Rumsfeld argues that running as an outsider could work to his advantage, noting that the last three elected presidents, Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Reagan didn`t hold political office at the time of their election and ran against the political establishment.
Kevin Phillips, a one-time Nixon political strategist and author of ”The Emerging Republican Majority,” says, ”I just have trouble seeing a Rumsfeld scenario because he isn`t viewed as a conservative by the activists. Rumsfeld represents in a Midwestern sort of way what Bush represents in a Connecticut and Texas sort of way, (and) I see Bush putting a great shadow on Rumsfeld`s candidacy.”
Nixon, though, recently observed that Rumsfeld has the potential to break out of the Republican pack and emerge as one of the surprises of the 1988 presidential season if Bush or Kemp are tripped up in the early going. Nixon has long described Rumsfeld as among ”the brightest stars” of the Republican Party. Aware that his endorsement would have limited impact and could be controversial, Nixon is not expected to go public with his choice for the nomination.
Roger Stone, a senior political adviser to Reagan and Nixon, says,
”Rumsfeld is ideally positioned in the sense that he is a conservative on foreign policy and economic issues and in the center on social issues. He is the kind of candidate who could hold together the GOP`s center, party regulars and the right wing.”
White House press secretary James Brady, a Rumsfeld protege, says that his former boss may have difficulty establishing himself as an alternative to Bush without holding political office. ”He needs a power base,” says Brady. ”Don is conservative enough for the Republican activists, and he can raise a lot of money. He`ll take it right out of your belt. But he`s got to get out there and labor in the vineyards and do some of the things he`s not so fond of doing (like pressing the flesh with voters).”
Patrick Buchanan, Reagan`s White House communications director, has described Rumsfeld as ”articulate, able and experienced” but ”a party pragmatist of vast ambition and no settled political philosophy.”
Despite Rumsfeld`s image as a Republican moderate, he is, in fact, a conservative stalwart. As a freshman congressman, Rumsfeld received a 100 percent rating from the conservative Americans for Constitutional Action and a 4 percent rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. By his third term, his ACA rating had dropped to 73 percent. Rumsfeld describes himself as a conservative but not a purist. In foreign policy, Rumsfeld is a hard-liner against the Soviet Union, a forceful advocate of a strong national defense and a supporter of Reagan`s ”Star Wars” weapons research. On domestic issues, Rumsfeld opposes a tax hike to reduce the federal deficit and says that he would bring down the deficit by reducing the spending increase for social programs from the current 11 percent ”to something that approximates the rate of growth.”
Rumsfeld was born in St. Luke`s Hospital in Chicago on July 9, 1932. His father, George Rumsfeld, was a real estate broker for Baird & Warner, and his mother, Jeannette Husted Rumsfeld, was a former school teacher. Rumsfeld grew up in what he describes as a working-class neighborhood of Winnetka–a far cry from an urban blue-collar neighborhood. His hometown is one of the wealthiest communities in America, and the Rumsfeld family income positioned it in the middle-class. As a youngster Rumsfeld attended the Crow Island Grammar School in Winnetka and then moved to North Carolina when his father enlisted in the Navy shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Rumsfeld attended school in five cities in four different regions of the country. ”It was hard to leave every place I lived,” Rumsfeld says. ”But when it came time to move, I never felt put upon.”
Even in his youth Rumsfeld worked hard. He was a newspaper delivery boy and magazine salesman in Winnekta. Then, in the Navy town of Elizabeth City, N.C., he worked in a fish market and raised and sold chickens, watermelons and cantelopes. In the Pacific Northwest he chopped wood, delivered ice and dug razor clams. In Southern California he gardened and sold newspapers. On his return to the North Shore Rumsfeld shoveled snow, cleaned rugs and worked as a janitor. ”He was always a super-energetic, hard-working boy,” his mother says.
At the same time, Rumsfeld confides, he was ”a bit of a rascal.” He occasionally stole gum and candy, and once, with some friends, broke into a liquor store–not to steal anything but for the fun of it.
Rummy, as he was called by his school pals and is still addressed by old friends, settled down and became much more disciplined at New Trier High School. He was an outstanding student in an academically challenging school, and he was also well liked. Like Jerry Ford, he collected enough Boy Scout merit badges to become an Eagle Scout. In 1949 he was elected vice president of the junior class. One of the other officers, Joyce Pierson, the class secretary, from Wilmette, became his high school sweetheart. Five years later, they were married. They have two daughters and a son.
Rumsfeld was the star of the New Trier wrestling team that won the state high school championship in 1949. ”In high school he was very concerned about keeping fit,” his mother recalls. ”He never stopped thinking about it, and I think that`s why he didn`t smoke or drink. He gave up Cokes and candy. He even gave up the peanut butter that he loved.” A half dozen Big 10 schools offered him athletic scholarships, but Rumsfeld chose to go to Princeton on an academic scholarship. It was a decision based on pragmatism. ”I felt that I might get hurt, in which case I couldn`t use the scholarship,” he recalls.
At Princeton, Rumsfeld was a champion wrestler and played on the 150-pound football team. As a sophomore he switched from an academic scholarship to a Naval ROTC scholarship and gave serious consideration to a Navy career. Rumsfeld was also becoming more interested in history and politics. He wrote his senior thesis on Harry Truman`s controversial seizure of the nation`s steel mills.
When former Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson II addressed Princeton`s senior class, it was Rumsfeld`s first exposure to a nationally prominent political figure. With his characteristic style and eloquence, Stevenson, a Princeton graduate, urged the graduating seniors to become more politically involved, and Rumsfeld decided to take his advice.
Following graduation, Rumsfeld served three years in the Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant. He was an accomplished Navy pilot, with more than 2,000 hours of flying, and was among the elite few selected to become a flight instructor; he taught formation flying. Rumsfeld also won the All-Navy wrestling championship and the U.S. district trials for the 1956 Olympic games. But a shoulder injury ended his bid for an Olympic medal. Rumsfeld considered extending his Naval tour but decided against it. ”If I had stayed in, I realized that I might get to be skipper of a fighter squadron for one three-year period in my life.”
He had been scheduled to leave the Navy in November of 1957 and wanted to begin law school. But it was too late in the year for him to gain admission as a first-year law student, and he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Dean Edward Levi of the University of Chicago law school to permit him to begin school in the middle of the semester. Two decades later, Rumsfeld was largely responsible for Levi`s appointment as U.S. attorney general.
He took law classes at Georgetown Law Center and Case Western Reserve University but decided to go into business. After interviewing with several corporations in Chicago, however, Rumsfeld shifted his attention to the nation`s capital and was hired as administrative assistant to U.S. Rep. David Dennison of Ohio, a first-term conservative Republican. Like Rumsfeld, Dennison was a former wrestler, and the congressman`s brother had been a Navy pilot and flight instructor. Rumsfeld soon became Dennison`s chief political adviser and confidant. In 1958 Rumsfeld went to Ohio and directed Dennison`s campaign for re-election. In a disastrous year for the GOP, Dennison was defeated by just 900 votes. Soon Rumsfeld went to work for another Republican congressman, Robert Griffin of Michigan. But when Dennison approached his former aide about managing his 1960 comeback, Rumsfeld promptly took him up on the offer. In another cliffhanger, Rumsfeld`s candidate lost.
To break his political losing streak, Rumsfeld moved his family back to the North Shore and joined an investment banking firm in Chicago. Within a short time Rumsfeld seized an unexpected opportunity to launch his own political career. Congresswoman Marguerite Stitt Church, a Republican who represented a northern suburban Cook County district, announced that she would not seek re-election in 1962.
With his crew-cut all-American look, the 29-year-old Rumsfeld was almost a prototype for a new generation of Republican candidates. He was an economic conservative who supported civil rights and a strong national defense. Rumsfeld`s political organization was put together by old friends from high school and college. In a later era, they would have been called Yuppies–young lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers.
State Rep. Marion E. Burks, an Evanston insurance executive, was the early favorite to succeed Church and commanded strong organizational support. Rumsfeld`s insurgent candidacy gained momentum, though, when Burks was tainted by a state investigation of his insurance firm. Already showing his political agility, Rumsfeld never made a public comment about his opponent`s difficulties, but Rumsfeld`s operatives, including future Watergate figure Jeb Stuart Magruder, made certain that Burks was asked embarrassing questions at each campaign stop. Magruder later became deputy campaign manager of Nixon`s 1972 re-election committee and served a prison term for committing perjury during the Watergate trial. Partly because of the controversy surrounding his opponent, Rumsfeld was an easy primary winner.
Rumsfeld`s political future could not have looked brighter. He easily won the general election and was assured of job security in a district that had long been a Republican stronghold. Even before taking his oath of office in January of 1963, Rumsfeld demonstrated that he would be an activist. His former boss, Griffin, enlisted Rumsfeld to line up the votes of other Republican freshmen to replace GOP Conference Chairman Charles Hogan of Iowa with Jerry Ford of Michigan. Rumsfeld delivered, and Ford edged out Hogan.
Rumsfeld soon became the leader of a bloc of a dozen youthful GOP congressmen who would become known as ”Rumsfeld`s Raiders.” As president of the 88th Club, the class of GOP congressmen elected in 1962, Rumsfeld held regular meetings with his cohorts and some of the party`s ranking figures. Former Vice President Richard Nixon was among Rumsfeld`s frequent guests. Rumsfeld wasted no time chatting with people who didn`t matter to him; he shunned the circuit of cocktail parties thrown by trade associations and political groupies. He was a clock-watcher, a hard worker who allotted his time carefully.
Rumsfeld`s voting record reflected his conservatism and the views of his suburban constituents. He opposed funding for urban programs, including mass transit and anti-poverty programs, and voted against the establishment of a federal department of urban affairs. Yet he was among the few conservatives who consistently supported civil rights legislation. Rumsfeld favored replacement of the Selective Service draft with a volunteer army. He became known as a Republican spokesman for the space program.
During overseas junkets, Rumsfeld accounted for every dime in his expense account. Raymond Coffey, chief of The Tribune`s Washington bureau, was a war correspondent in South Vietnam when he met Rumsfeld and was struck by the young congressman`s sense of purpose and eagerness to learn firsthand about the war and the Vietnamese people. ”Unlike the other guys who would just go to the official briefings and have their pictures taken on a tank, Rumsfeld went out in the countryside on his own,” Coffey recalls.
In the wake of the 1964 Democratic landslide that followed John F. Kennedy`s assassination and that brought Johnson a full term in the White House, Rumsfeld, Griffin and Charles Goodell of New York engineered Ford`s election as House Minority Leader over longtime GOP floor leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana. By this time Ford and Rumsfeld were close friends as well as political associates. Rumsfeld says that Halleck`s ouster enabled the GOP to project a more youthful image. In a secret ballot, Ford edged Halleck by the narrowest of margins.
House Republican Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois, Halleck`s deputy, became Rumsfeld`s political enemy because of his role in dumping Halleck. ”Les couldn`t believe what I`d done,” says Rumsfeld. ”He felt it struck directly at his power.” Arends got revenge by blocking Rumsfeld`s efforts to gain a spot on the prestigious House Appropriations Committee.
Other powerful congressmen were also offended by Rumsfeld`s brashness. In his second term, Rumsfeld outlined a long, detailed program for congressional reform that sounded good to the folks at home but fell on deaf ears in Congress. He urged that congressmen give up such patronage plums as appointments for postmasterships and other federal jobs, and appointments to the U.S. service academies.
At one point, Rumsfeld`s Raiders kept the House of Representatives in session for more than 32 hours, the longest single period in a century, in an effort to have their congressional reorganization bill brought to the floor. But their effort failed.
Frustrated by the legislative process and too much in a hurry to wait his turn on the seniority ladder, Rumsfeld looked at other options. In 1966 he was set to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul H. Douglas, but stepped aside for Charles H. Percy, the North Shore industrialist, who was his friend, constituent and political ally. When Percy defeated Douglas and was widely promoted by GOP moderates as a 1968 presidential contender, Rumsfeld was an early passenger on his bandwagon. Percy, though, chose not to seek the presidency, and Rumsfeld shopped for another candidate.
Percy`s friend Nelson Rockefeller sought Rumsfeld`s help, but the Illinois congressman was noncommital when approached by a Rockefeller aide. Rumsfeld attended a meeting of House Republicans who were supporting Nixon. It has been reported that Congressman Rogers Morton of Maryland told the group that Nixon was a cinch to win the nomination and that anyone not supporting him should leave the room. Rumsfeld stayed. Nearly 20 years later, Rumsfeld says that he can`t recall that Morton issued such an ultimatum to the GOP congressmen.
In any event, Rumsfeld`s support of Nixon turned out to be the major turning point of his own political career. He was chosen by Nixon as one of a half dozen campaign ”surrogates,” and barnstormed the country as an official member of the Nixon team. Rumsfeld was also Nixon`s man on the scene at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a member of Nixon`s ”Truth Squad,” a contingent of Republican congressmen who followed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey`s tracks and gave a partisan response to his speeches for the local news media.
