Authors: Hedrick Smith
Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told me that in a private conversation he had once burst out at Weinberger, “Jesus, Cap, negotiating with you is like negotiating with the Russians. All you do is keep repeating your position.”
60
Sam Nunn was offended that Weinberger was so partisan, so quick to condemn all that went before Reagan. “Some of his statements are just preposterous,” Senator Nunn told me with some heat. “In an open hearing, he said that all the strategic modernization programs started in 1981, and I went back and named the systems that started under either Ford or Carter or Nixon. He never did back off of it. I think that’s hurt Weinberger up here with an awful lot of prodefense Democrats and with some Republicans, too.”
61
Indeed, Republicans echoed Democratic impatience with Weinberger. “Cap does not have … a willingness to accommodate, soothe, work with senatorial, congressional egos,” Maine’s Bill Cohen asserted.
“I don’t think Cap particularly has the time, the patience, the inclination to want to sit down and try to take into account congressional concerns or proposals. There is almost an automatic knee-jerk reaction to us [in his] saying, ‘We’ve looked at it, and it’s out of the question. We don’t need it.’ Period. He has a mind-set which precludes, for the most part, taking into account diversity of opinion or at least recognizing the legitimacy of a diverse opinion. That may be unfair, but that’s the perception. And so as a result, he doesn’t have anybody who can carry the water for him.”
62
Weinberger’s Waterloo—Losing More than Money
After Weinberger’s early defense-budget increases, his Waterloo with Congress came in the spring of 1983. His insistence on ten-percent real growth in the Pentagon budget created an uproar among conservative Republicans worried about the deficit. Pete Domenici, the chain-smoking, tough-talking Senate Budget Committee chairman, protested Weinberger’s tendency to “highball” and “stonewall” the budget and his Chicken Little rhetoric about the dangers of cutting defense. “His sky’s-falling-in theory was no more than a theory,” Domenici told me, “and so it cemented the mood into an absolute majority who had become extremely skeptical” toward the Pentagon.
63
The showdown came on April 7, 1983. All spring, Domenici and Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker had been urging Weinberger and William Clark, then national security adviser, to get President Reagan to compromise and accept a 7.5 percent defense increase. For weeks, the White House stalled. Two days before the crucial Senate Budget Committee vote, Weinberger insisted that anything less than a ten-percent rise would jeopardize the nation’s security. The budget committee, angry and frustrated, was moving the other way; Domenici sensed that with domestic programs being cut, his committee would grant the Pentagon no more than five percent. On the critical day, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker called the White House to push for 7.5 percent and Chief of Staff Jim Baker phoned Weinberger, urging him to accept it. Weinberger promised an answer and then disappeared for a few hours. White House officials suspected he was ducking them.
Then, unexpectedly, Weinberger showed up in the White House West Wing. In the hallway outside the Oval Office, two of Jim Baker’s top aides, his deputy Dick Darman and Ken Duberstein, the chief White House legislative lobbyist, made one last pitch for compromise
to Weinberger and William Clark. Finally, Weinberger said “7.9 percent is the lowest I can go.” It was too little, too late, in Duberstein’s mind; Weinberger had not read the mood of the committee. Howard Baker cautioned Duberstein, in a voice filled with futility, “Kenny, I’ll run it up the flagpole, but I wouldn’t have the president call Domenici.” Baker knew it would be rejected and did not want Reagan to be rebuffed in person.
Weinberger and Clark disregarded the warning. In the Oval Office, they urged Reagan to call Domenici and tell him to “get the Republican troops in line” on the Pentagon budget.
“Order him!” Clark said. “You’re the commander in chief.”
Ken Duberstein threw in a warning. “I just spoke with Senator Baker,” he said. “The committee is going forward. There’s no way to stop Senator Domenici. It’s too late.”
The president phoned anyway, catching Domenici on the verge of the committee’s vote. As Domenici remembered the conversation, it was tense and hard. One White House official told me it ended in a shouting match.
64
“Pete, I understand you’re about to finish the budget,” the president began.
“Yes, Mr. President, we are,” Domenici replied, perspiring in a small hallway phone booth and bracing for the pressure.
“I understand you’re going to give us five percent,” the president said, voice hardening. “You can’t do that.”
“That’s the best I can do,” Domenici countered gruffly.
“You can’t,” the president insisted, his voice rising. “You have to wait. Come and see us. Let’s talk.”
The president’s aides recall his raising the possibility of compromise at 7.9 percent and Duberstein’s scribbling the figures 7.5 and 7.9 on a paper, holding it up to the president with his fingers measuring off a tiny distance. But Domenici does not recall 7.9 percent being mentioned. Anyway, it would not have satisfied him. Two months earlier, it might have worked; but coming so late, it reflected Reagan’s reliance on Weinberger and Weinberger’s poor timing and his failure to understand Congress.
“I can’t wait,” Domenici declared. He was reflecting his committee’s impatience with delays and vagueness. “I have all the respect in the world for you, but I’ve been waiting for weeks. There is no give on your side. Cap Weinberger won’t give an inch. I have a responsibility, too. I have twenty-two senators on this committee. It’s an important part of the United States Senate and I have a job. It wouldn’t do any good
to talk. What for? We could talk again. We can sit down, but there isn’t any room. You’ve had all the time you can get. There’s just no more time. I’m sorry.”
The president was growing angry. His voice hard and rising, he was barely able to control his temper.
“You can’t finish today,” he ordered Domenici. “You have to put it off.”
“No, I will not,” Domenici boomed back, sweating from the tension. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
Reagan hung up abruptly. Furious, he slammed down the phone so hard that it bounced out of the cradle. That angry burst was like a hand grenade tossed into a small knot of people. It broke up the Oval Office session. Clark, Weinberger, Darman, and Duberstein left almost without a word.
Domenici, shaking, went back to vote. His committee rejected Weinberger’s ten-percent increase 19–2 and passed a five-percent increase 17–4. Eight Republican senators broke sharply with Reagan-Weinberger that day. Eventually, the Senate passed the five-percent increase; the House passed three percent, and the ultimate compromise was under four percent. Had Weinberger shown flexibility sooner, Domenici contended, “We could maybe have come out with six percent.”
That episode was a watershed for Weinberger, for it galled Senate Republicans to have him insist that cutting so much as a dime from his Pentagon budget would put the nation’s defense in dire peril, and then to see him adjust to much less. It took them several years to decipher his game. They did not notice the enormous inflation assumptions built into Weinberger’s five-year buildup, which ran up the costs of weapons systems; nor did they catch on that when inflation came down, Weinberger just kept the old figures, always “discovering” billions of dollars in “savings” from the exaggerated inflation estimates to offset congressional budget cuts. When Congress caught on, even his Republican backers were furious at having been duped.
Weinberger lost more than money. He lost credibility—the White House staff knew that—and he lost control of the defense debate. Reagan and Weinberger tried to make the issue simply “more” or “less.” But the public mood had shifted dramatically. (In January 1981, sixty-one percent of the public felt defense spending should be increased, and only thirty-five percent felt it should be cut or kept about the same, according to a
New York Times
/CBS News poll. Five years later, only seventeen percent favored an increase and seventy-nine
percent favored cuts or keeping it level.) The deficit had become an overriding concern. Moreover, the furor about scandalously priced coffeepots and wrenches reached a crescendo in 1985, eroding the prodefense coalition that Reagan inherited from the Carter presidency. The political agenda changed. No longer was defense debate fueled by fear of the Soviet threat—which had not significantly changed since 1981—but by Pentagon waste and bad management.
Five years into the $1.5 trillion Reagan-Weinberger buildup, prodefense Democrats such as Nunn and Aspin were boldly declaring that the nation had not gotten its money’s worth. Nunn assailed the terrible inefficiency of building too many things at once and then stretching out production. Other Democratic defense experts charged that Weinberger’s “bloated and unbalanced” Pentagon budget had lavished money on nuclear weapons and the Navy “at the expense of everything else,” particularily conventional preparedness in Europe and for crisis trouble spots.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa complained that defense contractors were less efficient than the Japanese and than other sectors of American industry but were reaping much higher profits and often paying no taxes. Even Navy Secretary John Lehman admitted that weapons systems were gold plated, contractor costs were excessive, and defense-industry profits had, for two decades, “averaged nearly four times the norm of nongovernment profit.” He blamed Congress. New Hampshire’s Warren Rudman shot back that the military bureaucracy was so fat that it contained more clerks than combat personnel, more generals and admirals than during World War II, with only one sixth as many troops to command.
The underlying premise of the criticism was that defense was too important to leave the military turf cartel to its own devices, as Weinberger had done. That suspicion lay behind repeated congressional requirements for more competition in Pentagon procurement contracts, independent testing for faulty weapons systems, more detailed reporting on cost overruns. Moreover, that was the central message of bipartisan reforms pushed by Goldwater and Nunn in the Senate and by Aspin in the House. It was a message echoed by President Reagan’s own Pentagon management commission. Despite Weinberger’s protests and the howling of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional leaders slapped Weinberger down. In mid-1986, both houses voted to centralize more power in the Pentagon, and Reagan went along. Several architects of reform told me privately they could not force Weinberger’s ouster so they changed the structure around him, stripping the
service chiefs of some power and giving more authority to the chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff to override the turf cartel, and granting more power to regional commanders in Europe, the Pacific, and elsewhere, to impose more discipline on the individual services.
A parallel, though less drastic approach was taken by the President’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, headed by David Packard, a former deputy Defense secretary. Weinberger opposed naming this commission, but Reagan went ahead, key senators were told, because he had grown impatient with Pentagon inefficiency and with the homogenized advice of the service chiefs. At one point, I was told, Vice President Bush brought Reagan thirty yards of diagrams showing communications circuits in the Pentagon. “Eisenhower waged World War II with a staff of three hundred,” Bush told the president, according to one high official. “We can’t wage the peace with a Joint Staff of three thousand.”
Reagan’s Blue-Ribbon Commission rendered a harsh judgment. “Today, there is
no rational system
[emphasis added] whereby the Executive Branch and the Congress reach coherent and enduring agreement on national military strategy, the forces to carry it out, and the funding that should be provided—in light of the overall economy and competing claims on national resources,” the Packard commission asserted. “The absence of such a system contributes substantially to the instability and uncertainty that plague our defense program. These cause imbalances in our military forces and capabilities, and increase the costs of procuring military equipment.”
65
Echoing congressional critics of Weinberger but without naming him, the commission proposed more centralized control by strengthening the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and by appointing a new undersecretary for acquisition to ride herd on weapons procurement.
But the turf cartel and its iron triangles are so entrenched that by mid-1987, reformers were complaining that Weinberger had watered down the congressional reforms of 1986 and, the military had blunted the policy impact of the Packard Commission report, especially the independent procurement czar. Les Aspin protested that the new post lacked real power. “A czar without authority is a eunuch,” he declared. The czar, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Richard Godwin, was so frustrated at being hamstrung that he quit in frustration in September 1987. Although he was supposed to have centralized authority, Godwin declared that he “couldn’t make anything stick” against the labyrinthine Pentagon bureaucracy and the ingrained parochialism of the services.
From two former four-star generals, as well as top former Pentagon civilians, I heard dark estimates of the costs of service parochialism in actual battle. General David Jones, who retired in 1982 after serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told me he was fearful the military branches could not fight well together in crises.
66
General E. C. Meyer, who retired in 1985 after serving as Army chief of staff, warned that this problem was so grave it could lead to nuclear war.
“The biggest danger would be that as a result of our current capability, you would have to use nuclear weapons far more rapidly than you might otherwise have to do,” he told me. “And it may even mean that you have to use nuclear weapons, where if you had a better capability, you wouldn’t have to use nuclear weapons.”
67