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By Root 3688 0

Ford to the leadership continued to press for many of the reforms we had been urging. We were hopelessly outnumbered by Democrats in the Congress who liked things the way they were and by some Republicans who didn’t want to make waves. At one point we stood in front of the Capitol with a large banner showing the last time the rules were changed in the House—1909. We called these “horse-and-buggy rules.” Over time our group was dubbed Rumsfeld’s Raiders. Our tactic was to make parliamentary moves at opportune moments during legislative debates to try to enact some of our reform planks. Our proposals included the establishment of a House ethics committee, the opening of more congressional hearings to the public, and the recording of yea or nay votes on spending bills rather than the more typical unrecorded, anonymous voice votes.†

By 1966, Republican fortunes were on the rise, thanks in part to a rein-vigorated GOP as well as the drooping popularity of LBJ as the public focused more on Vietnam. In the midterm elections that November a string of Republicans were elected across the country—notably Governors George Romney of Michigan and Ronald Reagan of California. Republicans gained forty-seven seats in the House, which brought to Congress a number of bright freshmen members: William Steiger of Wisconsin and Edward “Pete” Biester of Pennsylvania particularly stood out. Both were fine examples of legislators willing to dig down on issues and consider legislation on its merits. They thought as I did about the Congress—rather than serving as a stepping-stone to the Senate or the White House, there was important work to do where we were.‡

Another new member who supported some of our reform efforts was George Herbert Walker Bush, the son of Senator Prescott Bush of Greenwich, Connecticut. Bush attracted notice by managing to secure a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee as a first-term congressman. Bush and I would find each other in the same circles many times in the years that followed.

Our group’s renegade activities also caught the attention of a young Republican who was looking for a job on Capitol Hill. In 1968, Dick Cheney had won an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship and applied to be an intern in my congressional office. To this day Dick contends he flunked our first interview—and has gotten a good deal of mileage over the years in telling his amusing but completely inaccurate version of our first meeting, calling it the worst interview of his life. The fact is that I didn’t take him as an intern at the time because my office needed a lawyer, not a budding academic. I thought he seemed like a fine person, bright and talented. But I confess that as he left my office that day, I had no expectation that I’d be working so closely with him over so many decades.

Not long after Gerald Ford won the top Republican leadership post in the House in 1965, he received a phone call from President Johnson. LBJ wasted no time in applying the Johnson treatment to prod the new GOP leader to support his policies on the war in Vietnam. After bellowing, “Congratulations!” Johnson expressed annoyance that Ford had stated, accurately, that Republicans were not getting much in the way of actual information from the White House about the situation in Vietnam.

“There’s not anything that we know that we don’t want you to know,” LBJ assured him. The President then tried to persuade Ford that the key to increasing the number of Republicans in Congress was to go along with the administration on the war. “I think it will get you more Republican seats than anything else, if you show that you are not picayunish and not fighting,” he advised.10

He was a “Ford man,” the President said, but of course he couldn’t say so publicly.11

No matter how heartfelt Johnson’s remarks might have been, I found it hard to believe that bolstering the ranks of his Republican opposition in the Congress was part of LBJ’s agenda.

When it came to the Vietnam War, the Republican Party was in something of a quandary—and Johnson knew