Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [125]
Ford made clear to me that he was unhappy with our position in the Defense Department. Undeterred, Ford approached the Soviets with a proposal to continue negotiations while pushing the final status of cruise missiles for a separate discussion at a later date. Brezhnev rejected Ford’s suggestion outright, calling it a “step backward.” The Soviet leader wrote in March 1976 that “someone is deliberately trying to put roadblocks on the way to reaching an agreement.”25 I had little doubt who the Soviet leader meant by “someone.” The U.S.-initiated talks collapsed.
American public opinion leaned heavily in favor of arms reductions. Those who didn’t support agreements with the Soviets tended to be characterized in the press as advocates of confrontation with the Communist empire. Paradoxically, I thought Soviet aggression and confrontation could become more likely if we passed a SALT II treaty that conceded too much. The Soviets might be emboldened by our weakness.
In 1979, two years after he had left office, Gerald Ford came to visit me in Chicago. I drove to the airport to pick him up. He was bringing Joyce and me one of the golden retriever puppies from his dog, Misty. He also had just completed his memoir, A Time to Heal. Sitting in the backseat of the car on the way to my house, Ford handed me an autographed copy of his book.
Placing his other hand on my arm, he said gently, “Don, you are not going to like everything in this.”
I asked why.
“Because I placed responsibility for our failure to get a SALT agreement on you and Brezhnev,” he replied.
I smiled. “Well, Mr. President,” I said, “I can live with that.”
CHAPTER 17
The 1976 Defeat
The year 1976 saw not only the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but also a surprisingly close presidential election. The attraction of a virtually unknown candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Jimmy Carter, resonated with many voters in a way that it might not have in any other year. His simple promise, “I’ll never lie to you,” appealed to a country still furious over Watergate and Vietnam.
Gerald Ford, despite being burdened by the characterization of his tenure as the Nixon-Ford presidency, had become a solid, decisive executive. He was no longer the surprised occupant of a shattered, discredited presidency that he had to rebuild. Now it was his office, and he wanted to keep it.
Reagan’s run for the Republican nomination continued to gain traction. He was winning a number of states and putting Ford on the defensive. At one point, the President’s close advisers considered the possibility that President Ford might lose the Michigan primary. It was never discussed publicly, of course, but if Ford were rejected by Republican voters in his home state, the embarrassment could leave the President little choice but to consider dropping out of the race. Fortunately Ford won the Michigan primary convincingly.
Ford and Reagan then engaged in a series of primary duels, each in search of the magic number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination. By the time of the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where one of the two would be nominated, it looked like Ford would win, and the process of selecting a replacement for Rockefeller began.*
For the third time in three years, I found myself being discussed for the vice presidential nomination. Ford again asked me to fill out the extensive paperwork, including the dozens of pages of disclosure forms required for background and financial checks. I knew well that I made no more sense as a running mate for Ford than I had the last time he’d considered me.
Some weeks before the Republican convention, my mother sent me a newspaper article that indicated that the medical therapy of choice for tonsillitis in the 1930s was radiation treatment, which could lead to cancerous thyroid tumors. She told me that I had been radiated