Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [94]
Then he went on to say, “I know this is not an ideal time,” but if I was up to it he had some rather urgent business that required my attention. He said that he had decided he needed to replace Al Haig as chief of staff after all. He made it clear that he wanted me to take the post. Ford said he was having problems managing some of the staff, including his longtime aide Bob Hartmann.26 He was a seasoned newspaper man who had worked closely with Ford since 1968 and had become Ford’s chief of staff when Ford became vice president. Hartmann’s role had now changed drastically, and the President said Bob was having difficulty adjusting to it. I sensed that Ford was working hard to spare Hartmann’s feelings.
Ford knew that I had a strong desire and intention to stay at NATO and, equally, to not work again in the White House, having been there for four years previously. But the President asked me to come to the White House to talk with him about it before I returned to Brussels.
On September 22, 1974, I found myself back in the Oval Office. President Ford said again how sorry he was about my father. He knew I had always looked up to him as a man of integrity, much as Ford had to the man who raised him. Ford’s biological father had left his mother when he was a baby; his stepfather, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Sr., raised the boy as his own, even giving his stepson his name. For a moment it didn’t matter that I was talking to the President of the United States in the Oval Office. We were two friends talking fondly about the men who shaped us.
Eventually he turned to the business at hand. Things had not been going well for the President, and he knew it. It was not only the negative reaction to the pardon, although the immediate damage from that decision was difficult to overestimate. The economy was worsening. Relations with Congress had soured. The Rockefeller nomination as vice president was not well received by a large number of conservatives and was being delayed in the congressional confirmation process by an exhaustive investigation into his personal finances. On top of all that, the Republican Party’s prospects in the upcoming 1974 midterm elections were at best gloomy, which did not bode well for Ford’s agenda.
The President now conceded that his spokes-of-the-wheel approach was not working and would not work. The Hartmann faction was unfriendly with the Haig faction, and others in the White House seemed caught in between. Only a few weeks after informing the country that Nixon’s White House chief of staff, Al Haig, would stay on indefinitely, Ford would have to do something he never liked to do—change his mind.
The President said that while he could not be seen as abandoning outright his very public decision to reject the Nixon-Haldeman staffing system in favor of his spokes-of-the-wheel approach, he agreed that he would move toward a proper staff system gradually. His solution was, at the outset, to call whoever replaced Haig the “chief coordinator.” I was not impressed with that idea, because it would signal to others in the White House that the new chief of staff was not actually in charge of the staff. But I understood Ford’s reasoning.
The President went on to say that if I took the post, it would be only temporary, perhaps six months or so. He added that if a cabinet position became open that I found interesting, that would be an option. After an hour and a half of going through the pros and cons, it was time to make a decision. In the end Ford made it an issue of patriotism. He was the President of the United States, and he insisted he needed me to do the job.27
Finally, as I continued to express reluctance, Ford smiled. “Come on, Rummy,” he prodded. “Say yes. I have a golf game.”
I smiled back at him. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it.”28
Joyce, as usual, took the news in stride, though she was sad to leave her friends in Belgium. “This time,” she jokingly said, “I’m not going to try to save the world.” She was hoping to just get through the next few months,