Authors: Hedrick Smith
But the practice did not stop. In 1983, Senator David Pryor of Arkansas found himself being scolded face-to-face by an Air Force general for his voting record on military issues.
Pryor, a longtime foe of chemical weapons, had irked the Pentagon and defied the pork-barrel norms by offering to cut funds for making nerve gas at a small factory in his home state. In addition, he was a target of Air Force pressure on the C-17 transport plane. An Air Force general and a colonel, trying to swing Pryor into line, suggested that if the C-17 were built, it might be based in Little Rock. Pryor was not immediately persuaded, and the general shifted from soft sell to hard sell. In his gentle, curling Arkansas drawl, barely containing his anger at the memory of crass political pressure from a uniformed officer, Pryor recounted the event as I sat across from his desk:
“That general looks me in the eye and says, ‘You know, Senator, you’re not considered very pro-defense.’ And I say, ‘Let’s go into that a little bit.’ He turns to this colonel and says, ‘Let’s see Senator Pryor’s sheet.’ And literally, I thought the colonel was going to choke. He pulls it out and hands it to the general, sitting in that rocking chair right there where you are. The general opens it up and starts readin’ it. Every vote that I passed up: aid to the
contras
, aid to this, statements on Reagan, statements on defense, votes on nerve gas.”
Pryor fell silent, visualizing the scene. Then I asked him, “Do you want to say who that general was?”
“I’d rather not,” he said. “And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because right now he has been promoted,” Pryor answered. “He’s very high in the Strategic Air Command, and what that general does really has life-or-death over our SAC base in Blytheville, Arkansas. Then you say, ‘Well, are you cowed by this?’ I don’t want to say cowed. But you know, why would I go out and whip up a fight knowin’ what the detrimental effect might be to my own constituents? The fact is they have denied that they keep sheets on people, but they do. I saw mine. In fact, I asked him for it. They sent it to me the next day.”
We were talking more than two years after the incident, but it still roiled Pryor. “The idea that some defense policy might be based on whether or not a senator or congressman supports the Pentagon position or not,” he simmered, “that’s dangerous.”
37
John Lehman, Cocky Operator
If any single Pentagon figure personifies the Iron Triangle game, it is John Lehman, for six years Reagan’s secretary of the Navy. No one in the Pentagon in recent years has played the Iron Triangle game more successfully than Lehman. He is a slick, cocky, rough-and-tumble operator, a self-proclaimed naval strategist and a showboater who enjoys making waves, thrives on controversy, knows his stuff, and has few peers as a bureaucratic infighter. Normally, a military service secretary is a figurehead position. It is generally an honorific bestowed on a campaign benefactor or some political ally of the president who becomes the easy captive of his own military brass or is overrun by the tiers of civilian staff of the secretary of Defense. But Lehman’s combination of brilliance, brazenness, and guile gave him real power and won him more of what he was after than any other major figure in the Pentagon, including Weinberger.
Bill Cohen, a Maine Republican, one of the Senate’s most thoughtful prodefense moderates, called Lehman the “most effective individual in the administration on defense policy.… He’s probably the most effective service chief that I have seen, or anyone has seen, in a long, long time.”
38
“Tough, able, and mean” was the blunt rundown given me by a bureaucratic ally of Lehman. I heard similar assessments often. Lehman dared to clash openly with his superiors, and when they tried to put him down, he covertly ran to allies in the White House or in Congress and got his superiors overturned. When he was exposed for alley-fighting tactics in Weinberger’s staff meetings, he argued down critics and grinned at Weinberger. He got the Navy admirals a fleetful of new ships but annoyed them by invading their prized turf: their promotion boards and the internal management of the uniformed Navy. He infuriated defense contractors such as General Dynamics by bargaining down their prices or ostentatiously suspending them from bidding on new business, and then infuriated military reformers by letting the contractors back into competition before excommunication had cost them seriously. But even detractors credit Lehman with bringing down prices on certain Navy weapons, such as the F-18 fighter, and introducing more competition into Navy procurement. In short, Lehman is the master of bureaucratic ploys, the fast opening, the legislative blitz, the head-on clash, the bureaucratic end run, and bargaining to gain networks of support.
In Congress, he sometimes rankled his backers by browbeating them for not doing more and then cutting deals with adversaries to win them over. Senators say he could charm them with camaraderie at cozy little breakfasts, but high Pentagon officials describe him as ruthless toward his foes. For example, when Lawrence Korb moved into private industry after five years as an assistant secretary of Defense, and then, in 1986, as a private citizen, endorsed a group statement opposing further Pentagon budget increases, two of Lehman’s close lieutenants protested to Korb’s new employer, the Raytheon Company. Those pressure calls cost Korb his high-salaried job as Raytheon’s vice president for corporate operations. He was forced out of the defense business entirely, eventually becoming dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Phillip Phalon, Raytheon’s senior vice president for marketing, told me that the Navy said, ‘We never want to see Korb again,’ and that, of course, jeopardized Raytheon’s ability to get contracts,” Korb told me. “I think people who use methods like that should not be entrusted
with public positions.… I was outraged, because my feeling was that people ought to be free to express their opinions. I couldn’t imagine a great company like Raytheon caving in to that kind of pressure. It was the Iron Triangle [at work].”
39
In person, Lehman, a compact, five-nine, 170-pounder who once stroked the crew for Caius College, Cambridge, cuts a jaunty, swash-buckling figure, given to wide-shouldered, double-breasted blazers. Now in his early forties, he keeps qualified as a Naval Reserve helicopter pilot and a navigator-bombardier on a Navy A-6E Intruder; he gets in flying hours while inspecting the far-flung fleet. He has a politician’s zest for debate, a love of politicking among a friendly crowd, and a politician’s monumental ego. In his Navy public relations officer’s room, I found myself surrounded by four walls of framed magazine covers and newspaper layouts of John Lehman in flight suit, John Lehman in aviator’s helmut, John Lehman in dramatic debating pose. Another Navy official, showing the room to visitors, gestured to the walls: “This is the secretary’s I-love-me room. Every once in a while he comes in here. It’s an ego trip for him.” His admirers, and even some detractors, say that in a future Republican administration, he could be a Defense secretary or national security adviser, or perhaps senator or even president.
Lehman’s operation as Navy secretary was an object lesson in the power game. What gave immediate thrust to Lehman when the Reagan administration took office in 1981 were four things: powerful political allies, his own clear sense of direction, a head start on rival officials, and his savvy for the politics of the Iron Triangle.
Lehman entered the administration as the darling of the hawks, the personal symbol to right-wing conservatives of Reagan’s military buildup. He was pushed for his job by political patrons such as senators John Tower of Texas and John Warner of Virginia, powerful figures on the Armed Services Committee, and Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first National Security adviser. Back in 1969, as an aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Lehman developed his rationale for a six-hundred-ship Navy and a forward naval strategy of attacking the Soviet Navy in its home waters and ports. Afterward, as a consultant on naval affairs, he helped Tower and others battle Jimmy Carter for more carriers. Then in 1980, Lehman helped draft the national security plank of the Republican platform and got his naval notions formally endorsed.
In short, Lehman arrived in the Pentagon with a ready blueprint while other officials were feeling their way. Weinberger had to lean
heavily on Lehman when Reagan tapped him as secretary of Defense. In a great rush, Lehman and William Howard Taft IV, a longtime Weinberger lieutenant, had to prep Weinberger for his confirmation hearings.
Even supporters of Lehman have questioned his “forward strategy” against the Russians, his emphasis on building large carriers, and investing so heavily in the surface fleet. But in the critical months of the new administration, Lehman was equipped with a rationale and a slogan: “the six-hundred-ship Navy”—expanding from 479 to 600 ships. (Fifty of those ships were started by Carter.) It was a shrewd tactic politically. Just how shrewd became clear when Lehman persuaded Weinberger to buy not one, but two new aircraft carriers, with the argument that buying two at once was more efficient. Indeed, Lehman was able to claim savings of $750 million from the Newport News shipyard by ordering two carriers, at a total cost of $7.3 billion. As Lehman described it to me, he went to Weinberger and said, “Give me a big jump this year [fiscal year 1983] and I’ll give it back to you next year.” In Pentagon lingo, that’s “front loading” the budget, getting money and a commitment up front now, and taking less later.
It was a supremely canny stroke. It meant “bending a lot of metal,” in Navy lingo, getting construction going so the program would be impossible to stop. Lehman had the advantage of pushing this huge package early in the Reagan years while Congress was still enamored of defense. For deploying carrier battle groups meant building scores of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and submarines, not to mention hundreds of aircraft, along with the two carriers. The $7.3 billion for the two carriers was just the tip of a forty- to fifty-billion-dollar iceberg. It was a classic “buy-in.” Lehman’s scheme also followed Rockwell’s model on the B-1; it spread subcontracts all over the country and engineered wide political support. Lehman told me proudly that the flow of dollars from one carrier alone would go to all fifty states and would cover three hundred to four hundred congressional districts.
“And the Congressional Budget Office did a study, which we distributed to everybody during that debate, that showed that every billion dollars in the ship-building account created twenty-seven thousand direct jobs for a year and fifteen thousand indirect jobs,” he said. “That’s just one billion. And a carrier uses every kind of equipment, and it’s produced all over the country—basic heavy equipment and electronics and pumps and valves and beds and mattresses and toilets and, you know, every kind of conceivable thing that you’d put in a city is in a carrier.”
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As if that were not enough, Lehman and his Navy admirals dreamed up another scheme for broadening their political base geographically. Their idea was far more ambitious than the Army’s light divisions. Lehman called it home-porting; critics quickly nicknamed it
home-porking
. Lehman’s plan was to spread patronage from his expanded Navy to ports and states along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts beyond existing navy bases. With legendary bluntness, Senator Barry Goldwater, who became Armed Services Committee chairman in 1985, scoffed to Weinberger that this was “pure unadulterated politics” and a waste of money. Lehman claimed that “strategic dispersal” of the fleet would make it less vulnerable to nuclear attack and complicate Soviet targeting. Nonsense, cried critics in Congress and the Pentagon. Adding ten or a dozen more naval ports—soft or easily destroyable targets for nuclear weapons—would make no significant difference in a barrage by thousands of warheads.
But Lehman had politicians all over the country eating out of his hand, angling for new naval bases, construction, and jobs. Just before the 1982 election, he dangled the hint that San Francisco would become a new home port and Mayor Diane Feinstein became an enthusiast. Another leak that Everett, Washington, was on the tentative list made political converts up there. When Lehman floated the notion of putting the battleship
Wisconsin
somewhere on the Gulf Coast, the competition was so intense that the Navy split up its battleship group in seven chunks spread across five states from Texas to Florida.
New York’s senators and congressmen were in a lather to have the battleship
Iowa
based at Staten Island. They fought rival bids from Boston and Newport. New York’s Senator Alfonse D’Amato cornered Lawrence Korb, a New Yorker who was Weinberger’s assistant secretary for Manpower, Installations and Logistics, in a restaurant during a summer thunderstorm in 1983. “Listen, you don’t want to go to Boston,” D’Amato insisted. “You buy nothing up there [politically]. It’s all Democrats. Who gives a damn about Rhode Island? Hempstead, New York, where I come from, is bigger than that whole state. You gotta go to New York. It just makes good political sense.”
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D’Amato made the same pitch to Weinberger at a Pentagon lunch. Other New Yorkers reminded Lehman that New York’s delegation voted more prodefense than the Massachusetts delegation did.
Inside the Pentagon, the home-porting scheme was opposed by top officials such as Paul Thayer, number two to Weinberger, and Richard DeLauer, undersecretary for Research, Development and Engineering.
They shared Goldwater’s dim view that this was a cynical political ploy. In late July 1983, Weinberger had still not yet given a firm go-ahead.
Lehman went directly to Weinberger around his higher-ranking adversaries. According to one high official, Lehman phoned Weinberger, who was traveling in Hartford, to say that New York had been selected for the
Iowa
. Weinberger agreed on the phone without going through the normal staff review. Instructions were given for Lehman to talk to Paul Thayer, but that evening Weinberger’s military aide was unable to reach Thayer. The next morning Lehman was in New York for a gala breakfast aboard the
Intrepid
, a retired aircraft carrier now a museum docked in the city. With great fanfare before a gathering of six hundred invited guests, Lehman announced the Navy’s plans to base the battleship
Iowa
, one cruiser, three destroyers and two frigates between piers 8 and 18 on the eastern shore of Staten Island. “It’s like bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers back home,” gushed Mayor Ed Koch. “It means jobs, jobs, jobs,” cheered D’Amato.
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In Washington, Thayer was furious at being outflanked, but the genie was out of the bottle.