The Unknown Known Page #3

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this vast archive?

Oh, it never crossed my mind.

I never knew

what I was gonna do next.

The only thing I've ever

volunteered for in my life...

one was to go in the Navy,

and the other was

to run for congress.

The other was to get married.

You look at being

married to the same woman

all those decades...

when you're 20, 21, 22,

what did you know?

Both of us were young

and unformed.

How in the world

can you be that lucky?

How did you propose?

Imperfectly.

I was getting ready

to leave for Pensacola.

About 10:
00 in the morning,

I said to my folks,

"I'll be back.

I'm gonna go down

and see Joyce."

I asked her to marry me.

I didn't get down on my knees.

I didn't do anything fancy.

I didn't want to get married,

but I sure as heck

didn't want her

to marry anyone else.

And I was correct.

It was a good decision.

It just hadn't been

part of my plan.

Director of the

office of economic opportunity

was Rumsfelds first job

for Richard Nixon.

Later, when O.E.O. Seemed

headed for extinction,

Mr. Nixon named him director

of the cost of living council.

After friction developed

between Rumsfeld

and H.R. Haldeman,

Rumsfeld requested a change

and was sent to Brussels

as the U.S. ambassador

to the north Atlantic

treaty organization.

He got out just in time

and survived Watergate

with reputation intact.

A person who works

that hard to become president

had to believe that

everything he did or thought

would be useful to preserve.

He puts in place

these recording devices,

like other presidents had,

and then he'd go about

being himself,

and sometimes

he'd let his hair down

and say things in ways

that he might not have said

had he remembered

that each second of the day

that it was being recorded.

All of us say things

we shouldn't say,

that on reflection,

we wish we hadn't said.

I expect he just felt that

on balance,

everything was worth preserving

because he was

an historic figure.

Did presidents after

Nixon make recordings

in the White House?

The only president

I was close enough to

to answer that question about

was Gerald R. Ford,

and I can assure you he did not.

My guess is that people

tend not to fall

in exactly the same potholes

that their predecessors do.

More often than not,

they make original mistakes.

We all do.

But I assume the presidency

under extraordinary...

Gerald Ford had announced,

when he first took office,

that he was not gonna have

a chief of staff.

He was going to be

the anti-Nixon,

the anti-Haldeman,

the anti-Ehrlichman.

He had said he was

gonna have a coordinator

or something like that.

And that's when I told him

he'd have to find somebody else,

because it wasn't gonna work,

and I didn't want

to be a party to it.

After a while,

he agreed that I was right.

At the time,

there were a number of people

still being looked at

by what was then called,

"the special prosecutor."

This is really

an extraordinary moment.

The White House is filled

with lawyers and investigators.

That's exactly right.

It was September 29, 1974,

in the morning

that I dictated this memo

on the subject of the safe

in the chief of staff's office.

"I arrived

at approximately 5:00 P.M.

I wanted to clean out the

place so that I could move in,

and I wanted to make sure that

there was nothing in the place

that I didn't want there,

such as recording equipment,

telephone bugs, and the like.

At approximately 5:15 P.M.,

bill Walker commented

that there was a safe

in the cupboard."

This says, "to the left

of the fireplace."

If you're standing

in the fireplace,

it was to the left.

Actually, it was to the right

if you faced the fireplace.

So here's a safe,

and it's locked.

And I thought, "oh, my goodness.

I wonder

what's in that safe?"

I said to Dick Cheney,

my assistant who was helping me,

"look, why don't we get

the secret service,

get 'em down here with people

who can move the safe

and open it

or do whatever they have to do."

And what happened

to the safe in the end?

The end for me was when

I got it out of my office

under a proper

chain of evidence.

I'm dreaming

of a white Christmas

just like the ones

I used to know

where the treetops glisten

and children listen

They put the word out,

"stay tuned

to armed forces radio.

When you hear it said

that the temperature is rising

to 105 degrees

and you hear, 'I'm dreaming

of a white Christmas, '

you'll know

the evacuation is ordered."

The north Vietnamese

and Viet Cong forces

moved into Saigon

directly towards

the U.S. facilities.

The scenes of the helicopter

lifting people off

of the roof of the building

were really heartbreaking,

because you had

really wonderful people

who'd worked with our forces

and knew that their circumstance

when the Vietcong

and north Vietnamese

took over that country

would be difficult,

that they'd be killed

or put in jail.

They kept lifting

more and more out,

and more kept coming.

They ended up landing

so many helicopters

on the carrier that they

started shoving helicopters off

so that they could get

more helicopters on.

Were you with the president

when all of this was going down?

Yes, I was in the oval office

with secretary Kissinger

and the president

and other close aides

to the president.

It was a day anyone involved

will never forget.

The inevitable ugly ending

of an unsuccessful effort.

Do you think that there's

a lesson to be taken from this?

Well, one would hope

that most things

that happen in life

prove to be lessons.

Some things work out.

Some things don't.

That didn't.

If that's a lesson...

yes, it's a lesson.

President Gerald Ford

had given a talk

to a labor group.

He went out the back,

and we went into

a freight elevator.

The doors went open,

we walked out,

and the top door came back down,

and it hit Gerald Ford

right across the forehead.

And he ended up with a cut

about an inch and a half wide.

Of course, at that moment,

Chevy chase and these people

were talking about Ford

bumping his head

or stumbling.

So we went up in the room

and the doctor started

putting powder on it

to see if he could calm it down

so it didn't look like

a neon sign.

It came time to leave.

He waved and shook hands.

Got out to the street corner...

A shot rang out.

Sara Jane Moore

was across the street,

fired a bullet.

It went by his head,

by the secret service

guy's head,

by my head.

A matter of inches

from both of us.

We got in the car,

pushed him down

on the floor, and...

Secret service man on top,

I'm on top.

The car races out of the city...

...not knowing

what might be next.

Finally you hear

this muffled thing

from president Ford,

and he says,

"come on, you guys.

Get off.

You're heavy."

And so we sat up,

went to the airplane, and left.

I used to tease him and say

I hoped he appreciated fully

how I handled his departure

from the hotel in San Francisco.

No one ever noticed

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