TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/030689/03068900.037

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 9KB | 168 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.