Known and Unknown Page 8

  Ned Jannotta, a friend from New Trier High School and Princeton, became the campaign manager. He had also been away for many years in college, the Navy, and business school and was not even registered to vote. Brad Glass, another friend from high school and college, became our campaign treasurer. As a former All-American tackle on Princeton’s football team and a national intercollegiate heavyweight wrestling champion, he could be persuasive.

  Another friend from high school, Hall “Cap” Adams, agreed to handle our advertising. He had printed up pocket-sized campaign cards designed for me to hand out to voters. I thought carefully about what my positions should be and managed to condense what I believed at age twenty-nine and what I believe today into twenty-three words onto the card. The policy portion read: “firm foreign policy, strong defense and a freer trade policy, effective civil rights measures, reduction of the debt, incentives for increasing economic growth.”

  My parents, despite initial skepticism, quickly became enthusiastic supporters. Dad let us use a vacant house he was in the process of fixing up as our temporary campaign headquarters. My mother even spoke on my behalf. “I have heard many comments about your performance on behalf of your wayward son. I’m sure it was not a pleasant task, but the victory was well worth the many hours you spent working toward it. I am delighted with your stamina,” I wrote my mother after she gave a talk supporting me at the Women’s Republican Club of New Trier Township.1

  Joyce and our friends went to work on making the candidate more presentable. For one thing, it was clear early on that I wasn’t a very good public speaker. Ned Jannotta and Joyce arranged to use an empty hall one evening so I could practice and they could critique me. I went up on the stage and gave my stump speech to the almost empty hall, over and over, while they would yell, “Stand up straight!” and “Get your hands out of your pockets!” and “Quit popping the microphone!” until I started doing a bit better. I found public speaking was like anything else: Unless you have some remarkable natural talent—which I didn’t—when you’re starting out, you don’t do it very well. But if you work on it and work on it, you can get better. I used to say it is like training an ape. If you do it right you get a banana and if you do it poorly you don’t. And pretty soon you start doing it right.

  I had to deal with the impression that at twenty-nine I simply was too young to be a congressman. It was a particular problem since the incumbent, Mrs. Church, was so much older. So I traveled around the district as often as possible with Joyce so voters would see that I was married. As it happened, the election two years earlier of the young President Kennedy proved helpful to me. Kennedy had successfully overcome questions about his age and inexperience. The youthful image he and his family projected proved to be a winning asset.

  To get my name out, Jannotta and I decided to meet with prominent local leaders and ask for their public endorsements. The idea was that their endorsement would create a ripple effect, so their friends and colleagues would learn they had endorsed me, which might encourage them at least to hear me out as well. We decided to think big and looked for one of the most prominent business leaders in the district. Donold Lourie, the chief executive officer of Quaker Oats, became an early target. My mother again was helpful; she had known Lourie’s mother years before. Another stroke of luck was that Lourie had been an All-American football star at Princeton. The meeting was of pivotal importance to my campaign, and I was going to use every possible advantage I could. So I gathered together my friends Ned Jannotta, Brad Glass, and Jim Otis—all of whom had been on Princeton’s varsity football team—and brought them with me.

  Lourie was delighted to meet his fellow Princeton football alums—maybe too delighted. All he wanted to talk about was Princeton football. But I did manage to pry in a request for his help. Lourie graciously said he would give it some thought. I figured I had little to lose by indicating my sense of urgency. “Let me explain our situation,” I said. “The primary election is the second Tuesday in April. I need your support now, so I can use your support to get others to step up.”

  I told him I wanted to publish his name in a local newspaper advertisement with the names of some other prominent citizens who were endorsing me. Then I said that when people asked him why he was for Rumsfeld, he had to be ready to make my case. It was a lot for me to ask a major businessman who had met me only a half hour earlier, but we needed his help and we needed it then, not later.

  As I continued to press—maybe press my luck—Lourie again said he would get back to me. Not long after, he contacted us and said he’d sign on. It was, as expected, a major boost—one of the area’s most prominent citizens had put his backing behind a young unknown who was not the favored candidate of the Republican organizations in the district. It caused others to wonder why, and take a look. Soon community leaders in the district indicated they were backing me. Among them was Dan Searle, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle & Co. He came on as our finance chairman and helped open the door to contributors and community leaders. Chuck Percy, the head of Bell + Howell, came onboard and led me to Arthur Nielsen, Jr., who signed on as chairman of the Rumsfeld for Congress Committee. By the election in early April, we had recruited some fifteen hundred volunteers and mounted a grassroots effort with everything from “Rumsfeld for Congress” earrings to cartops and bumper stickers to help to get the word out.

  In those days newspaper endorsements were important. The biggest paper in the district, the Chicago Tribune, already had a candidate. They had endorsed the front-runner in the GOP primary, a prominent state legislator named Marion Burks. But the Tribune’s major rival, the Chicago Sun-Times, had not endorsed anyone yet. We knew that the Sun-Times was not likely to back the same candidate as the Tribune, so I took a gamble that I might be able to persuade that paper to throw its support behind me.

  The paper was owned by the legendary Chicagoan Marshall Field. As it happened, the father of a close friend of Joyce’s and mine from high school, Carolyn Anderson, had a business connection to Field, and he arranged for me to meet him. Field made himself available for about three minutes. He was on his way out of town but said he would ask the editors of both of his papers, the Sun-Times and the Daily News, to meet with me, and then it was up to me to persuade them to support me. The editor of the Sun-Times was a well-known, crusty, old-time journalist named Milburn “Pete” Akers. He agreed to see me that morning and at least give me a hearing.

  I found my way to Akers’ office and faced a large, somewhat disheveled man sitting behind a desk piled with papers. Akers started peppering me with questions right away: Who was I? What had I done? Who had I met in the congressional district? What places had I visited? Who was supporting me? Why was I running? And so on. It was all done in a courteous but penetrating way. I answered the questions as best I could. But I had never done anything like this before and was somewhat dazed by the encounter. I left our meeting without any idea what Akers might decide.

  In fact, he got on the phone the moment I left and started checking out my answers. Not surprisingly, Akers wanted to talk to his numerous contacts to see what they thought of me. The political editor of the Sun-Times, who had predicted I would run seventh in a field of seven in the GOP primary, had to change his prediction when a month later, to his certain amazement, his paper, thanks to Akers, endorsed me for Congress. And the battle was on between Chicago’s two morning papers—the Sun-Times and the Tribune.

  From there on out, whenever my name was mentioned in the Sun-Times’ editorials, it said that I was thirty years old, which was not yet the case.2

  “Mr. Akers, I’m grateful for the mention,” I told him on the phone, “but there’s a problem. You keep writing that I’m thirty, but I’m only twenty-nine.”

  “I know that,” Akers replied, matter-of-factly. “But you will be. And thirty sounds better.”

  After the Sun-Times endorsement, a number of the original candidates in the Republican primary dropped out. By late March it came down to
a four-man race between the two who were by then the front-runners with strong newspaper support—Burks and me—and two other candidates. Burks was the favored candidate, having garnered the endorsement of a number of the big Republican Party township organizations. He used what he saw as his strengths in the race against what he saw as my weaknesses, homing in particularly on the charge that I wasn’t a hard-right conservative. In one of his campaign ads he repeatedly labeled himself as a conservative and noted that he was “the only candidate qualified by experience, maturity, and political philosophy to represent the citizens of the 13th Congressional District.”3 Burks, however, also had to deal with unproven allegations involving financial management issues at an insurance company that he had chaired.

  By the day of the primary election it was looking like I might actually win. We were mobilizing an army of volunteers, finally raising some campaign funds, and had important endorsements.* It was a surprising showing for a group of young people who started the campaign in a kitchen scraping together four hundred dollars. Because I’d managed two losing campaigns for Dave Dennison, failing by the thinnest of margins, however, we weren’t going to take anything for granted until all the votes came in. I won with 67 percent of the vote on April 10, 1962. “RECENT POLITICAL UNKNOWN IN SWEEPING WIN,” reported the Chicago Daily News.4 Joyce and I were still amazed at the thought that we had actually won. We knew we had little time for celebrating as we quickly turned our attention to the November general election.

  Since the district was Republican leaning, I felt we had a good chance. Our campaign team was energized and enthusiastic, and I could feel traction as we went into the fall. But then historic events intruded. In late October, Adlai Stevenson, by then America’s ambassador to the United Nations, gave a dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council. Complete with fresh aerial photographs to prove the Kennedy administration’s case, he asserted that the Soviet Union had been secretly planning to install nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba, ninety miles from the United States. For many days, as American forces imposed a blockade against the Soviet ships en route to Cuba, the world stood closer to the brink of nuclear confrontation than at any time yet in the Cold War. Politics didn’t matter anymore. Americans stopped thinking about an election that was but a few weeks away and focused on the Cuban missile crisis.

  When the confrontation ended and the Soviet ships turned around, President Kennedy received a sizable boost in popularity. I thought it might propel Democrats to victory in races around the country, even where they weren’t favored to win. I was also running against a man with a good name for a Democrat in 1962: John A. Kennedy. He was not related to the President, though it probably didn’t bother him all that much if some voters thought otherwise.

  In the final days of my 1962 general election campaign I had no sense of what would happen. We kept working and worrying. On election night, when I prepared for a close vote, I was stunned again. We had won by a sizable margin. I was thirty years old and headed to the United States Congress. It was quite a night for our entire family. But most of all I remember the expression of amazement on the faces of my parents. Something had happened in the life of their son and in their lives that was beyond anything they had imagined.

  I had been a newly elected member of the Republican freshman class for about fifteen minutes before I was asked to make waves. Shortly after my victory, Congressman Bob Griffin elephoned. I assumed my old boss was calling me to offer his congratulations. Instead, he told me he was in the early stages of an effort to unseat the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, Charles Hoeven of Iowa, as the chairman of the Republican conference. Griffin had put together a small group that thought the party needed fresh blood and new ideas if they were to stake a claim on becoming the majority party sometime in the future. Of course, as a member of the leadership, Hoeven had strong backing for reelection. But Griffin and his team had a candidate they thought might be able to beat Hoeven. Their candidate was his colleague and friend from Michigan, Gerald R. Ford.

  I had met Ford briefly while I was working as a staff member in Griffin’s office and had a positive impression of him. But as one might expect, opposing the entrenched party leadership was not something a newly elected, unknown freshman—not yet even sworn in—clamored to do. To make things even dicier, Griffin acknowledged that Ford hadn’t yet agreed to run. He was waiting to determine how much backing he could expect. My assignment, if I chose to accept it, would be to round up support from as many newly elected members for a man who wasn’t even sure he would make the race.

  This was unusual business for someone who hadn’t yet set foot in his new office. But Griffin argued that the mission was worth the risk. The thought of having Republican leaders who seemed to accept, or at least not be uncomfortable with, a state of permanent minority status was discouraging. Republicans had made a lackluster showing in the 1962 midterm elections when historically the out-of-power party should have made reasonable gains. I knew from my experiences working for two Republican congressmen how frustrating it was to be in the minority, and particularly to feel that your leadership wasn’t mustering the energy and determination to fight back.

  So I told Griffin I was onboard and went to work urging other incoming Republican members to support Gerald Ford for conference chairman. With the showing of support we assembled, Ford decided to run for the post, which he eventually won by a vote of 86–78.

  As expected, our renegade effort left a lasting impression on the other members of the Republican leadership.

  “I was picked as the lamb for the slaughter,” Congressman Hoeven said after his loss to Ford. “This should serve as notice to [other party leaders] that something is brewing.”5 As it turned out, Hoeven’s warning proved prophetic.

  PART III

  The U.S. Congress: From Camelot to Quagmire

  “[W]e stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

  —John F. Kennedy, 1960 acceptance speech

  The White House

  FEBRUARY 25, 1966

  For nearly ninety minutes, the President of the United States fired a barrage of confident-sounding words at us. He was up and down from his chair like an oversized yo-yo that had been wound too tight.

  “Now I don’t want to hear any of y’all leave here and say you haven’t been briefed!” he insisted in his booming Southern drawl.1

  The briefing Lyndon Baines Johnson was providing to members of Congress that frigid February morning was a last-minute affair. My office had received an invitation to the White House late the previous afternoon. It was on a Friday, a day when there were no votes scheduled in the House of Representatives, which meant that many members of Congress would be out of town. Yet because of the profound importance of the subject—the war underway in the country LBJ called “Veet-NAMM”—I was one of more than one hundred members of Congress who braved the snowy Washington roads to hear what the President had to say.

  We were gathered in the East Room ostensibly to receive an update from Vice President Hubert Humphrey on his recent trip to Southeast Asia. But from the start this seemed more like a political presentation. The Vice President was a warm, lively person, filled with optimism, and his remarks held true to his character. Yet despite Humphrey’s enthusiasm, the presentation was thin on new information and heavy on upbeat platitudes. “We no longer need to be afraid to speak of victory,” Humphrey told us at one point, as LBJ looked on approvingly. “The tide has turned.”2 Anyone following the media knew that casualties in Vietnam were mounting, which did not seem to mesh with the administration’s assertions of impending victory. In fact, the war would go on for nine more years.

  In addition to the Vice President, Johnson had his senior national security officials in attendance at the morning session, including the courtly southerner Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the cerebral Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, A
mbassador Averell Harriman, and Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms. This was a command performance. And there was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who the commander was.3

  Though LBJ was supposed to turn the briefing over to the Vice President, he never relinquished control. Humphrey spoke with almost continuous interruptions from the President. Throughout the meeting, Johnson gave the impression of a man sitting on the lid of a volcano that kept erupting. Overall, it did not seem like a presentation from a confident administration.

  With only a small number of U.S. military advisers on the ground, the Vietnam War had not been an issue in my first campaign for Congress in 1962. After Johnson became president and the American war effort expanded, I was willing to support a more robust military campaign in Vietnam, as were many others in Congress. But it was becoming difficult to support the administration, since their policy was increasingly unclear. The President seemed to vacillate between the left flank of his party, which wanted concessions to the enemy—some were even beginning to talk of withdrawal—and those on the right who supported a more decisive military effort. LBJ would give a speech about negotiating and working things out with the North Vietnamese. Then the next month he’d give another speech asserting that the road to peace was not the road of concession or retreat and criticizing those who disagreed as “nervous Nellies.” The military would announce a bombing pause that could last for weeks. Then bombing suddenly would commence with ferocity. Even at this meeting, President Johnson’s team again was offering up the word “victory” without providing their definition of the term.

  Though the meeting was supposed to be a frank exchange between the executive and legislative branches, during the first half of the question-and-answer session I watched White House aides walk through the attendees, seeming to place questions with friendly members of Congress. I was thirty-three years old, in my second term in Congress, and far from an expert. But I had a question in my mind and decided to ask it. I began by mentioning some of the earlier questions raised by other members that I felt had not received adequate answers. I noted Congressman John Young of Texas had asked, “Why, in view of all of the power, the airplanes, the bombing, the manpower, the billions of dollars, have not the Viet Cong quit?” Humphrey’s response had been that the Viet Cong still believed we might pull out. I then pointed out that Secretary of State Rusk had said much the same: The Viet Cong still thought they would win and America would fold up in defeat as the French had in Vietnam twelve years earlier.