Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [104]
As our motorcade continued to speed to the airport, I heard Ford’s muf-fled voice from below. “C’mon, Rummy, you guys get off,” he urged. “You’re heavy!”
It was the second assassination attempt in less than a month. This time the would-be assassin was Sara Jane Moore. A Marxist radical, she had been picked up by the local police a day earlier on an illegal handgun charge but had been released.49
Moore was standing across the street, about forty feet from the President, when she fired. An alert bystander, Oliver Sipple, saw the revolver and reached out to deflect her aim.50 The bullet came within inches of the President’s head—and my own—striking the wall of the hotel behind us. “I do regret I didn’t succeed, and allow the winds of change to start,” Moore said immediately after the shooting. “I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos.”*
When we arrived on Air Force One, we could not take off immediately because we had to wait for the First Lady, who had been on a separate schedule. No one had told her what had happened, so when Betty came onboard, she asked the President innocently, “How did they treat you?”52
After the events of the day were described, she was as calm as her husband. In fact, they handled the situation so well that we were even able to take a moment to lighten the mood somewhat. As the Fords laughed, I chimed in that I thought I deserved a good deal of credit for handling the event so skillfully that “not one single person noticed that the President had bumped his head again.”
As much as we wanted to make light of the situation, however, we knew it was deadly serious. The President’s natural response was to be brave and defiant in the face of would-be assassins.53 But it never left my mind that twice in a matter of weeks, two deranged individuals got close enough to President Ford to kill him.54
In October 1975, I was with the President in Connecticut when yet another incident occurred. As the presidential motorcade moved through Hartford en route to the airport, the local police department failed to block one of the intersections at the base of a hill. When the President’s car was crossing that intersection, a car with four teenagers rammed into the side of the presidential limousine. Those of us seated in the backseat—the President, our host, and me—were thrown to the floor.
Taking no chances, the Secret Service followed their normal procedure and had the motorcade start up fast to get the President out of possible further danger. As we sped away, the lead car in the motorcade had to stop suddenly to avoid a pedestrian. Our limousine slammed into the rear of the lead car, again jostling us around in the backseat. Then, as we stopped suddenly, the Secret Service car behind us, which had been racing to keep up, slammed into the back of our car. We were thrown around in the backseat for the third time.
While no one was seriously injured, the near comic chain reaction seemed to be a metaphor for an administration whose troubles were piling up. Coming off the midterm elections, which were bad for Republicans, we had every reason to believe that 1976 was going to be another tough election year. There were even some suggestions in the press that the GOP was an endangered species on a trajectory of perpetual decline.55 The administration was not performing up to its potential. I felt an urgent need to get it on a better track.
CHAPTER 13
An Agonizing Reappraisal
On October 22, 1975, Dick Cheney and I met with the President in his study, just outside the Oval Office. We discussed some possible scenarios for the 1976 campaign if, as expected, Governor Ronald Reagan were to challenge Ford in the Republican primaries. There was also discussion of the unpleasant possibility that Ford might lose the nomination, which gave him another chance to decide if a nasty