PROFILE, Page 28Smart, Dull And Very PowerfulSAM NUNN, John Tower's nemesis, has never flirted with charisma,but built a strong Senate presence on expertise, instinct andunderstated 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
