Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [447]
* His most notable combat experience occurred during World War II when, in August 1943, as part of the 93rd Bombardment Group, Brown took part in a famous bombing raid against the Ploesti oil refineries in Romania, which were providing oil to Nazi Germany. Eleven planes in his bombardment group, including the lead plane, were shot down during that dangerous mission. Brown was credited with helping to bring back the surviving aircraft safely.
* Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, wisely decided to reinstate the B-1, and it has remained a valuable weapon system for our country into the twenty-first century.14
* Years later in a meeting with Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, I told him my story about the USSWisconsin. “I was on that ship. I was the navigator,” Zumwalt replied. Astonished, I asked him, “How the heck did you become an admiral with that foul-up in your record?” Zumwalt answered that he had warned against the mooring location but had been overruled by the Navy Department in Washington. I then asked if my account about the tugboats was what he remembered. “You are exactly right, but you left one part out: The tide came up.” It was a lesson about the importance of teamwork, to be sure, but it is also best to have a little help from the Lord.
† Both Robson and Denny went on to have distinguished careers after Searle. John served as dean of the Emory Business School before going on to be deputy treasury secretary for the George H. W. Bush administration. Jim became chief financial officer for Sears, Roebuck & Co. and later chairman of Gilead Sciences. Their private investment activities, however, have been less exalted. The three of us banded together in the 1980s as TBM. Once when we were considering a project requiring legal disclosure, we were forced to disclose that TBM stood for “Three Blind Mice.”
* Since Searle did business outside of the United States, especially in Europe, one of the people I turned to was a man whom I had always found a reservoir of good sense and unique perspectives, former ambassador to North Atlantic André de Staercke, the Belgian who had long served as the dean of the North Atlantic Council.
* I cannot, however, claim to have sold the centrifuge company. Because of the power of the unions and French law, we weren’t even able to give the company away. Our only solution was to pay the employees and the government so we would be permitted to transfer the business to the employees and be free of it.
* Searle sought new legislation to help every company affected by an FDA stay of approval. In January 1983, Congress passed an amendment to the Orphan Drug Act that provided any product that had been approved, and was subject to a stay of that approval which was later lifted, an extension of their patent to compensate for the time lost during the period of the stay.
* During the same period, the Standard & Poor’s 500 grew 12 percent.
* Carter said, “My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous 2 1/2 years before that.”2
* Others mentioned were former treasury secretary Bill Simon, former New York Congressman Jack Kemp, and Reagan’s close friend Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada.12
* Dr. Robert Goldwin had written an article on the Law of the Sea in June 1981 that pointed out the potentially unfortunate consequences of the treaty. Goldwin wrote that John Locke did not define “common” resources as belonging to everyone; he defined them as belonging to no one, and that ownership derived from the labor expended to harvest the resources. Remove the reward for the labor and you remove the incentive to work. Goldwin’s article so impressed me that I sent it to George Shultz, who had succeeded Haig as secretary of state. 13
* Early in the administration, Bush came up to Joyce and asked, “What’s your son addicted to?” It was a blunt question, to be sure—it was one of the first conversations Joyce had ever had with the President—but that was not unusual for George W. Bush. Perhaps reflecting