Don said, “Jim, come over here and say hello to your friends.” As I approached the desk through the haze of smoke, Gattuso said, “We asked Don how long it would take for him to get you down here. It looks like he did it in less than three minutes.” The two Joes then laughed uproariously.
Don motioned for me to take a chair and I joined them for about fifteen minutes. The talk was, of course, about wrestling, mostly great collegiate wrestlers we had encountered. When it was clear that it was time to go, I made my farewells, and as I was departing through the door I looked back and saw the two Joes putting on their coats and knotting up their neckties, still grabbing each other in exotic wrestling holds, laughing and scratching as they said goodbye.
When I got back to the office, John Poindexter was waiting for me and asked what had happened. I said that it was a personal affair rather than an international crisis and we could all relax. It is interesting that Don Rumsfeld, Joe Henson, and I were all three later inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
I first met Don Rumsfeld in the spring of 1973. I had been selected to succeed Admiral Zumwalt as CNO, and before the change of command, the CNO asked me to represent him at a NATO conference in Brussels which all of the U.S. and NATO chiefs of service had been encouraged to attend. It was at this conference that I met the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Don Rumsfeld, who was a naval reserve commander and a designated naval aviator He had gone through flight training in 1954. For his active duty, Rumsfeld had been assigned to the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Corry Field outside of Pensacola, Florida, as a flight instructor, teaching student pilots basic Navy training, flying planes such as the SNJ, SNB, T-28, and T-34. Rumsfeld completed his active service in November 1957 but remained a selected Reservist. He flew out of the Naval Air Station Grosse Ile, Michigan, and in time became an aircraft commander in the S-2 Tracker, a carrier-based antisubmarine aircraft with twin reciprocating engines. During the three days of the conference, Don Rumsfeld and I, largely because of the ties of naval aviation, seemed to get along well. It also turned out that he had known my wife’s brother, Lewis Rawlings, at Princeton. Rumsfeld had wrestled at Princeton in the same weight class in which I had wrestled at the Naval Academy some twelve years earlier.
When I next encountered Don Rumsfeld, he was the White House chief of staff to President Ford and I was CNO, spending considerable time at the White House working with the president’s team briefing members of Congress on the need for a more robust defense budget. Then, in 1975, Rumsfeld succeeded Jim Schlesinger as secretary of defense. The prospect of a vigorous young Naval Reserves officer, who was also a naval aviator, as the SecDef seemed like a good break for naval aviation and the Navy.
The Joint Chiefs found out quickly that we were getting a different kind of boss. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had a decidedly personal style. Discussions were less structured, and Rumsfeld was much more aggressive in his approach to decision making. He did ask questions from his subordinates, but as a rule, he received the answers with an undisguised air of cynicism. It was as if he had made up his mind that he should assume that he could not believe what his chiefs were telling him. It soon became obvious that a response at odds with the secretary’s preconceived position was to be avoided. This made it uninviting to speak up at one of his conferences. As a result, his decisions could often appear to be quite arbitrary.
In his early days as secretary, Rumsfeld was not always punctilious in his scheduled meetings. He was obviously diverted by his tight links to the White House and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney. President Ford was clearly in need of political advice during those critical days before the election. This gave rise to problems for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Don was not readily accessible during these hours he was away at the White House. It was especially difficult for the service chiefs, who had real time operational responsibilities as well as pressing administrative and budget decisions to be cleared or approved. We could not always count on being able to contact him in a time-sensitive situation, and he did not characteristically afford us much latitude in delegated authority. This could make the working relationships quite uncomfortable, because it was not always clear what the secretary wanted done.
One of my first opportunities to talk to Don Rumsfeld after he had taken over as secretary of defense occurred in 1975, when I accompanied him to the White House to brief the president on our plans to meet with members of Congress in seeking support for the president’s defense budget. We were the only passengers in the official car, and in the course of the conversation, Rumsfeld offered his views on civilian control of the military. He told me that he regarded the existing relationships to be far from what he thought the statutes intended them to be. He felt that the people in uniform were assuming too much authority vis-à-vis the civilian leadership. He had been unfavorably impressed by an incident shortly after he had arrived at the White House as chief of staff. Summoned to his first National Security Council meeting, his entrance to the cabinet room was blocked by a Marine lieutenant colonel in uniform. The officer said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Rumsfeld, but you can not go in.” Rumsfeld asked why. The Marine responded, “Your security clearance for this level of classification has not yet come through and you are not on my list of those authorized to attend this meeting.” Continuing the story, Rumsfeld said, “I didn’t want a scene in front of the cabinet room on my first day in office, and I could see that this Marine lieutenant colonel was quite taken with his presumed responsibilities. My own reaction was that this was ridiculous. He knew I was the chief of staff to the president, and that regardless of whether or not the paperwork had been done to clear me to attend this meeting, it obviously was in process and was bound to happen. It was just a question of time. In my view he showed very poor judgment. Unfortunately, I believe that’s the attitude that’s becoming more and more a mindset among the uniformed people. Given a little authority, they are inclined to flaunt it without the flexibility that’s necessary in many cases.” He ended the conversation with a comment to the effect that he intended to address this issue early on during his days in the OSD.
Rumsfeld’s personality had clearly stiffened from what I had seen in Europe when he was ambassador to NATO. This was perhaps inevitable, in that his responsibilities as SecDef were a great deal more abundant and substantive than his previous duties as ambassador. I must add, too, that after I had retired from active duty in the Navy and Don was no longer in government service, our relationship resumed its previous pleasant cordiality.