Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [48]
As the Senator began speaking, he turned to introduce the state and local officials gathered on the platform. Then he turned toward me. Goldwater glanced at his notes and said, “And I’d like to thank your fine congressman, Don Rums-field.” No doubt some people on Goldwater’s staff winced at the mispronunciation. Not I. Goldwater had just proved to the press that he really didn’t know me very well.
With nothing seeming to go right for the Goldwater campaign—he was down by double digits in nearly every national opinion poll—I still held on to the slender hope that we might win a few more seats in the House and Senate for voters who wanted a check on the excesses of the Johnson administration. Instead, the Republicans ended the election in considerably worse shape. Thirty-six Republicans in the House were defeated, and our minority hit a low of 140 seats out of 435. We were outnumbered by the Democrats by more than two to one. I was one of the fortunate ones able to hang on, winning by what must have looked like a comparably comfortable margin of 57 to 43 percent. That turned out to be the closest of my four elections to Congress.
My fellow Republicans and I were a dwindling, lonely group in the House of Representatives. Though Democrats long had outnumbered Republicans in Congress, after the 1964 election there were so many Democrats in the majority that when all the members were in attendance, the Democrat side spilled over across the aisle into the Republican side of the chamber. The press suggested the Republican Party was on a course toward permanent minority status. The entrenched GOP leadership appeared to regard this state of affairs as a fact to be accepted rather than a problem to be solved. I saw the situation differently.
CHAPTER 6
Young Turks
After the Goldwater defeat, a small group of like-minded Republicans in Congress began considering what to do next. Some thought we needed a fresh approach in the House Republican leadership. We had made a start with the election of Congressman Gerald Ford as the Republican conference’s chairman in 1963. Now we could either accept the status quo or keep working for change.
The first call I placed the day after the elections was to a veteran in our party, Congressman Tom Curtis of Missouri. Curtis had been a mentor of sorts to me since I first came to the House. He was a sober, scholarly type who would become interested in an important issue, consult the leading national experts on the subject, develop a conviction, and then pursue his position aggressively. I liked that approach. He had a tenacity that sometimes grated on opponents, but he also had in abundance the best qualities of a legislator—he was principled, studious, honest, and courageous. Just elected to his eighth term, Congressman Curtis shared my concerns about our party’s situation. We agreed to meet in Washington with a few other members to talk about what might be done next.1
The legend surrounding those days—among those who followed it—was that those of us who met in the aftermath of the 1964 elections had mutiny on our minds from the beginning. But my recollection is that no one at our early meetings was talking about trying to oust the House Republican leadership. After talking with a few congressmen, including Bob Griffin, Charles Goodell, and Bob Ellsworth, we decided to encourage adoption of a reform agenda that would pose a more aggressive challenge to the Democratic majority and provide Republicans with a sharper contrast in the next congressional elections.
The Republican leader, Charlie Halleck, and his number two, Minority Whip Arends, both resisted the idea. Halleck was a decent man, a staunch conservative, and a supporter of civil rights. But he had been elected to Congress in 1934 and was a symbol of a different era. Arends continued to resent my defiance of his authority as the chairman of the Illinois delegation. Both remembered that Griffin, Goodell, and