Authors: Hedrick Smith
When they returned to private life, both wound up working for the Bechtel Corporation, a multibillion-dollar world-wide construction firm based in California. Weinberger became Bechters top legal executive, once again in the shadow of Shultz, the company president. After Reagan’s election in 1980, Shultz was bruited about as a likely secretary of State, a post that Weinberger aspired to. When Weinberger learned that he would get Defense, Reagan political advisers told me, he subtly blocked Shultz from becoming secretary of State by privately suggesting that it would be inappropriate to have “two Bechtel men” in Reagan’s cabinet. Instead, Haig got State.
Shultz and Weinberger cut radically different figures, physically and temperamentally. Shultz is a sturdy Buddha, a teddy bear, solid, and bland-looking. Shultz likes to be a comfortable old shoe—cooking steaks on his backyard grill for foreign leaders or conducting office interviews in a sweater by a roaring fire. For many years, he shunned publicity and became known for dull press conferences. Shultz’s temper flares when he is crossed personally, and he erupts in indignation, as he did during congressional hearings on the Iran-
contra
operation. But normally he is even-tempered and reassuring. In Europe, he offset Reagan’s cowboy image with his reassuring manner. He talks with the hedging, inbred caution of an economist. Generally, his style is conciliatory, compromising, pragmatic. He is a labor mediator by training, a blender and a fixer.
Weinberger by contrast is a feisty partisan who cannot resist producing fireworks. Angular, agile, and dapper, he tugs on his plastic cheeks, eyes rolling, mouth turned in a wry smile. His style is confrontational. A lawyer by training, Weinberger is a debater, an advocate, a Reagan ideologue, sharp and unyielding. He likes the Washington social circuit and the limelight. Inside the administration as well as in Congress, he has exasperated many officials by his rigidity. “Stubborn,” “bull-headed,” “arguing with him is like the Chinese water torture”—those
are things other officials say about him. Shultz’s world is painted in grays; Weinberger’s, in blacks and whites.
“Shultz moves like an elephant,” observed Joe Laitin, a longtime government press officer who has worked for both men. “Shultz moves that one big elephant foot forward cautiously and checks to see if the ground will hold it. And then he moves the next foot and gradually shifts his weight. Weinberger is like a fox terrier. He darts out here and there. He races into dangerous areas where angels fear to tread. He’s a pretty feisty guy who gets himself in trouble because he talks without thinking and then he refuses to budge. But he has a personal charm.”
Like cabinet secretaries in many administrations, both men proclaimed loyalty to the president even as they tugged him in different directions. The Iranian affair was a rare instance of agreement between Shultz and Weinberger; in that case, their rivalry may have reduced their influence because they were not in the habit of going to President Reagan with a combined position.
Normally they have been on opposite sides of the barricades. Weinberger has sent Reagan memos warning of the trap of negotiations and summits with the Russians. Before he resigned in late 1987, he relentlessly pressed Reagan to junk previous arms treaties and to deploy a partial strategic defense. Shultz has urged Reagan to negotiate with Gorbachev. He has promoted flexibility in American negotiating terms, tried to keep past treaties alive, and cautioned Reagan that strategic defense must be proven feasible, survivable, and cheaper than the Soviet offense.
One of their most telling conflicts arose over the use of American military force, where their roles were oddly reversed. Although Weinberger championed Reagan’s costly military buildup, he resisted using those forces, whereas Shultz pushed Reagan to exercise the nation’s military muscle. In January 1986, for example, Shultz called for swift reprisal against Libya for terrorist bombings. Weinberger cautioned against those who seek “instant gratification from some kind of bombing attack without being too worried about the details.” Three months later, after more terrorism, he relented in the raid against Libya, but only one swift strike.
At virtually every step, Weinberger resisted sending American Marines into Lebanon and escalating American military action there, as advocated by Shultz, Bill Clark (then national security adviser), and Bud McFarlane (then Clark’s deputy). “The hard reality is that diplomacy not backed by military strength is ineffectual,” Shultz argued in one speech. “Leverage, as well as good will, is required. Power and
diplomacy are not alternatives. They must go together, or we will accomplish very little in this world.”
Later, Weinberger derided “theorists”—obviously meaning Shultz—who send troops into perilous situations for fuzzy diplomatic purposes. “Employing our forces almost indiscriminately and as a regular and customary part of our diplomatic efforts,” he declared, “would surely plunge us headlong into the sort of domestic turmoil we experienced during the Vietnam War, without accomplishing the goal for which we committed our forces.”
Even before the fateful truck bombing that took 241 Marine lives in October 1983, Weinberger was privately urging Reagan to pull those troops out of Lebanon. As fighting escalated, he argued that the United States was being sucked into taking sides in the Lebanese civil war. When Shultz, Clark and others wanted to step up American air actions, Weinberger warned against stumbling into a war with Syria. At times, Shultz needled Weinberger, once suggesting sarcastically that if Weinberger was not willing to use force, “maybe we should cut your budget.”
The most stunning episode occurred after Shultz and McFarlane, two former Marines, had persuaded President Reagan—over Weinberger’s objections—to authorize an aerial reprisal for the truck bombing, according to a top White House official. Shultz and McFarlane wanted a joint raid on November 17, 1983, with the French, who had lost fifty-nine lives to another truck bombing. French jets from the aircraft carrier
Clemenceau
carried out the raid, but the Americans did not. Weinberger called McFarlane at about 6:30
A.M
. to say, “We just weren’t ready. We needed more time.” General John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me that he was notified so late “that there wasn’t time even to write alerting messages and get them out” to the American aircraft carrier
Eisenhower
. In short, a joint raid had been impossible.
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Shultz and McFarlane were deeply upset. The president was apparently angered, too. “He was mad about it,” a top aide told me. “But he didn’t pick up the phone and say, ‘What has gone wrong and why?’ He was visibly sighing and head shaking, but he’s not the kind of person who would ever sternly discipline anybody.”
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Eventually, Weinberger, bolstered by political pressures from Congress, got Reagan to pull the Marines out of Lebanon while Shultz was off on a trip to Grenada on February 7.
The Shultz-Weinberger policy disputes had a personal edge—a battle for image and standing as well as policy influence. The coin of success was not only who prevailed on policy but who was closer to the
president. As a Reagan confidant, Weinberger goes way back. As a San Francisco lawyer, he had been Republican party chairman in California and was named by Reagan in 1965 to be state finance director—the key figure in Reagan’s California cabinet. Shultz met Reagan back in those days, but did not get seriously involved with Reagan politically until he became an economic adviser to the 1980 Reagan campaign.
Having been Nixon’s budget director, Labor secretary and Treasury secretary, Shultz put great stock in direct, private access to the president. “You have to involve the president in this strategy or he won’t be with you,” he advised me. “I have to be with the president, have opportunities to talk with him privately, and know what his bottom line is.”
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Shultz demanded—and got—the privilege of two private audiences a week with Reagan, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. To build up Shultz’s prestige in 1983, Mike Deaver arranged for him to be photographed often with Reagan and to take trips with the president, without Weinberger. “George feels very strongly that being with the president without the opposing view being there is always helpful,” one former national security adviser said. “He believes that the president’s quality of not wanting to counter anybody makes him vulnerable to collegial decision making and vulnerable to not doing what he would naturally prefer to do. And I think he’s right.”
On occasion, Shultz would get Reagan’s assent to policy initiatives that the Pentagon would have fought, had they known about them. Weinberger was upset, for example, that Shultz got Reagan to approve his unannounced trip to Nicaragua on June 1, 1984, to negotiate with Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader. Weinberger was even more infuriated that in October 1985, Shultz got Reagan’s approval for a proposed joint communiqué for Reagan’s 1985 summit meeting with Gorbachev. When Weinberger found out, the Pentagon protested so vigorously that the draft was eventually abandoned.
Shultz’s regular private access to Reagan grated on Weinberger. “The timing of meetings with Reagan is very important because everybody knows that with people he likes, the last one to see him can usually carry the day,” one high Pentagon official told me. In 1986, when Rear Admiral John Poindexter became national security adviser, Weinberger established his own privilege of regular private meetings with Reagan. And in October 1986, one Pentagon official bragged to me, Weinberger used his special access to lobby Reagan not to bargain away the right to develop strategic defenses at his imminent summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavík.
SALT II: Battle of the Clans
Weinberger entered the war of bureaucratic clans over the SALT II treaty with distinct advantages. He had allies strategically placed in the bureaucracy: William Casey as head of the CIA; Ed Meese as Reagan’s personal counselor; first Richard Allen and then Bill Clark, as national security adviser; retired Army Lieutenant General Ed Rowny as first-term strategic arms negotiator; and first Eugene Rostow and then Kenneth Adelman as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Moreover, Weinberger had hired Richard Perle, one of Washington’s most canny infighters, as assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. Chubby and cherubic-looking, Perle was a tough, brilliant master of the intricacies of arms control. As aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington, he had been a no-holds-barred foe of both SALT I and SALT II.
Weinberger’s antagonism to all past arms-control treaties, especially SALT II, appealed to Reagan’s gut instincts. In a debate before a president who has no taste for details, subtlety and complexity lose out. The hard-line simplifier has important advantages. Uncertainty and ambiguity do not cloud his views or slow his maneuvers. One Weinberger-Perle gambit was to establish an appealing-sounding, hard-line position and then discredit anything less as “selling out.” State Department officials complained that the Weinberger-Perle terms were unrealistic because they required Moscow to restructure its nuclear forces without imposing equal burdens on Washington. State urged “negotiability,” something within reach of the Russians; Perle derided negotiability as “cowardice.” Weinberger hammered his line: Moscow could not be trusted to make and keep agreements, and no important American weapons system should be compromised unless Moscow gave up more. Weinberger was on the offensive.
Shultz’s game was defensive, for he lacked one normal asset of the secretary of State. Usually, in the battle of policy coalitions, a secretary of State tries to position himself at the political center of the national security community—as a broker between the hawkish, hard-line right and the pro-arms-control left. In the Carter administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had done that—with Paul Warnke, as the chief arms negotiator and director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, on his left pressing for an arms agreement, and with Defense Secretary Harold Brown and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his right,
raising cautions and opposing concessions. In that lineup, the State Department can forge compromises for the president.
But Shultz never got that chance because the normal political lineup got switched in the Reagan administration. Instead of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) advocating arms agreements, Reagan’s ACDA was manned by hard-liners in league with Weinberger. That left Shultz on the left flank—not in the center, and it hurt his bargaining leverage.
Nonetheless, Shultz had important allies. At State, his arms guru was Paul Nitze, a slender, silver-haired former Wall Street investment banker who had helped negotiate Nixon’s 1972 arms treaties. Initially Nitze had fought SALT II, and he had strong credentials among hard-liners; now, he wanted to save SALT II. But the critical balance was swung by National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McFarlane believed in arms control, saw value in SALT II, and did not think American security had been seriously damaged by Soviet violations of arms treaties. McFarlane’s support was pivotal, for when secretaries of State and Defense disagree, the national security adviser can tip the balance with the president. It was more ticklish for the Joint Chiefs to help Shultz. Since Weinberger oversaw their budgets, they could ill afford to declare open revolt; but as careerists, they were inclined to keep SALT II. Careerists tend to favor continuity in policy, whereas in-and-outers—Reagan’s political appointees in the Pentagon—were eager to make a fresh mark on policy.
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In a tough bureaucratic fight on arms control, the military chiefs play a crucial role. A politically astute president wants them on his side on arms issues—especially if Congress may second-guess the president. In 1979, Carter had gotten endorsement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for his SALT II treaty. In Reagan’s first two years, military men had defended it to him: first, Haig; then General David Jones, the JCS chairman whom Reagan inherited from Carter; and later, Vice Admiral Bobby Inman, the widely respected deputy director of CIA.