Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [97]
We decided to trim the size of the White House staff. By the time Nixon left, it had more than doubled, from about 220 people to 510, not counting the additional hundreds of so-called detailees who were theoretically on loan to the White House from the departments and agencies, most of them from the Department of Defense. Lyndon Johnson had also made extensive use of the practice. Whenever I visited the West Wing during Nixon’s second term, while I was serving at NATO, I would see people in the hallways and meetings and wonder who they were—and what in the world they were supposed to be doing.
Always wary of comparisons to Nixon’s imperial presidency, Ford endorsed my proposed belt tightening—at least, most of the time. It was a quite different story when I briefed him on my plans for a similar reduction of the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing. He seemed fine with it—that is, until I suggested that he broach the subject with Betty that evening.
“Oh no, Don,” Ford said with a chuckle. “This is your plan. You go up and settle it with her.”10
I then suggested to Cheney that he might be the best one to raise the subject with the First Lady, but he knew exactly what I was up to. Despite our reputations as taskmasters, neither Cheney nor I had the persuasiveness to successfully turn the indomitable Betty Ford. “Predictably,” President Ford later noted, “the size of the East Wing staff hardly changed at all.”11
Other challenges were more nettlesome than staff size. One involved Henry Kissinger. As I feared from the day Ford announced Kissinger would stay on in both of his posts, Ford’s approach to Kissinger was at times deferential. Kissinger often arrived late for Oval Office meetings with the President, sometimes by as much as twenty or thirty minutes. Perhaps tardiness had not been an issue in the waning days of the Nixon presidency, but things had to be different now.
After Kissinger failed to arrive at the scheduled time three days in a row, I raised the matter with Ford, who had also taken notice. The President suggested we change the meeting time to accommodate Kissinger. That was the wrong approach. Ford’s tolerance of repeated late arrivals by his cabinet or staff sent a bad signal.12 I told Kissinger and his staff that things had to change, which they did, at least with respect to the President’s schedule.
Going back to my time in the Nixon administration, I had noticed that the National Security Council was not well connected to the cabinet and the rest of the White House staff. But foreign policy decisions had consequences outside the State Department and NSC bureaucracies. They often involved Congress, the press, complicated legal issues, as well as other departments and agencies. Ford’s economic advisers needed to have an opportunity to weigh in on international economic issues. Ford’s press secretary needed to be able to communicate to the public the administration’s foreign policy actions and decisions. Perhaps because foreign policy had become largely his sole domain during the tumultuous years of Watergate, Kissinger was not accustomed to coordinating with others. Further, with Kissinger holding two of the three national security posts, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was marginalized. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that Ford and Schlesinger did not work well together. On any number of occasions I made an effort to see that Schlesinger was included in major decisions, urging Ford to see him. I was only partially successful.*
The one-sided national security process led to at least one major embarrassment for the Ford administration. In 1975, the prominent Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Washington to attend a banquet put on by the labor federation, the AFL-CIO, in his honor. Solzhenitsyn was one of the most powerful voices of opposition in the Soviet Union. Because he told the truth about the Marxist system—his book