Oral History Interview with Tom Reed
November 8, 2013
Key:
Q:
William Inboden
A:
Thomas Reed
Q:

All right. This is Dr. William Inboden of the University of Texas, Austin. I'm sitting
here in Healdsburg, California with Mr. Thomas Reed who served with Bill Clements at
the Pentagon in a number of capacities. It's November 8, 2013, about 11:30 a.m., and
this is the beginning of our oral history. So all right.

A:

And this is Tom Reed and I know I'm being recorded.

Q:

Fantastic and with your full consent, Sir?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Thank you. All right. Well, just to begin with some background and context, can you
tell us about when you first moved to Texas and why?

A:

I have family in Texas, so I have been there often. My father and his brother were in
business with my uncle being in Houston and my father being in New York, and so I
visited family often. I actually moved there in the autumn of 1962 when I left Livermore
and started a high tech company making superconductors. And our principal investor
was Dudley Sharp of the Mission Manufacturing Company and part of his contribution
was to let us have about 10,000 square feet of floor space in his plant in Houston. And so
we decided that we would start there and then once we were up and rolling and had a
track record of financial success, we would then try to merge or sell ourselves or
something to firms either on Route 128 in Boston or Palo Alto in California.

Q:

Great. All right. Now how did you first get involved in Texas Republican party politics?
I know Texas was more or less a one-party state at the time. It was not a Republican
state, so how did you first get involved?

A:

I didn't get involved in Republican Party politics there. I got involved with George H. W.
Bush. That's because Bush, Sr. was a Connecticut guy like me. He was ten years older
but he came from the same town. I knew his family. His father was a U.S. senator and
George knew all of us and when he went to Texas in the oil business, he lived in Midland
but when he moved from Midland to Houston until he and Barbara had a chance to find a
home of their own, they lived with my uncle. So I knew George Bush very well, not
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really from politics as much as for just old friend and another New England expatriate.
So I wasn't really involved in Republican politics or politics in general until Kennedy was
shot in Dallas, which was while I was in Texas. And Lyndon Johnson is now president
and the business establishment and most of the people I knew were instantly horrified,
not with what policy meant from a Johnson presidency but from his disastrously bad
intellectual honesty record. The table talk all over town was too bad about Kennedy and
that really shocked a lot of us because I thought he was beginning to catch on, but
Johnson was absolutely lacking in integrity and everybody talked about it. And at the
same time, Vietnam was beginning to heat up and I didn't really think it smelled right. So
I got involved in politics at the time that LBJ became President. I had worked for George
Bush a little bit before or at the same time in ringing doorbells and so forth just because
he was a friend, but I'd hardly call that being involved in politics and I certainly wasn't
seriously involved in Republican politics before then.
Q:

Okay. If I can pick up on your side comment about Vietnam was just beginning to heat
up and if I recall, you said it didn't smell right. And so with Kennedy being shot in
November of 1963, this was pretty early that you're starting to pay attention with
Vietnam. What were your early concerns about Vietnam?

A:

Because I had buddies in the Air Force. I had been in the Air Force. I had been in the
engineering world, but it's a big family and I had buddies in the Air Force who were
serving there and one particular friend of a friend who got killed, and we're not at war but
he's still very dead. And basically what I was reading in the press did not match what my
Air Force buddies were saying was really going on. They weren't just over there training.
They're flying missions and then as I looked at the assassination of President Diem just
before Kennedy got killed and that seemed to me a really bad, bad judgment, bad morals.
It all didn't smell right.

Q:

Okay. And so you were concerned that LBJ would perhaps continue and escalate those
policies in Vietnam?

A:

Well, I think for all the things he started saying and from what I was reading, this is
getting to be a lost cause. And then you have the Tonkin Gulf. All these stories, I mean
that's now between the Republican and the Democratic Convention so that was later in
'64. But uh-uh, that doesn't smell right.

Q:

So during the 1964 campaign and election, were you still living in Texas at the time?

A:

No. We sold the company. Basically we closed on or about July 1st. We started this
company in '62. The whole mindset was to get it profitable. We did marvelously well.
We were profitable by the end of the first year. We were making superconductors, which
are the big magnets that are now in MRI machines and so forth and we were profitable by
the end of the '62. In '63 we were rolling and in early '64, we said okay, we need to move
to a permanent home. Dudley Sharp and the Mission Manufacturing people said, “You're
making a big mess in our factory” because we're using lubricants and so forth that made a
mess and so there was--you need to get out of here. Secondly, it was a small firm,
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technically smart guys but without the depth to really run the business. I didn't want to
run it and so we were approached by several people, Varian, down on the Peninsula was
one of our principal customers but we ended up dealing with the National Research Corp.
that had a research company on Route 128 outside Boston. And we closed on the deal in
about July of 1964. We sold the machinery and we kept some royalties that we lived off
of for 17 years. But basically we sold the company and I wanted to get back to California
because that's where my friends were and that's where I had a sailboat and a whole bunch
of other things. And at the same time, I was really getting interested in politics and my
friends in Houston had connected me with Peter O'Donnell who arranged for me to get in
the door and get a ticket, not a seat on the floor but to get in the door in the balcony to the
convention in San Francisco.
Q:

Oh the 1964 Convention? Yeah, that's right when Goldwater received the nomination?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Well, that anticipates my next question. How supportive were you, if at all, of Goldwater
in '64? I know you mentioned your concerns about LBJ as president. So was Goldwater
someone you got excited about? I know the Republicans were fairly divided.

A:

Oh, absolutely. I had read Conscience of a Conservative. I thought he made sense. The
part his fulminating about big government was all interesting, but the lines that really got
my attention where I can't quote the exact lines, but basically we should not strive to coexist with communism, we've got to beat them. And that meant victory and that sounded
to me that that was exactly right. Korea to my age was to what Vietnam may have been
to your age. We got into it and then it was a meat grinder and it just went on and on and I
think that was one of my problems about Vietnam, early Vietnam smelled a lot like what
happened to Korea because I watched that meat grinder thinking boy, all my high school
class is going to get sucked in. So I read Conscience of a Conservative. I thought that's
exactly right. We need to win and the fact that he was the candidate and I thought going
to the convention and watching all of that was really a great idea. And when he won, I
then said okay, now I want to help and I volunteered to become an advance man and the
Texas friends got me connected to the right people, which is all done in a chaotic fashion
as you know but I ended up as an advance man for Goldwater.

Q:

And in your capacity as an advance man for the Goldwater campaign, were you mostly
doing work in California or did you go to other states wherever he was campaigning?

A:

No. The rule for an advance man is you don't work your home state because you'll make
too many deals with your cousins. And so the basic advance man rule is you don't go to
your home state. And so I basically went to school at the Hilton in DC for a weekend and
then you get assigned to a project as the campaign begins with an old-timer that the
senior class for the advance man for the Nixon campaigns of '60. And so I was assigned
with a guy and we did an event for Bill Miller up in his home territory and then we did
something else. And after that, the guy that was my mentor obviously said this guy is
fine and the tours came off fine. So I was then franchised to operate on my own and I got
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the projects that I basically couldn't screw up. A Goldwater rally in Rhode Island that
you can't win, but it was really interesting. So we did a fundraiser at the tennis club. But
what was impressive is the governor, John Chafee, came to the airport and did all the
right things and I thought this is a guy with integrity and I really like him. I became a
lifetime fan of John Chafee. He played it straight up and he understood meeting
Goldwater or Bill Miller at the airport, that's not good press but he wasn't on the ticket
that year and he did what he needed to do. And once I did that, I was entrusted with really
playing in the major leagues and pretty soon I got a major event in New Orleans.
Q:

And just to clarify, this was the same John Chafee who later became the senator from
Rhode Island?

A:

That's correct.

Q:

He was the governor.

A:

Well, he was governor. Next, he then became Under Secretary of the Navy and then
Secretary of the Navy and then from that position, he ran for Senator and served as a
Senator forever and his son took over.

Q:

Yes that's right. So I want to return to politics at the time in the second, but realizing that
you had spent time in Texas and then a significant time in California in the early '60s, it's
striking looking back now that five out of the last nine U.S. presidents were from either
Texas or California. So those two states really in so many ways, economically,
politically, demographically, have set a lot of the agenda for the United States for the last
50 years. How do you compare the ethos of Texas and California at that time, in the
early ‘60s? Did the states feel very similar or did it feel very differently?

A:

Well, at the time, they were very similar. Anybody reading this transcript today will say
what are you talking about? But in the mid ‘60s, California was what had became
identified in the Nixon campaign as the sunbelt which was Florida, Texas, Arizona,
California, suburbs, growth. California in the mid ‘60s was really a booming get with it,
free enterprise place. And yes there was San Francisco out here and Austin in Texas, but
basically they were both places where you get with and earn a living that they diverge for
a variety of reasons. But at the time, they were similar. They weren't identical because
Texans are not Californians and you know California had movie land which is not Texas.
And Texas had Lubbock and Amarillo and Big Springs, which is not Oakland.

Q:

Yeah.

A:

But they were similar in terms of an attitude of yes we can do it.

Q:

Okay. Fascinating. Now how did you get to know Ronald Reagan?

A:

Part of the campaign in 1964, I was an advance man and I was at the close of the
campaign, I was running a train campaign whistle stop from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh.
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And when we got to Pittsburgh, we had a big rally and then it was the last week of the
campaign, there was the crowd was huge because the Goldwater campaign headquarters,
by then they've figured out we're going to lose and they all want to get out of the bunker
for a few days and have fun. And I got tired of all that and I'd heard somebody say this
this guy Reagan is giving a speech and so I went to my room in Pittsburgh and got away
from all this hoo ha going on and I watched. And I was absolutely astonished as were
millions of other people. Bill Clark was the same way. Bill Clark got involved in that he
watched the same thing and said wow, that is somebody very different. And so I thought
that's impressive. The Goldwater campaign was so bad, so poorly run, so inarticulate and
here's a guy who’s articulate that I think if there could have been different content. But I
listened to him and I thought that's really pretty good. I went home, thought about it,
started having lunch with my friends, and I wrote him a letter, like a whole bunch of
other people. I just wrote Reagan a letter and said, "Great performance, very articulate, I
agree with what you said. I hope you run for political office and if you do that, I'd be
glad to help." And then I spend another paragraph on, "I've been an advance man in
other states. I did ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons so I know all about that stuff
and I run a small business so I'm my own boss in terms of time and I'd be glad to help."
It would appear that Reagan gets all his mail and reads it and apparently he put it in a
stack of this is worthwhile and he handed--once his friends down there had hired Spencer
Roberts to look into a gubernatorial campaign, they started sorting through these letters.
Reagan handed them the letters, they pawed through that, they picked out a few of people
that sounded reasonably interesting, and I got a call in I would say the summer of '65 to
come have lunch with Ronald Reagan at the club. It was middle of the summer and I was
doing something else so I said I can't do that, which I then got a follow-up call from Fred
Haffner, one of Spencer Roberts' partners who will say come down to the office and
talked. He had looked at my letter and said this learned politics but in somebody else's
state. So nobody in California had a clue as to who I was. And so I met with Haffner. I
was given some assignments. I'd been an advance man so he said get down to Modesto.
Reagan is going to go down there, go down and do stuff. And I did other things and then
I got an invitation, okay come to the Reagan residence in the first week of September in
1965 and we need to talk. And there was one or two other qualified volunteers. There
were the Spencer-Roberts partners and there was sort of Reagan's trusted allies, being his
brother and his minister. And they had about a dozen people and that was how I first met
him. And after that, I was basically given other assignments, go organize counties, go do
missions, and basically I passed because in mid December, Ronald Reagan called and
said, "I'd like you to be the Northern California chairman." That Fred Haffner was the
partner that I first talked to and he was absolutely my mentor. He was really a very good,
professional politician. He was a wild man in many ways but he was my mentor.
Q:

Well, you mentioned when you first saw Reagan’s speech and then it sounds like when
you first met Reagan in person it was at his home, what was your impression of Reagan
in person at that first meeting, especially compared with how you had seen him while
watching his speech?

A:

Watching his speech, like a lot of people, we wondered who is this guy? Is he real? Is he
a movie actor? Is that speech, is he delivering his lines or does he have a mind of his
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own? Does he live in Hollywood? I mean he lives in the Pacific Palisades but does he
live in some right wing cave or does he live in the real world, earning a living and dealing
with people? Who are his friends? And so that was sort of the questions and that was
what I was interested in and when I went to meet him, what struck me is it was not
Hollywood. Very charming. Lovely family. But we talked early on about he kept an
audio scrapbook for his children. He didn't have time to do pasting pictures but they did
little dinner time interludes, interviews for what they did this week. He was keeping that
for Patty and Ron and I came home and decided I'd try that. I thought real guy.
Obviously very bright. What people even to this day don't understand, his mind worked
ten times faster than yours and mine. Not just twice as fast. His clock speed was unreal.
His recall was unreal. Unreal. Who were his friends? Well, I didn't really learn that and
the other question of course was does he have personality defects that are going to
preclude his being a candidate, whether he drinks too much or is sort of right wing or is
he pragmatic and does he live in the real world? And it became very clear that he lived in
the real world.
Q:

And I know you're finishing a book on his gubernatorial campaign and some of his time
as governor, so we'll skip over a decent amount of that. I'll encourage anyone reading
this transcript to please take a look at Mr. Reed's book.

A:

The book to come is not about the gubernatorial race. It talks about that but it's about
Reagan’s mind.

Q:

Yes.

A:

He got elected in '66 and by then I was absolutely committed to getting rid of Lyndon
Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was an absolutely peril to this country in my view. We've got
to get rid of him and that was one of the reasons for getting involved with Reagan. My
involvement with Reagan was not because I didn't even know where the capitol was. I
didn't-- that's not the issue. The issue was getting rid of Lyndon Johnson and extracting
us from Vietnam, and so the minute Reagan is governor, I'm now focused on now, we've
got to start collecting delegates, not because I thought he was perfect but because we've
got to get rid of Lyndon Johnson and anybody that knows anything knows that Richard
Nixon can't win anything. And so who's the candidate going to be? Now I was wrong. I
was young.

Q:

Okay. All right. Well, and again I'll encourage our listeners to read your book about the
'68 campaign. But as an aside, once Nixon got the nomination in '68 and you were still
were committed to getting rid of Lyndon Johnson, did you do anything to help out the
Nixon presidential campaign in '68 in the general?

A:

No, because we had our hands full in California.

Q:

Okay.
6

A:

Nixon won, Reagan was very supportive. Reagan went to San Diego. Nixon was putting
together his campaign plan also in San Diego. They all met and talked as to who was
going to do what but I had been elected Republican National Committeeman, that that's
one of the consequences of that convention and we had some serious political problems at
home. And so Ron and I talked about that and he agreed he would do speeches to help
Nixon, but my concerns in California first off were the state legislative elections because
now he's governor. He'd had a Democratic legislature but only by one vote and CalPlan
was, we target these people and if we can win this one and that one, then we get control
of the legislature. And if we win that one and this one, we get control of the Senate. And
so I was really focused on raising money, identifying the two or three really hot prospects
and then the Kuchel-Rafferty-Cranston-Specter goes out of the coffin because in doing
that, about Labor Day, it became clear that, while we're doing really well in those races,
the top of the ticket really was a problem because in the primary, Max Rafferty had
defeated Tommy Kuchel who was the incumbent senator. Rafferty had been endorsed
mainly by Salvatori and others of the hard right because they wanted Kuchel out of the
senate. They didn't care who the new senator was. They just wanted to get rid of Kuchel.
That's because six years before at the time of the Berlin Wall, Kuchel had basically
supported Kennedy in saying a wall was better than a war. And Salvatori and others said
no, let's get the tanks out there and roll it down. Kuchel had been defeated a very bitter
primary and Rafferty had no campaign organization, not much money and the people
who supported him in the primary, all disappeared. They'd achieved their objectives and
so in Labor Day about Reagan and I and Stu Spencer and Jim Halley talked about this
and said, "We've got to take charge of the Rafferty campaign."

Q:

Just to clarify, this is Labor Day 1968, right?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

Labor Day '68, we've got to take charge, we've got to get involved, in fact take charge of
the Rafferty campaign. We even looked at pulling a New Jersey, of getting him to resign
and installing some other candidate. You can't do that under California law. So we said
okay, we've at least got to make--so we put together a major unity push, Reagan, the
Honorary Chairman, I was the campaign director, Nofziger was the press guy, Holmes
Tuttle raised the money and much of the fall was focused in trying to turn that campaign
around. We probably weren't going to be able to win but just all of us being involved
gave a stamp of unity. You know, we all got to get behind the party and you could see it
all the way down. That result we want, control of the assembly, we want control of the
Senate. Cranston won the Senate seat but that's the long answer of what I was doing. I
was doing California politics, not Nixon nationally. That helped Nixon win California.
California provided the 40 electoral votes. He only won by 30-some electoral votes, so
you know California provided the margin. And I think it was all getting the Republican
party unified.
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Q:

Okay. And once Nixon became President, how did you feel about the Vietnam policies
that he pursued, just mindful that you had mentioned this earlier as one of your main
critiques of LBJ, was his Vietnam policy?

A:

What did I think about Nixon and Vietnam?

Q:

Yeah.

A:

I guess he was saying the right things and it wasn't clear what he was going to do. And to
leap forward, one of the really frightening questions others have asked me, you did all
this stuff in '68, so if you won, what the hell were you going to do about Vietnam? That's
a frightening thought.

Q:

Yeah.

A:

One of the things that's emerged from this book I'm working on is Eisenhower became a
Reagan mentor and it's not well understood. In '62, Eisenhower campaigning for Nixon
and others in the gubernatorial, Reagan was the Master of Ceremonies. They all were
doing stuff together. When '64 is over, Eisenhower is trying to rebuild the party, get rid
of all these crazy people doing ideology, and let's win some elections. And he started
communicating with Reagan about campaign--you ought to run and then strategy, unify
the party, broad base, talk to the--pay attention to the press. And then once '68 was
unfolding, he really became an advisor, not just on campaigns but on national security,
Vietnam. And there's a great quote in the basically John Eisenhower talking to his father,
when Ike was being asked--Kennedy asked Ike to come down to Camp David right after
the Bay of Pigs. And John asked his father, "Are you going to go down there to talk to
Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs? What do you think about that?" And Ike's answer was
"I don't do bad invasions." And I think that was really Eisenhower's push and corollary,
he said, "You know if there's a battalion holding the hill, give me a division and I'll take it
without any casualties." And that was his attitude to Vietnam, same as ending the war in
Korea. We're going to end it and we're going to threaten serious violence if you don't end
it. And that's what folded into the speeches that Ron gave in '68. So what did I think of
Nixon in '69? I guess I was--you know I was helping at the White House. In the summer
of '69, he won. We did all that stuff and then I went to the inauguration in '69 and then I
was doing other stuff, running my business. You know I still had a business.

Q:

And your business was back in California?

A:

Back in California, yes. And basically we took the cash flow from superconductors and
we're doing other things. And by the spring, the Nixon White House, because I knew
these guys, were calling, what do think about Weinberger to become Director of the
OMB? They knew that I had been Reagan's head hunter. Once Reagan got elected
governor, he was such a terrible chooser of people that I went there and ran the personnel
office for half a year and they knew I was the head hunter, so we were talking about
people. And then as it got to be spring, Harry Dent asked me to come work at the White
House for the summer. And I thought that would really be a good idea because I did not
8

want to get involved in Reagan's re-election campaign. And I had reasons. My wife's
family had a spot on the Jersey Shore so I thought that would be just fine. I'll go live at
the Metropolitan Club and the kids will be on the New Jersey Shore and we'll have a
lovely summer. So I went and worked at the White House, but I was so involved in the
personnel issues that I didn't really pay much attention to Vietnam. It's a real problem but
what he was saying made sense which is you know, "We've got to end this thing and
win," and Vietnamization we're going to turn this over. I was not reading the CIA reports
that said you can't do that because there is no Vietnamese army. So it all seemed to make
sense but I was focused on other things.
Q:

I want to return back to a comment you made on the side about Reagan being a, I think
you said, a terrible chooser of people. Tell us a little bit more about Reagan's personnel
choices, his approach to picking staff members, members of his team.

A:

Well, let's go to the big picture.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Reagan is not just an actor. Reagan is a motion picture professional. He was a union
leader. It was tough times. He was fighting off the communists. He was licensed to
carry a concealed weapon during that time. And as a union leader, he was really good at
negotiating and you look forward to his dealing with Gorbachev in Geneva and
Reykjavik, he knew what he was doing. He'd been doing it. He was a motion picture
professional. Now what that means is, and I've talked to a lot of people about him in '68,
he looked at politics through the motion picture lens. There's got to be a director. Who’s
my director? Holmes Tuttle in charge of money and big decisions. Who's the director?
Stu Spencer. Stu Spencer has the strategy. Who's the studio chief? Tom Reed. He
produces the cameras and the lights and all that stuff and markets the product. Who's my
publicist? Mike Deaver. During the campaign and during government, if you put things
to him in a movie context, you got a decision right off. He was a very decisive guy. But
it helped if you put it in movie context or when there was issues on the table. He would
start talking about movies and we knew him. His wife went crazy. She hated this but we
knew--he's talking about Gary Cooper in High Noon. That means take the risks, do
what's right, leave the star in the dust, and get the hell out of town. Stu Spencer was with
him in Stockton and after a speech, Reagan was grousing about what the hell are we
doing in Stockton. There's more voters in Santa Monica and the weather's nicer. Stu
says, "For the same reason you don't open on Broadway. You open in New Haven," and
he says, "Got it." He was a motion picture professional but that means the studio head
made the cameramen appear and the lighting men appear and the script--all that stuff
happened by magic and so when there was a management, something to be done, his
attitude was leave it to the boys. Leave it to the studio chief.
He was a product of the Depression which means people out of work, he was really
sympathetic to. The problem was which drew me to Sacramento, as soon as the election
of '66 was over, all the losers are showing up at his doorstep saying, “I want to be
secretary of this or that” and he's saying, “Oh yeah, sure.” I know you need a job. And
9

that was a disaster. So I had to have a conversation. The people said this guy is
incompetent. You may not do that. You need a good personnel chief so it's going to be
me. Okay. And so his choice of people were--I mean it was not reaching out to find the
brightest and best ever. It was who is next outside the door.
Example: This secretary worked on the campaign, a very serious executive secretary, a
professional. Her husband's job took him, they had to move. She would leave. He just
goes out and picks the receptionist who was a nice teenager from high school saying,
okay, you're next, because he was used to seeing her. Nice kid but a disaster. She had
learned he doesn't like bad news so any incoming mail with bad news, she puts in a box
in the closet. Those include appeals from death sentences. You cannot put them in the
closet. And so we, Bill Clark and I, reached out and said you know this has got to
change. So we installed Helene Von Damm and put this girl on some nice job someplace
else. This happened repeatedly over and over again. I mean that's part of his problems in
the '76 campaign. He would not get good management. He just took staffers like Deaver
and all these guys, without any reaching for management. He did not know how to reach
out for good management.
Q:

Okay. Well, we're going to come back to some of the Reagan stories, particularly back in
the 1980s when Bill Clements comes back in the picture, but I now want to come around
to bring in Bill Clements into the picture because this background has been very helpful
for our listeners to know where you're coming from when you first encountered Bill
Clements. Now if memory serves correctly, you first met Clements on the 1972 Nixon
campaign. Is that correct or...?

A:

That is correct.

Q:

Well, tell us more, how you did first meet Clements?

A:

That is a laugh riot.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I became the National Committeeman in '68. In '72, I'd been the committeeman for four
years and Nixon is now re-election time and Nixon campaign, Bob Mardian called and
said, we want you to help in the campaign. Well, I don't really want to do that but I will.
I want to see the man re-elected. George McGovern is not the man we need but I said the
deal is, same thing about your home state. I'm not going to run a campaign in California.
I have a few remaining friends here. You run campaigns and you have to throw people
out and sometimes they're your friends and all that, and so I said I'm not going to do
California so what do you want me to do? Well, we want you to be the regional
campaign director for the southwest. I looked at the map and I saw Hawaii as the most
southern and western state we've got and I said count me in. Okay. The southwest was
defined as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii. In all those states, and this
was about spring of 1972, in all those states, John Mitchell had gone out and picked the
oldest conservative business man he could find to be the Nixon chairman in all those
10

states. And in every state, in all those states, I basically went in and changed them out
and recruited new people and the old guys, we said you're a great chairman. You're now
the chairman of the executive committee and we want all your advice whenever you're
awake but we've got to do something.
Fred Malek was my boss and he and I were in Texas, because that was a big state. And
we looked around and we said okay, now we've got a business man's committee and
there's this guy Clements that I don't know and Bobby Mosbacher, who I knew very well,
because he's from Houston and their co-chairmen. So why don't we let Mosbacher run
the business man's committee and get this guy Clements to be the state chairman. And so
Malek came down and we did that and we installed Bill Clements and the state chairman.
Now I really laugh because I just gave Clements unshirted hell. I flew into Texas every
week and I would either see him or I would go to Amarillo or Lubbock and I'd go to
where he said he had a headquarters, I would take a picture. There was no headquarters
or I would go to San Antonio and there was a couple of ladies drinking coffee, but they
weren't running a phone bank. And every week, I just gave him hell about you're not
doing the job. Your job is phone banks and headquarters, and da da da da da. And he put
up with that. Knowing him now, I can't imagine how or why. I did the same thing in
Arizona. My proudest achievement is some construction guy who is in charge who said
go away we can win Arizona against McGovern. I said tides run in the affairs of men
taken at the flood and you can get control of the legislature if you play this right and you
can elect a congressman. And so I found a lady who was in the state senate and said why
don't you become chairman and then you'll be the senate majority leader, a lady named
Sandra Day O’Connor.
Q:

Okay.

A:

And when the campaign was over (you're going to ask about did I recruit Clements) but
when the campaign was over, I was looking for names in all these places. I called Ms.
O’Connor up and said okay, you did a great job. Would you like to come be assistant
secretary of something? I got the standard 1960s answer. "Well, my husband's got a law
practice. I've got young kids. I'm now the senate majority leader. It's fun. Maybe
something will turn up some other time."

Q:

Maybe indeed.

A:

Same deal in New Mexico. In Hawaii, one of the few times the Republicans carried.
Why? I went to the Japanese American community and said your businesses will not
survive George McGovern as President. This campaign is now yours. And they just took
it and ran with it. It was wonderful.
So in Texas, I was part of getting Bill installed as chairman and then I just gave him grief
and he apparently developed some respect for me because when it was over, then I went
to the inauguration, the re-election inauguration in January of '73. I was the outgoing
national committeeman. I went to the inauguration. I had a nice seat. There was a nice
11

party that Ross Perot threw and I talked to Bill, but that was sort of--you know I was
going to go home and doing other things.
Q:

Now what did you think of Bill Clements as a person when you were first getting to
know him during the campaign in '72? So you described some of the tensions you had
when you were trying to hold him accountable for opening up campaign offices, but just
what was he like as a person? What were your first impressions?

A:

No, well we did not have tensions. I mean that was amazing. He did what I told him to
do. In retrospect, I can't believe it. No, we did not have tensions. I said the plan is
you've got to do this. You've got to get phone banks. You've got to do this, this, and this
and John Tower was on the ballot at the same time and so--

Q:

For re-election?

A:

Re-election. Tower was on the ballot, but he was never going to win in a landslide and so
we really were paying attention but it was a Republican--we've got to get Tower reelected. No, we didn't have tensions. My relationships with him were just fine. And you
know he took orders very well and in retrospect, I can't believe it.

Q:

Now, was he also very busy running SEDCO at the time?

A:

I don't think so. I don't think so because he'd really done a great job, I mean he was a
great picker of people and so he'd really picked good people to run the place and yes
that's where he went to hang out because he had a lovely office there but I don't think he
was answering the phone or doing stuff with SEDCO. I think he was committed to “the
country's in danger.”

Q:

Okay. So he was able to--because SEDCO was running so well at the time with his team,
he was able to spend so much more time on the campaign?

A:

Yes.

Q:

All right. So during the campaign in '72, did you have any inkling that Clements might
be a candidate for a major position in the Nixon administration such as at the Pentagon?

A:

I didn't think he was a candidate. I thought he would be my candidate because part of
what I was doing at heart I was a head hunter. As an executive, I absolutely believe if
you really pick the good people, then everything else falls into place. And that's why for
every project, I picked a guy and 10% of the deal is his. Now you go run it and if you do
that right, then the rest is downhill. And so I was in these campaigns, I was looking for
people, as I say in Arizona, Sandra Day O'Connor. In New Mexico, the star of the show
was not somebody we were going to recruit, was Peter Domenici. I helped get him
elected to the Senate for the first time, that he was the mayor of Albuquerque and there
was a vacant seat and this was part of what was running through my mind as the regional
coordinator, we're going to pick up a bunch of senate seats and congressional seats if
12

Nixon wins as big as we think he can. And so in New Mexico it was Peter Domenici but
for the Senate. In Texas I thought Bill Clements and two or three other people I
encountered are people that I want to call when this is over. At no time did I have him
talk about what he wanted to do. At no time was I party to Fred Malek/Bill Clements
conversations although I suspect there were some. But he was not saying this is what I
want to do when this over. I was thinking this guy needs to come to Washington.
Q:

Okay. And what are your memories of the process? How did it happen that Nixon then
picked Clements for Deputy Secretary of Defense?

A:

I do not know that firsthand, so you've got to get a second source but I believe, well, I
became aware that he had been on a blue ribbon panel that I think Laird, by maybe the
White House had created a blue ribbon panel during Nixon One to look at the defense
department. I think in the context of what are we going to do when Vietnam is over,
something like that. I don't know whether it was called the blue ribbon panel. Bill
Clements was one of the members and I read that panel report and I thought they're
focused on the right things. The Soviets are going to have nuclear superiority under
Nixon's watch. And so now what I believe what I heard from Clements, the election is
over and Malek or whatever talked to him about coming to be Deputy Secretary of
Defense. I believe that Nixon's model was Elliott Richardson is going to keep the
Congress happy and Bill Clements is going to run the Pentagon. And the model in
Nixon’s one was Dave Packard ran the Pentagon and he was just genius. Everybody
respected him and so it would replicate the Packard experience.

Q:

Okay. So for our readers and to clarify during Nixon's first time, when Mel Laird was
Secretary of Defense, David Packard was Deputy Secretary of Defense.

A:

That's correct.

Q:

And so that had sent a good precedent of a business leader then being the Deputy
Secretary of Defense.

A:

It was more than just a business leader. I mean Neil McElroy was a business leader. It
was a business leader in what was then high tech who really understood technology and
he was just outstanding. Packard was outstanding. And so I think Nixon's intent was to
replicate that with Elliott Richardson is going to keep Congress happy and Clements is
going to run the Pentagon. Kind of like Reagan picked Weinberger to be Secretary of
Defense because he was known as Mack the Knife and therefore Reagan wanted to really
pour the money down the defense chimney and he wanted Congress to be comfortable
that it was being looked after. So Nixon's image, belief was Richardson is going to keep
Congress happy but Clements is going to run the Pentagon.
Bill Clements said he was invited up to Camp David for a discussion of all this, probably
in the December of '72 time period. Clements I am told had a conversation and Nixon
said, "I want you to run the place and you, Clements, are going to pick the people and
you're going to make these decisions and Elliott Richardson is going to do this stuff on
13

the Hill." Okay. Clements becomes Deputy Secretary of Defense and one of your
questions was what did I think when I heard that? I thought that's really great.
Q:

Okay.

A:

He was on my list of people that I want to come to Washington and he's cut from the
cloth of David Packard and wonderful. And so forth. The problem arises to get to your
next question is then Elliott Richardson leaves and that's in March. I wrote down the
date. I think it was sometime in March of--

Q:

March of '73.

A:

March of '73.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Yeah. I'm sorry, May. May of '73.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Okay. So it's Richardson and Clements and they're cooking with gas and Clements is
getting organized and he really hadn't talked to me yet about coming to the Pentagon.
Peter O'Donnell was his companion and handmaiden. So you need to talk to Peter about
what was in Bill Clements' brain because you have questions about what did he think
about Vietnam and how did he get along. Peter would know. I didn't know. I wasn't
there. I went to the inaugural. We had a nice party and then I returned to run my
business and I had other stuff to do. But in May of '73, Watergate is now cooking and
Richardson is moved to be attorney general and Clements does not get promoted to be
Sec Def, this guy Schlesinger arrives. Now what Clements would not address, I mean the
problem is over and over again, Bill was such a hard-nosed, hard-driving character that
he in the eyes of most White House people, Bill didn't have the flexibility to really be a
cabinet member. I think he did but I think that was the problem.
There's a vacancy and Nixon turns to Schlesinger. This was not a random name. Jim
Schlesinger. I know him very well and we're going to talk about that relationship. Jim
Schlesinger had been a Nixon confidante and ally for years. Schlesinger wrote campaign
speeches for Nixon. When Nixon gets elected President, he taps Schlesinger who has
been at RAND to come be one of the deputies at OMB. And then he needs a Chairman
of the Atomic Energy Commission, so he puts Schlesinger there. And then there's all this
boiling at the CIA because of Watergate and he puts Schlesinger there. Schlesinger is his
guy and I know Jim very well. I mean Schlesinger and Clements absolutely--Mercury
and Saturn--and I like Jim very well. He's a close friend. But the point is Schlesinger is
Nixon's guy and now all this Camp David discussion about “Bill you run the Pentagon” is
suddenly out the window because now Nixon has his guy as Sec Def. And so you know,
Bill who? He doesn't tell Clements that. And so Bill still thinks that he has the same
relationship but he doesn't.
14

Q:

So just to clarify so Nixon didn't tell Bill Clements about the change?

A:

He told him about the change. He goes, “I want Jim Schlesinger to be Secretary of
Defense.” He doesn't say, “I'm sending my guy over there who I really know and trust
and has been with me for X years, so please don't call me anymore.” He never said that.
But that was the implication. Problem number one was Bill did not get promoted to be
Sec Def. Number two, Nixon's guy Schlesinger is installed and therefore the Camp
David accords between Nixon and Clements go out the window. Bill doesn't know that.

Q:

Okay.

A:

About this time, he's trying to staff up the Pentagon. He did beautifully in the opening
time with Richardson. He did marvelously well. One of the questions you'll ask is the
people he recruited. He really did a marvelous job of recruiting. Peter O'Donnell was his
assistant head hunter right across the hall. You need to talk to Peter about all this but he
recruited Mal Currie to be the DDR&E. He recruited Norm Augustine to be
Undersecretary of Army.

Q:

Just for the readers, can you unpack the acronym, Mal Currie, DDR&E.

A:

I'm sorry. Mal Currie, who came from a high tech industry in Southern California, I
forgot what, became the Defense Director of Research and Engineering. And that is the
umbrella that oversees all the advanced technology work in all three services.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Very important. For Undersecretary of the Army, he recruited Norm Augustine. The
undersecretaries, sort of like OSD, the undersecretaries run the store and so there was a
political service secretary that talks to Congress, the Undersecretary of the Army was
Norm Augustine who did a marvelous job in the Army and basically went on to become
the CEO of Lockheed Martin. Bill recruited a guy named Dave Potter to be
Undersecretary of the Navy who really brought the Navy into the post-Vietnam area.
During that opening time, he recruited some really good people, a lot of others, during
that late winter. In the spring, April or so, he starts talking to me about coming to be
Secretary of the Air Force.

Q:

And this is the spring of what year?

A:

'73.

Q:

'73, okay. So just a few months after--

A:

Election's over, Bill is installed. He's been hiring people. He's installed all these other
people.
15

Q:

And so to clarify, when he first starts talking to you, this is still when Elliott Richardson
is Secretary of Defense. It's before Schlesinger?

A:

It may be he's just left.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I don't really recall the timing.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Or maybe he was just sort of--because he was Acting Secretary. Bill, yeah, in fact that's
part of the point. Bill Clements was Acting Secretary of Defense from May of '74 until
Schlesinger was sworn in, which was--

Q:

May of '73?

A:

'73, sorry. May of '73, yes. That's a good point. That's when he called. He was in
charge.

Q:

Okay.

A:

May of '73, Richardson leaves, Schlesinger is sworn in about the first of August of '73
and during that six-week time, Bill is the Acting Secretary of Defense. I think that's
when he got in touch. I hadn't really thought about that, but he thought he had the power
to hire people and so he calls and says would you come talk about being Secretary of the
Air Force? Very fortunate that didn't happen because as you know Will, as a cognoscenti
of Washington, if you just come down the chimney and you're suddenly Secretary of the
Air Force, you don't know squat and you're going to get eaten. And so I said, oh yes, sure
I'll come talk about that. I was in the Air Force once and I know a lot about ballistic
missiles and I knew more about nuclear weapons than most any people in the building
and so I came and talked.
By the time I came to talk, Schlesinger is Sec Def. And Schlesinger doesn't want to have
any of Clements' appointees and so he's vetoing everybody that Clements is floating up
and Clements says, “I have Nixon's authority to pick the people” and Nixon isn't
answering the phone. But it's not I mean there are several other Assistant Secretaries that
Clements wanted to install and they all were getting vetoed. And so I came and talked.
And nothing happened and the first generation, Bob Seamans was Secretary of Air Force.
He wanted to retire. There was an Undersecretary, John McLucas, but Clements wanted
me to be Secretary of the Air Force. But Schlesinger said no and it wasn't no, I want
McLucas. It was no Reed is a Reagan, is a name from the White House. And so I
thought fine, I've got other things to do and I commuted back and forth. Peter O'Donnell
left and Jack Hammock also from Dallas became the head hunter in the office there.

Q:

So Peter O'Donnell returned to Dallas at this point?
16

A:

Returned to Dallas, yes. Peter O'Donnell was right across the hall there's Special
Assistant to Secretary and the Deputy Secretary have a special assistant who are sort of
the political, fix everything people. Richardson's was Mort Abramowitz and he and I got
along just fine. Schlesinger arrived and his special assistant was Martin Hoffmann, then
Clements had been O'Donnell and then Jack Hammock. I went down to La Jolla for
August as I often do and I saw Jack playing tennis and he said, “I'm going to leave.”
Why don't you go help Clements? You know he wants you there but he can't get you past
Schlesinger. I thought yeah why not? Then Yom Kippur War comes along and suddenly
both Schlesinger and Clements decide we need somebody right now. So I went to join.
Back to the Schlesinger issue, Schlesinger basically now was Sec Def and he's vetoing all
these things that Clements wants to do and it was the beginning of a long, grinding,
difficult time. But the reason for that difficulty is Clements never got the word that the
Camp David accords were out the window once Schlesinger got there. And they were
absolutely different cats. I mean Schlesinger is an academic, very smart, and tells
everybody how smart he is. He wasn't a businessman, he wasn't an organizer, he was just
absolutely the other side of the coin from Bill Clements. They professionally detested
each other, although personally they got along well. Very touching: when Gerald Ford
fired Schlesinger, Bill Clements was the first guy out of the jar to say what's he going to
do for a job? He's got a wonderful wife and suddenly he's out the window and we've got
to find him a job. Very interesting.

Q:

All right. I'm going to want to come back to that. No, no, this is very helpful
background.

A:

Where were we?

Q:

Well, let's go back to you in 1973, when Nixon's inaugural in January of '73, you said that
your plan was to go back to California and continue to run your business. After your
work on the campaign, did you have a very strong interest in taking a Nixon
administration job if the right one came along?

A:

Absolutely not.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I did not, you know, I'd run campaigns. I'd done that. It's like giving up smoking. I'm
not going to do that anymore because you eat your friends. The problem is if you run
campaigns well, you've got to make hard decisions and you've got to make them during
the next hour and you're going to throw out somebody that was your soccer playing
buddy from ten years ago. But politically they're fools and so you really use up friends.
When I got through with running campaigns, I said, “no more.”
And I got involved. I eventually got recruited to run Reagan’s re-election campaign in
1970. I did it because if I didn't, he was going to lose. And he had a rendezvous with
17

destiny. And so okay but when the 1970 election was over, election day, I went and
voted on election day, Monday we flew around the state with Reagan, Tuesday morning,
I voted, got on the plane and went to Colorado to watch the returns in Joe Coors’ living
room. No more. Absolutely no more.
You're never home. I had young kids and you just use up friends. And so once '72 was
over, I did that because McGovern was really, we can't have that and I was the national
committeeman and that's what you're paid to do, figuratively, but I had absolutely no
interest. Harry Dent said come be a “summer intern” at the White House. Well, that
sounded like fun and it was. I talked with friends about it's really fun but it's not my
store. You know at 5:00, I'm going to go home and go to the movies. And it's not my
store and the fact that this guy hates that guy, you know, that really isn't my problem and
so I had a wonderful time because I really helped recruit people and identified people and
put together lists and then Nixon trusted me as a former national committeeman, I mean
trusted me personally to help mollify all the factions in California, but I absolutely did
not want to stay after the summer of ‘69.
Q:

Okay. Well, let's come back around to once you do get the call and you're having
discussions with Bill Clements and then Schlesinger about joining the Pentagon team,
how would you describe the general feeling at the Pentagon in the year 1973 in light of
Vietnam and the Cold War? So American troops have just finished, I think in January of
'73, we finished the final draw down of American troops, the Cold War, Soviets are still
making some geo-political advances in the Cold War, what did things feel like at the
Pentagon at the time in terms of America's place in the world?

A:

Well, I can't help you with the big picture. I don't know why, but just I sort of didn't
notice because I was focused on other things. Vietnam, the feeling was in Nixon and
Ford, the feeling was we're all here at the Alamo. This is really a mess, we cannot screw
around and yeah Watergate would you please stop that stuff? We've got serious things to
do.
One of the things I'm proudest of or what I did and Bill Clements did was learn lessons
from Vietnam. We got kicked around in Vietnam and we learned some important
lessons. We can talk about that list, but it was really learn the lessons of Vietnam. And
don't do it again. I don't mean politically, I mean here's a weapon system, command
structure, so forth. And so it was you've got to learn from Vietnam and you had a
Congress that would not vote funds to help the South Vietnamese defend themselves. It
was really a bad climate. So I wasn't thinking about the geo-political picture and what
does it mean. I was thinking about we're here at the Alamo and there's Santa Ana and
you know keep every weapon loaded and keep firing. And it was a very--focus on
Congress, don't let Congress screw it up and keep chugging ahead and we learned some
lessons and don't lose the message. Cold War, well, my perception was very narrow. My
perception was from ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and I had seen the results of
the Soviet nuclear tests, '61 and '62, how they really had done a lot of breakthroughs.
They had not done a moratorium. They'd been working very hard and so I personally
saw these guys in another couple of years are going to have nuclear superiority. Now it
18

doesn't really matter in that you can't win a nuclear war but nonetheless, bad things are
happening. But I can't help you with the picture. I really don't recall.
Q:

Okay. But no, even that was very helpful context. So now what about--did you have a
sense for Bill Clements' views in 1973 when he takes the position in the Pentagon, did he
believe that the United States was a nation in decline?

A:

You ask that question. I have no idea. I think you need to talk to Peter O'Donnell or
maybe Rita. We didn't talk about that. Part of my failings, I'm a scientist and an engineer
and as I write about my own history, I understand this kind of guy a scientist like me
should not be national security adviser. He ought to have lawyers who think about what
ought to be done because us engineers, here's a problem. How am I going to solve it, and
they don't spend a bunch of time thinking about whether it ought to be solved. And that's
a weakness. So you know the “what should we be doing” about all that, partly I didn't
think about it because that's not what I do. Partly I think about things that I can do
something about. And so I read all the news now about ObamaCare. That's really a
problem. But it's not my problem. There's nothing I can do about it. I just wasn't
thinking about the big picture and I don't know Bill's mindset. Peter O'Donnell
absolutely would know. Rita would know, if she can help you.

Q:

Okay. I will be following up with all of those others. Now also returning to your
describing some of the other hires that Bill Clements had made at the Pentagon,
particularly some people with different business or corporate backgrounds, overall, what
was your impression for how his hires, his team, fit in to the Pentagon, particularly with
the uniform military or some of the career civil servants there? How were they received?

A:

I think Bill was well received. He was well received and they were well received
because their competence just shown through. These were not political appointees.
These were people who knew what they were talking about and had been there, done that,
paid their dues. Here's a guy who had run SEDCO. This is not a soap company. Here's a
guy who had run one of the major satellite or electronics companies in LA. Their
competence showed through. While there were jurisdictional disputes or jostling about
you're giving the Navy too much money. We should have diesel powered boats or
nuclear powered boats but the people, Bill himself and the people he brought in, earned
immediate respect and I don't recall any resentment of incompetence.

Q:

Well, this anticipates my next question which was going to be how Bill Clements himself
was received at the Pentagon particularly given that he didn't have uniform military
experience or a lot of policy experience. I know he'd been on that advisory panel in the
first term but your general sense is that he was still received pretty well.

A:

I think he was massively well received. You ought to ask his military assistant Ken Carr
because he saw him every day. My view is you don't have--basically it is not a good idea
to appoint somebody who has been in the Army as Secretary of the Defense. I was the
first Sec Air Force to have been a blue suiter. You don't do that. You don't do that
because guys will come with their own crusades because twenty five years ago, that
19

damn Jeep didn't work and now every Jeep is going to be inspected. I was guilty of the
same thing. I was a missile man and so we're going to build MX and we're going to
rebuild the strategic forces and oh yeah, F-16s, I guess they're important. So prior
military, that doesn't really count, as long as they haven't been out in the Ban the Bomb
world. But I think they earn respect. Bill had not had policy--well, he wasn't in the
policy business. He was in the equipment technology business. I think if he had been
appointed the Undersecretary for Policy, there would have been terrible grief but that was
Fred Ikle or whatever. He was the right guy in the right spot. And I think he was warmly
received but ask Ken Carr.
Q:

Ask Admiral Carr, right. Now coming back to also--

A:

And as were all these other guys. I mean Mal Currie was a star. All these guys were
stars.

Q:

Norm Augustine you had mentioned.

A:

Yes.

Q:

And coming back to you, you had both written in your book as well as in our earlier
conversation, you're describing some of the tensions between Clements and Schlesinger
as Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense. But you also had said that
they functioned as an effective team. In your book, you described them as the best
Secretary and Deputy Secretary team in the history of the Pentagon. How were they able
to function as an effective, given the tensions?

A:

No, well I didn't say they had operated as a happy team. I said they were the best Sec
Def and Dep Sec in the history of the Pentagon. That's not the same thing.

Q:

Good clarification for the record there.

A:

Not the same thing.

Q:

Okay.

A:

They were respectful. I mean they were not throwing tomatoes down the hall. They
were respectful, but a demarcation line emerged that Schlesinger is going to worry about
nuclear policy in Europe and all that stuff and Clements is going to worry about whether
the M-1 tank has a diesel or a turbine engine and they basically demarcated the place and
tacitly agreed to their territories. Now part of the success for all this, the stars of this
show are me and Marty Hoffmann. Marty Hoffmann was Schlesinger's special assistant.
I arrived as Clements ' at the time of the Yom Kippur war and all of a sudden there I am
because both of them want me to help run an intelligence program. Hoffmann and I
understood that our job is to keep these people from killing each other, and as a result
Marty Hoffmann and I have become lifelong friends. He was general counsel and when
the Sec Army Calloway left, I told Schlesinger and everybody else, that Marty is the guy
20

for Sec Army and when McLucas finally moved on to FAA, he said to everybody, Reed
needs to be Sec Air Force. We became very close friends. Early on, I mean in the
autumn of '73, when I first started working in OSD, it was very clear once I became part
of the permanent party that Hoffmann and I have got to keep these people from killing
each other.
Q:

These people referring to Clements and Schlesinger?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Okay.

A:

And I think we did magnificently well because we went to meeting and I talked to
Clements and listen to him rant and rave. Marty would talk to Schlesinger and then we'd
get together and say now we've got to fix this and we went around and tightened all the
bolts and so forth and I think we really kept them working very well.
When I went off to become director of telecommunications and he's general counsel, I
was still until I was Secretary of Air Force, I was in the first thing of the morning
meetings with Ken Carr every morning was Clements and Schlesinger and Hoffmann, the
same thing. That we were very close and we kept them bolted together. They were great
because they didn't get in each other's hair because Schlesinger really knew what he was
talking about. He had been at Rand. He had thought through why we have nuclear
weapons. How much can we afford to spend? What do we need to do? Clements
understood military and technology and had a drive to say, “We’re not going to talk about
it. We're going to build this and deploy them and I don't want to hear all the reasons why
we can't do it.” And so they each covered their own lily pad marvelously well and they
basically stayed out of each other's hair. For that reason, they were the best Sec and Dep
Sec we've ever had but they didn't work as a team.

Q:

Okay. Wait. Where is Marty Hoffmann now?

A:

Washington, DC. It's Martin Hoffmann and let me give you a phone number.

Q:

Okay. Sure.

A:

He is absolutely somebody you need to talk to – [stopped recording]

Q:

Resuming. In your observation, how did Bill Clements get along with other members of
the Nixon administration, national security team, such as Henry Kissinger or any others
who are prominent in your mind?

A:

I don't know. I think he got along just fine. I think he and Henry got along very well and
I think that's because Kissinger and Schlesinger were at each other's throats all the time
and so I think Henry was Byzantine enough to know he'd better ally himself with
Clements.
21

Q:

Because he needs someone at the Pentagon?

A:

Needs somebody at the Pentagon.

Q:

Yeah.

A:

Well, more than at the Pentagon. The Dep Sec does come to NSC meetings. And so I
think that Bill and Kissinger got along very well. I think Bill got along well with other
parts of the NSC. I think he got along well with Nixon, but I'm not sure he respected
him. And as Watergate began to unfold, I think he was annoyed. “We've got serious
problems in the country--why are you burdening us with all this?” I just don't know.
Again, that's a good question for Ken Carr because Ken was there, went to the meetings
all that stuff and he can tell you better than I. My impression, he did not come home and
rant and rave.

Q:

Okay. Great. So and then you've written about Clements' close relationship with Joint
Chiefs Chairman General George Brown.

A:

Right.

Q:

How did that develop?

A:

Well, Bill always got along with the Chairman, but Tom Moorer was chairman when he
got there and he and Tom Moorer was great friends.

Q:

This is Admiral Moorer?

A:

Admiral Thomas Moorer was chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the first Nixon
administration and he retired in '74 probably about, and George Brown was selected as
chairman. I think that was a unanimous choice. He was such an obvious choice because
he was a rational, normal human being. He'd paid his dues during the war, flying into the
refineries in Romania and all that stuff, but he was also technically trained and everybody
just thought he was really an outstanding guy. I don't think there was a big hassle on who
was going to get to be chairman. I think he was sort of--I have no idea how he got to be
chairman. Just suddenly there he is but once he was there, Bill was--when he was
walking in, you come into the Pentagon and you go past the chairman's office, he was in
there all the time. They were very close.

Q:

And General Brown was chairman for the duration of Clements' time at the Pentagon
right up through the end of the administration?

A:

It was from basically summer of '73 yes, because then Carter appointed Dave Jones '77
to--

Q:

'77, '78?
22

A:

Well, because Dave Jones, I think Carter installed Dave Jones pretty early on. I think
that was--yeah, because George Brown was sick. He had prostate cancer and so he didn't
serve out his full term.

Q:

Okay. Well, how about why don't we go ahead and take a break now so that we can head
over for the lunch and then a number of other questions.

A:

Well, before you do that, let me just look down the answers I've prepared to some of
your--

Q:

Oh yes, okay.

A:

How I got involved in politics because of George Bush. Other people I knew in Texas.
Republican politics. Dudley Sharp was my business partner but he was also a big
fundraiser in the Republican Party.

Q:

Okay.

A:

And so that's how I got connected with all of that.

Q:

Dudley Sharp was in Dallas?

A:

Houston. Dudley Sharp was in Houston and that's an important part of the story. Once
upon a time, there was an oil drilling company called Sharp & Hughes, and Dudley
Sharp's father thought Hughes Senior was too scurrilous a character and so they parted
company but he kept the rights to make the Hughes' drilling tool. So Hughes Tool went
on to do all this stuff and then Howard Hughes, his trillions of dollars to spend but his
former partner, Sharp Senior, had the right to make drilling tools which went to the
Mission Manufacturing Company which was out on Katy Highway and Dudley Sharp, Jr.
started to run the company. So it was a very successful company. And Dudley Sharp ran
it and he was very wealthy and very successful, but he was not chained to the company
and so he got involved in the Pentagon in the Eisenhower years and became an assistant
secretary and then when the secretary was involved in some scandal, he became Sec Air
Force. And so in many ways, he was my mentor and model and he was one of the guys I
knew and he was Sec Air Force and he was the guy I looked to for advice.

Q:

What years would have been Secretary of the Air Force roughly?

A:

Late Eisenhower, ’58-‘61.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Late '50s.

Q:

Okay. All right. So a good decade and a half before you were in that position.
23

A:

So you asked why did I move back to California. Because I sold the business and wanted
to get back here. I told you I met Reagan. I listened to his speech, I wrote him a letter, I
got a call, and we had a meeting. How did I take on leadership role? I didn't take on. I
was recruited, tested. Reagan's staff was really pretty competent in giving people
assignments and seeing if they screw up or not and moving forward. Meeting Clements
was really good fun and I knew the blue ribbon panel, we talked about. Military and
civilians got along fine. Vietnam, yes. Okay. Maybe the Moorer and Brown
relationship you elsewhere asked earlier about who from the Pentagon helped in his
campaign for Governor in ‘78. Those guys came down and campaigned. We'll talk
about Bill's campaign which was good fun but I was running it and we looked at where
we've got to get support and we've got a huge retired military and we thought let's get a
couple of former JCS chairmen to come down here. And so Moorer and Brown got in
our campaign plane and they went to San Antonio and gave all the right speeches and
they were a big help. George Brown was sick. It was really troublesome because he was
doing the whole chemo and all that stuff but they came down and helped. Beyond that,
okay.

Q:

Okay. Great.

A:

Let's hit the head and go to lunch.

Q:

Taking a break here.

[End of Recording, Part 1]
[Start of Recording, Part 2]
Q:

Okay. Resuming the interview with Mr. Thomas Reed in Healdsburg, California on
November 8th.

A:

And here I am, Tom Reed, and I know I’m being recorded.

Q:

Picking up our discussion about Bill Clements’ different professional relationships at the
Pentagon, how would you describe what you observed of his relationships with
Congress? Are there any particular senators or representatives he was especially close to
or respected or ones he didn’t?

A:

Absolutely. He was a master at all that. It was absolutely a Texas story. His number one
friend happened to be Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, George
Mahon, who represented Lubbock to Big Springs for whatever twenty-two terms in the
Congress and he was chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And Bill and George
Mahon were very close and that made a lot of other things easy. He was very close to-24

Q:

And to clarify, Mahon would have been a Democrat, right?

A:

Oh, yes. George Mahon was a Democrat, West Texas. Been there forever. Bill worked
well and was close with the Chairmen of the Armed Services Committee, John Stennis
from Mississippi and Eddie Hebert from New Orleans. He got along well with those
people and I don’t think he was cultivating them. I think they sort of viewed him as one
of them and they were comfortable with him. I don’t think he had any terrible fights. I
think there were people that Bill did not respect, but they were sort of the people that
were doing ridiculous things after Vietnam and the younger members. But I think he got
along very well with Congress.

Q:

What about did you see anything of his relationship with Senator John Tower, another
Texan?

A:

Yes. You know that’s one again you ought to--for looking into his mind, you really need
to talk to Peter O’Donnell and Rita because I can tell you about times and places of what
we did, but what was going on his brain, I didn’t spend that much time talking about that.
I don’t think he was massively impressed with John Tower. He was impressed that he
got elected, but he sort of looked at him as a weight that he had to carry along in ’72 in
the Nixon campaign, we’ve got to pay attention to John but he didn’t view him as some
great pillar of strength. When we were running again in ’78, same deal. You know,
we’ve got to somehow push John Tower across the finish line. They were not buddies. I
think that Bill Clements was dismissive of Towers’ lifestyle of booze and women and so
forth and so on.

Q:

And that was known in Washington at the time?

A:

Yeah. I mean that’s basically why Tower couldn’t get confirmed as Secretary of
Defense. Even his own peers knew of Tower’s lifestyle. So I think Bill did not view
Tower as a friend, but he viewed him as an ally and a compatriot. And in politics, you’ve
got people on your team and you got along with them and he certainly did the right
things.
Tower was a friend of mine because I have family from Wichita Falls that, when I was
nominated to be Secretary of the Air Force, Tower introduced me to the U.S. Senate since
my senators were, you know my senators from California by then were sort of far out
there, Barbara Boxer types. And John was a friend of mine. But I think he and Clements
had a working relationship and understood that their survival and objectives were linked
but I don’t think they were buddies.

Q:

Okay. All right. Now, just as an aside, and we’ll becoming more to Ronald Reagan
again later, but in these first two or three years at the Pentagon, ’73, ’74, ’75, did Bill
Clements have any sort of relationship with Ronald Reagan, who I guess is finishing up
his second term as California governor at the time?

A:

Not that I know of.
25

Q:

Okay.

A:

Not that I know of. He may have gone to some dinner somewhere, but basically I did not
know that and I was glad to be out of California so I was not building that relationship.
As I told you, the ’70 campaign, I ran it. Holmes Tuttle and I were co-chairman. I was
the director and election night I spent in Joe Coors' living room in Colorado. So during
the ‘70s, during the Pentagon years, I don’t think Bill had much to do, but you know
Reagan left. The end of his term was ’74, so the ’75, ’76 years, Ron was giving
speeches.

Q:

Yeah. Okay. We’ll come back to the ’76 campaign a little bit. Now you had touched on
this earlier, but anything else to add about what you observed about Bill Clements’
relationship with President Nixon, particularly on American defense policy?

A:

Again, that’s above my pay grade. You need to talk to Peter O’Donnell and Rita but my
perceptions were, he was wholeheartedly in favor of seeing Nixon re-elected. He really
worked hard in the ’72 re-election campaign and I don’t think he was doing that out of a
desire to feather his own nest. I think he seriously believed that getting Nixon re-elected
was important for the country. I think as Nixon’s second term unfolded, I’m not sure Bill
was close to him. I think he was part of this blue ribbon panel and he probably knew
Nixon from fundraisers, whatever. I don’t think he was particularly close to him. As the
second term unfolded, as Watergate began to go drip, drip, drip, and as Vietnam went on,
I think that Bill was losing his professional respect. He didn’t lose personal respect, but I
think he just sort of lost his professional respect and it was getting worse and worse.

Q:

Okay, resuming recording here. Back on the question of Clements’ relationship with
President Nixon and you had touched on this earlier but if you have any more to say on
how did Clements respond to the unfolding of Watergate revelations? You had described
briefly that in 1973, as these headlines are starting to come out, that it was a bit of a
distraction to the work that everyone was trying to do at the Pentagon but obviously
unavoidable.

A:

I think he just viewed it as an annoyance.

Q:

Okay.

A:

The whole Watergate thing unfolding because it was drip, drip, drip, and I do remember
there being Nixon wanting to have some meeting about something and Bill sent me
instead. Clements was supposed to go and he sent me. Sort of the tone I got from Bill is
“I really don’t have time to be bothered.” Not that Nixon is a bad guy or a jackass, it’s
just I don’t have time to deal with that. I think Billwas just annoyed with it all and what
he thought of the tapes and all that stuff, I really don’t know. Again, that’s for Peter and
Rita.
26

Q:

As the Watergate investigations and stories began to pick up steam, did they in any way
impede or hinder your work at the Pentagon with Bill Clements? I mean did it get to the
point of there were any particular projects or initiatives that were hindered because of the
Watergate investigation?

A:

Only in the macro sense. Congress was more and more difficult after Vietnam. I mean
post-Vietnam, the Congress that was elected in ’74 was absolutely, “We want to close
down the Pentagon and we’re going to get Nixon out of here” and so dealing with them
was very, very difficult, not in a rational way. It was not some chairman with 20 years in
the Senate saying I think you ought to buy this airplane because it’s built in my district.
It was just the whole “we need to burn down the Pentagon” attitude.

Q:

Wow.

A:

It was very, very difficult. On the other hand, many of those Congressmen were
greenhorns and they didn’t know how the system worked so we just sort of did our job.
But there were some senators that were really giving us a hard time but basically our--I
didn’t get involved in Watergate and Clements and so forth because we were basically
trying to keep the ship sailing through the water and, as time went by, it became clear that
Nixon’s time was short but we didn’t really worry about that. We had other things to do,
which is probably strange.

Q:

Now, what was Bill Clements’ relationship like with Gerald Ford when he was vice
president because after he replaced Spiro Agnew because this gets into his relationship
when Ford is President but I first want to understand if there’s any history there. What
was the Ford/Clements’ relationship like?

A:

You’ve got to ask Rita and you’ve got to ask Peter. I have absolutely no idea. He never
was disparaging of Ford. He liked him. He thought he was extremely normal. He liked
him as a person but I have no idea what the relationship was.

Q:

Okay. Now after Ford fired Jim Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense, he replaced
Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld.

A:

Right.

Q:

Had Clements had any hope that second time of becoming Secretary of Defense? We
talked earlier about his hope of assuming the role after Mel Laird, but was there any
window of possibility there?

A:

I’m not sure hope is the right word, but he was certainly annoyed. That was a terrible
relationship and a terrible time.

Q:

Just to clarify, the relationship with Rumsfeld-27

A:

Rumsfeld, yes. The Rumsfeld arrival was just terrible. It was terrible in part because
Rumsfeld wanted his own deputy but he couldn’t do it because Clements was there and I
think Clements was being protected by Ford, but Rumsfeld was very close to Ford and so
Rumsfeld installed another deputy secretary, Bob Ellsworth. I think that Clements was
really annoyed that Schlesinger goes and once again he doesn’t get promoted, that
somebody comes floating in the door. And I think that I’ll never know. I tried to ask
Henry Kissinger, “Why didn’t you promote him? You’re there at the NSC,” and I never
got a straight answer.

Q:

Had Clements had any relationship with Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was White House
Chief of Staff before he became Secretary of Defense?

A:

Oh, he must have. I don’t know that for a fact but there’s no way he could not have. And
with Cheney, Cheney was the good guy in all that. But Clements obviously thought
Schlesinger is gone, I can get to be Sec Def and all of a sudden here comes Rumsfeld.
That was really annoying and then Rumsfeld doesn’t come with a “let’s all work
together.” His attitude is “I wish you were out of here.”
Okay. We’re talking about Rumsfeld/Clements. That was really a bad time because
Rumsfeld obviously didn’t want Clements there at all. He therefore uses his ability to
create another deputy secretary spot. The good news is Rumsfeld’s total focus was
getting Ford re-elected and therefore he didn’t have much time to run the Pentagon. I had
known Rumsfeld from earlier times. Basically we settled into, I came to see him once a
week. I tell him what I’m doing. If I needed him to do anything, I told him. But
basically, I didn’t. I wanted him to leave me alone because for what we’ll come to.
Plodding ahead, here we are at the Alamo, and Rumsfeld basically wasn’t involved in
running the Pentagon and that was part of the problem. He was sitting there but he was
over at the White House all the time trying to help with the campaign. And so he wasn’t
paying attention. He brought in Ellsworth as a deputy. He obviously didn’t want
Clements there. Clements resented not being the Sec Def and so it was difficult.

Q:

Now, what was the division of labor, division of responsibility like between--now you
that you have two deputy secretaries, between Clements and Ellsworth?

A:

Well, Ellsworth, I didn’t really see him do anything. He was sort of a handmaiden. He
was assigned intelligence projects which Bill really wasn’t involved with and I think that
Rumsfeld didn’t want to just accept the whole intelligence apparatus. And so Ellsworth
did intelligence sorts of things but basically he was just sort of a handmaiden. I don’t
know what he did.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

Sorry.

Q:

And just to keep the narrative straight, what was your job at this time when Rumsfeld
became Secretary of Defense?
28

A:

Director of Telecommunications.

Q:

Okay. All right. So picking up the conversation is now about Tom Reed’s role at the
Pentagon in addition to his head hunting work, it was also doing energy intelligence in
the ’73, ’74, ’75, especially right after Yom Kippur.

A:

Right. But I got really recruited and admitted into the Pentagon because Schlesinger after
conversations decided that I had some brains and I knew what I was talking about. And
the Yom Kippur war, they hit upon the idea that we really need good intelligence about
what is going on with all these embargos and who is this guy Kaddafi. And they hit upon
and they perceived, the CIA had no idea of energy economics and they were saying our
statistics show that three percent of our oil comes from the Persian Gulf so we don’t care.
And Clements and I understood no, oil is a fungible commodity and it goes in one end
and it comes out the other. So we hit upon the idea of asking the vice presidents of the
major oil companies what happened yesterday. And so my job in ‘73 was to call up--

Q:

And these companies were known as the Seven Sisters--

A:

The Seven Sisters--Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Chevron, Texaco--the big producers. And I
would call two of them every morning and ask what happened yesterday and it was just
fascinating because they knew they had big time stakes and they knew. And they would
say okay, now yesterday, Mr. Yamani, who was Saudi’s Oil minister, he gave a speech
and he said these things. But at dinner, he said, “Don’t worry, we understand we can’t let
your war reserves stocks drop down. So we’re going to make all these speeches. On the
other hand, they said, you know, you need to pay attention to this guy Qaddafi.” We’ve
never heard of him but he was one of the prime movers in OPEC. So we had a good
system of getting the production vice presidents of the big oil companies to tell me what
was going on and that was a system that really produced a major White House crisis
because the White House had an energy czar who really didn’t know what he was talking
about and the CIA was issuing all these ridiculous numbers. And Schlesinger was able to
go to the White House and say this is what’s really going on. And I think that’s how we
built the relationship because I gave him the support, the information that he needed to
really equip himself well in the White House.

Q:

Well and this is also I suppose a specific example of how Bill Clements’ background
with SEDCO equipped him to be in the deputy secretary role understanding more how
energy markets were having good contacts for new sources of information among the
Seven Sisters.

A:

Well, understanding, yes. This was a problem because Martin Hoffmann, whose name I
gave you, was general counsel by then and he was horrified that Bill Clements with
drilling contracts to all these places was now going over and representing the U.S.
government. And Hoffmann saw very serious conflicts of interest. And so there was a
lot of hemming and hawing and conflict about no, you may not go to Saudi Arabia. No,
you certainly can’t go to Iran. And I don’t really know what went on, but I know that
29

Bill Clements was not a major player in the oil energy world. He was a major player in
the Yom Kippur war in the logistics and supporting Israel, getting the tanks over. But I
don’t think he was a major--he advised and Kissinger looked to him for conversation but
the General Counsel was very cautionary about conflict of interest. That’s a question you
ought to ask Marty Hoffmann.
Q:

Okay. I’m certainly going to. Before we come back around to some of Clements’
operating style, one other question about when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense,
how would you describe maybe the overall culture or feel of the Pentagon as an
institution under Rumsfeld as opposed to under Schlesinger? You had said that Rumsfeld
was spending most of his time on re-election but surely did--how did he put his imprints
on the Pentagon if at all?

A:

I don’t think Rumsfeld put his imprint on the Pentagon in ‘76. He was not there that
long. He was so busy running over to the White House all the time. He had a staff and a
military assistant that was sort of his voice into the world but I sort of--I think in
retrospect, the whole attitude was “nobody home.” There’s a great expression that I
heard from Schlesinger’s military assistant, maybe it’s Ken Carr. “We get a new
Secretary of Defense and they step up to the wheel of the ship of state and they spin it to
the left and spin it to the right and after a year we decide whether to connect it to the
rudder.”

Q:

Very good.

A:

And I think that was the attitude with Rumsfeld. We believe in civilian control. If he
tells us to bomb someplace, we’ll do it. But in terms of building a culture, I don’t recall
that there was really much impact, that he was too busy with the election and once the
election was over, he was a lame duck and so we’re going to worry about those other
things.

Q:

Yeah. Now, you’ve also written that Clements was a, and I’m quoting from your book
here, “A straight shooter from Texas who ran the Pentagon with an iron hand.” Tell us
more about his management style and how it functioned at the Pentagon.

A:

Well, his management style was to recruit good people, not to just promote within the
system. He was attentive to personnel and then he really got his fingers into the general
officer, not only promotion but assignment system. He was annoyed and he wanted me
to pay attention to and I was annoyed with this whole process of every general officer has
been groomed to be chairman. That’s nonsense. We only need one chairman. And so
Bill interviewed guys that were going to be three stars, and secondly he laid down the
rules that I really imposed on the Air Force and Hoffmann did it in the Army, no moving
people. Once you’re a three star, then do the job. And you’re not being groomed for
chairman. You may get there, but if you’re a two star, you’re moving around. Once
you’re a three star, you’re a three star because you’re the Director of the NSA, stay there.
You’re a three star because you’re the commander of the forces in Afghanistan. Stay
there and do it and none of this moving around, especially with project managers. Who is
30

the project manager for the F-15 and we’re not going to change him out after two years.
Put him there and he can go when the plane flies. So Bill’s style was to really pay
attention to personnel. “Don’t dither around and don’t tell me all the reasons why it can’t
be done and to fight for things.” The prime example is the cruise missile, but a whole
bunch of other things. “I don’t really care if you don’t like it. That’s what we’re going to
do now do it. And if you can’t, we’ll get somebody that can.” It was a very harsh--I’ve
thought about this because Bill didn’t do spontaneous decisions. They were thoughtful
decisions but once he made a decision, that’s what we’re going to do.
Q:

Did you see him fire many people at the Pentagon?

A:

Did I see him fire people? No, but even in Washington, you don’t fire people. You just
sort of move them away. I just regularly saw general officers that were suddenly
reassigned someplace. I saw assistant secretaries that he just didn’t care to listen to
anymore. I don’t recall him firing anybody, but partly of course because the people he
could fire are people he also hired and he liked them or he did a good job with that.

Q:

Okay.

A:

And the people he might like to fire are all civil servants and you can’t. So he basically
just moved them away.

Q:

Now, what was your sense of his main priorities when he first started at the Pentagon, in
first in areas of policy but then in areas of budget and management? Like did he come in
with a certain vision or set of two or three areas he especially wanted to concentrate in
and really set a policy imprint?

A:

Well, if by budget, you mean why are we spending so much, no. I think budget is “we
need to do X” and money is the way that you get people to pay attention to doing X. So
he was not a budget slasher but he was a budget re-focuser. And one of his major
achievements is cruise missiles and he knew enough about engineering to pay attention to
we really can build turbines that are the size of one of these chairs. We have this terrain
following radar that really works and Mal Currie was an instrumental part of his whole
thinking in this and he decided we’re going to do it, now we’re going to do it. And we’re
going to move the money around and do it. So he used the budget to get things done that
he wanted done.

Q:

Did he particularly, given his previous experience in the Middle East with his SEDCO
work, did he have any, and then of course the Yom Kippur war breaking out shortly after
he arrives at the Pentagon, did he have any strong sense of policy priorities for the
American role in the Middle East, the American posture in the Middle East?

A:

I don’t know about his policy views in the Middle East because you know I was there as
a head hunter. That’s an entertaining story. I was the head hunter. I was the intelligence
guy but I was also the head hunter. I recruited Undersecretary of the Air Force. I
recruited an Assistant Secretary of the Army for Personnel which was a great
31

achievement because the Army was going volunteer and I recruited a guy named David
Lowe who ran the biggest personnel firm in Houston to come be the Army personnel guy
to make the volunteer Army work. So I was doing a lot of that stuff. One of them, the
issues that really bothered Clements was telecommunications with the worldwide military
command and control system he thought was archaic and he wanted it fixed. And so one
of my assignments was to recruit somebody to do that, and I did. A guy from AT&T
named Ed, last name I forgot. And I tour him around and we’re all set. Right before
Christmas, he calls and says, “I don’t want to come and work in Washington. I’ve done it
all for AT&T and I’m ready to retire and I’m not going to do that.” Okay. So I failed.
But time to go home so I go home to California for Christmas. I’m living at the
Metropolitan Club. I want to go see my kids. I come back. January 2nd, I come back to
the Pentagon.
Q:

This is now January 2, 1974?

A:

1974.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I’m summoned to Schlesinger’s office and Schlesinger right out of the jar just gives me
grief. We’ve asked you to do a job here and you were supposed to get an Assistant
Secretary for Telecommunications and you didn’t do it. Why are you frittering away
time in California? Blah blah blah. And then he smiled broadly and said, “You’ve got a
degree in electrical engineering, don’t you?” “Yes, I do.” “Well, then you’re it.” Okay.
So and that was fine with Clements so both of them agreed for different reasons because
number three they wanted something done about the world wide military command and
control system. So I started doing that in January of ’74. And that really got me focused
on really serious technical stuff. Telecommunications, all that stuff very complicated,
cryptography because I oversaw part of NSA and so I really had little time for Watergate
and all the great issues of the time. It was complicated. I knew electrical engineering but
that’s a very specialized world so I had to wrestle to take charge of the whole place. So I
was really busy and so I didn’t have time to talk with Bill about those things and it was
really only as ’74 ground on and then Watergate and he was just sort of don’t bother me
with that and then the elections of fall in ’74 and Congress changes and then in the spring
of ’75, it really got very difficult because now the Congress was absolutely “let’s burn
down the Pentagon” and so our whole attitude was we learned lessons. We paid a terrible
price in Vietnam, and we need to pay attention.

Q:

Well, I’m going to--

A:

I’m sorry. I lost track of the question.

Q:

No. This was about some of the policy priorities of the time and how your roles were
fitting into that. So I was actually--but this is something you have mentioned a couple
times now and I want to come back to. You said just now and earlier that both you and
Bill Clements felt like you learned some powerful lessons from Vietnam and you wanted
32

to apply those to the Pentagon. So what were those lessons, especially as they felt in
1973 when the last American troops are pulled out and over the next couple of years?
What were those lessons for Vietnam and how did you and Bill Clements think about
them and try to apply them at the Pentagon?
A:

By then, I was really paying attention to telecommunications and then Air Force, so my
lessons were in those fields and so I didn’t get into the operations. Telecommunication
lessons were a lot of guys get killed because we have no secure radios but we’re using
radios and the VC is sitting right over there listening and they know that we’re out of or
low on ammunition or the battalion is going to move and so we were taking terrible
penalties for that. Secondly, the Army couldn’t talk to the Navy. Here’s the Army
cruising around. The Navy is running these boats but the radios don’t connect. If you
want to talk to them, the Army, you call the Pentagon and tell Charlie to shoot left.
Terrible. Satellite technology was just emerging but Bill’s problem with that was that the
Navy traditionally, once they leave port, they do not care to hear from the Commander in
Chief. The Navy leaves port and now it’s the Admiral at sea. And so Bill was really
frosted that in the final close-down and getting out of Vietnam, the Navy brass over there
all got on the ship that had no satellite terminal. And therefore, they could direct the
evacuation their way. And Bill was really by golly, we’re going to put a satellite terminal
on every ship of this Navy and satellite communication, we’re going to change
communications because we at the NMCC want to know what you’re doing and we want
to tell what to do. And you know, understandably, the division commanders and the boat
skippers do not care to hear that.

Q:

Yeah.

A:

And so the lessons learned from Vietnam in my communications area were security,
interoperability, satellite communications, and that sort of thing. The lessons learned for
the Air Force which are then picked up was you’ve got to support the troops on the
ground.

Q:

And just to clarify, what month and year do you become Secretary of the Air Force?

A:

The chronology is I became Director of Telecommunications in January of ’74 and I was
really totally focused on that for much of ’74. As it got to be ’75, Congress is changing
and Schlesinger is out and Rumsfeld arrives. I become more of a floater. And then as
Watergate unfolds, it becomes clear that the Secretary of the Air Force is going to get
drafted to go do something else. And Clements had been my champion, but it’s not quite
clear how I became Secretary to the Air Force but the net result is by about September or
October, the system was telling me September or October of 1975, you’re likely to be the
next Secretary of the Air Force. And my view at the time, no, you’ve got two guys
better: Mal Currie and Jim Plummer who is the Undersecretary of the Air Force, were far
better qualified than me. Go get them. And the conclusion was no, the Secretary’s job is
to talk to Congress and you know those birds and you run campaigns. But the point is, by
about September I was beginning to focus on the fact that there are changes happening
around here. Rumsfeld arrived in the fall of ’75, I think, when Schlesinger left, or at least
33

he was nominated and then my name was floated. So I went over to the White House or
in the White House office and met with him. The system has nominated me as Secretary
of the Air Force. But if you want somebody else, that’s fine with me. I think there’s
other guys that are better qualified. And he basically said, “No, that’s what we want you
to do.” And whether it was out of momentum, because we were never close friends, I
mean we are social friends, or whether he really thought it was a good idea, I don’t know.
But the net result was by the September or October ’75, it’s clear McLucas is going to
leave, we need a new Sec Air Force, yes Reed is the guy. And I’m beginning to pay
attention to that possibility but I refuse to get sworn in until I finish the
telecommunications budget.
Q:

Okay. Resuming. From what you saw of Bill Clements and his policy priorities, how did
he address the worry that America’s withdraw from Vietnam might diminish its influence
on the global stage and give the Soviets a strategic opening? This is picking up on our
earlier discussions about the lessons of Vietnam and you give a number of tactical
lessons, but I wonder with what you saw of Clements, did this also affect his take on
America’s cold war posture?

A:

I think it did, but I don’t know. I think that’s again, you need to peer inside his head via
either Peter or Rita. That’s going to be hard work but basically we didn’t spend time
talking about that. You know in part my makeup is if there’s a problem I can’t do
anything about, then why spend a bunch of time thinking about it. And Vietnam was
above my pay grade and yeah, I mean they both were a problem. The Soviet Union was a
big problem but we really didn’t dig into how does Vietnam affect that.

Q:

Okay. All right. Well, and then this is returning to a couple of things you’ve touched on
earlier, I’m struck by the paradox if you will, and this maybe one of Clements’ greatest
achievements, on the one hand, you have some real negative developments. You have
the United States essentially losing its first war ever in Vietnam. You keep on using the
analogy to the Alamo because you have this tremendous Congressional hostility to the
Pentagon, to any more defense appropriations, significant budget constraints, but it’s also
during these years that Bill Clements, you, Malcolm Currie, others, really developed
some of the most significant new weapons platforms for the American military, ones that
have formed the backbone of our force projection for decades since. So how did Bill
Clements and his team, you, Mal Currie, others, how did you guys approach the strategic
issue of weapons development? I mean how were you able to take this environment of
austerity, of wanting to cut back the American military, and then turn it into an
opportunity to actually develop, not just maintain some military strength, but develop the
next generation of weapons?

A:

Well, let’s back up to talk more about the lessons learned at Vietnam.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I talked about the telecommunications lessons of secure voice and satellites and so forth.
When I got my Air Force hat on, the lessons learned were the Air Force has got to
34

support the guys on the ground. The primary purpose in the Air Force is to fly and fight
in the sky so that there’s absolute air supremacy. I read a recent article that in 60 years
no U.S. Airman been killed on the ground because of enemy air action. The first job is to
have control of the skies. But having done that, you’ve got to support the guys on the.
We’ve got to support the people on the ground. So the lessons learned from Vietnam,
we’ve got to support the people on the ground. The purpose of an Air Force, first and
foremost, you’ve got to have control of the sky.
Q:

Air superiority.

A:

Air superiority, absolute air superiority. Okay. That means that led to the F-15. You’ve
got to have enough of an Air Force to be able to afford it which means single engine
airplanes that are bought with cost in mind, which means the F-16, but you’ve got to
support the guys on the ground, which is A-10s. You cannot do as we did in Vietnam,
I’m astonished. We’re used to--when this country goes to war, we lose airplanes.
Nowadays we lose a couple of airplanes in Afghanistan, we think that’s bad. In Korea,
the Korean war with all the air battles over the Yalu River Valley, in the Korean war, the
United States Air Force lost about 300 aircraft. In Vietnam, the United States Air Force
lost 2,257 aircraft. Frightening. And most of that was not glamorous dog fights. It was
trying to go take out dams defended by very sophisticated ground fire. Well, you’ve got
to deal with not having to face the ground fire, which means smart weapons. That was
first invented to take out the bridge at, I forgot, in Vietnam, but we needed to do that.
We’re going to have to have air superiority and that means we’re going to buy F-15s.
They’re in production and don’t fool around with the plan.

Q:

And to clarify, so the F-15 design program had pre-dated Bill Clements’ arrival to the
Pentagon?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Okay, yes, but the question is the production line and--

A:

Basically what he brought to all this was produce them. Don’t talk about it and don’t
produce one a month. Produce them. Because the worst things we do in the Pentagon is
change our mind. The worst thing we do in government is change your mind. Yeah, the
F-15 was a lesson learned from Vietnam but the lessons were being learned as early as
’71, ’72. The next lesson learned was you’ve got to be able to afford them which means
single engine aircraft that meant the F-16 and by the way produce it with NATO so that
they will buy some of them and spread the cost.
And then another lesson learned is you’ve got to support the guys on the ground which
means A-10s which the Air Force just did not want because who wants to fly that slowly
and that low and so forth and so on. And that was my fight in the Air Force, yeah we’ll
develop it, but Mr. Secretary, you’re not planning to buy one. Well, yes actually I am.
We’re going to buy 740 of them. And then Marty, my deal with the Secretary of the
Army, is we’re going to develop the A-10 and we’re going to buy them, lots of them. So
35

the lessons learned from Vietnam were not a bunch of whiz-bang technology. It was
produce them and get them in the force.
And that was the issues with Congress. They would not get in big fights over some--we
got in big fights over the B-1 but in general, produce them and don’t be changing your
mind. And that relates to what was the atmosphere and it gets back to the Alamo.
We’re here at the Alamo and we’re not going to give up and we’re just going to do our
job and our job is to recover from Vietnam and those airplanes may really, you know the
lessons learned seems minor but in the Air Force, lessons learned, pilots live to old age
by looking around a lot and not getting shot down. What we did with the F-4 is bit by bit,
we’re putting more and more crap in the cockpit so the pilot couldn’t look around. The
F-15 and F-16, which involved high tech, they’re building a bubble canopy that if you
ride in those, you think you’re in a kayak because from the waist up, there’s nothing but
sky. You can look all around. There’s nothing obstructing your view in any direction
and that took some sophisticated plastics technology but if you look at both of those
airplanes, big bubbles. A-10, lesson learned is the bad guys are shooting 23 millimeters
at you so just put a big bathtub under the pilot so that he can say what was that?
Q:

A titanium bathtub.

A:

That’s right.

Q:

Yeah, plus a 30 millimeter Gatling cannon.

A:

That’s right. Great airplane but the whole spirit was--now it was a lot of smart weapons.
I mean the laser-guided weapons really began to be developed but the other things I only
was tangentially involved with is the Abrams tank. We need a new tank and the big
technical issue which I only tangentially knew about was is it powered by turbine or
diesel engine? And that was a huge fight within the Army and the Army did not want to
go to turbines and so forth.

Q:

Why did the Army want to stick with diesel?

A:

You’ve got to ask Marty Hoffmann. He was Secretary of the Army at the time but he
will give you full stories. With all these, everybody starts taking credit for things they
really didn’t do when they turned out well.

Q:

___(inaudible)___ [0:45:00]

A:

Who is the father of the turbine? Lots of people now. But anyway, same thing with the
A-10, but a lot of people are now taking credit.

Q:

Well, then another weapon system that Bill Clements as I understand it as instrumental in
building which you alluded to earlier was the cruise missile. Tell us more about his role
there and particularly why--what was the opposite he faced and why?
36

A:

Well, the cruise missile I think was a solution, the airborne cruise missile which is where
it started, was a solution to B-52s probably can’t fly into the target. Now, I disputed that
theory all the way because one of the lessons learned from Vietnam is when we finally
ended it, we uncorked the B-52 force. They were in Guam and they were going to go
bomb Hanoi. They take off from Guam and there’s a Soviet trawler off shore saying
okay they took off. Interesting to talk to Russians 15 years later, they listened in to even
the handheld radios on the deck. And then they knew exactly when we were coming.
They knew exactly from what direction we were coming and nonetheless, there was
about 720 sorties at Hanoi during Linebacker 2 and the attrition was three percent. Now,
they had all the information of where we were coming from which if the balloon really
went up big time, the Soviets probably would not have known. And secondly--but on the
other hand, they didn’t defend with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, we didn’t use
nukes to take out their defenses. But my point was B-52s had a three percent attrition so
maybe you’re wrong by a factor of ten. It’s 30%. We’re only going to launch once
against the Soviet Union and that means 70% of the aircraft are going to get through. So
don’t worry about it. Well, there was worry about it.
And so the issue was in order to prolong the life of the B-52, because we’re not going to
buy anymore--other new bombers, it’s cruise missiles and then they can fly and when
they’re at the edge of the Baltic, they can launch or when they’re over the Med, they can
launch. And so there was a big part of that. Secondly, they’re virtually impossible to
shoot down if you make them small and if make terrain following radar. So they’re just
sneaking in between the valleys. You can’t find them. And so they were going to be
very important for air penetration and for delivering nuclear weapons or whatever other
kind of weapons you wanted. And Bill saw in the small engines, in the terrain following
radar, a really technological breakthrough and I don’t--because of the sort of START
issues and SALT issues that Henry Kissinger was all caught up in, I think that was
probably one of the things they really fought over was that Bill was absolutely adamant
that we were going to develop and build a cruise missile and Henry said that’s going to
violate START and make my job tougher and so forth. And Bill’s attitude was “tough
luck.” That’s what we’re going to do. And he was adamant to not let Ford negotiate
away cruise missiles at Vladivostok. The background and detail, I don’t know all that
well. I just knew that he was adamant that it get built. The Air Force the same way. I
mean it was sort of some strange thing that doesn’t fit their current job profiles. We don’t
need those and he just said, “Fine. Do it anyway.”

Q:

What about the--maybe you didn’t work on Navy issues as much, but my sense as Deputy
Secretary, Bill Clements was also instrumental in the Aegis Cruiser System, you know
tremendous advance there.

A:

I think he was but I don’t know anything about it.

Q:

Okay. That wasn’t something you worked on?

A:

No.
37

Q:

Okay. All right. Now then finally back to, you had mentioned earlier his reforms and of
course you worked on this a lot on the worldwide military command and control system.
And you at least in your book, At the Abyss, you said that after the final Saigon
withdraws in 1975, Bill Clements “directed a resentful military proceed to the satellite
age and without delay.” So what was the communications crisis at the time and how did
he respond and why was the military resentful?

A:

We talked about it because the admirals don’t like to have any more help from the
Commander in Chief. The admirals leave and they go to Trafalgar and they’re in charge.
And the evacuation from Saigon, I think I mentioned earlier, that the Navy brass all went
and got on a ship that had no satellite terminals and he was really incensed with all that.
And he just basically laid down the law that every capital ship is going to have a satellite
terminal and you know as time progressed, now everybody does. But he was adamant in
the aftermath of Vietnam, we have satellite communications and we’re not going to have
guys out thinking that they’re Admiral Nelson. That’s not the way it works anymore and
they did not like that at all. At all. I mean they come from too long a history of “we’ll
put to sea and give us orders when we go past the lighthouse.”

Q:

Well this raises the larger issue of civil/military relations under at the Pentagon under Bill
Clements where on the one hand I can see evidence of ways that he was tremendously
supportive of the military, particularly on budgets and new weapon systems. I think on
some things like this whether it’s resistance from the uniform military to some of these
weapon systems or to some of this command and control stuff. So did he have a
particular theory or understanding of civil/military relations or was it more of an
instinctual, let’s remind the generals who is in charge?

A:

I don’t think those were civil/military issues. I think they were sort of traditional Navy
versus the younger generation.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I think it was a generational issue. I think that we’re not going to do it Admiral Nelson’s
way anymore, and that a lot of the younger generation understood that. I don’t know for
sure but I think that the boat skippers understood and they thought these things--you
know the guys that had to go try to take out the Thanwa Bridge, really thought that using
lasers rather than just flying their 105s into that gunfire all the time really was a hell of a
lot better way to do it.

Q:

Yeah. It’s sort of much more accurate and higher hit rates.

A:

So I don’t think with Bill, there was a civil/military crunch. I think there was a
generational crunch and a competence crunch. I mean he was very big on personnel and
recruiting guys that are going to be the three star and you’re not going to send him there
just because he put in his time and it’s his turn.
38

Q:

Yeah.

A:

And likewise, we’re not going to relieve him after a year because he’s got to be moved to
a logistic job so he’ll be qualified to be chairman. So it was dealing with the system but I
think that a lot of people thought that just right.

Q:

And then going back to his relationships with Secretary Schlesinger and then Secretary
Rumsfeld, when Clements is trying to push through something like the development of
the cruise missile against some resistance, did he have support and top cover from
Schlesinger and Rumsfeld depending whichever one was Secretary of Defense at the time
on those?

A:

I don’t think they were paying attention.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I think with Schlesinger clearly. I mean they had clearly--they had demarcated a line and
you know you’re in the cornfield and I’m in the wheat field and have a nice day. And
you know there was some crunching around early on but they sort of developed an
understanding of where they would and would not go. And I think, by the time it’s ’74, I
don’t think Schlesinger and Clements got into big fights. They didn’t like each other but
I don’t think they got into jurisdictional fights and when it came to, should we develop
cruise missiles, I think Schlesinger basically understood that was a good idea. But why
go there? And Rumsfeld was too busy. I don’t think he really understood.

Q:

Okay. All right. Now coming back to your career, you had mentioned earlier about in
1975 how you became Secretary of the Air Force. When did you become head of the
National Reconnaissance Office and what were the circumstances behind that?

A:

Well, that was absolutely the Peter principle, in that the National Reconnaissance Office,
as you know, was early on very compartmented and we thought it was very secret. No,
as you know, Will, because you’re a creature of Washington, the issue really was that we
didn’t want to admit to these other people that were flying overhead and taking pictures.
The Russians knew that perfectly well but the Iraqis and the Israelis and the French all,
it’s just like the NSA today. They didn’t want to have to admit that we were up there
taking pictures. Part of this was the issue of where does sovereignty end and we were
forever in debt unto Khrushchev and Sputnik for launching the first satellite which
disposes of the issue of where does sovereignty end. And the answer is it sort of ends at
the atmosphere because there was, early on, there was a lot of if we fly satellites
overhead. This gets caught up with the air traffic rules as you may know. If you fly from
London to Johannesburg, your airline pays a fee to all these third world countries based
on how many miles you fly overhead based on how much it would cost you in gasoline to
fly all the way round in the ocean. And so Benin and everybody else is getting a buck
and a half every time United Airlines flies over and the issue with satellites was going to
be well, okay, so you’re flying overhead and taking pictures and so we want to get paid
when you do that. And so the NRO secrecy was we’re just not going to talk about. It’s
39

sort of like your wife has a drinking problem. We’re just not going to talk about that.
And so it was--early on the technology was very sophisticated. Later on, we didn’t want
to reveal the technology but it really was to not tip off the Russians on how good our
ELINT was and how good everything else was.
Q:

ELINT being...?

A:

Electronic Intelligence. And so the NRO basically, early on there were some really major
technological achievements. I had recruited Jim Plummer to become Undersecretary of
the Air Force when I was the head hunter and he had become the Director of the NRO.
He was a satellite guy from Lockheed. I thought he was marvelous. I thought he should
have become Secretary of the Air Force but he had no political touch and so I take over
and he’s still Undersecretary. We get along very well, but he is the Director of the NRO
and for reasons not clear to this day, in September of election year, he I think knows that
Ford is going to lose or maybe it’s just time to do something about the family, but in
September of ’76, he decides he’s going to leave and he’s the Director of the NRO. And
he and I talk about that and we decide the objective is, don’t make waves. We do not
need any brilliance. Just keep chugging along and at the time, the reconnaissance system
was called Hexagon which was still--the last system was dropped filmed down in buckets
instead of sending it down in electronic format. Electronic format was coming in but we
decided Charlie Cook is the Deputy. These guys know what they’re doing. All we want
to do is keep dropping one bucket a month out of Hexagon and we want to keep funding
the next system and beyond that, don’t make waves. And so let’s don’t go create some
brilliant new director who will feel the need to re-invent the wheel. Just turn the crank.
So we decided I would serve as the Director of the NRO but my achievement is nothing
happened. But it gets back to the Alamo. My instructions were don’t do anything
bizarre. Don’t do anything brilliant. Do your job. See to it that the tasking is what we
want, that the Hexagon is told we want pictures of these places and see to it that the real
and near real time electronic system comes into service but otherwise, don’t make waves.
And so that was my achievement is to say we just did it. Now it was made easy because
the NRO reports to an executive committee which used to be very structured with big
fights between CIA and Defense. And so the NRO Board of Directors was an executive
committee of two people, Sec Def and Director of CIA. It then became the Dep Sec and
the Director of the CIA. Well, by the time I got to do this, the Dep Sec was Bill
Clements who I’d known since Texas. And the Director of the CIA was George H. W.
Bush, who I knew from Connecticut and Bill Clements had been George Bush’s finance
chairman when Bush ran for the Senate. And so we had one meeting. We had one
meeting and they both said, “We really don’t want to hear from you. We want you to
dump buckets. Make sure you get the intelligence that the Services want and the Agency
wants and do not get imaginative and don’t do anything to annoy the Congress.
Preferably don’t talk to them.” So that’s what I did.

Q:

Well, what a small world that there you are in 1976 running the NRO and you’ve got Bill
Clements and H. W. Bush.

A:

That’s right.
40

Q:

Oh, my goodness.

A:

No, we really had a lot of laughs at that and the fun part was it was the advent of what’s
called near real time intelligence which means we don’t take pictures, put them in a
capsule, and drop them and fish them out of the ocean. We now take pictures on very
high resolution digital plates and then beam that over to a satellite down link so that you
get pictures basically the afternoon you asked for them. You don’t get the real time but
you say what you want and you get them with incredible resolution. Edmund Land of
Polaroid was the genius of thinking all that up and so the fun was the first photos from
that system came on, they were delivered in December ’76 on my watch and we had a big
to do inside a big cage for--and we’d land and say thank you.

Q:

Wow. I was not aware that we had that technology as early as 1976 for the new real and
real time.

A:

Yeah, December ’76 were the first near real time. I think we kept using Hexagon for
another couple of years and the other ELINT systems. I mean there were a lot of
systems.

Q:

So stepping back to the bigger picture then, so it’s safe to say that throughout your time at
the Pentagon, that Bill Clements was very supportive of your advancement, your
promotions, putting up for Secretary of the Air Force, for heading the NROs, right?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Okay.

A:

No, he didn’t put me up for head NRO. Jim Plummer and I decided what to do.

Q:

Oh, okay. Right.

A:

And said what we need to do is not be imaginative, make no waves, and Plummer’s going
to leave, and let’s do it this way. Bill said fine. George said fine.

Q:

Okay. Yeah, so he certainly wasn’t trying to block you or try to keep you back in--

A:

No, he was promoting me either. He didn’t really--I know that he thought about it
because I guess I knew that Plummer was going to leave before Bill did because
Plummer told me because we were friends and he was my Undersecretary. So he told me
that and then we sat there and cooked up what are we going to do about NRO and so I
went to Bill. “Plummer’s going to leave. These are the problems. He’s the Director of
the NRO. I think what you ought to do is--” I didn’t put it that way but he sort of wanted
to do it that way.

Q:

That’s right.
41

A:

Bill thought that was a good idea. I mean it wasn’t something I said, “You need to do
this.” I basically said, I probably said, I don’t know, I think, “Plummer’s going to leave.
You can do several things. If you want a technically sophisticated satellite guy, here’s
the guy you want. If you want to make the bureaucracy happy, just appoint the Deputy,
Charlie Cook. If you want to have a placeholder, I will be the placeholder, but I’m not
going to invent any new systems.” And he said, “Fine,” and then we got together with
George and they all laughed and said, “Yeah, fine, do that but your job is to bring down a
Hexagon capsule every month, target what the agency wants, and don’t talk to Congress.”

Q:

One sort of particular incident that has come up a lot when I’ve talked to other Clements’
people is the 1976, the ax murder incident and Operation Paul Bunyan on the Korean
Peninsula. Did you have anything to do with that?

A:

After the fact, I went to Korea. I went to the--oh yeah I went to Korea and the DMZ and
met the guys and thanked them and I met with President whoever and he gave me some
big sash that I have in my closet somewhere. As it happened, I wasn’t involved, but after
the fact, I wanted to go to Korea. I liked going to the forward operating bases. I wanted
to go to Asia because also Lieutenant Bondarenko had landed his MiG-15 in Japan. And
I wanted to--

Q:

Or his MiG-25.

A:

MiG-25. And so I wanted to get close to it and I wanted to talk to him and I wanted to
talk to the guys and learn about it.

Q:

And to clarify, this was the prominent Soviet defector who produced the first MiG-25 for
the U.S. to examine.

A:

Right. MiG-25 and he flew it out of Siberia and landed it in the northern island of Japan
with practically no fuel left. The one thing we learned that the Russians never gave them
a full load of gas because they knew the pilots would defect. And that was one of the
advantages that we had in Korea and intelligence flights is the North Korean pursuit
planes couldn’t really pursue very well because they didn’t have enough gas. But this
guy flew his MiG-25 to Northern Japan and landed there and we went through the whole
business of saying all the right things to the Russians but at night when the sun went
down and they couldn’t take pictures, we took it all apart and photographed everything
and then put it back together and after about a month, we sent it back and said, “Here’s
your airplane.”
But I wanted to go do that but I also went to Korea and while I did, I went up to the DMZ
which is a pretty scary place and I thanked the--it’s interesting that the guys, the Army
guys that are assigned to DMZ, they are not equal opportunity diverse group. They are
all professional football players. I mean they’re all guys with no necks. And you think,
holy mackerel, what is going on up here? And so the fact that one of them got killed and
boy they armed everybody else with baseball bats and we did not let it escalate out of
42

control. But then I had lunch with President Park and had nice things and he tried to get
me to talk about the upcoming election and so forth which I would not do.
Q:

The upcoming U.S. presidential election?

A:

I went there but I went there basically as a re-assurer.

Q:

Okay. It’s an incident largely forgotten now and when one reads about it, it’s obviously
very morbid and troubling but it seems almost a bizarre operation, but at the time, was
there a real concern that this could escalate into a major confrontation between North
Korea and the U.S., or North Korea and the ROK?

A:

Yeah. I think this was part of some diabolically clever Asian plan.

Q:

Because this is just a few years after the Pueblo, too.

A:

Yes. That’s right. You’ve got a bunch of guys who just do things like that and the South
Koreans do not look kindly on that sort of thing and the U.S. Army sure as hell doesn’t
look kindly on that and so it was a fear, they should--not that South Korea is going to
invade. It’s going to be ten guys from south of DMZ are going to go over and kill
somebody on the other side and then it’s going to spin out of control.

Q:

Okay. Well why don’t we go ahead and pause here for now and we will--

[End of Recording, Part 2]
[Start of Recording, Part 3]
Q:

All right. Resuming recording with Tom Reed at his home in Healdsburg, California,
still November 8th. And Tom, you’re still aware you’re being recorded?

A:

I’m still here.

Q:

Okay. Great.

A:

I’m still with it.

Q:

All right. We had been talking earlier about when you became Secretary of the Air Force
and head of the NRO. Did your working relationship with Bill Clements change at all
when you took those new responsibilities on?

A:

I think it changed in that he had things he wanted done that I could not do as Director of
Telecommunications. That was a very narrow, very exhausting time period and the
Congress generally was not fooling around with telecommunications. There was a
43

subcommittee that was well-informed and they sort of wanted to know what was going
on.
Once I became Secretary of the Air Force, I then could be an instrument for getting a lot
of things done that Bill wanted done. Cruise missiles, I mean produce the cruise missile.
Put it in the budget and make sure it’s there and don’t let anybody take it out. Personnel.
He was interested in academics and so he took a great interest in the service academies.
He had all the service secretaries go visit the service academies to look into how they’re
run and so forth. The general officer corps, the promotions process, as we’ve talked
about earlier, the stability. We’re not going to have general officers moving every two
years and whether it was in technical stuff, you put some guy in charge of a new fighter
plane and he stays there until it flies and none of this constantly moving around stuff.
You put him, you know a three star, in charge of a Pacific command and he stays there so
he knows the names of all the islands and so forth. Bill really wanted stability and he
wanted good people and he didn’t want to put people because it was their turn. And he
was death and so was I on the whole matter of constantly rotating. I think one of the
things that I'm proudest of from the Air Force days is from talking to people ten years
later, the three star on the Air Force staff that became my biggest fan was the Deputy
Chief of Staff for Personnel, Chief Tallman, because I was making him do things that he
basically wanted done in terms of stability. I was paying a lot of attention to the general
officer promotion boards. I mean the system--the general officer system is not well
understood. All general officers are appointed by the President and confirmed by the
Senate. Now it's a big sheep run. The Armed Services Committee said, "Yes fine." But
the point is they are Presidential appointees. And that's part of the civilian control of the
military and I made it clear when I arrived that I'd take that seriously and that I'd been a
head hunter and I pay attention to personnel and therefore I want to know who is on the
General Officer promotion board and I want to talk to them and then just don't bring me a
briefing. The system will let the secretary pick whoever he wants, even if it's his cousin
and then leave us alone for the rest of it. I said, "No, I'm not going to give the board any
recommendations. I want to see the whole list," not just who are they but balance. I want
to see some bomber pilots. I want to see fighter pilots. I want to see telecommunications
people. I want to see project managers that have developed airplane. I want to see a
balance and we're not in the business of training everybody to be the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs. And Gene Tallman really appreciated that because it was something he
couldn't have done by himself and we got along very well.
Bill was very keen in the personnel matters. Likewise, what's in the budget that he now
paid a lot of attention to, he did pay attention to the telecommunications budget because
the services basically want to take money out there. They don't want to buy satellites that
talk to boats and so he was not cutting my budget. He was saying you scoop this out of a
new base somewhere south of Wansan or something and put it into satellites. So he was
beefing up my budget. Once I got to be Sec Air Force, it was either you do this or you do
that, and I think I was doing what he wanted done.
Q:

Right. Now, other friends and family members of Bill Clements have told me that he
loved to read history and I've seen this tremendous collection of history books he
44

amassed. I'm just curious in your years of working with him and for him, did you ever
talk to him about reading about books? Did you see much evidence of his interest in
history?
A:

I didn't talk about books but we talked about history, about the lessons learned, back to
Admiral Nelson and so forth. No, I think that we talked about lessons drawn from history
but we didn't talk about did you read so and so. But we talked about history a lot.

Q:

Obviously we've talked about the lessons of Vietnam quite a bit already and that was very
recent history at the time. Were there any either historical episodes or historical eras that
he seemed particularly interested in or that would come up in your conversations?

A:

Well, he's a serious Texan. In his library, I mean he's really serious.

Q:

I've seen that library at the Cumberland Hills School Building. It's amazing. Floor to
ceiling, thousands and thousands--

A:

And I think one of the joys was when I came down there in ’78 to run his campaigns and
we're out campaigning, he starts telling me about what happened here. And I was
enough, because I worked college summers in West Texas, I knew where Lubbock was
and I worked in Midland and I knew what the Permian Basin was and he was really
impressed. Midland-Odessa. Yeah. They're not twin cities. You want a drink, either you
drink in Midland or Odessa but not both. So we talked about Texas history and so he was
then, lectured a lot when we went to A&M. He talked about how it got there. We went
to East Texas, but because I'd been there in '72 and one of the reasons that--when you
want to talk about it, the '78 election, one of the reasons I knew what I was going to do is
because I had been there in '72 and I wasn't just passing through opening headquarters. I
understood that we've got to win this state and John Tower is going to be a tough sell and
you need to understand where the votes and how does it work. And so as we wandered
around, he talked about the history that East Texas really was the confederacy, West
Texas was not, and all that stuff.

Q:

All right. And how about as it related to his work at the Pentagon, his work on American
defense policy and American national security, did you ever see either in your
conversations with him or in his actions, ways that his understanding of history shaped
his approach to--

A:

Well, I just didn't discuss policy all that much. We were talking about hardware because
I was an engineer. We were talking about particular problems, but I guess I come back to
lessons learned from Vietnam and so forth, if that relates to what kind of airplanes, okay.
But otherwise, yeah, Soviet Unions are bad guys and so we didn't spend that much time
talking about policy.

Q:

Okay. All right. One other question I meant to ask that you'd alluded to earlier is of
course a propound transformation that takes place in the military at this time is the shift to
the all volunteer force.
45

A:

Right.

Q:

How involved was Bill Clements in managing that transition shift and did he seem to
have any strong opinions on it one way or the other?

A:

Oh yes. He was supportive of it. He was really, as he was getting in the personnel
business, he was very instrumental. We want good guys as recruiters. We've got to have-this is not the old world. You've got to recruit people and this is going to be fine
because now we're going to have people that want to be here and he and I both thought
this is a step forward because you're just going to be a transition but when you get done,
you're going to get people that want to be here and you can threaten with throwing them
out if they don't do their job and I talked about one of my achievements was picking the
right Assistant Secretary of the Army as we went to an all volunteer force because he ran
the biggest personnel firm in Houston and it was really a big deal.

Q:

Okay. All right. Transitioning now to politics, in 1976, you had previously been very
close to Ronald Reagan in California.

A:

Yes.

Q:

You're now working of course for the Ford Administration.

A:

Right.

Q:

So when Reagan challenged Ford for the nomination in 1976, did that put you in an
awkward position and then also what can you say about Bill Clements' views or roles
there. I mean was he very loyal to Ford? Did he have any sympathies for Reagan's run
in '76?

A:

Those are multiple questions. First of all, my relationship. I was a professional that had
run Reagan's campaigns because I believed that he was the vehicle for eventually killing
off the Soviet empire. He was not a buddy. He didn't have any friends, but basically I
ran those campaigns because I believed in him and his talents. Once we went through
Watergate and we had a Republican president, I was enough of a pro and a historian to
know no party has ever unthroned their incumbent and kept the office. And therefore for
Ronald Reagan to run for presidency is utter nuttiness and I was early on instrumental in
advising Cheney and other parts of the White House as to what are they doing.
Gerald Ford invited me over to his office in the summer of '75, the first time I'd ever been
in the Oval Office for a real meeting, and the point was to recruit me to be his Deputy
Campaign Manager and there were problems. I was going to end up running the show
half a year later if I did that and I said, "No, I cannot do that." I've escaped politics. But
the guy you want is Stuart Spencer. And so I connected him with Stu Spencer who then
ran the Ford campaign. I was instrumental in the running, or not running, but structuring
the Ford campaign. To the extent I conversed with Reagan I said was this is really a
46

dumb idea. But it was a mismanaged campaign with no focus but I wasn't stressed at all,
other than Watergate has happened, Vietnam has happened. We have a Republican
president and he's a friend of mine. I mean he's normal and so why don't you go do
something else for a while?
Reagan didn't see it that way and he had a cluster around him. You get the staff around
the king and if the king quits, they're all out of work. And so they all had a real serious
vested interest in Reagan running. And what his views were I don't know. He saw
himself as Nixon's heir and all of a sudden, there's a usurper in the White House. Nancy
wanted to be in the White House. I'm sure she was egging him on. What was going on
in his mind, I do not know, but I know that I was not conflicted one bit when I tried to
give advice to Ford people. Here's a good manager. Here's who you need to call to find
out what's going on. Was Clements' conflicted? I think his views were the same as mine.
We have a Republican president. What is wrong with you people? There's no history of
change. Now, the counter argument, well he wasn't elected to the vice presidency or the
presidency and he is doing a seriously misguided things on détente. I mean what
bothered Reagan was Henry Kissinger is still there and so Reagan was really annoyed by
all that. What went on his brain, I don't know but I think Bill, I think we talked about it.
It was 40 years ago but I think that his view is we have a Republican president. We've
survived Vietnam and Watergate. For heaven's sakes, don't rock the boat.
Q:

Picking up the question was about détente, I know you had said you didn't talk policy as
much with Bill Clements but did you ever pick up from him any strong feelings one way
or the other towards détente? I mean was he enthusiastic about it and the Ford
administration policy on that? Was he skeptical of it?

A:

I think he was reasonably supportive. Again, we've just hit upon the really key ingredient
that I had not really appreciated. Bill didn't tell you what he thought. Bill Clements did
not tell you what he thought because a) you learn more by listening than talking but b) if
he told you what he thought, then he figured he'd get echoes. So then you’d tell him what
he wanted to hear. So a lot of times, we didn't talk about that stuff. I think he was--I
mean I was a real hard line cold warrior. We've got to kill off the evil empire and there’s
no doubt about it. It wasn't called evil empire. The Soviets are no damn good and look at
all these SS-18s and more rational people would say you're never going to fire missiles so
don't worry about it. But Bill was really realistic. He was not appreciative of the
Schlesinger limited war options and maybe we're just going to do something in Europe.
He knew right where the nuclear options book was and if the satellites go off and the
Secretary of Defense isn't there, he's going to get the book, and we're going to go with the
full out let them have it. But he didn't believe in all this limited response stuff because he
believed basically it's really dumb to get that far. And so I think that he believed in
getting along with these people better than I did. I was absolutely beat them. I think he
was more of we've got to get along, let's make a deal and we've both got interests that are
responsible. Other than that, at the time, I didn't understand what détente was. Again, it
wasn't my problem so I didn't worry about it.
47

Q:

Okay. So now after Ford's election loss in 1976, did you have a sense for how Bill
Clements felt about the prospect of leaving the Pentagon and returning to Texas or I
could ask it another way. If Ford would have won re-election, did you know would
Clements have liked to stay on in the Ford administration?

A:

The answer is if Ford had won, would Clements have stayed? Yes, but not as Rumsfeld's
deputy, not as anybody's deputy. I think if Ford had said, “I want you to be the Director
of Central Intelligence or the Secretary of Defense or other such things--”

Q:

Secretary of Energy maybe.

A:

Well, there was no energy department yet because Energy didn't get created--

Q:

Oh until Carter.

A:

Carter created that in '76, '77. But I think for do something substantive, yes. But I think
he didn't like seeing Ford lose and he thought Carter was a fool, but I don't think he was
“all is lost.” I think he was, like a lot of people, he'd been there for four years. My study
was the mean time to failure with presidential appointees is two years. And if they stay
for four years, that's remarkable. And so I think he was ready to go and there was no
“would you stay and help with the transition.” I said I've only been Sec of Air Force for
a year and you want me to stay. This is before I knew about Harold Brown, I checked the
box that said, yeah I'll stay a while if you want me to, because the Pentagon is a pretty
nonpartisan place. I think Bill was absolutely, “I'm out of there on January 20th” and I
think he was glad to get out and go home.

Q:

Okay. Now, those last few weeks, his last few weeks or last few months at the Pentagon,
after Ford's election's loss before Clements actually leaves, did he talk to you at that time
about his interest in running for governor of Texas or did that come up later?

A:

No, that came later.

Q:

Okay.

A:

The conversation about running for governor was in November of '77 and I think the bug
didn't really enter his bonnet until probably the summer of '77.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I think, Lord knows where it came from, but his--I think Rita and he both were really
interested in politics. I think they saw the opportunity for change in Texas. The trigger
was the senator from New Mexico had been an astronaut, Jack, who visited Bill and
talked about “you can do it.” Bill talked about that conversation but when we started
talking about it, Bill's attitude is Republicans usually get X million votes and I've only
got to get another 200,000 more and I think I can do that.
48

So when did he start thinking about it? Absolutely not. I think that winding up the Ford
years, he wanted to finish up well, see that all the pieces were put in place, that all the
right things had been done, and he was probably a little dismissive that I was staying in
the Carter administration. Not anti, but just sort of what would you want to do that for,
but he didn't start thinking about the governorship and after that, I basically sort of wasn't
in touch. I was busy being Sec Air Force in the Carter years and then I wanted to get out
of there because I wanted to do other stuff. But as soon as I got through that, Schlesinger
recruited me to help organize the Department of Energy and I was highly busy with that.
I turned to Bill for advice but basically I started as being Chairman of the DOE activation
task force in about April or May of '77 and then we opened the Department on the first of
October. And during that time, I was really busy with that and I talked with Bill but not
all that often because it involved this is what Schlesinger is doing. And I don't want to
hear about it and Carter's a fool and so forth. So we sort of lost track until the DOE was
organized. I had stayed in touch and then after that, I told Schlesinger, I’m not going to
work in the Department of Energy. Carter had just cancelled the B-1; I’m out of here. I
mean that’s when I left Sec Air Force. He cancelled the B-1. I’m out. And but Bill and I
then had lunch at the Metropolitan Club in November of ’77 and that’s when he said,
“I’m going to run for governor and would you come run the campaign.”
Q:

Okay. So Bill Clements was back in DC having lunch with you at the Metropolitan Club
and that’s when he told you?

A:

Yes. I mean he wasn’t living there. He came to town to talk to the people but I was on
his list.

Q:

Okay. Great. Well, one more question, just looking back on his time at the Pentagon,
what would you say--how would you evaluate his most significant legacies, either at the
Pentagon or for America national security more broadly from his four years there?

A:

I don’t think any one program. I think it was bringing an atmosphere of professionalism.
I think perpetuating if you want the place to run well, get a David Packard or a Bill
Clements to run the place. And subsequent presidents haven’t done that with messy
results. But I think his legacy was deputy secretary runs the business part, and make sure
you get the right guy to do that. Now the subsets are you know the people that he picked
and promoted in the personnel world, it was the cruise missile, very important, because it
started out as an augment to the bomber force but it became ground base cruise missiles
and the offset to the SS-20 and all the bargaining chips. It was probably the things he did
in the Army and Navy that I can’t list but I think a sense of professionalism and no
politics was really his legacy.

Q:

Now transitioning, the focus of this interview is not his time as Texas governor or the ’78
campaign so much, although we’ve touched on that a little bit. You mentioned this
briefly earlier, but to what extent or did Bill Clements’ experience pay any role in his
1978 gubernatorial campaign? Anyone else from his Pentagon team besides you get
involved in the campaign?
49

A:

I think very zero. I don’t think his Pentagon experience other than he knew how to run
things and he was very perceptive of a good evaluator of people and so he would not
tolerate appointing so-and-so as the county chairman because he was so forth’s cousin.
Absolutely not. But I think he brought that to the Pentagon from SEDCO. But I think
that the Pentagon lessons were be very attentive to picking good people. I think much to
Rita’s horror is you really can’t entrust women to do anything of serious executive
requirements, that he really didn’t have many women in the upper reaches of the
campaign. I mean he had women working in the office and they had responsible
positions but they weren’t people he really turned to for advice other than Rita. Even
Ann Armstrong, he was sort of dismissive and the ladies that ran the press office. But I
think that in politics, Rita impressed upon him half the voters are women and more than
half the people who are going to do the work are women and she really got on his case in
that regard. Good for her. I don’t think he brought much of the Pentagon. As I
mentioned earlier, he brought the two former chairmen of the joint chiefs to campaign for
him and I think that really--that told a lot of good old boys in San Antonio that this is
serious.

Q:

And I wonder if part of his ability to sell himself to Texas voters was, “I have some
policy experience. This whole notion of me as governor is not going to be my first time,
my first exposure to government. I’ve done this in Washington, DC already. I can
certainly do it here in Texas.” Did that come up at all?

A:

I don’t think so.

Q:

Okay.

A:

I think it was that was not the card we played. The cards we played is he’s a good old
boy. He’s one of you. The ’78 campaign to get ahead before you ask the question, he
asked me to come run it. As Kay pointed out, I was horrified that he asked me and then
he goes home and announces and then he tries to staff up the campaign. That is a horror
story. Reagan is a stage professional. The last thing you do is raise the curtain but not
until the props are there, everybody knows their lines, and so Bill just said, “I’m going to
do it. Now we need to get organized.” Horrible.
But when your thoughts was why did I do that? Did I think we could win? I thought it
needed doing because Humphrey had carried Texas in ’68. Carter had carried Texas in
’76. Clearly if you’re going to get rid of Carter, you’ve got to carry Texas and who is
governor makes a difference. Not only in the leverage of power, but in the former
confederate states, you’ve got to convince those voters that you will not burn in hell if
you vote Republican.
And it’s really interesting to look at the electoral maps for Eisenhower’s year. I mean it’s
amazing if you look at ’52 and ’56, Dwight Eisenhower, the war-time hero, is running
against Adlai Stevenson, a card-carrying member of the ACLU. And what states does
Stevenson carry? He doesn’t carry Illinois or New York. He carries Louisiana,
50

Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, both times and more. And that Texas had been a
confederate state and my mindset is yeah this is something that needs to be done.
Secondly, I thought enough of Bill, I thought this will be interesting. This is not just
going to be some idiot run. This is going to be a serious effort. And I guess thirdly I
thought I’d run campaigns for Reagan and I had the horrible feeling at the end, if I never
went to work, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Now it really would have. Bill
could have lost. But Reagan is so good on stage that he really puts it home himself. I
knew Bill Clements could not do that. I knew that Bill Clements is not going to get
elected unless there’s good management around and that lastly I had been in Texas in ’72
paying attention to the Tower campaign and I had a vision of how to win, the answer is
different from New York, but the Republican votes from the big city, Dallas, Ft. Worth,
Houston, some in El Paso and Republicans have won and boy they really do well in
Houston, and that’s it. And there’s 254 counties in Texas. And so in ’72 I made a little
chart about where are the Republican votes? And the turn-out and the Republican votes,
you do a chart of percentage of vote versus how big is the state and up here is Dallas, and
Ft. Worth and Houston and then it’s just [makes whooshing sound] down to zero. And
my view is Big Spring and Lubbock and Amarillo were not a hell of a lot different from
Ft. Worth. But the sheriffs in all those counties know they’re going to burn in hell if they
even have lunch with a Republican and so you’ve got to convince those people to change
their minds. And therefore, the whole thrust of the campaign is Bill is a good old boy.
He’s one of you. He’s a drilling contractor. He’s not an oil man. And the whole
message was not, “I’ve got this big time experience in Washington.” It was, “I’m a
drilling contractor. I know how to run a business and we’ve got to change this place. We
don’t need another lawyer as governor.”
Q:

Well, someone else I wanted to ask you about which I should have brought up earlier but
someone who--another fellow Texan who worked in the Nixon administration and also
was a Texas governor is John Connally. So what was Bill Clements’ relationship with
John Connally like, both in the Nixon/Ford administration but then also when Clements is
running for governor in ’78? Is Connally actively supporting him?

A:

Yes, part two, Connally was actively supporting. I think they were good friends. I think
they were good friends, that Connally was helpful. He had advice where to campaign
and how to campaign and so forth and so on. That’s sort of above my pay grade but I
think Connally was making the right calls to the right people to get him to do things
because the whole campaign, I mean my contribution was what we call Project 240.
Texas has 254 counties and 14 of them are big deals. Okay. You have chairmen. You’re
in charge of that. The other 240 was Project 240 and we’re going to break those down
into segments and we’re going to get Bill and Rita into those county seats and they’re
going to go to the café and they’re going to have coffee with the sheriff. And Connally
was very helpful in saying, “When you get over to Odessa, you need to see so and so and
when you’re in Big Springs, why don’t you do this.” Connally was very helpful. I don’t
know about their relationships in Washington. I never saw him.
51

Q:

We’re getting up to the Reagan administration so the end is in sight. So skipping forward
then, one other question for the record, after Bill Clements wins in ’78, was there any
thought on his part or your part about you joining his cabinet or his gubernatorial team in
Texas or was it always clear you’re going back to California?

A:

No, there was no thought of that. I and two or three others were gunslingers. I knew
even though I’ve got cousins here, I’m passing through. By then it’s ’78 and I really
have started clos du bois and what is all of this? And so I really wanted to pay attention
to other stuff. Kids were getting ready to go to college. I just had other things to do and
it had been a lot of fun and winning that closely was really a kick in the butt. I had a
wonderful time but my most strongest memory was my uncle lived in Texas in Houston.
And he was sick on election day and I went to see him and he spent half an hour
commiserating me. “I really appreciate your coming to Texas, but you know it’s not
going to work and don’t be disappointed.” And I knew we were going to win. We
weren’t going to win by much but you don’t need much. And it was really a kick and it
was really a kick because Bill understood and he said it often privately and to others.
“Reed, you did. I didn’t do it. You did it.” Yeah, he was the candidate but he over and
over said, “This never would have happened without you.” And Ronald Reagan never
said that. Bill was really great but my attitude was no, I don’t want to stay here. I said
you need a transition director who is not going to be part of the new administration and
so you’ll need to have George Steffes be the transition director because he’d worked in
the campaign and he knows all the players but he will go away. And so I picked the
transition guy and then a couple days later, went away. I did not want to join up and he
didn’t import to me to do that. I mean he knew I had other things to do.

Q:

So then in 1980, there’s Reagan’s presidential campaign. Did you do anything to help
out or be involved with Reagan’s campaign in 1980?

A:

Let’s see. 1980. Well let’s see. 1980. No, I did not--

Q:

Especially because your good friend, George H. W. Bush was running against him in the
primary.

A:

Yeah. No, first of all, I committed political suicide by organizing a draft Ford committee
because Gerald Ford is a friend of mine and a great human being and more miscellanea,
but when we left, ’76, he has a Christmas party at the White House. He has the military
service secretaries and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and their wives. A big, big, deal.
Black tie. Not big crowd but very big deal. Gerald Ford takes time to dance with the
wife of every guy there.

Q:

Oh, good for him.

A:

He was a good guy. He was a friend of mine. I would go to Ford administration
reunions because again it was the Alamo. We’re here and we’re a band of brothers and
we don’t have time to go stabbing each other in the back. Just keep loading and firing.
And I loved the guy and so it seemed to me that Reagan was too old. That’s was a lot of
52

people were saying. He’s deaf. George Bush, well I don’t know, and I really liked Ford
and Ford was thinking about it. Gerald Ford was thinking about and Stu Spencer and I
said, “Well, get it out of your system. Let us--” as Washington will do. All these guys
are saying, “Oh man, Gerry, you’ve got to run.” And we said, “Well, let’s see if they say
that in public.” So we said, “Okay, we’ll organize a draft Ford committee and the deal is
if enough people sign up, then you’re going to run. If it doesn’t work, then you’ve got to
endorse Reagan or you’ve got to endorse the nominee of the party but you cannot just sit
and pout,” which is what he was doing at the time.
He was--as ’79 was turning into ’80, he thought he would have won it if it hadn’t been
Reagan and this and that. So in the Spring of ’80, I organized a draft Ford committee.
And it was really a wonderful experience because of my relationship with him. I have on
my wall in here, I’ll show you sometime, the papers he needed to sign to get his name on
the ballot in Ohio and he gave me the papers that said, “If we squeeze the trigger, here
they are.” And we formed the draft committee and presto, all these guys who were
saying, “Oh Gerry, I’m all for you.” I mean Mel Laird was in the--you could see the dust
down the trail as he began to disappear because he’d been, “Oh I’m all for you Gerry,”
and then there’s this draft committee and suddenly, all these friends, geez I can’t find
them. And so we basically had a draft committee. We said who would sign up and who
would not sign up and that we then had the closing meeting out at Palm Springs and we
said, the delegates aren’t there. We’ve been counting all this and the primaries are over
and this is still a time when conventions worked but the delegates are not there. Reagan
is winning these primaries. It ain’t going to work. He said, “I agree with you.” And so
he went outside said, “I’m not going to run. I support the nominee of the party.” And I
have the filing papers in here but that did not make me a big hero in Reagan land and so
therefore, I was not invited to join the campaign but then nobody was invited. It was
headed down the drain for the same reason ’76 was, which was no management. And
basically it was en route--the week before the convention that Nancy called up Stu
Spencer and said we’ve got to get some good management in here. And that’s when it
turned around.
Q:

Was that when they called Bill Casey or...?

A:

No. Casey was after New Hampshire. New Hampshire was in March. They were sort of
flailing around because John Sears was making a mess of things and Ron was behind in
the polls. I mean he was five points behind Carter and he was viewed as some right-wing
guy from California. And Clark and Meese asked me to come to New Hampshire and
meet and so forth. And I went there but I thought what is the purpose of all this? I mean
I’m not going to give Ron advice because I ran a Ford draft and he’s not going to ask me
to run his campaign and it was sort of a pointless meeting.
But it was a big turmoil and that’s where Nancy was the one that said Casey can at least
solve the financial problem because they were $2 million bucks in the hole. And so
March was when they got Casey aboard but it still was going nowhere. They were down
five points and they were flailing around and not doing well but probably Reagan was
going to get the nomination because Bush was not that good a candidate. Bush was
53

winning the Northeast and industrial states but Ron had the South and the West and so
forth. But it was not until July before the convention that they realized that this is not
working and we’ve got to get some pros and they called up Stu Spencer and Stu joined
the campaign and the first time he really talked to Ron was in the airplane en route to the
convention. And it was an interesting conversation. I wrote in At the Abyss about Stu
said, “Why are you doing this, Ron?” because Stu was learning it was a good idea to ask
a question--ask the candidate why are you running. And he asked Ron and right out of
the jar, Reagan says, “We’ve got to end the Cold War.” And by then, I was persona non
grata so I helped an independent committee that Peter Flannigan organized. I gave him
advice on how to spend money on television. But basically I was not involved. Again I
was busy dealing with clos du bois and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Q:

So shortly after Reagan became president, you joined his National Security Council staff?

A:

Not shortly after. A year later.

Q:

About a year later. Once Bill Clark became National Security Advisor?

A:

Yes.

Q:

In the span of eight years and you also as I understand it, helped develop the President’s
Commission on Strategic Forces.

A:

Yep.

Q:

So what did that Commission do and what role did Bill Clements play on it?

A:

The Strategic Forces Commission, one of your questions was who was a member. So
here’s the web page that tells you who the members are.

Q:

Okay. Great. All right.

A:

My name is not in there because that’s a press release in May. The committee was
formed in January or February of ’83 and it basically got the deals put together. The
report was March or April and then I was caught up on in all sorts of tong wars of Baker
versus Clark. It was just bloodshed. I mean just backstabbing something awful and so I
said when the Senate votes approval for MX, I’m out of here. I’m turning in my badge
and my name is not on it anymore. So my name is not on there. I was the vice chairman.
I helped put it together. The Democrats had all this. We’re going to build railroads
under the desert in Nevada and so forth and that was absurd. And so I and Clark and
McFarlane said we really need to have some sort of bipartisan scheme and so we hit upon
the idea of a commission with heavy hitters, not only for advice but will then go wire up
the deal. I mean that was the key of this Strategic Forces Commission. It was not just
write us a report. Meet, talk and then take assignments. You’re going to talk here and
here and that’s why I became a big fan of the lady who ran for vice president, what was
her name? The Democrat?
54

Q:

Geraldine Ferraro.

A:

Geraldine Ferraro. She was good. She was good. And so was Al Gore.

Q:

She was the congresswoman from New York at the time.

A:

New York, yeah. And so was Al Gore.

Q:

Al Gore was the young senator from Tennessee.

A:

Senator from Tennessee.

Q:

Yeah. That’s right.

A:

But basically, we talked and we thought where are going with this and then we went and
talked with this guys and then we had lunches at the Blair House. So we put the deal
together and that was the key of it all, that we put it together. Bill was very instrumental
in that. He and I, none of us rehearsed our views a head of time but some of the
underlying ground rules were trying to make a land-based missile mobile is ridiculous.
We’ve got submarines that do that and the purpose of all these missiles is if the balloon
goes up, the Soviets have got to hit them and hit them hard and that’s an unambiguous
display of fire power.

Q:

Can you explain for our readers what the balloon goes up means?

A:

I’m sorry, the balloon goes up meaning there’s a crisis that basically the U.S. and the
Soviet Union decide to go to nuclear war with each other.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

And that my view was and Bill Clements’ view, we have a triad in forces--bombers,
submarines, land-based missiles and it’s stable because each of them by that balance
means you cannot bring a surprise attack. You can fire, you can do things, so you can
catch the bombers on the ground, but if you do that, you’ve alerted the missiles and now
you’ve got a thousand missiles outgoing. You can hit the missile silos all at exactly the
same minute in which case, however, you’ve told the submarines and the air craft what’s
going on. And so Bill and my views were the Minuteman was in silos, put the MX in the
same damn silos, and get away from all this mobile basing and so forth and so on. And
we saw eye to eye on that. He was very good in talking to the members of Congress
because he had relationships with the Mahons and so forth. But it was a solid group of
people because they were very diverse. Let me have the list and I’ll talk about it. I mean
the list is--first of all from all sides of the party. So it was Dick Brady, who was a senator
from New Jersey, but he was really George Bush’s guy.

Q:

Later the Treasury Secretary.
55

A:

Yes, right. That’s Bill. John Deutch had been--was at MIT and had been heavy in
research. I really liked John a lot. Al Haig, who had been state and allied commander.
Helms, from the CIA. Then we had union guys, John Lyons from the AFL/CIO. Then
we had Levering Smith who knew all about submarines. He was a submarine--e knew a
lot about missiles and submarines and so forth. And then we had Jim Woolsey, a former
undersecretary of the Navy.

Q:

Bill Perry I saw, future Secretary of Defense.

A:

And Bill Perry so who was big with the Democrats. So it was bipartisan and bicultural.
And Bill and everybody--it was a very stable. Scowcroft was a master. We’re not going
to start arguing. Let’s just brainstorm ideas. So we’d brainstorm and then we broke up.
Okay, you talk to Gore. You talk to Geraldine. You talk to John Tower and so forth and
we basically convinced Les Aspen to sign up and so we basically put together the deal
and then announced the report and the Congress said yeah and the House voted money
and the Senate voted money to just put MX missiles in minuteman silos.

[End of Recording, Part 3]
[Start of Recording, Part 4]
Q:

Okay. Resuming the interview with Tom Reed, November 8, 2013, talking about 1983 in
Healdsburg, California.

A:

And here I am and I know I’m being recorded. Okay. Let’s go.

Q:

So we had just finished talking about Bill Clements’ membership on the President’s
Commission on Strategic Forces. This of course is in 1983, right after he’s lost his reelection bid for governor of Texas. Were there any discussions about him joining the
Reagan administration in any capacity? Was that an interest of his at all or an interest of
President Reagan’s or was he happy to going back to doing his private sector work in
Texas?

A:

I think he was a Texan. I think moving to Washington, I don’t know. I think he kept the
house at Wexford probably as a hedge against Ford getting re-elected and he kept it for a
while but I don’t think he had any desire because I don’t think Reagan would have
offered him--I mean I think the only things he would have taken were DCI or Sec Def
and Reagan had a Sec Def and Casey was the DCI and so there’s nothing to talk about.
So I don’t think--but he’s a Texan. I think he wanted to go home.

Q:

Yeah. Okay. Sure. Now, Clements also served on Reagan’s Commission on Central
America that Henry Kissinger chaired. Did you work with him at all in that capacity?

A:

No. I knew there was one but I had no idea of anything about it.
56

Q:

Okay. Okay . So that wasn’t--? All right. Did you have much of a sense for what did
Bill Clements think of the Reagan administration’s national security policy especially
since he’d previously been a Ford guy and as we’ve talked about earlier, part of Reagan’s
platform had been a critique of détente and the Ford administration foreign policy. But
once Reagan’s actually in office implementing the Reagan doctrine in so many ways,
which I know you played a key role in, did you have a sense for what did Bill Clements
think of this? Did he support it? Did he have any reservations?

A:

I didn’t talk to him much about it. I think he was supportive of the Reagan candidacy.
As you know, he had a house there, Wexford, which he offered and the Reagans used as
their base camp during the campaign.

Q:

And before the inauguration right?

A:

And before the inauguration, yeah. Well, before the inauguration? No, I think after the
election was won, I think the Blair House was made available.

Q:

Oh, okay. I thought I’d read that they stayed there a few weeks between but maybe I’m--

A:

No, I think basically after the election, they moved out. I would bet that all their socks
and pajamas were out of Wexford by November 10th or 15th.

Q:

Okay.

A:

They did not want to use that as a transition office and that once the election was over,
Blair House was available and I had nothing to do with the transition. I made one call to
Bill Smith. I got a call from Harold Brown who wanted to talk about transition and I
said, “Not me,” that I was doing other things. That Reagan provided the house and I
think he was involved in conversations in Los Angeles about who ought to be Sec Def
and who ought to be Sec State. And I think Bill was consulted. I don’t think he had a
key input but I think Reagan and the Reagan entourage respected him because he had
been their landlord. They respected him because he’d won an election in Texas and that
that had turned Texas into a Republican state. They understood that he made history.
But I don’t--I have no way of knowing but I don’t really think that Clements wanted to
do anything or that they had room for him.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

I think he got heard on the matter of advice. What did he think about the strategic forces?
Well, your notes talk about my view of the press conference in October as a disaster.
That’s probably too strong. But both Clements and I were of the view of why do you
have to spend ten months studying all this? A Sec Def who knew what he was talking
about could make all those decisions in one week. You need the Trident submarine. You
don’t need to study it. You need to do a new B-2. You need to upgrade all this stuff and
the fact that they spent ten years to think about it and sort of waffle on MX was basically
Bill and I sort of laughed at all that but it wasn’t our problem.
57

Q:

Well, following up on that did you see any specific ways that Clements’ work at the
Pentagon in the ‘70s helped lay the groundwork for the Reagan administration’s foreign
and defense policy?

A:

The only aspect I would know would be in defense in hardware systems technology and
we absolutely. By the time Reagan got there, there were a whole bunch of F-15s and a
whole bunch of F-16s and smart weapons and stealth. The stealth aircraft started when I
was Sec Air Force, a very secret compartment. I wasn’t involved; it was only petty cash
but it started in ’76. I guess the good part of the Carter years is Perry and Harold Brown
really put the technology in the bank. They did a great job. I think Harold Brown was
over his head as Sec Def but he and Bill Perry were technically really sound people. And
so that stuff, the technology started in the Clements’ years for stealth and it was pursued
and so then the first aircraft began to fly just as Reagan takes over. I think that Reagan
was the beneficiary of a lot of technology that had been put in the bank but that had also
been pushed and pursued by Harold Brown and Bill Perry.

Q:

Okay. And that’s where some scholars are starting to point out and actually Bob Gates
points this out in his From the Shadows’ memoir is that the last year or two of the Carter
administration after--when the Carter administration starts to change course towards a
more hawkish posture, does help lay some of the groundwork for the Reagan
administration when they come in too. Now, I guess a bigger picture question, since you
were over the years very close to Reagan and very close to Clements, how would you
describe the relationship between Reagan and Clements? Did you ever have any
visibility?

A:

I’d say very formal. First of all, Reagan has no friends and people he gets along with are
laid back Southern California, let’s don’t get tight about it, and Bill and my “do it now or
fire all of those people and get somebody else in here.” That’s not Reagan’s lifestyle. So
I think they were friends and during the campaign of ’78, I got Reagan to come campaign
in Texas which was an interesting story.

Q:

Actually since you mention that, can you say anything more about that story?

A:

Sure.

Q:

I wasn’t aware of this.

A:

Yes, well I took this job of running the ’78 Clements campaign, and we’re going to win.
It’s going to be close but we can do it. And I was very confident of that, tough but we
can do it and by the way, we need to do it. And it was absolutely the A-Team. I mean I
was the campaign director. Stu Spencer was the campaign strategist. George Steffes ran
the store. The press people were a bunch of locals. The schedule people were my
people. It was absolutely the A-Team and so it was a campaign that was really fun
because we didn’t have a bunch of Mickey Mouse and also because the second level all
respected us. They were not thinking if we could only get rid of O’Donnell and we can
58

do some--no, no, no. We were the God Squad and they all worshipped us and so it really
ran well and we had a coherent plan.
But one of the things we hit upon, the system we’ve got to get every last Republican vote.
They’re not enough in Texas to win anything so we cannot have any Republican
defections. We’ve got to get every Republican vote and then we’ve got to go convince
about a quarter of the good old boy Democrats that they will not burn in hell if they vote
Republican and we’ve got to do something about the establishment around the edges and
the keys to the Democrats were basically Briscoe and Connally and all of those guys
were sort of not impressed with John Hill.
But your Republican unity, Stu and I said you know what we need to do, we need to get
Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to come down here and do a joint campaign appearance.
And then we laughed uproarishly. We said that’s the most ridiculous thing we’d ever
heard of. And then we say, well you know, it never hurts to ask. So we sat there and said
okay, we want Ford and Reagan to do a joint tour, you know just as I had Admiral
Moorer and General Brown do a tour of San Antonio. We want those two guys to go to
the Republican bastions of Dallas and Houston and appear together at rallies. Okay. And
then we laughed and we said okay, this is a pair of suicide missions, mine especially. I’m
going to see Ronald Reagan and tell him this is what we want him to do and Stu is going
to go see Gerald Ford and we’ll see if they’ll do it. So I call up Ron, you know, long time
no see. I’d stayed in touch with him and I said, “I want to come talk to you about the
campaign in Texas and I’m deeply involved in all that.” Okay because we remained
friends. So I show up to the house.
We have a nice lunch and I say, “Now Ron, the reason I’m here is I am running--I and
Stu are running the Clements for Governor campaign in Texas.” As a formerly
confederate state, Jimmy Carter carried it, Hubert Humphrey carried it. We’re going to
fix that but it’s not easy. And what we want, we cannot lose any Republican votes and so
we want you and Gerald Ford to come do a joint appearance.” Well, he collapsed into
laughter and then his eyes lit up and partly the inner clock was saying, “I need Texas in
1980.” Or maybe he was just struck with the humor of it all or maybe he trusted me
because he trusted me absolutely. In all the things that I did, he never said, “That’s a bad
idea.” And so he laughed and said, “Okay. Sounds good to me. Will Gerry do that?”
And I said, “Stu is talking to him this very afternoon but probably so.” And Ron said,
“Okay.” So we put it together.
Q:

If I can ask, and pardon the interruption, but just to clarify so at the time when you go
make this request of Reagan in 1978, was it widely known or assumed that Reagan was
going to run again for President in 1980 or was that a possibility but--

A:

No, I think it was strongly assumed.

Q:

Okay.

A:

But not considered likely. He’s just too old.
59

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

So it was assumed but he probably won’t make it because he’s old.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

And George Bush is a bright young man and the John Connally and Howard--

Q:

Yeah, Phil Crane

A:

I think it was widely assumed that he’s going to try but it won’t work because it’s too old.
But it was probably in his mind although I think really crossing the Rubicon was in about
the summer of ’79. But he appreciated the humor. He trusted me. He thought it was the
right thing to do. He thought, we’ve got to break the Democratic hold on Texas if we’re
going to win any elections. And oh by the way, that may be me.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Stu went to see Gerry Ford who laughed similarly and that was an easier sell because Stu
had helped Ford win in the convention. And he thought that pretty funny. And his same
question, “What did Ron say?” And Stu said, “Tom’s at his house this very afternoon.”
And so we talked on the phone and we said okay, go tell our principals, the other guys
agreed. And so they did and so they flew in, they got themselves to Dallas and we had a
plane and we had did a rally in Dallas and I think something in Ft. Worth and I think
Austin and then we ended up in Houston. And they were great. They were great. And it
was really pretty funny because Gerald Ford couldn’t remember Bill Clements’ exact
name and so introducing him or talking about him, he talked about Biff Climicks. And
everybody that campaigned from then on, that’s what we called him. You know, Biff is
calling.

Q:

You know this reminds me, I’ll show you when you come to Austin in a couple weeks,
but the Clements’ family recently gave us or loaned us a box of photos and memorabilia
from the old central office in Dallas but one of those we found is this great photo of
Reagan, Ford, Clements, and John Connally, the four of them together and it’s got to be
from the ’78 campaign.

A:

Yes, absolutely.

Q:

Okay.

A:

No, I think Connally was hanging around for that too but we had a great tour and it really
was instrumental in we’re not going not going to have any squirreling around from the
Republican terrorists in Houston. Everybody get on board and it really worked and I
think Reagan and Ford both had a good time.
60

Q:

Yeah. Well, all right, just a final question here on the Clements’ legacy is do you have
any final thoughts or memories of Bill Clements’ work and legacy for American national
security policy? I mean we’ve covered a lot here but I don’t want to leave anything left
unsaid.

A:

I mean that’s the question of American security policy, he didn’t talk about it and so what
I said before, it was a legacy of competence, honesty, integrity, ability to be an example,
like Dave Packard. And so it’s sort of the gold standard that Packard and Clements are
what you want to strive for and in terms of what we should be doing about Israel and so
forth, and Saudi Arabia and paying attention to energy, he probably had some but I don’t
know what they are.

Q:

Well, there’s a quote I’ve come across that he seems to have said to his staff at least once
if not several times at the Pentagon there that we’ve put in our brochure, something to the
effect of “Let us never send the President of the United States to the conference table as
the head of the second strongest nation in the world.”

A:

Oh, absolutely.

Q:

So did he talk much about just wanting to maintain American strength, American
supremacy?

A:

I don’t think we talked about it because he and I saw that as our purpose. I’m sure we
didn’t talk about the meaning of going to lunch. Well, we’re going there to have lunch.
So don’t talk about it.

Q:

Okay.

A:

Basically, my view and I think Bill’s view was we need to rebuild this to overwhelming
American strength. Not everybody agreed with that. I mean there was no--when I first
arrived as Sec Air Force, I said now we’re going to improve minuteman accuracy and
double the yield, there were those who did not want a counter-force capability and
therefore said, missiles that will miss by mile mean you can attack cities and so you
won’t be doing counter force. I think Bill and I thought that was utter nonsense, that you
can build ballistic missiles. You want them as accurate as possible, just as you’ve got a
rifle. You want it foresighted and you want the biggest load you can get and to even
spend time talking about that is absurd. I think he and I saw eye-to-eye on that. That was
not a generally held view but I think his views were you want overwhelming American
military superiority, not that you’re going to use it but you--I think he echoed lots of
Reagan’s speeches about no country ever got into a war because they were too strong.

Q:

Well, one more question related to his legacy because as I realized that you stayed in
touch with him over the years, right, really right up until his death. Over the years, when
you would go see him in Texas, did he talk much about his time at the Pentagon? How
did you see him remembering that?
61

A:

I think he remembered his Pentagon years with great fondness because he felt he really
made a difference, which he did. He felt that he had recruited a lot of good people that
stayed as his friends and fans and that he really had made a difference. So he was very
fond and proud of those years and I don’t think he came away with boy we really
screwed up on this one or that one. I think that we really made a difference and got the
job done and he was very proud of that.

Q:

And over the years, did he talk to you much about his thoughts on American foreign or
defense policy in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s?

A:

I think in the ‘90s, in the post-Reagan era, you know, I go to talk to him, and that’s what
we talked about was what’s the President doing now? I think he was very pleased with
George Bush’s conduct in really bringing the Cold War to an end. Again, as a big fan of
Ford’s and I’m a close friend of George Bush’s, so At the Abyss, as you know, has a
chapter that says, The Closers, that I really think George Bush was absolutely
indispensable to winding up the Cold War. It could have turned out differently. We
could have annoyed those people. They could have evolved into sort of a Chinese model
but in fact George Bush extracted a surrender by never using the word, just “Mikhail, we
need to do this and you’ve got a problem. Can I help?” And I think absolutely it could
have come apart anytime along the way and there are some things that he shouldn’t have
done and I wish blah blah blah, but basically George Bush was the closer and every deal
needs a closer and you can have all the salesmen you want, but sooner or later, you’ve
got to have a closer and George Bush effected the close. He effected the close and then
he built the relationships with Gorbachev about, “We’re not going to have big summit
meetings. I’m just telling you I’m going to pull the troops out of here. I’m going to take
the nukes off the boats and what are you going to do?” And I think he was really good. I
think Bill Clements shared that view. I think that he thinks that Bush was instrumental in
that he did not--I mean in talking to Bush 41, I’m appalled, because I interviewed him at
length for the book and he wrote the introduction, the number of people who wanted him
to go over and dance on the Wall and proclaim victory and so forth. And he said,
“Absolutely not. We’re not going to do any crowing. That’s out of the question. We’re
just going--because we’ve got a lot to do here.” And I think Clements approved of that.
He was more defensive of Ross Perot than I would have been because my view is Ross
Perot cost Bush 41 the re-election.

Q:

Just to clarify when you said, “he,” you’re referring to Bill Clements was more defensive
of Ross Perot?

A:

Yes.

Q:

Okay. All right.

A:

Bill Clements was defensive. Ross is fellow Dallas and they’re friends and so forth. My
view and I wrote about it in At the Abyss, I’m not impressed. And one other point, same
thing, we’ve got a Republican incumbent, don’t fool around and Ross Perot and all his
carryings on, go out there and eat up about 16% of the vote in states that gave those states
62

to Clinton and he elected Clinton. In talking to Bill about that, because I thought for a
whole bunch of reasons that Perot was not good news and Bill was defending him and
he’s my friend, well don’t be so harsh and so forth and he’s a good American, he did all
the right things for the POWs and so forth. So we talked about that and then once
Clinton was President, we talked about stuff but I can’t really remember talking about
specifics. I just don’t remember. I just remember going to the house and he and I and
Kay and Rita sat there and drank bourbon and I was amazed that at 88, he could still toss
down a couple of bourbons while I was having one and we talked about Texas and he
was pretty scornful of the guy that Ann Richards beat that made all the ridiculous
statements about rape and lean back and enjoy it.
Q:

Clayton Williams?

A:

Clayton Williams. So we talked about Texas politics and how that was a setback and so
forth but I don’t--in terms of Iraq and Kuwait, we talked about Kuwait and what a
professionally well-down job that was in ’91, but re-invading Iraq in ’03, we didn’t really
talk about that.

Q:

Okay. Well this concludes all the questions I had about the Bill Clements’ aspect of the
interview, so do you mind if we stop this for a second and then shift to the Reagan
administration?

A:

Okay. Absolutely.

[End of Recording, Part 4]

63