Bill Cohen, a Maine Republican, one of the Senate’s most thoughtful prodefense moderates, called Lehman the “most effective individual in the administration on defense policy.… He’s probably the most effective service chief that I have seen, or anyone has seen, in a long, long time.”38
“Tough, able, and mean” was the blunt rundown given me by a bureaucratic ally of Lehman. I heard similar assessments often. Lehman dared to clash openly with his superiors, and when they tried to put him down, he covertly ran to allies in the White House or in Congress and got his superiors overturned. When he was exposed for alley-fighting tactics in Weinberger’s staff meetings, he argued down critics and grinned at Weinberger. He got the Navy admirals a fleetful of new ships but annoyed them by invading their prized turf: their promotion boards and the internal management of the uniformed Navy. He infuriated defense contractors such as General Dynamics by bargaining down their prices or ostentatiously suspending them from bidding on new business, and then infuriated military reformers by letting the contractors back into competition before excommunication had cost them seriously. But even detractors credit Lehman with bringing down prices on certain Navy weapons, such as the F-18 fighter, and introducing more competition into Navy procurement. In short, Lehman is the master of bureaucratic ploys, the fast opening, the legislative blitz, the head-on clash, the bureaucratic end run, and bargaining to gain networks of support.
In Congress, he sometimes rankled his backers by browbeating them for not doing more and then cutting deals with adversaries to win them over. Senators say he could charm them with camaraderie at cozy little breakfasts, but high Pentagon officials describe him as ruthless toward his foes. For example, when Lawrence Korb moved into private industry after five years as an assistant secretary of Defense, and then, in 1986, as a private citizen, endorsed a group statement opposing further Pentagon budget increases, two of Lehman’s close lieutenants protested to Korb’s new employer, the Raytheon Company. Those pressure calls cost Korb his high-salaried job as Raytheon’s vice president for corporate operations. He was forced out of the defense business entirely, eventually becoming dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Phillip Phalon, Raytheon’s senior vice president for marketing, told me that the Navy said, ‘We never want to see Korb again,’ and that, of course, jeopardized Raytheon’s ability to get contracts,” Korb told me. “I think people who use methods like that should not be entrusted with public positions.… I was outraged, because my feeling was that people ought to be free to express their opinions. I couldn’t imagine a great company like Raytheon caving in to that kind of pressure. It was the Iron Triangle [at work].”39
In person, Lehman, a compact, five-nine, 170-pounder who once stroked the crew for Caius College, Cambridge, cuts a jaunty, swash-buckling figure, given to wide-shouldered, double-breasted blazers. Now in his early forties, he keeps qualified as a Naval Reserve helicopter pilot and a navigator-bombardier on a Navy A-6E Intruder; he gets in flying hours while inspecting the far-flung fleet. He has a politician’s zest for debate, a love of politicking among a friendly crowd, and a politician’s monumental ego. In his Navy public relations officer’s room, I found myself surrounded by four walls of framed magazine covers and newspaper layouts of John Lehman in flight suit, John Lehman in aviator’s helmut, John Lehman in dramatic debating pose. Another Navy official, showing the room to visitors, gestured to the walls: “This is the secretary’s I-love-me room. Every once in a while he comes in here. It’s an ego trip for him.” His admirers, and even some detractors, say that in a future Republican administration, he could be a Defense secretary or national security adviser, or perhaps senator or even president.
Lehman’s operation as Navy secretary was an object lesson in the power game. What gave immediate thrust to Lehman when the Reagan administration took office in 1981 were four things: powerful political allies, his own clear sense of direction, a head start on rival officials, and his savvy for the politics of the Iron Triangle.
Lehman entered the administration as the darling of the hawks, the personal symbol to right-wing conservatives of Reagan’s military buildup. He was pushed for his job by political patrons such as senators John Tower of Texas and John Warner of Virginia, powerful figures on the Armed Services Committee, and Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first National Security adviser. Back in 1969, as an aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Lehman developed his rationale for a six-hundred-ship Navy and a forward naval strategy of attacking the Soviet Navy in its home waters and ports. Afterward, as a consultant on naval affairs, he helped Tower and others battle Jimmy Carter for more carriers. Then in 1980, Lehman helped draft the national security plank of the Republican platform and got his naval notions formally endorsed.
In short, Lehman arrived in the Pentagon with a ready blueprint while other officials were feeling their way. Weinberger had to lean heavily on Lehman when Reagan tapped him as secretary of Defense. In a great rush, Lehman and William Howard Taft IV, a longtime Weinberger lieutenant, had to prep Weinberger for his confirmation hearings.
Even supporters of Lehman have questioned his “forward strategy” against the Russians, his emphasis on building large carriers, and investing so heavily in the surface fleet. But in the critical months of the new administration, Lehman was equipped with a rationale and a slogan: “the six-hundred-ship Navy”—expanding from 479 to 600 ships. (Fifty of those ships were started by Carter.) It was a shrewd tactic politically. Just how shrewd became clear when Lehman persuaded Weinberger to buy not one, but two new aircraft carriers, with the argument that buying two at once was more efficient. Indeed, Lehman was able to claim savings of $750 million from the Newport News shipyard by ordering two carriers, at a total cost of $7.3 billion. As Lehman described it to me, he went to Weinberger and said, “Give me a big jump this year [fiscal year 1983] and I’ll give it back to you next year.” In Pentagon lingo, that’s “front loading” the budget, getting money and a commitment up front now, and taking less later.
It was a supremely canny stroke. It meant “bending a lot of metal,” in Navy lingo, getting construction going so the program would be impossible to stop. Lehman had the advantage of pushing this huge package early in the Reagan years while Congress was still enamored of defense. For deploying carrier battle groups meant building scores of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and submarines, not to mention hundreds of aircraft, along with the two carriers. The $7.3 billion for the two carriers was just the tip of a forty- to fifty-billion-dollar iceberg. It was a classic “buy-in.” Lehman’s scheme also followed Rockwell’s model on the B-1; it spread subcontracts all over the country and engineered wide political support. Lehman told me proudly that the flow of dollars from one carrier alone would go to all fifty states and would cover three hundred to four hundred congressional districts.
“And the Congressional Budget Office did a study, which we distributed to everybody during that debate, that showed that every billion dollars in the ship-building account created twenty-seven thousand direct jobs for a year and fifteen thousand indirect jobs,” he said. “That’s just one billion. And a carrier uses every kind of equipment, and it’s produced all over the country—basic heavy equipment and electronics and pumps and valves and beds and mattresses and toilets and, you know, every kind of conceivable thing that you’d put in a city is in a carrier.”40
As if that were not enough, Lehman and his Navy admirals dreamed up another scheme for broadening their political base geographically. Their idea was far more ambitious than the Army’s light divisions. Lehman called it home-porting; critics quickly nicknamed it home-porking. Lehman’s plan was to spread patronage from his expanded Navy to ports and states along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts beyond existing navy bases. With legendary bluntness, Senator Barry Goldwater, who became Armed Services Committee chairman in 1985, scoffed to Weinberger that this was “pure unadulterated politics” and a wast
e of money. Lehman claimed that “strategic dispersal” of the fleet would make it less vulnerable to nuclear attack and complicate Soviet targeting. Nonsense, cried critics in Congress and the Pentagon. Adding ten or a dozen more naval ports—soft or easily destroyable targets for nuclear weapons—would make no significant difference in a barrage by thousands of warheads.
But Lehman had politicians all over the country eating out of his hand, angling for new naval bases, construction, and jobs. Just before the 1982 election, he dangled the hint that San Francisco would become a new home port and Mayor Diane Feinstein became an enthusiast. Another leak that Everett, Washington, was on the tentative list made political converts up there. When Lehman floated the notion of putting the battleship Wisconsin somewhere on the Gulf Coast, the competition was so intense that the Navy split up its battleship group in seven chunks spread across five states from Texas to Florida.
New York’s senators and congressmen were in a lather to have the battleship Iowa based at Staten Island. They fought rival bids from Boston and Newport. New York’s Senator Alfonse D’Amato cornered Lawrence Korb, a New Yorker who was Weinberger’s assistant secretary for Manpower, Installations and Logistics, in a restaurant during a summer thunderstorm in 1983. “Listen, you don’t want to go to Boston,” D’Amato insisted. “You buy nothing up there [politically]. It’s all Democrats. Who gives a damn about Rhode Island? Hempstead, New York, where I come from, is bigger than that whole state. You gotta go to New York. It just makes good political sense.”41 D’Amato made the same pitch to Weinberger at a Pentagon lunch. Other New Yorkers reminded Lehman that New York’s delegation voted more prodefense than the Massachusetts delegation did.
Inside the Pentagon, the home-porting scheme was opposed by top officials such as Paul Thayer, number two to Weinberger, and Richard DeLauer, undersecretary for Research, Development and Engineering. They shared Goldwater’s dim view that this was a cynical political ploy. In late July 1983, Weinberger had still not yet given a firm go-ahead.
Lehman went directly to Weinberger around his higher-ranking adversaries. According to one high official, Lehman phoned Weinberger, who was traveling in Hartford, to say that New York had been selected for the Iowa. Weinberger agreed on the phone without going through the normal staff review. Instructions were given for Lehman to talk to Paul Thayer, but that evening Weinberger’s military aide was unable to reach Thayer. The next morning Lehman was in New York for a gala breakfast aboard the Intrepid, a retired aircraft carrier now a museum docked in the city. With great fanfare before a gathering of six hundred invited guests, Lehman announced the Navy’s plans to base the battleship Iowa, one cruiser, three destroyers and two frigates between piers 8 and 18 on the eastern shore of Staten Island. “It’s like bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers back home,” gushed Mayor Ed Koch. “It means jobs, jobs, jobs,” cheered D’Amato.42 In Washington, Thayer was furious at being outflanked, but the genie was out of the bottle.
Thayer was no patsy; like Lehman, he was a pilot and a tough fighter. He was also an experienced executive who brought notions of his own into the Pentagon, from experience in the defense industry. His most fundamental brawl with Lehman, over the six-hundred-ship Navy, reached a climax in August 1983.
Thayer had been forced upon Weinberger by the White House in late 1982, and was never close to the secretary personally. Thayer was also immediately skeptical of the six-hundred-ship Navy. Warned by other high officials that Congress would squeeze future defense budgets, he figured the full naval buildup would never be financed. Moreover, Thayer felt that Lehman’s power grab had left the Army with short shrift, and he wanted to right the balance. Lehman told me that Thayer wanted to cut forty to fifty ships from his buildup. Others said Thayer planned to cut $18 billion from Navy procurement over the five years and to transfer more than half of it to the Army. Lehman told congressional allies he was sick of “senior officials”—meaning Thayer—waging “guerrilla warfare” against him, and Thayer exploded to Weinberger: “The place isn’t big enough for the both of us.”
The showdown came on August 11, 1983. Under Weinberger’s system, the deputy secretary runs the Pentagon inside, while Weinberger takes its case to the president and Congress. Thayer had been putting pressure on the services to tighten their budgets and had summoned the Defense Resources Board, which he headed, to go over the figures. He was furious at Lehman’s bookkeeping. He had intended for Lehman to cut ships to meet the budget targets; instead, Lehman merely lowered his estimates of what each ship would cost, a paper exercise.
“I don’t believe those cost figures any more than I believe in the tooth fairy,” Thayer boomed at Lehman, according to one participant of the meeting. Then Weinberger walked in and engaged Thayer in a discussion about military contracts.
When Lehman tried to interject, Thayer shouted, “Shut up.”
“Mercy,” muttered Lehman, playing the victim.
The meeting ended in a standoff, with Thayer warning Weinberger that if he protected Lehman’s six hundred ships, “then the other services are going to be in trouble.”
In his no-bull way, Thayer then gave Lehman a written instruction to cut back to one carrier from two, but he did not reckon on Lehman’s guile, his power network, and his speed. That very day, Lehman did an end run. He went to allies in the White House—Robert McFarlane, an ex-Marine who was then deputy national security adviser, and John Poindexter, an active duty Navy rear admiral who was then number three on the national security staff. Through them, he got President Reagan’s approval on names for the two new aircraft carriers. The White House, uninformed on the latest fracas inside the Pentagon, issued an innocuous-sounding three-paragraph press release saying that the president had decided to name the two new carriers George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. That release also contained a routine-sounding statement from President Reagan endorsing the “six-hundred-ship Navy.” Thus armed, Lehman got Weinberger to overrule Thayer. His carriers and his six hundred ships were enshrined anew.
Lehman was occasionally hoist by his own petard: In 1986, the Navy pulled an end run on him, when he tried to name a personal protégé, Vice Admiral Frank Kelso, the Sixth Fleet commander, as the new chief of Naval Operations. Lehman won the acquiescence of Weinberger, who dislikes overruling individual services. But the Navy brass resented Lehman’s move; they felt that Kelso, only a vice admiral, was too junior for the top job. The “old Navy,” I was told, got its message to John Poindexter, by then Reagan’s national security adviser. Poindexter blocked Kelso’s appointment, and got Reagan to demand another choice. With Lehman threatening to resign, Weinberger nominated Admiral Carlisle Trost, the Atlantic Fleet commander and a more senior figure. Trost got the nod and later declared that Lehman, with his brashness and his playing favorites, was “not a balanced human being.”43
For all his rumblings, Lehman remained for several more months but he resigned shrewdly in early 1987, as Congress grew more resistant to the Navy’s funding requests. Ever the smart politician, Lehman quit while ahead of the game.
The Military Turf Cartel
John Lehman epitomizes a vital truth about the Pentagon power game: that it is driven by the parochialism of the individual military services. From a distance, people treat the Defense Department as one great hulking whole, but it is far from monolithic. It is a confederation of bureaucratic tribes with celebrated rivalries and long established but less well-known patterns of communal collusion. The iron law of bureaucracies is to grow and to control their own fiefdoms, and the military services—being bureaucracies—follow that law.
Turf is the prize they protect: Turf, meaning their roles and missions. Turf, meaning their market shares of the budget. Turf, meaning their autonomy, their power to develop their own strategies, their own weapons systems. The military services have been extraordinarily successful, especially in the Reagan era when money was plentiful and when the Defense secretary believed in letting them have their heads.
Almost everyone kno
ws that in the Pentagon turf game, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps each jealously guards and nourishes its own special identity. But they do not engage in unbridled competition. They have reached an accommodation, a pact not to intrude upon each other’s turf or to challenge each other’s missions.
By operating as a cartel, they foil attempts at ruling them, made by outsiders—including the secretary of Defense and his sprawling staff of 1,765 civilians. The service turf cartel does not decide paramount issues of war and peace or determine American policy toward the Soviet Union. But the cartel enables the services to define their own strategies and budgets and pick their own weapons systems. The service military chiefs have a habit of withdrawing into the “tank”—their top-secret meeting area, generally off-limits to civilian officials—to broker their differences before civilian leaders intervene. Then each service uses its own iron triangle to protect its turf and interests.
The rivalry of the military services has caught the public eye. Think of the drama of the annual Army-Navy football game, or the stirring fife-and-drum traditions of the Marines. Take a public tour of the Pentagon, and service rivalries are imprinted on you. Each tribe owns a pie-shaped wedge of the Pentagon and marks off its territory with symbols and tokens. On the elite E-wing overlooking the Potomac River, each has its own power center, the office of its civilian secretary, and nearby, the quarters of its chief of staff. Its corridors are lined with oil portraits of former secretaries, former chiefs of staff in uniform, and photographs of the special heroes of that service.
Power Game Page 27