Free In My Time by Dick Cheney Page A

rest of my political career, I expected that any day someone was going to turn up paperwork saying that for four months I did.
    DON RUMSFELD WAS SWORN in as director of OEO on May 26, 1969. That same afternoon I got a call from Frank Carlucci, who said Rumsfeld had asked him to help get OEO up and running. He wanted to know if I would be part of a task force they were setting up. I said I would be happy to be there, and the next morning I went to the OEO building at Nineteenth and M Streets, where I was welcomed by Carlucciand then joined about fifty other people jammed into a conference room.
    Carlucci, who would quickly become a friend (and, years later, would be my predecessor as secretary of defense), was a compact, wiry man whom Rumsfeld had met when they were both varsity wrestlers at Princeton. Although not yet forty he’d already had a storied career in the Foreign Service, including an assignment in the Congo during which he had been stabbed. He had been on his way to a sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Rumsfeld asked him to help out at OEO.
    Rumsfeld came into the meeting and talked for half an hour, completely enthusiastic about OEO’s starting to make a real difference in the lives of the poor. This was not a man who had been sent to dismantle the agency. As soon as he left, a young woman came in. “Is there anybody here named Cheney?” she asked. I raised my hand and she motioned me out of the room and down a couple of corridors. “Mr. Rumsfeld would like to see you,” she said, opening a door and ushering me in.
    Rumsfeld was seated at a desk and poring over a thick file. He didn’t look up, so I had a chance to observe his office. It had windows on two sides, none of them too clean, as I remember it. There was a desk, a sofa, and a coffee table that had clearly seen better days. A couple of cans were strategically placed under dark spots on the ceiling.
    Finally he looked up and pointed at me. “You, you’re congressional relations,” he said. “Now get the hell out of here.”
    Back in the corridor, it took me a minute to process what had just happened. It was harsher than my first encounter with Don Rumsfeld, but this time I had been offered a job. Accepting it would mean delaying my return to Wisconsin and the work on my Ph.D., but I told myself that it was only for a year, and I’d have a chance to be where the action was, where things were getting decided. I set out down the hall to find the congressional relations office, not realizing what a life-altering decision I was making. I didn’t know I was saying goodbye to the academic world forever and signing up for a forty-year career in politics and government—but it was exactly the right call.
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    THE OEO CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS office was small and leaderless, and although I was still a congressional fellow, I found myself working with the House and Senate in Washington as well as with governors and legislatures across the country. The state-level relationships were frequently more complicated—and far more testy—because many governors felt that OEO’s reason for being was to make things difficult for them. Governors had the right to veto OEO programs, and the director of the agency had the right to overrule those vetoes. This situation guaranteed a lively and contentious time.
    One morning soon after I arrived, I got an irate call from the governor’s office in Juneau, Alaska, about an OEO grant that was in the works. If it went forward, I was warned, the governor would veto it and we would have a real mess on our hands. I assured the voice on the phone that I would look into the situation, and after a few calls, I found the individual in our building responsible for the grant. I asked him to bring me the package so I could study it. Half an hour later, it had been delivered by hand and was locked in my desk drawer, where I intended it to stay until I could sort things out.
    A couple of days later