford and breathed a sigh of relief. No more distrust, no more suspicions. That proved short-lived.
On September 8, 1974, one month after he took office, with no advance notice to the country, Ford made a decision that left nearly everyone who heard it stunned. Those of us who knew Ford well—and who had heard his periodic expressions of sympathy for Nixon—probably should have at least suspected that he might consider the possibility of a pardon. Nonetheless, it had never occurred to me. In fact, at Ford’s first cabinet meeting a few weeks earlier, he seemed to rule out the idea and said the subject should not even be discussed.21
As he announced the pardon, totally out of the blue on a Sunday morning, Ford referred to Nixon and his loyal family, saying, “Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part.”22 The President spoke about Nixon’s plight with obvious sincerity and sympathy—the charges against him being a “sword” over his head. But it was a sympathy that the public did not share at that