Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [151]
“Hold on, Don, I’ve got another call,” Cheney interrupted. “Let me get back to you.”
Ten minutes later Cheney rang me up again. “We don’t need any more advice, Don,” Cheney said. “That was the President-elect calling. He told me to tell you he wants you to be secretary of defense.”2
“Actually before we were interrupted, I was going to suggest you as SecDef,” I told Cheney.
It was an idea similar to one I had suggested to President Ford a quarter of a century before, that Nelson Rockefeller, in addition to being the vice president, might also have substantive responsibilities running a cabinet department. There was nothing in the Constitution that prevented such an arrangement. Cheney had run the Defense Department before. I felt that if anyone could handle both positions, it was Dick.
Cheney didn’t sound surprised by the suggestion. “The President-elect had the same idea,” he acknowledged. But Bush ultimately concluded that running a cabinet agency could conflict with bringing in Cheney as a key adviser on a wider range of policy matters and raised a question about having a sitting vice president regularly testify to Congress.
I told Dick I wanted to discuss Bush’s offer with Joyce and think about it more before giving my answer. Later that day, I decided to accept the nomination. The young man who had joined me at the Office of Economic Opportunity as my special assistant back in 1969 would become one of the most influential vice presidents in American history. And to my amazement, I would go from having been the youngest secretary of defense in our country’s history to the oldest.
When I left the Pentagon in 1977, the Carter administration reversed many of our decisions seemingly just because they were made by the prior administration. I was not going to do the same. I wanted to understand the rationale behind the Clinton administration’s decisions before making changes.
Eleven days before the inauguration, I met with President Clinton’s outgoing defense secretary, Bill Cohen. I had known him when he was a Republican senator from Maine and was eager to hear his thoughts. Measured and knowledgeable, he touched on more than fifty issues he expected I would have to deal with as his successor. A number of them proved prescient. He mentioned the threat posed by Iraq’s attacks on U.S. and British aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones. Noting the recent terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, he raised the dangers posed by al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. He also suggested that it might make sense to appoint a combatant commander to be in charge of protecting the American homeland from attack.3 Cohen’s briefing was enormously helpful as I prepared to testify as a nominee for secretary of defense for the second time.
When I was nominated by President Ford in 1975, the major issue of the day had been détente with the Soviet Union. Now, with the Cold War behind us, there had been upbeat talk during the 1990s of a “peace dividend” that would allow the U.S. government to spend more on domestic programs by reducing investment in national security. Some analysts and scholars had argued that we were at the “end of history”—that the United States and its democratic principles were beyond ideological challenge in the world.4
If the world was moving steadily and irreversibly toward democracy and capitalism as some claimed, perhaps there was less need for a robust U.S. national security strategy. Focusing only on the short term and the immediate rather than taking time to consider longer-term potential challenges is an understandable temptation. There is often pressure for the seemingly urgent to crowd out the important. The post–Cold War holiday from strategic thought that characterized much of the prior decade turned out to be not a luxury but a dangerous misjudgment. Overconfidence had spawned complacency. U.S. intelligence