TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.3 KB | 236 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 28

Smart, Dull And Very Powerful


SAM NUNN, John Tower's nemesis, has never flirted with charisma,
but built a strong Senate presence on expertise, instinct and
understated toughness

By  MICHAEL KRAMER

    For Sam Nunn, who believes that the tests of private
relations and public life cannot be different simply because it
is impossible to split a whole person in two, it was a painful
admission. A few days before Nunn would lead the charge against
John Tower on the Senate floor, the 50-year-old chairman of the
Armed Services Committee sat in his office under the influence
of two diet Cokes and finally confessed that he once stole some
eggs from a neighbor who kept chickens.

    That was around 40 years ago in Perry, Ga., the small town
about a hundred miles south of Atlanta where Nunn grew up at a
time when the movies cut away to pounding waves whenever a
couple embraced. A lot has changed in Perry, but along Sam Nunn
Boulevard, where just about every fast-food chain known to man
has an outlet, there is still a statue of a Confederate soldier
pointing North, and farther along a billboard that says COME
FOLLOW ME -- JESUS CHRIST. (Back when Nunn was in school, his
class would regularly break for a period of religious
instruction at a church across the street. "That was before
anyone realized it was unconstitutional," says Nunn.)

    "Yeah, I took the eggs," said Nunn last week. "It was a
scheme to make some extra cash" -- a plan too clever by half.
Even then, Nunn prepared his moves carefully, cautiously. A
cooling-off period was decreed. The eggs were stashed in the
attic of Sam's home. "But I never realized they'd rot," said
Nunn. "It was theft without profit."

    And that's about it when you go looking for dirt on Sam
Nunn. Oh, sure, he's accepted some modest honorariums from
defense contractors, and Perry and Georgia are not hurting for
military contracts, and there was also the time, when he was
26, that Nunn got loaded at a party and sideswiped a car and
pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and paid a
$100 fine. That one made the papers again last week when Tower
partisans were dredging up anything they could find "on" Nunn.
"Well, that is something, isn't it?" says a senior White House
aide, who will speak only on background because it doesn't take
a genius to realize that Sam Nunn is going to be around long
after George Bush has retired to Kennebunkport.

    One point to the Bushies: Sam Nunn is not a saint. But he is
perhaps the nation's most widely respected Senator, and it is
his opposition to Tower, more than anything else, that is likely
to doom the would-be Defense Secretary. And no matter who rules
the Pentagon, it is fair to say that few major national-security
decisions will be made without Nunn's approval. He is that
powerful.

    Luck, hard work, some powerful connections and a willingness
to gamble. That's how Nunn has risen so far so fast. The eggs
aside, Nunn breezed through Perry High, Georgia Tech and Emory
University law school. He was an Eagle Scout and a star forward
who led Perry's high school basketball team to the 1956 state
championship. "We were behind by 5 points at the half," recalls
Ed Beckham, a Perry oil distributor. "Our coach was one of the
winningest in the nation, but it was Sam who gave us the
half-time pep talk."

    Nunn absorbed politics by osmosis. His father, a lawyer and
farmer, was mayor of Perry and a campaign manager for other,
full-time politicians. His great-uncle was the legendary Carl
Vinson, who served in the Congress for 50 years, 14 of those as
the brook-no-dissent chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee. Politics, in other words, was everywhere.

    After a brief stint as Uncle Carl's congressional counsel,
Nunn returned to Perry and won election to the state house in
1968. Three years later his goal was to create a new
congressional district, for which, naturally, he would run. But a
man named Jimmy Carter was Governor, and Carter favored a
different reapportionment scheme. Let down by Carter, whom he
had supported for years, Nunn challenged the man Carter
appointed to the U.S. Senate. "I was only 33 then," says Nunn,
"a junior legislator. Even Uncle Carl said I couldn't win, but I
felt I had to try. I gave up a seat I probably could have held
forever and took a chance." And won.

    That was in 1972, and Nunn proved then that he can play
politics with the best of them. With Uncle Carl's help, Nunn
visited Washington and was able to tell Georgians that if he was
elected he would be put on the Armed Services Committee. I have
"assurances," he said cryptically. By primary day, Nunn had the
support of both arch-conservative Lester Maddox and black
activist Julian Bond. After defeating Carter's man -- a
Harvard-educated lawyer whom Nunn chided for being "too used to
air-conditioned rooms in Eastern Ivy League schools" -- Nunn
faced a conservative Republican in the general. The great coup,
the stroke that many say put him over, was Nunn's enlistment of
Alabama Governor George Wallace as a public supporter of his
candidacy. Nunn's memory of that ploy is somewhat selective.
"You have to keep the context in mind," says Nunn -- a
"context" that also caused him to attack the "dictatorship
created by lifetime tenure of federal judges." "After the
primary," says Nunn, "Maddox was leaning toward supporting my
Republican opponent, who was running an ad showing George
McGovern with Coretta King over a line about how they were
warming Georgia up for me. I counteracted that with Wallace. It
was no big deal, and I didn't get involved in actually
supporting Wallace for President."

    Well, actually, Nunn was "talking up" Wallace for President
-- and before the threat of Maddox's bolting was perceived.
"Without George Wallace on the national ticket," said Nunn
before the Senate primary, "the Democrats cannot win. I
fervently hope he will be on the ticket."

    Despite commendable work on race relations and the support
of black liberals like Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, statements
like these -- and a generally conservative voting record --
could cripple Nunn if he seeks the 1992 Democratic presidential
nomination. He considered running last year but pulled back
primarily because his two children were still in school.
"They'll have graduated by '92," says Bill Jerles, a Perry
dentist and close friend. "Sam has those presidential thoughts
in mind all the time."

    Something else must happen if Nunn is ever to become
President. Americans will have to fall out of love with
charisma. The words that define Nunn are "serious" and
"studious." Thirty-second sound bites are not his forte. He
once turned down a chance to appear on national television to
speak about defense policy in response to President Reagan
because the time allotted "wasn't enough to do justice to the
subject."

    Nunn's Senate tenure reflects an eclectic mix of interests.
National security is his primary focus, of course, and the keys
to his influence are knowledge, timing and as little
partisanship as possible. "By the time he starts talking about a
subject," says Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, "he
knows more about it than anybody else." "His real genius," says
Republican William Cohen of Maine, "is to wait for the right
moment to come up with a solution after allowing the sides to
play themselves out."

    The Tower debate aside, Nunn's essential bipartisanship is
almost uniformly accepted by his colleagues. So much so that
even before he took over Armed Services, no less a Republican
partisan than Dan Quayle called Nunn the "de facto" head of the
committee even though it was chaired by the G.O.P.'s Barry
Goldwater.

    Nunn was a man to reckon with almost from the day he entered
the Senate. In fact, even before he was sworn in, he took steps
to ensure that he'd be ready on day one. He hired a consultant
to study the organization of several Senators' offices and had
the desktops measured so he could plan his office space most
efficiently. Six years later he was holding up SALT II for a
Carter Administration commitment to increase conventional-forces
spending. "They told me they couldn't think of how to spend more
money," says Nunn, still incredulous. "That was what really
started SALT II down the drain." But Nunn wasn't implacably
hostile. His support of the Panama Canal treaty gave Carter one
of his greatest victories. "I think it would have lost if I
hadn't gone along," says Nunn. "There were at least two Senators
who were waiting to see which way I'd go." (When Nunn boasts,
which is rarely, it is almost always at Carter's expense.)

    When it came to defense funding, Nunn had a kindred spirit
in Carter's successor. But he clashed repeatedly with President
Reagan over specific weapons systems. He didn't then, and still
doesn't, think there is "anything magical" in the Navy's desire
for 15 aircraft-carrier battle groups. He engineered the MX
compromise, cut back Reagan's grandiose plans and today favors
the single-warhead Midgetman over a rail-based MX. He described
as "fantasy" Reagan's dream of a nationwide Star Wars shield and
fought the former President's insistence that the 1972
Antiballistic Missile Treaty permitted the expanded testing and
development of a space-based strategic defense system.

    Even NATO responded to his reach. In 1984 Nunn proposed
cutting American troop strength in Europe as a way of forcing
the allies to contribute more to the common defense. That
threat, says former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, "had
beneficial effects." Today, with the Europeans enthralled by
Mikhail Gorbachev's peace overtures, Nunn's views have changed.
"I wouldn't introduce the same kind of legislation now," he
says, "and I don't favor driving the Germans to the wall on
((modernizing the short-range)) Lance missile. There are ways to
keep the nuclear deterrent alive in Europe without getting
everyone in an uproar. We could base missiles at sea or on
aircraft that the NATO countries already accept."

    Closer to home, Nunn virtually echoes Secretary of State
James Baker's willingness to deal with Moscow in Central
America. "Reagan pretended that the hemisphere is ours," says
Nunn, "but the reality is that the Soviets are already major
players in Cuba and Nicaragua. There's nothing wrong with
acknowledging that reality and trying to fashion a policy that
ties Moscow's need for Western credits to a diminution of their
support for Castro and the Sandinistas."

    Nunn's other passion is his proposal to create a Citizens
Corps. The plan would have young people work at community jobs
-- or serve in the military -- in exchange for education grants
of $10,000 to $12,000 for each year of service. "We have to
restore a sense of civic obligation," says Nunn. "Today
everything is considered an entitlement." Nunn's
national-service proposal has been criticized for
discriminating against the poor, a charge Nunn finds "ridiculous
. . . The current system isn't working. The dropout rates are
horrendous, and $10,000 is more than almost every student could
hope to make. It's a benefit, not a penalty."

    If all this adds up to a presidential run in 1992, it will
not be the first time Nunn has clashed with George Bush -- or
the second, considering that the fight over John Tower has been
cast as a Bush-Nunn feud. In 1975, when President Ford selected
Bush to head the CIA, Nunn and Senator Henry Jackson were
concerned that Ford was helping Bush audition for a future
vice-presidential race, perhaps even with Ford on the '76
ticket. "We felt strongly that the CIA shouldn't be used that
way," says Nunn, and "we forced Bush to renounce his ambition."

    At first, Bush swore that he would "take no part, directly
or indirectly, in any partisan political activity of any kind."
But that didn't satisfy Nunn and Jackson. They demanded a more
explicit promise. Finally, and over Bush's objections, Ford
sent Congress a letter ruling out Bush as a potential
vice-presidential candidate. "Yeah, we beat him back then,"
says Nunn, "but you notice where he's sitting today." As for '92
and an ultimate Bush-Nunn face-off, that could make the present
skirmish look like child's play.