Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (and Other Right Wingers) Conspire
to Remove Nelson Rockefeller from the '76 Ticket
Author's note: I'm no fan of Nelson Rockefeller. His flaws star in
his history, and you can easily check them out. (You might start with
the eye-opening book Thy Will Be Done-- The Conquest of the
Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil,
by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett.) Rockefeller was chosen
vice president in 1974 when Tricky was forced to fly back to
San Clemente and Gerald Ford became President. To grrrr-ing
right wing klingonistic officials in Ford's White House such as
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, having Rockefeller as v.p.
was a horrid event, so they and their right wing nut ilk conspired
to toss Rockie from the '76 ticket.
Nixon had fallen in disgrace in August of '74
& Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller for vice president
according to the provisions of the 25th Amendment
Ford seemed particularly fumbly & stumbly
whose unwingéd mind flapped low on the limb
Two men who would
later help lead a great nation
toward reckless violence & battiness for war
were pushy, aggressive parts of the Ford team:
Dick Cheney & Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld was chief of staff
And then on September 5
a Manson adept named Squeaky Fromme
in a red hooded robe
approached President Ford in a Sacramento park
pulled a .45 from a holster strapped to her thigh
& tried to shoot him
The president was saved
by a heroic Secret Service agent named Larry Buendorf
who batted away the gun hand
Vice Pres Rockefeller was in NYC
when Squeaky tried to kill.
"What is the Manson gang?" the v.p. asked
as the Secret Service hustled him off to a place back to D.C.
Then on September 22
FBI-informer Sara Jane Moore took a shot at Ford
in San Francisco
The torrent of Clio (Muse of History) is murky
but the fact that Squeaky, then Sara Jane
almost made the satan of Pocantico Hills president
made the right wing sleaze-pack inside the
White House
whirl into action
the whirl-pack convinced Ford that Rockefeller
was responsible for his drop in the polls--
& that the Bible Belt
was oozing away because of liberal Rockefeller.
Across the nation, of course, the word was out that
Gerald Ford was mean and stupid
as traced on the October 30, 1975 front Page of the New York Daily News
FORD TO CITY:
DROP DEAD
after Ford had announced
he wd not support Federal money
to help NYC
through a fiscal crisis
It was presidency-dooming
sort of headline
and liberals everywhere recalled Ford's mean
& unseemly attempt to get the great William O. Douglas
tossed off the Supreme Court
& Ford's dim work on the Warren Commission.
Meanwhile, right wing Ronald Reagan also
was making right wing waves
as if he might grab the '76 nomination
from dearth-noggined Ford
So that late that month of October, '75
when Rockefeller entered the Oval Office for his
weekly one-on-one with Ford
here was an awkward silence at first
then Ford blurted
"I have been talking with my political advisers
and I think it would be, as much as personally I feel badly about it
it would be better if you were not on the ticket...."
Rockefeller, "Fine. I will write you a letter."
Ford responded dimbulbedly, "That will be wonderful."
A few days later
Ford fired Kissinger as national security sdviser
(but kept him on as Secretary of State)
fired William Colby as CIA director
fired James Schlesinger as defense secretary
(the one who'd made certain Nixon
could not call in the military
to keep him in the White House)
replacing him with Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld had been chief of staff;
now dour-mouthed Dick Cheney had the job
George Bush was brought in to take charge of the Langley scandal-land
and thus in the CIA
Shrub 1 began his surge toward the campaign
that made him president in '88
and then his biasmophilic (violence loving) son Shrub 2
a stolen victor in 2000
and Cheney/Rumsfeld would reappear
in Shrub 2's reign
to help smirch American history with
reckless violence, passion for slaughter
and hate-producing oilopathic greed & swagger
--adapted from America, a History in Verse (Volume 4, 1971-1985)
