Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [87]
On April 17, 1994, Joyce and I flew to California to attend the memorial service at Nixon’s presidential library in Yorba Linda. So many from his administration had gathered there that it was like turning a page to the past. The Reverend Billy Graham, with whom I had sat in Nixon’s hotel suite all those many years ago as Nixon quizzed the attendees for advice about a running mate, officiated at the service. He hailed Nixon as “one of the greatest men of the century.” Spiro Agnew, the man Nixon chose as his running mate in 1968, made a rare public appearance, looking solemn and sad. Haldeman had died a year earlier, but Ehrlichman and Colson were there, aging, and somber. Like Nixon, Colson had spent his later years working to achieve peace and reconciliation in his life. After his release from prison, to his great credit, Colson embarked on a prison ministry program that won acclaim and admiration. Any differences with them seemed so long ago.
Henry Kissinger, who became a national figure during the Nixon presidency, and who stood by Nixon in the final days of Watergate, delivered a touching eulogy. “He achieved greatly and he suffered deeply,” Kissinger pointed out, “but he never gave up.” And, in the front row, were all the living presidents. Each of them—Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—had been affected by the Nixon presidency in one way or another. A few, including the sitting president, Bill Clinton, had started their careers in fierce opposition to him. Yet as Clinton saluted his once disgraced predecessor as a “statesman” who sought peace, all was forgiven and forgotten, at least for that day.13
After the service, I greeted Nixon’s daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She loved her dad, and all who knew Nixon could see that she and her sister, Tricia, were the lights of his life. It was a difficult day for Julie. As she gave me a hug, she whispered sweetly, “I think he would have liked it.”
Her comment struck me, since during the service I had turned to Joyce and quietly said pretty much the same thing. “I can almost see President Nixon smiling,” I whispered.14
The man from Whittier, California, who seemed to have struggled so mightily in a search for acceptance, had finally achieved it.
Time and perspective had softened most everyone’s view of the Nixon era. But his resignation had left the nation reeling. And as so many mourners praised so much of his legacy and focused largely on his achievements, I took a moment to notice someone else at the gathering. As usual, Jerry Ford sat quietly, humbly, avoiding attention or accolades. Yet he was the man who had had to pick up the shattered shards of the Nixon administration and pull a bitterly divided country together. And I had been summoned back to the White House all those years ago to help him.
PART V
Javelin Catcher: Inside the Ford White House
“The role of White House Chief of Staff is that of a javelin catcher.”
—Jack Watson, White House Chief of Staff to President Jimmy Carter, as quoted in Rumsfeld’s Rules
The Philippine Sea, West Pacific Ocean
DECEMBER 18, 1944
In his early thirties, Lieutenant Gerald Rudolph Ford had sandy blond hair and the build of the lineman he had been on the University of Michigan football team.* Like thousands of Americans, Ford had volunteered for the United States Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor. By the spring of 1943 he was aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Monterey, as it steamed toward the Pacific theater and war.
As part of the U.S. Pacific fleet, Ford’s ship helped secure Makin Island in the Gilberts, participated in strikes in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and launched air strikes against Japanese-occupied Wake Island. In various battles the ship survived, but it was a force of nature, not of man, that almost sent the carrier—and Gerald Ford—to the bottom of the sea.
On the outskirts of the Philippine islands on December 18, 1944, a typhoon tore at the Monterey. As Ford raced to his battle station on the bridge in the early morning hours, the storm forced the