Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [84]
I returned to our festive table, where everyone was continuing to have a good time with the Czech patrons. A bit later, the room grew quiet. The music stopped. People moved away from us. Apparently a Czech or Soviet security official who had not been pleased with the festivities had signaled that the evening was over.
Joyce tugged on me. “We should go,” she said.
It was a sad farewell to a wonderful New Year’s Eve, with friendly people repressed by their puppet government and their Soviet overlords.
The following June, President Nixon came to Brussels for a major NATO summit with the other fourteen heads of state. This turned out to be his last trip abroad as president. As he came down from Air Force One, I greeted the President and his delegation at the foot of the stairs. It had been some time since I had seen Nixon. He appeared to be in a pleasant mood, and I wondered if he was simply grateful to be out of Washington and away from the Watergate problems for a while. The foreign arena was a break for him, and it was the forum in which he was usually at his best.
I escorted him and Secretary of State Kissinger to an airport reception hall, where I had assembled the senior American officials and staff from the U.S. NATO mission. I thought it might boost Nixon’s morale to meet some friendly Americans and, at the same time, give our hardworking staff a rare opportunity to shake hands with the President.
Roughly three quarters of the NATO staff assembled were American military officers or senior enlisted personnel. The rest were some of the Defense and State Departments’ finest civilian officials. Nixon went down the line and graciously shook hands and exchanged brief pleasantries with each of them.
After his greetings to them, I left with Nixon and Kissinger and climbed in the President’s limousine. We rode in the backseat and headed to the American ambassador to Belgium’s residence, where Nixon would be staying while in Brussels.
Once in the car, away from the press and cameras, Nixon’s face fell. His mood changed.
Referring to the NATO staff members he had just met, Nixon snapped, “They’re a bunch of fairies.” The President apparently had assumed that the NATO staff was composed of State Department people. His White House prized “machismo and toughness”—as Chuck Colson once described it—and Nixon tended to view people in the State Department as lacking grit.6
I was taken aback by Nixon’s mood and derogatory comment. Only a moment before he had seemed friendly to the staff I had worked so hard to recruit from both State and Defense. They were fine public servants, and I felt protective of them. So I spoke up and told the President that he was mistaken.
“Those folks are mostly military,” I said. “They just didn’t have their uniforms on.” They were exactly the kind of hardworking people Nixon tended to appreciate.
Of the small numbers who were from the Department of State, I noted, “They’re fine folks. I handpicked everyone, and they are doing an excellent job for the country.” Nixon looked out of the window, his face sullen. Perhaps in private, with people he knew, he allowed the strain of the events in Washington to show. When we arrived at the ambassador’s residence, the President got out of the right side of the car. Back in public, he was smiling and cordial again. I moved to get out from the opposite side. As I exited, Kissinger followed behind me. He grabbed my arm, gently tugging me to the left side of the car. When he was sure the President was out of earshot, Kissinger said to me quietly, “Rummy, we don’t argue with him anymore.”
A few weeks later, Nixon’s second chief of staff, Al Haig, called me from the White House.7 During the last months of Watergate, he,