Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [74]
With the 1972 presidential campaign in mind, Nixon soon had another thought for me. He suggested that I become chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, which had the unfortunate acronym of CREEP. Running Nixon’s reelection campaign might have seemed like a prestigious assignment at the time, but I had no desire to be a full-time political operative.
I tried to turn the President down in a lighthearted way. “Mr. President,” I said with a laugh, “I’m pretty sure you’re going to run your campaign, and to the extent you don’t have the time, John Mitchell will run it, and to the extent he doesn’t, Bob Haldeman will. So you certainly don’t need me at that post. The organ-grinders will all be in the White House.” I didn’t have any desire to be the trained monkey.
Nixon smiled. “Well, let’s think about it some more,” he said. For whatever reason, that idea too was dropped.
Later the President raised the idea of my becoming chair of the Republican National Committee. I felt once again that it would be Nixon, Mitchell, and Haldeman who would be calling the shots, and that whoever was at the RNC would be little more than an adornment. It was not the job for me.
I was well aware that repeatedly saying no to a president posed risks, risks that increased each time I did it. My pattern of turning down job offers did not seem to please Haldeman or Ehrlichman. I’m sure they began to think that I wasn’t a team player. And I suspected that Nixon probably was beginning to feel the same way.
As the 1972 election drew closer and politics took over, the group in the White House that Joyce and I were close to, the academics and policy-oriented people like Shultz and Moynihan, became less involved than they had been at the beginning of Nixon’s term. The other circle—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and later, Colson—were the ones who seemed to have his ear and confidence.
In one sense, this was a natural development. The Haldeman group was attuned to Nixon’s increased focus on his reelection. We were not. But the theory put forward by some, that this group unduly influenced the President by appealing to his resentments is inconsistent with my experience. Maybe it’s because I was younger and he was the president of the United States, but I seldom observed Nixon being unduly influenced by anyone. He may have had his enablers, but Nixon seemed to me to be the one in the lead.
As the campaign proceeded, I did sense a change in mood at the White House, and not for the better. At the end of one meeting I watched the President walk off with Haldeman and Colson. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, since they were frequently together. But for some reason I was increasingly uncomfortable with what was going on at the White House. Something didn’t feel right.
By the early 1970s the rate of inflation, though not high by historical standards, was a growing political issue. As was typical in Washington, there was pressure on politicians to do something, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the government’s concern about a problem. The Democratic majority in Congress came up with a solution that seemed politically attractive but was unwise: They passed legislation giving the president the power to impose wage and price controls on the country.
My suspicion was that Congress passed the legislation never imagining that President Nixon would actually use the power, but rather to put him on the spot politically, and to demonstrate that the Congress was doing something about inflation. The Democrats hadn’t counted on John Connally, the charismatic former governor of Texas. Connally was well-known for having been hit by one of the bullets fired at President Kennedy by Lee