Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [69]
I imagine there weren’t a lot of people in Elvis’ normal circle with whom he could have a serious conversation about the military. I was impressed that years after his service he still cared so much about the Army. It certainly wasn’t the sort of conversation I expected to have when I walked into his dressing room, but it was a welcome reminder that patriots can be found everywhere.*
During my tenure as director of OEO, we were successful in saving and strengthening some worthwhile programs by reallocating funds to them from less successful projects. We spun off functioning programs to other federal departments. We didn’t perform miracles there, though I believe we did some good for the poor and for the country.
Even though many well-intentioned people at the agency worked hard to find solutions to the problems of poverty, easy answers were in short supply. During those tough times I could always count on Joyce to provide some good-humored perspective. She knew how often I would come home feeling disappointed that a program had not worked out better.
One night when I came home late, I went to the refrigerator and found a note taped to the door. Joyce had written, I am sure with a smile: “He tackled the job that couldn’t be done; with a smile he went right to it. He tackled the job that couldn’t be done—and couldn’t do it.”
CHAPTER 9
Counsellor
After I left the Office of Economic Opportunity, Nixon appointed me Counsellor to the President, a general advisory position in the White House. I continued as a member of the cabinet, and I moved full time into an office in the West Wing. I began to see the President and his top aides far more regularly than I had while at OEO.
I soon noticed that Nixon liked to ruminate away from the Oval Office. He often took refuge in a separate private office in the Old Executive Office Building, the massive nineteenth-century building adjacent to the White House. There he would meet with small groups of aides to talk about whatever might be on his mind. I would find him there dressed in a suit and tie, his feet up on a stool, the ever-present yellow pad in his lap, thinking his way through a problem.
In 1970, the country remained in turmoil. Tension over Vietnam remained high, and the situation flared in the spring after the so-called incursion into Cambodia—a phrase that seemed to conjure up a sightseeing visit more than the armed invasion it was. On May 4, students at Kent State University shut down the campus with a massive demonstration protesting the administration’s action in Cambodia, which students feared would widen and extend the war. In an attempt to control the chaos, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire, killing four people and wounding others. The incident precipitated a nationwide student strike at more than four hundred colleges and universities—involving as many as four million students.1 Nixon, troubled by the mass demonstration, appeared at the Lincoln Memorial at an early-morning student protest and talked to a group of them who had made camp there. His visit was dismissed by a growing and vocal legion of critics, but I thought it demonstrated an interesting aspect of the President’s character that he was willing to put himself in the middle of such a scene.
On May 15, protests at the historically black Jackson State University in Mississippi turned violent, and two more students were killed. Shortly after these shootings, Cheney (who continued to work as my assistant after I left OEO) and I traveled to Mississippi to get a sense of what might