TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.039

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 18.7 KB | 346 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

COVER STORIES: Is This Goodbye?


A Senate committee stuns Bush by rejecting Tower's nomination

By George J. Church


    After a month as President, George Bush had his first chance
to make a splash on the world scene. But as he began a series
of one-on-one meetings with some of the foreign leaders who went
to Japan for the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, Bush suffered a
slap from which not even the 6,800 miles between Washington and
Tokyo could remove the sting. Disregarding fervent pleas by the
President, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 11 to 9
along strict party lines to reject his nomination of former
Senator John Tower to be Secretary of Defense. The main reason:
Democrats on the committee said they could not accept the
Administration's claims that Tower had shaken the excessive
drinking habits he displayed in the 1970s.

    Bush, for whom loyalty is close to a religion, quickly
announced that he would carry the fight to the Senate floor. A
vote by the full chamber may take place this week, assuming
Tower does not take the White House off the hook by
withdrawing. Considering that the Democrats hold a 55-to-45
majority -- and that, for all the sanctimonious clucking about
Tower's personal habits, last week's vote was overtly partisan
-- Bush is likely to suffer a second and perhaps more damaging
loss.

    Even if, against all odds, Tower squeaks through to
confirmation, he will be seriously damaged. As Pentagon boss,
his effectiveness would be hampered by having to deal with a
hostile Senate Armed Services Committee whose chairman, Georgia
Democrat Sam Nunn, had led the battle against him.

    It was difficult to see how Bush could emerge a winner from
the Tower fiasco. Whatever the outcome, his personal and
political judgment has once again been called into question. He
insisted on appointing Tower, a longtime political ally, over
the objections of aides who knew the nominee's vulnerabilities.
The decision was all too reminiscent of Bush's selection of Dan
Quayle, who as Vice President still comes across to many people
as a lightweight. Other debatable appointments were those of
Boyden Gray, the ethics chief with ethical problems of his own,
and chief of staff John Sununu, an abrasive former New
Hampshire Governor untrained in the ways of Washington. Sununu
was insisting "we've got the votes" to confirm Tower over the
powerful Nunn's opposition, a boast echoed by other White House
officials only a day before the committee vote. Bush's
political judgment was no better. It was the President who
proclaimed last Tuesday that an FBI report had "gunned down" the
allegations of heavy drinking and womanizing by Tower.

    Bush's widely touted "honeymoon" with Congress, already
endangered by his vagueness  on the budget, was ending sooner
than that of any new President in recent memory.  Though the
President cannot get anything done without the cooperation of at
least some members of the Democratic congressional majorities,
the task of wooing them will now be harder. Within the
Administration, the absence of a Secretary of Defense able to
assert the Pentagon's view will prolong the review of foreign
and national-security problems that Bush insists on completing
before he makes major international-policy moves.

    The Administration's lack of momentum is already causing it
to fall behind events in several regions. Soviet Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's trip to the Middle East last
week was part of a skillful diplomatic campaign aimed at giving
Moscow a major voice in the region. In Panama, General Fred
Woerner, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, issued an
uncharacteristically public complaint that Washington has no
real policy toward that country. In Asia, the focus of Bush's
efforts last week, China and Viet Nam are negotiating a
settlement in Kampuchea with almost no input from Washington. In
Western Europe, allies beguiled by Mikhail Gorbachev's promise
to reduce Soviet conventional forces wonder how far to modernize
their own military power, and the U.S. has been unable to give
them much guidance.

    The appearance of sluggishness overseas was compounded at
home when the Federal Reserve Bank raised the discount rate a
half point, to 7%. The move was a clear sign that the Fed,
frightened by recent indicators, does not believe the new
Administration's rosy assertion that inflation can be held in
check without higher interest rates.

    Under different circumstances, Bush's Asian trip might have
been the start of a more vigorous diplomacy. As it was, the
President appeared likely to accomplish no more than he did at
the innumerable foreign funerals he attended as Vice President.
During only two days in Japan, Bush scheduled 19 meetings with
Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers of countries ranging from
France to Saudi Arabia to Singapore. But since he was
unprepared to get into matters of substance, many of the
meetings lasted only 15 to 25 minutes, including opening
pleasantries and time for translation. In a meeting with
Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, Bush refrained from
discussing in detail such key topics as trade and sharing the
defense burden. In China, where Bush stopped Saturday and
Sunday, his visit mostly renewed friendships dating back to his
residence there as U.S. envoy in the mid-1970s. The entire basis
of the relationship between the U.S. and China, which was
founded on mutual distrust of the Soviet Union, is changing as
Gorbachev prepares to visit Beijing in May for a summit with
Deng Xiaoping. Yet there was no indication that Bush spelled out
American rethinking of where the relationship goes from here.
Nor was he prepared to touch on any ticklish trade and security
issues in a six-hour visit to South Korea on Monday before
winging home.

    Asked about these problems, the White House invariably
replies blandly that they are "under review." Supposedly, the
Administration is formally reconsidering some 30 issues,
including general policy toward whole regions (the Middle East,
Central America) and such narrow questions as whether the U.S.
should help Japan build its own fighter plane rather than buy an
American design. But the reviews are going slowly, and the
absence of a Pentagon chief to give military input could
stretch them out for additional weeks or even months. Meanwhile,
the rush of events may not wait. Said a State Department
official: "We are going to pay a big price for sticking with
Tower."

    The price may not be confined to the Department of Defense.
Senior White House officials began to speculate about whether
chief of staff Sununu can survive in his post. Coming from a
state dominated by Republicans, Sununu has failed to appreciate
that in Washington it is necessary to deal with Democrats too.
In the Tower case, he underrated the power of Sam Nunn, the
owlish Democrat who has established such a reputation for
disinterested expertise on military policy that he can take
nearly all of his party with him on any vote on defense
matters. Sununu compounded the trouble by turning over most of
the pro-Tower campaigning to aides led by Frederick McClure,
who landed the job of White House congressional liaison only
after two other candidates declined to work for Sununu. McClure
is a former Tower aide who proved curiously unaware of the
Senate's real opinion of his former boss.

    After the vote, the White House went on a binge of
finger-pointing. Some Bush aides blamed the stunning defeat on
ex-Tower aides who, they said, had been lobbying ineptly on
Capitol Hill without proper supervision. The Tower men scoffed
back that they had been watched closely all the way by Sununu.
Said one: "Sununu has been in on all the major decisions." But
all sides agreed on the real villain: Sam Nunn. Several accused
the chairman of deciding secretly two weeks ago that Tower had
to go and then browbeating his Democratic colleagues into a
party-line vote. But that claim underplayed the qualms of some
Republican Senators. John Warner, the ranking G.O.P. member on
the committee, decided in the end to support Tower for two
reasons: Bush wanted him for the job, and Warner wanted to
secure his own political future.

    Longer range, Bush is running a risk of subtly and
unintentionally undermining his Administration. A primal
commandment for new Presidents, particularly those faced with a
Congress controlled by the opposition party: Thou shalt avoid
early defeats. The opening days are the time when Congress and
the public -- and foreign leaders -- are sizing up the new man.
The perceptions they form early are likely to color their view
of the President throughout his term.

    Though Tower himself and Sununu helped engineer this
debacle, Bush is also to blame. His insecurities and a stubborn
streak make him leery of admitting outsiders, especially people
who have independent followings, into his inner circle. Most
new Presidents display this flaw to some extent, but Bush has
it worse than, say, Ronald Reagan, who eight years ago put
together an effective team that mixed old friends and talented
people he barely knew, some staunchly conservative, others not.
In contrast, says a former Bush adviser who played a large role
in the transition, Bush "always asked, `Is he or she really on
the team?'" In selecting Quayle, for example, Bush did not want
a running mate with a significant constituency of his own, and
he made the decision without heeding the counsel of politically
savvy advisers. Sununu too was a highly personal choice: he had
little Washington experience, but Bush had come to rely on him
heavily during the 1988 primaries and in formulating the
Republican platform.

    Tower is a friend of much longer standing. The Texan's 1961
success in becoming the first G.O.P. Senator from the Lone Star
State since Reconstruction helped inspire Bush, then an oil
executive, to think that a Republican could win a statewide
race. (That feat eluded Bush, who sandwiched two terms in the
House between two losing bids for the Senate.) Tower was one of
the first senior Republicans to declare for Bush in 1988, and he
campaigned tirelessly for the Vice President. In short, he
passed the loyalty test, which Bush regards as all important,
with top marks, and he wanted the job of Secretary of Defense at
a time when no other Bush intimate did.

    Oddly enough, Bush seemed unconcerned about stories of
Tower's boozing and wenching, though he must have heard them;
anyone who knew his way around Washington in the past 20 years
could hardly avoid them. What did worry the President was
Tower's free-spending reign as Armed Services chairman, when he
played a key role in Reagan's $2.2 trillion military buildup.
Could a man with that record carry out the brutal crackdown on
military spending that budget deficits make inevitable? Tower's
opponents within the Bush transition team spread stories that it
was looking for a strong administrator to be No. 2 man at the
Pentagon and that such a person would be nominated along with
Tower as a team. That immediately downgraded Tower. After all,
the other Cabinet nominees had been chosen individually.

    The search for a No. 2 held up Tower's nomination for weeks.
So did the requisite FBI check. The agency concluded that the
many tales about Tower's affairs with women, even if true, posed
no threat to national security. Drinking was something else: FBI
agents asked more than 100 people if they had seen Tower
drinking, what he was drinking, how much he was drinking, and
so on. By the time Tower's long-delayed nomination was
announced, just before Christmas, his sex life and drinking
habits were already being publicly debated.

    Still, the White House foresaw no trouble. Bush and his
aides counted on Tower's status as a senior member of the
Senate, earned during four terms, to smother all doubts among
the other club members. But they made two salient mistakes: 1)
they failed to appreciate that Tower's four-year chairmanship of
the Armed Services Committee was not entirely an asset, that his
dictatorial manner had alienated some  members; 2) they greatly
underestimated the power of Chairman Nunn.

    At first the nomination appeared to be sailing through. But
in early February renewed stories about Tower's drinking and
womanizing became so prevalent that the committee demanded a new
FBI check. Another problem, a serious one, developed during the
hearings: major defense contractors paid Tower $750,000 during
2 1/2 years in which he was out of office, and Tower's
explanations of what he did to earn that money were vague and
unsatisfactory. Even apart from questions of conflict of
interest, Tower's actions tweaked congressional sensitivity
over the "revolving door" through which defense contractors and
Pentagon officials move easily, fostering an unhealthy coziness
that distorts what should be arm's-length relationships.

    In the end, it was not any one factor that brought Tower
down in the committee but a combination of four: allegations of
drinking, stories about womanizing, doubts about his relations
with defense contractors, and resentment of his high-handed
running of the committee. Democrats chose to single out  the
alcohol problem in speeches explaining their no votes Thursday
night. Tower admitted to the committee  that he drank
excessively in the 1970s, but said he now has no more than a
glass or two of wine a day. Yet he never sought help to
overcome the problem, a lapse that bothered Nunn in particular.
Moreover, stories of heavy imbibing much later than the 1970s
were coming to light even last week. The Houston Post reported
that four people questioned by the FBI said they had seen Tower
drunk and prancing with young women at a Dallas nightclub last
July. A Senator might brush off any or even all of the stories
as impossible to pin down; John Warner of Virginia, ranking
Republican on the Armed Services Committee, dismissed them as a
"cobweb of fact, fiction and fantasy." But to the Democrats the
sheer number of such stories, whatever their individual
veracity, was unhappily impressive. It seems likely that some of
Tower's Senate colleagues have seen him drunk, though none would
ever admit it publicly for fear of being on the receiving end
of a similar accusation. It is noteworthy that Republican
Senators who defended Tower last week would not say flatly they
had never seen him drunk; they asserted instead that they had
never seen him "unable to function," or some similar locution.

    Were the censorious Democrats being hypocritical? They were
certainly holding Tower to a higher standard than they would
apply to other Government officers -- or to themselves. Yet
those standards have gradually been rising even for lesser
offices. Quite aside from the erotic misadventures of Gary
Hart, once powerful Congressmen Wilbur Mills and Wayne Hays
helped bring themselves down in the 1970s through drinking and
sexual behavior that would have been winked at in any earlier
decade.

    More important, for a handful of posts such as Secretary of
State or Defense, CIA director and National Security Adviser
(and, of course, President), a higher standard is legitimate. A
Secretary of Education or Labor, or for that matter a Senator or
Congressman, who overindulges is unlikely to damage the nation
if a sudden crisis breaks. A Secretary of Defense or CIA
director who lacks a clear mind, steady nerves and cool
judgment could cause a disaster. As Nunn said just before the
Armed Services Committee vote Thursday night, "I cannot in good
conscience vote to put an individual at the top of the chain of
command when his history of excessive drinking is such that he
would not be selected to command a missile wing, a SAC
(Strategic Air Command) bomber squadron or a Trident missile
submarine."

    Bush, at least initially, refused to admit defeat  on Tower
and stubbornly insisted that his nomination be debated before
the full Senate. On the morning after the committee turned
thumbs down on him, Tower reported to work at his temporary
office at the Pentagon. In a meeting convened in Tokyo shortly
before the committee vote, Bush forbade his aides even to
speculate on possible successors to the Pentagon job. If any
violators of that rule could be identified, the President
declared, "I would like to kick some serious hide."  Though a
barrage of calls on Tower's behalf from Quayle in the White
House failed to swing the committee vote, the President planned
to re-enter the fight as soon as he returned from Asia and to
meet with as many as ten Democrats who might succumb to
personal wooing.

    The odds are poor. To begin with, the White House would have
to retain all 45 Republican votes. It might do so, but with
difficulty; at least some Republicans are likely to be torn
between party loyalty and their dislike of Tower. Then,
presuming all 100 Senators voted, Bush would have to win over at
least five Democrats to produce a 50-50 tie, which Vice
President Quayle could break in Tower's favor. That also looks
like a long shot. Aides at week's end could produce the names of
only three or four Democratic Senators susceptible to
conversion. Besides Tower's fellow Texan Lloyd Bentsen and
Charles Robb of Virginia, the list included such unlikely
possibilities as Massachusetts' Edward Kennedy and Christopher
Dodd of Connecticut. White House aides point out that Tower
cast one of five votes against the censure of Dodd's father
Thomas, who was charged with misuse of campaign funds when the
two men served in the Senate during the 1960s. They suggest that
Kennedy might be brought around because he too has been
victimized by rumors and innuendo, much of it spread by
Republicans. But if anyone can bring every last Democratic
Senator along, it is Sam Nunn. Before the Armed Services
Committee vote, he persuaded Richard Shelby of Alabama, one of
the most conservative Democratic Senators, to join his more
liberal colleagues in rejecting Tower. The nominee, said Shelby,
had already been "irreparably damaged" by the suspicions aroused
by the hearings.

    Considering how Tower has been weakened, it was difficult to
see why he was stubbornly clinging to his diminishing hopes of
getting the job. Some prominent Republicans at week's end were
urging him to spare Bush further embarrassment. "Even if he
wins, what has he won?" they asked. It was a difficult question
to answer, far more difficult than the question of what Bush
stands to lose: not just a Secretary of Defense, but the
all-important impression that he is in command of a government
with sound judgment, creative ideas and lots of momentum.