TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.037

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.1 KB | 177 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 24

Collapse of a Confirmation


White House blunders and Sam Nunn's power scuttle Tower


    It was the stuff of which high drama, as well as low comedy,
is often made. John Tower had served on the powerful Armed
Services Committee for 20 years, four of them as its
strong-willed chairman. Now a majority of former colleagues
blocked his efforts to climb one more rung in his distinguished
career. Moreover, and perhaps most demeaning, they ostensibly
turned against him because of +questions about his life-style,
although his professional activities also worried them.

    The committee's struggle over Tower began some five weeks
ago in a friendly fashion and on loftier issues. The members
were aware that the FBI had extensively probed the
twice-divorced Tower's personal life, including allegations
that the onetime Senator had carried on flagrant affairs, even
while serving as the chief U.S. negotiator at the Strategic
Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva. But after George Bush,
who was then President-elect, declared that Tower had been given
a "clean bill of health" by the FBI and then nominated him to
lead the Pentagon, those concerns temporarily subsided.

    Another issue then came to the forefront. Even Bush and his
advisers had been concerned about whether Tower could be
expected to clamp down on defense spending. After all, he had
enthusiastically advanced Ronald Reagan's $2.2 trillion arms
buildup. Prepped by Rhett Dawson, one of his former committee
aides who had moved to the Reagan White House and was tapped by
Bush to be Secretary of the Army, Tower impressed the
President-elect with a plan to implement neglected Pentagon
reforms advocated in 1986 by the Packard commission.

    Thus when the committee finally began confirmation hearings
on Jan. 25, Tower performed with the zeal of a new convert to
Pentagon parsimony. He assured the Senators that he backed cuts
in the Pentagon budget, including reduced funding for strategic
missile defense. At the end of Tower's crisp testimony, the
Senators burst into rare applause.

    The collegial mood changed abruptly on Jan. 31 with the
testimony of Paul Weyrich, an archconservative spokesman for
right-wing causes. Weyrich openly declared that he had seen the
nominee drunk in public and with women other than his wife. That
caused the committee's teetotaling chairman Sam Nunn to ask
Tower pointedly and in front of television cameras whether he
had "any alcoholic problem." Replied Tower: "I have none,
Senator. I am a man of some discipline."

    Quizzed behind closed doors, Weyrich was unable to cite
specific incidents of Tower's misbehavior, but the genie was out
of the bottle. The committee was inundated by telephone calls,
many anonymous, reporting "sightings" of Tower misbehaving in
public. The White House asked Nunn to delay a committee vote
while some of the accusations were being checked out by the FBI.
Referring to the leaks to the press, Tower privately protested,
"They've practically got me dancing naked on top of a piano."

    Now the committee began moving more cautiously. Some
veterans recalled that in 1982, when Tower was chairman, the
committee had blithely approved the nomination of Melvyn
Paisley to be an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, even though
he had some curious ties to defense contractors. Paisley later
became a key figure in the FBI's Operation Ill Wind, which
turned up a scandal involving consultants who had profited from
inside information about Pentagon procurement. Some Senators
wanted to avoid repeating that kind of mistake. While Tower's
own lucrative consulting on defense matters after leaving his
START post carried no criminal implications, it would raise a
conflict-of-interest problem if he became Defense Secretary.

    Behind the committee doors, another latent source of
friction came into play. Some old-timers on the staffs of the
Democratic Senators, and even a few of the Senators, had long
chafed under Tower's high-handed rule as committee chairman.
Now his nomination was being urged on the committee by many of
his former staff aides, who have since moved on to prestigious
White House and Pentagon jobs. Most notably, Frederick McClure,
the top legislative lobbyist for Bush, was resented for trying
to round up votes on the committee where he had earlier made
staff enemies.

    As the nomination lost momentum, the committee re-examined a
1984 maneuver by Tower's former staff director James McGovern,
now Under Secretary of the Air Force. In the final hours of a
House-Senate conference, McGovern slipped a provision into the
defense bill ordering the Army to choose a contractor for a new
120-mm mortar in three months. To meet this deadline the Army,
violating its own rules, was about to hand the contract to an
Israeli company favored by McGovern when senior committee
members blew the whistle. McGovern told Senate investigators in
1985 that Tower had directed him to insert the deadline.  Tower
vigorously denied involvement when he was asked about the
affair in his nomination hearings.

    Despite such worries about Tower, Sam Nunn of Georgia, the
committee's current chairman, had not been seeking a clash with
the Texan. He and Virginia Senator John Warner, the committee's
ranking Republican, had even worked out an arrangement under
which they would take press questions on the nomination only
jointly. The committee's approval of Tower seemed assured.

    But on Feb. 7 the Administration blundered. White House
ethics chief C. Boyden Gray and Senate Republican leader Bob
Dole invited committee Republicans to be briefed on the latest
FBI findings about Tower. They accepted. Nunn, who thought this
violated his understanding with G.O.P. Senators, was angered by
the partisan approach. He declared publicly that if the
committee were to vote as quickly as the White House was now
demanding, he would have to vote against Tower.

    Continually underestimating Nunn's influence in the Senate,
some of Bush's Washington newcomers began spreading the word
that the Georgian was power hungry and wanted to run the
Pentagon from his committee chair. In fact, he had been
exerting great leverage on Pentagon policy late in the Reagan
Administration, working with Defense Secretaries Caspar
Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. Still, Nunn's motives have
rarely been openly challenged. He became even angrier.

    Nunn thus readily agreed to a second White House request to
postpone a committee vote while the FBI looked into yet another
Tower problem. This time it was an allegation, surfacing in the
Ill Wind scandal, that some officials affiliated with Unisys
Corp., a defense contractor under investigation, gave money in
the early 1980s to a Tower associate, apparently to arrange
meetings with the Senator. The payment was allegedly made as a
campaign contribution.


    It was not until last week that the FBI finally finished the
last of its six reports on Tower. On Monday White House aides
put the best possible spin on the findings, claiming that "there
is nothing in this report to indicate that Tower is unfit for
office." Next day the President joined the steamroller,
declaring flatly, "The allegations that have been hanging over
this (nomination) have been gunned down."

    Even for some Republicans on the committee, Bush had gone
too far. When he got to read the FBI report, Warner conceded
that the document could readily lead to "credible differences of
opinion" on what conclusions could be drawn from it. Bob Dole,
who is not on the committee, noted that the President "was not
totally accurate" in assessing the report. Nunn observed coldly,
"That's the President's opinion, and I'm sure he thought
carefully about it. It's not my opinion."

    By Wednesday the committee Democrats were in open rebellion
against what they saw as an attempted White House whitewash.
Nebraska's James Exon declared that the President should start
seeking a different nominee. Michigan's Carl Levin asked for
more time to look into even newer allegations against Tower.
Reading the growing sentiment, Warner suggested that a
committee vote be delayed at least until week's end.

    But Nunn had heard enough about Tower. In a closed meeting
on Thursday afternoon, he proposed that the committee meet
publicly that night, deliver any explanations it wished on how
the members had made up their minds, then cast their votes. All
along, Tower's fate in the committee had depended on Nunn's own
decision. As the Senators debated Tower's strengths and
frailties during the three-hour executive session, it was clear
that Nunn would not accept the nominee.

    Before casting his decisive veto in public, Nunn declared
that Tower's "record of alcohol abuse cannot be ignored" and
that he could find no evidence that the nominee had sought help
to correct it. Nunn also judged some of the Texan's conduct
with women to have been "indiscreet." Once again, a man's
public career had been indelibly tainted by reckless personal
behavior.