"Face the Nation" transcript, June 3: Axelrod, Priebus and more

BOB SCHIEFFER: David?

DAVID SANGER: You know, in the case of Olympic Games, I spent a year working the story from the bottom up, and then went to the administration and told them what I had. Then they had to make some decisions about how much they wanted to talk about it. All that you read about this being deliberate leaks out of the White House wasn't my experience. Maybe it is in-- in other cases. I'm sure the political side of the White House probably likes reading about the President acting with drones and cyber and so forth. National security side has got very mixed emotions about it because these are classified programs.

BOB SCHIEFFER: I want to-- you have one-- one fascinating, almost scary little story, David, you talk about when the White House thought that the Taliban had stolen a nuclear weapon.

DAVID SANGER: That's right. There's a chapter called "Bomb Scare." They had about four days in 2009 when they thought the Pakistani Taliban based on intercepts they had gotten listening to-- to leaders of this Taliban group, had a-- a small nuclear device. And they actually sent a nuclear search team to the Gulf. They've never actually left there. And what did it reinforce in their minds? That it's Pakistan, not Afghanistan that is really the biggest single threat to the United States in that region. And Pakistan's got a hundred nuclear weapons. It's building them up very quickly. They're building mobile weapons and those are much easier to steal.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But as far as we know the Taliban didn't get one.

DAVID SANGER: In the end it was a false alarm but, boy, it really changed the way they thought about the problem.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Scary stuff. And I thank both of you, too, two really fine books.

Back in a moment with our FACE THE NATION Flashback.

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BOB SCHIEFFER: Thirty-six years ago this week, President Ford came to FACE THE NATION in the midst of another furious presidential campaign.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Hi.

BOB SCHIEFFER: California governor Ronald Reagan was challenging the incumbent Ford for the Republican nomination. And that is our FACE THE NATION Flashback.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: America needs a full-time President. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Ford had become President when Nixon resigned and many conservatives thought Reagan would be a better candidate, so the talk quickly turned to whether Ford should make Reagan his running mate.

One of the most interesting things I think that has been found by the CBS-New York Times polls is a statistic that came up the other day that said if-- if the race were Ford versus Carter, forty-one percent of those who call themselves Ronald Reagan people would defect and vote for Jimmy Carter.

In light of that aren't you going to have to put Ronald Reagan on the ticket if you're going to have the backing of your party? And you've got to have the solid backing of the Republican Party in order to make it.

PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD: I have said that I would not exclude any Republican that I've looked at or we've heard about that might qualify as being a vice-presidential candidate and that would include Ronald Reagan. Now, he has himself indicated he would not be interested in being vice president, but as far as I'm concerned, I would not exclude him.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Of course, he did exclude him, put Bob Dole on the ticket and went on to lose the election. When Reagan got the Republican nomination four years later, he returned the favor. Ford's backers urged Reagan to put former President Ford on the ticket as his running mate but Reagan declined and chose George Bush.

Our FACE THE NATION Flashback.

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BOB SCHIEFFER: And that's it for us today. Thank you so much for watching. We love having an hour and we'll be right here next week with more FACE THE NATION. See you then.