Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  In early 1986, Rudy Penner got caught in political crossfire. Pete Domenici, the Budget Committee chairman, was angry at Penner for making relatively optimistic forecasts on the economy and the deficit. House Democrats were happy with Penner’s optimism because that meant less pressure to cut programs. Domenici likes to use gloomy forecasts to impose discipline on Congress to cut programs, and he felt Penner’s estimates were undermining his strategy. As it turned out, the economy worsened, and the deficit estimates rose naturally, pleasing Domenici without forcing Penner to give in.

  Penner had even sharper clashes with the Reagan administration on defense spending in the 1987 budget. Penner said the administration had understated the Pentagon’s actual spending by $14.7 billion. (Administration figures, I was reliably told, were dictated by Weinberger rather than being economically calculated by Budget Director Miller.) Realizing that Penner’s numbers would incite Congress to cut more from defense, the administration attacked Penner, and so did Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the hawkish chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. At a hearing in July, Stevens raged at Penner, threatening to cut CBO’s own budget if Penner did not change his estimate on the Pentagon. “That really rocks this defense bill,” Stevens bellowed at Penner. “I am going to cut your money. You cannot put me in this position.”23 But Penner stood his ground. Later, the administration had to change its numbers, tacitly acknowledging that CBO had been right.

  The CBO is a special example of congressional staff power. Its estimates are required by law, and that forces its opinions into full view. CBO cannot escape a high profile. But normally, success in the staff power game against the executive branch dictates a low profile. If information is power, anonymity is protection. The basic technique for staffers is to develop substantive mastery, to work contracts inside the administration, to feed critical information to key legislators, and then let them take the heat and get the publicity for battling the White House or the Pentagon. Only a few staffers voluntarily go against the grain and play risky, high-visibility tactics.

  One of the most powerful in recent years is a blunt-talking weapons expert named Tony Battista, who struck me initially as a white-collar Fonzie (the TV sitcom character), with his jaunty, high-wave hairstyle and the accent of a Staten Island tough. A youthful-looking fifty, Battista looks as if he belongs in a garage, with his head popping out from under a car hood or wiping grease off his hands. That is where he would usually rather be, for Battista is an antique car buff who spends his weekends restoring such prestige models as a Bentley, a Lotus, and several, old Cadillacs, when he is not working overtime for the Research and Development (R and D) Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. His engineering skills are definitely hands on. One of his frequent reactions to outrageous military parts prices is to tell the Pentagon, “I could make it for a fraction of that in my own garage.” More than once, he has actually done so. Battista was trained as an engineer, worked a couple of years for the space agency and nine more at the Naval Surface Weapons Center before becoming a congressional staffer in 1974.

  Battista may be unknown to the public, but he is respected and feared by Pentagon officials and defense contractors. “Tony’s got a lot of power and he uses it,” said Dave McCurdy, a rising Democratic star on defense issues.24 Defense lobbyists say he is as powerful as a subcommittee chairman because his technical expertise, hard work, and tenacity carry the day nine times out of ten with committee members. “If Tony wants a certain program to succeed in his committee, chances are it will, and if he wants it not to succeed, chances are it won’t,” one defense lobbyist told me. Another bluntly told Richard Halloran of The New York Times: “If he’s against you, you’re in trouble. He’ll fight a bear with a buggy whip.”25 Having Battista on your side, added Tom Downey, a liberal New York Democrat, “is like the old days when you got into a fight—you took the toughest guy in town with you.”

  Knowing Battista’s clout but attacking his effort to cut spending on Star Wars space defense in 1985, a Wall Street Journal editorial blasted Battista as “an antidefense staffer” with “a line-item veto.” (Pentagon budgets, like all others, come with each program or weapons procurement item as an entry on a single line, hence the term line item. The Pentagon’s research and development budget is broken down into some eight hundred line items, embracing 3,400 projects. A real “line-item veto” would give Battista the ability to kill some of those individual items. It is a significant power, one that Congress has refused to give to Reagan. The Journal meant that Battista had that kind of power in practice, not in law.)

  To call Battista antidefense is inaccurate. Congressional hawks on defense such as Samuel Stratton, a New York Democrat, or Bob Dornan, a hard right California Republican, praise Battista’s commitment to defense. Battista has backed the MX missile and favored research on space-based defenses, though he is sharply critical of portions of Reagan’s program, which he insists were junked as unworkable or ridiculously expensive before Reagan enshrined SDI in 1983. During the Carter years, Battista quietly helped save research-and-development funding for the B-1 bomber. “Members trust him, both sides of the aisle,” Dornan told me. “When he sinks his teeth into something, you know you’re going to get a fair bipartisan assessment. He’s got an excellent scientific grasp of all the R and D stuff. Tony alone, I believe, prevented the junking of the B-1 R and D program. I think SAC ought to name one plane The Battista.”26 Significantly, one defense contractor whose firm has large business with all three military services told me: “Battista’s not in anyone’s pocket. If you disagree with him, you’d better reexamine your position, because he’s very smart and he does not take his position without good reasons.”

  In person, Battista is friendly, outgoing, almost casual, not pugnacious—but sure of himself in all things technical. He is good at reading the mood of Congress, and for a Congress that has grown skeptical of Pentagon procurement practices, he is ideal. He believes in both strong defense and efficient spending of tax dollars. At hearings, he grills generals mercilessly, more like a senior member of Congress than a staff aide. He will challenge an administration weapons system and get his subcommittee chairman to invite a bevy of top Pentagon brass to come debate him. In one hearing during the Carter years, Battista went toe-to-toe with Deputy Defense Secretary Graham Claytor, Defense Undersecretary William Perry, General P. X. Kelley, then chief of the Readiness Command, and two other generals, and he carried the day. The subcommittee bought his recommendation to kill funding for research on a new cargo plane. In the Reagan years, he challenged Donald Hicks, once Pentagon research-and-development chief, on three issues: the Star Wars space defense program, a new single-warhead mobile missile, and research into hardening concrete silos around American ICBMs. Hicks went away bristling; Battista was unperturbed, and the committee took his advice on all three issues. Later, with committee support, Battista forced the Navy to drop a duplicate radio communications system and use a similar system being developed by the Air Force, a move that saved taxpayers several hundred million dollars.

  “I’ll debate anybody at the witness table,” Battista told me. “I could be wrong. I have been wrong because I didn’t have all the data and the facts on a few occasions. If I’d never been wrong, I haven’t been doing my job. I’m not so pompous and cavalier to sit there and say I’ve never been wrong.”

  What grates the Pentagon, some contractors, and quite a few House members is that Battista presses his favorites quite openly, such as fiber-optics guided missiles and other high technology. He is a tireless foe of duplication and wasteful rivalry among the services. He insists that new weapons be run through combat-realistic tests. Experience makes him especially valuable to Congress. He has been around long enough to know which contractors are good during the research phase but inefficient on production. He has a keen sense of smell when things are going wrong. He is a bird dog. With the help of longtime contacts inside the Pentagon, he sniffs out weapons systems headed for
trouble and huge cost overruns. And he barks very publicly.

  Another thing that makes Battista so effective is thorough homework: ferreting out phony Pentagon reports and faulty weapons. Several years ago, for example, the Air Force had contracted with Hughes Aircraft for an air-to-surface missile called the Maverick. It was supposed to be a long-range tank killer using an infrared heat seeker to find the tanks. When an Air Force colonel told Battista that it could lock onto tanks at nearly thirteen miles (65,000 feet slant range, in technical jargon), Battista became suspicious. When the colonel threw technical jargon at Battista, he threw it right back. Their conversation, he recalled, went this way.

  “ ‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said. ‘What’s the minimum resolution of that seeker?’ And he told me. And I said, ‘What’s the minimum resolvable temperature?’ And I went through a list of parameters with him and I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t have a computer here, but I just did a rough calculation in my head and, Colonel, that’s pure bullshit.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I’ve got it here on tape.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care what you’ve got on that tape.’ So he proceeded to show me this tape, and I said I didn’t believe it. So the Air Force said, ‘What will it take to make you a believer?’ And I said, ‘Let’s go fly.’

  “I hate to fly,” Battista confessed to me. “I’m a white-knuckle flyer. So they stuck me in the back seat of an F-4 with a [Maverick] seeker on it. We went out looking for tanks. Only I did something that I didn’t give them any advance warning of. I set up a bunch of little charcoal fires out there to simulate thermal clutter.”27

  Translated, that means that Battista took steps to make sure that the Maverick test was realistic. A normal battlefield has many things that generate heat, in addition to tanks; that is known as thermal clutter. Battista figured—quite correctly—that the Air Force had a clear, sandy test range with only one or two tanks, easy conditions for the Maverick heat seeker to find its target—no clutter. So Battista had a colleague, Tom Hahn, set charcoal fires out around the test range to simulate the normal thermal clutter of a battlefield.

  “We had a lot of hot spots out there,” Battista recalled with a grin. “So I said to the pilot, ‘Okay, point me to the tank.’ And when we came buzzing in, he found the tank. But at a very small fraction of sixty-five thousand feet slant range. He found the tank when he was practically inside the gun barrel.” In short, the heat seeker had been confused by decoy fires and had to get so close to find the tank that the tank would have destroyed the fighter plane before it could have fired its Maverick-guided missile. When Battista reported that to his subcommittee, it slowed approval of the Maverick program.

  About a year later, some Air Force brass brought in videotapes of planes using the Maverick system. The film seemed pretty impressive until Battista, tipped off by a Pentagon mole, told Representative Tom Downey, “Make ’em play the sound track.” When Downey made the request, the Air Force generals got flustered. “They’re hiding something,” Downey charged. Finally the sound track was played.

  “The reason they didn’t want to play the sound was because it was hard to make out what was being destroyed,” Downey recalled. “In a couple of instances they were blowing up burning bushes and trucks instead of tanks. You could tell from the sound track because you had the pilots talking to one another, saying such things as, ‘Holy shit, you just blew up a truck!’ One guy was very clever. In the tape he was talking about blowing up burning bushes, and he was glad he wasn’t there in Moses’ time, because he would have been responsible for killing God.”28

  Again, Battista’s bird-dogging slowed the Maverick program and forced improvements. Battista later lamented, however, that the program was eventually pushed through by heavy lobbying on the Senate side. Battista had bird-dogged a wounded bird, but the political hunters did not choose to kill the program.

  “Big constituency,” Battista explained. “Program worth several billion dollars. It’s a production item now.”

  Battista defies other axioms of the staff game. One such axiom claims that staff directors gain clout from powerful committee chairmen. Battista is an exception. He has been powerful for years, but never more powerful than when the R and D Subcommittee was chaired by Mel Price, a feeble, almost absentee boss in his late seventies. Battista stepped into the vacuum. “Tony runs that subcommittee; there’s no question about that,” veteran New York Democrat Samuel Stratton declared with gruff respect.29

  Battista also leads with his chin, colliding with senior congressmen such as Stratton. Once he stormed into a hearing of the R and D Subcommittee to protest that Battista was invading the turf of Stratton’s Procurement Subcommittee by investigating the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Since the Bradley was already being bought (procured, in Pentagon jargon), Stratton considered it his worry, not Battista’s. But Battista was not intimidated; he insisted the R and D Subcommittee was investigating how the Bradley was tested. Stratton furiously stalked out.

  More broadly, Battista has for years virtually set the R and D Subcommittee’s agenda with his personal report to the subcommittee on the Pentagon’s R and D budget. Normally, the weapons that he says are in trouble get close scrutiny, ones he says are okay pass easily. In 1985, Battista recommended killing twenty-two proposed weapons systems, and the House Armed Services Committee went along on every item, though in conference with the Senate, it backed down on most—but not before imposing restrictions urged by Battista.

  Pentagon officials bristle over what they consider Battista’s micro-management of their programs. “What I object to is that Battista runs his own empire,” one thirty-year Pentagon official turned lobbyist angrily told me. “He’s like his own Department of Defense without accountability. Thousands of people put the defense budget together, generals and civilians. It’s a consensus opinion. So it’s sent up there, and here’s one guy, Tony Battista, who hasn’t been elected, who doesn’t have anyone to answer to except the members, and he sits down and says, ‘I don’t like the way they’re doing it.’ In a few months, this one guy changes hundreds of things that thousands of people have worked on for a year. Mind you, he may be right on some items. He’s intelligent. He’s able. But it’s not the right way to run a railroad.”

  But in Congress, some members compare Battista to Ken Dryden, the legendary ice hockey goal tender of the Montreal Canadiens; Battista does not let the Pentagon get things past him. “Day in and day out, Battista’s the most honest, most knowledgeable staff guy around, and he’s not afraid to jam some general,” commented Thomas Downey, a Long Island Democrat.30 “In the Pentagon, officers get rotated in and out of these jobs as often as the Yankees change relief pitchers. That always gave Battista an enormous competitive advantage. I mean, he’s a hawk on defense. No two ways about it. But, he doesn’t play favorites. He goes after people who he knows are notoriously ripping off the government.”

  Reagan’s “Staff Presidency”

  Just as the power of congressional staff has grown overall in the 1970s and 1980s, so has the force and authority of the White House staff—rising even more steeply. But there is an important difference: In Congress, staff power has sprawled and spread into many more hands; the opposite trend has taken place at the White House. The human apparatus of the Executive Office of the President has gained size and muscle since the 1960s, a symbol of more centralized power within the executive branch. And staff power has become more concentrated near the apex: the chief of staff, national security adviser, budget director, and one or two other aides, depending on the style of each president.

  The common thread between the White House and Capitol Hill is that the shadow government of staff has gained power at the expense of those formally and publicly assumed to exercise power: Congress and the cabinet.

  Never was White House staff power more dramatically demonstrated than in Ronald Reagan’s disastrous Iranian hostage operation. That policy was devised, promoted, and protected by successive national security advise
rs Robert McFarlane and Rear Admiral John Poindexter and run by their staff aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North—despite the objections of the senior cabinet figures, Secretary of State George Shultz, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. In particular, Poindexter and North skirted chains of command in other agencies, keeping the very top level officials in the dark. Poindexter even usurped the president’s power by deciding to divert profits from the Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras. He carried staff power to excess, but Reagan’s style of delegating power and his lack of interest in all but the broad sweep of policy invited bold action by his staff.

  One of the hollow rituals of American political life is the periodic extolling of cabinet government by presidential candidates and presidents-elect. They love to proclaim their intention to restore collegial rule at the cabinet table. The myth is that cabinet secretaries run the government with the White House staff in the shadows. That is far from reality, but somehow new presidents, especially those who come from state governments, are innocents about this.

  In August 1976, I visited Jimmy Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia, just after he had won the Democratic presidential nomination. Quite deliberately, Carter wanted to strike a contrast with the arrogant “palace guard” of Nixon’s White House staff. He told me over mint-flavored iced tea that he would have no chief of staff, would institute genuine cabinet government, and that he was even considering a parliamentary “question time,” where his Cabinet members would appear before the houses of Congress to answer questions.31 Those ideas all fell victim to reality, without much serious attempt to apply them.

  Four years later, during a campaign flight from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Columbia, South Carolina, I squeezed into an airline seat beside candidate Ronald Reagan, who explained how his administration would achieve true cabinet government, modeled after his governorship of California.32 Indeed, Edmond Meese, who had run Governor Reagan’s California staff and became presidential counselor in Reagan’s White House, did set up an intricate structure of cabinet councils. But more significantly, Reagan quickly established one of the most powerful and effective White House staffs of the modern presidency under Meese and Chief of Staff James Baker III. Reagan delegated enormous authority to that staff.