In the foreign policy game, Haig had two trump cards that Lehman lacked. First, Haig had enough rank to disown Lehman’s statement; second, Haig had command of the State Department’s worldwide network of communications. He could—and did—send cables to all American embassies, instructing them to brief foreign governments on his statement. Those briefings reinforced Haig’s policy. Only the president could reverse Haig.
Indeed, the next morning, Reagan was perplexed by news reports of anonymous officials saying that the United States would not undercut SALT II. “Who in the world is saying that?” he demanded. No one had forewarned him. When Reagan learned Haig was the source, he let the matter drop, not sensing its importance. Reagan’s White House aides, still relatively new to high-level infighting, felt powerless to overrule Haig at that point.
“There was nothing we could do,” protested one anti-SALT official. “We would have had to get another cable countermanding Haig’s cable. But we would have had to get Haig to sign it. No chance. We protested, but we found out what a weak link Dick Allen would be. Allen complained and groaned, but would do nothing. Ed Meese took a legalistic approach: There was no way to punish Haig.”
It was a case study of how policy can be set by one official’s preemptive action—so long as other policymakers remain passive. The episode also illustrates why experienced players such as Haig, Eagleburger, and Burt were so quick to react to Lehman, and why all agencies immediately fire back at bureaucratic rivals: to protect themselves from policy invasions.
That early skirmish was a critical moment for the Reagan presidency, though few people then recognized it as such. It showed that Reagan came into office lacking a master plan for foreign policy; he was preoccupied with his domestic economic program. So when SALT II came up quickly, neither he nor his White House aides had a policy framework for dealing with it.
Moreover, in his desire to avoid the foreign policy squabbles of the Carter presidency, Reagan had deliberately weakened and downgraded the role of national security adviser, any president’s personal protector on foreign policy. He had picked Richard Allen, who was no match for Henry Kissinger, Carter’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, or Alexander Haig as a strategist or bureaucratic infighter; so Reagan was underprotected. Nor was Reagan prepared, as an alternative, to anoint someone else—Haig, for example—as his foreign-policy czar. That left the field wide open for hit-and-run tactics. On this first big issue of SALT II, the White House let control of policy dribble away.
The Elephant vs. the Terrier
From my observation, there are four paths to dominance on national security policy for a secretary of State. Path number one is to be clearly designated by the president as the policy architect, the president’s alter ego. This is what President Truman granted two secretaries of State, George Marshall and Dean Acheson; it is what Dwight Eisenhower did for John Foster Dulles. Truman and Eisenhower exercised supreme power occasionally, but on most issues they let their secretaries of State reign. Except for Henry Kissinger in the mid-1970s, more recent secretaries have lacked this clearcut mandate.
Path number two is to grab power by bureaucratic fiat and preemptive policy moves. That was Haig’s tactic in 1981: seizing the initiative before his rivals had learned the power game. It won Haig some skirmishes. The risk, as Haig found out, is that this tactic makes a policymaker look power hungry to his president and to rival officials, who find ways of getting even.
Path number three to policy victories is to end-run cabinet rivals and privately sell the president on a policy action, without having to answer the counterarguments and crossfire of other officials. George Shultz did that on occasion and so did Caspar Weinberger, not to mention Reagan’s national security advisers. In fact, the end run became a trademark of the foreign policy game under Reagan—on arms control, Central America, strategic defense, and most notably, on the Iranian arms deals.
But equally typical of the Reagan period, and other administrations, is path number four: marshaling bureaucratic alliances and waging a campaign to sway the president with support from cohorts in other agencies, in Congress, and among allies abroad.
The long-term policy jousting over the SALT II treaty was just such a marathon tug-of-war between rival policy clans. It was classic bureaucratic tribal warfare, with Shultz and Weinberger deploying forces like tribal chieftains.
For five years that pair clashed over almost every major policy line: the use of American Marines in Lebanon, air reprisals against Arab terrorists, the proper strategy on Central America, summitry with the Soviet Union and American negotiating terms, and interpretations of past arms treaties. Even lie detectors: Weinberger used them to battle press leaks in the Pentagon. When Reagan ordered using them throughout the government, Shultz trumpeted his opposition: “The minute in this government I am told that I’m not trusted is the day that I leave.”
At least two of Reagan’s national security advisers, Bill Clark and Bud McFarlane, despaired of the collisions and machinations of Shultz and Weinberger and their paralyzing deadlocks. I have heard Clark and McFarlane complain about their inability to control the feuding cabinet barons; I know that the internecine combat was one reason why both security advisers quit. The Shultz-Weinberger feud took on the crusading passions of holy warfare. Sometimes, other officials said, one or both would take more extreme positions to oppose the other. Shultz privately expressed dismay to aides. “He told me that he was surprised by the viciousness of arms-control politics in this administration,” an official close to Shultz revealed. “He said he’d been around this city a lot, in government, but he’d never seen anything as intense and vicious as that.”
Reagan himself was upset by the testy wrangling between Shultz and Weinberger. “He knows about their fighting,” one presidential intimate told me. “It bothers him. But he doesn’t want to do anything about it. He doesn’t like those kinds of personal confrontations.”
The rivalry between Weinberger and Shultz had an unusually long history, one in which Shultz usually had the upper hand. “George tends to dominate everything and everyone around him,” said a former Shultz lieutenant. “He takes the reins of power and doesn’t appreciate sharing it.” Twice, Weinberger was cast as Shultz’s subordinate, and playing second fiddle apparently left him determined to prove his parity in the Reagan cabinet. White House officials detected that Weinberger was not only aggravated at Shultz for assuming that power was rightly his, but also that Weinberger felt he was brighter than Shultz, despite Shultz’s academic pedigrees as an economist.
In 1970, Shultz became Nixon’s budget director and the White House installed Weinberger as his deputy. Shultz tried to make his own favorite, Arnold Webber, the de facto number two. Weinberger was so frustrated that he finally wrote a memo for Shultz to sign, naming Weinberger as acting director whenever Shultz was away. After Shultz signed the memo, Weinberger secured his status by circulating the memo to other agency officials. Later when Shultz became Treasury secretary, word went out that Shultz would still conduct the annual budget briefing. Weinberger, the new budget director, was crushed because he expected to do it. But he was evidently too awed by Shultz to phone him directly. An intermediary worked out a joint press conference.
When they returned to private life, both wound up working for the Bechtel Corporation, a multibillion-dollar world-wide construction firm based in California. Weinberger became Bechters top legal executive, once again in the shadow of Shultz, the company president. After Reagan’s election in 1980, Shultz was bruited about as a likely secretary of State, a post that Weinberger aspired to. When Weinberger learned that he would get Defense, Reagan political advisers told me, he subtly blocked Shultz from becoming secretary of State by privately suggesting that it would be inappropriate to have “two Bechtel men” in Reagan’s cabinet. Instead, Haig got State.
Shultz and Weinberger cut radically different figures, physically and temperamentally. Shultz is a sturdy Buddha, a teddy bear, solid, and bland-looking. Shultz likes t
o be a comfortable old shoe—cooking steaks on his backyard grill for foreign leaders or conducting office interviews in a sweater by a roaring fire. For many years, he shunned publicity and became known for dull press conferences. Shultz’s temper flares when he is crossed personally, and he erupts in indignation, as he did during congressional hearings on the Iran-contra operation. But normally he is even-tempered and reassuring. In Europe, he offset Reagan’s cowboy image with his reassuring manner. He talks with the hedging, inbred caution of an economist. Generally, his style is conciliatory, compromising, pragmatic. He is a labor mediator by training, a blender and a fixer.
Weinberger by contrast is a feisty partisan who cannot resist producing fireworks. Angular, agile, and dapper, he tugs on his plastic cheeks, eyes rolling, mouth turned in a wry smile. His style is confrontational. A lawyer by training, Weinberger is a debater, an advocate, a Reagan ideologue, sharp and unyielding. He likes the Washington social circuit and the limelight. Inside the administration as well as in Congress, he has exasperated many officials by his rigidity. “Stubborn,” “bull-headed,” “arguing with him is like the Chinese water torture”—those are things other officials say about him. Shultz’s world is painted in grays; Weinberger’s, in blacks and whites.
“Shultz moves like an elephant,” observed Joe Laitin, a longtime government press officer who has worked for both men. “Shultz moves that one big elephant foot forward cautiously and checks to see if the ground will hold it. And then he moves the next foot and gradually shifts his weight. Weinberger is like a fox terrier. He darts out here and there. He races into dangerous areas where angels fear to tread. He’s a pretty feisty guy who gets himself in trouble because he talks without thinking and then he refuses to budge. But he has a personal charm.”
Like cabinet secretaries in many administrations, both men proclaimed loyalty to the president even as they tugged him in different directions. The Iranian affair was a rare instance of agreement between Shultz and Weinberger; in that case, their rivalry may have reduced their influence because they were not in the habit of going to President Reagan with a combined position.
Normally they have been on opposite sides of the barricades. Weinberger has sent Reagan memos warning of the trap of negotiations and summits with the Russians. Before he resigned in late 1987, he relentlessly pressed Reagan to junk previous arms treaties and to deploy a partial strategic defense. Shultz has urged Reagan to negotiate with Gorbachev. He has promoted flexibility in American negotiating terms, tried to keep past treaties alive, and cautioned Reagan that strategic defense must be proven feasible, survivable, and cheaper than the Soviet offense.
One of their most telling conflicts arose over the use of American military force, where their roles were oddly reversed. Although Weinberger championed Reagan’s costly military buildup, he resisted using those forces, whereas Shultz pushed Reagan to exercise the nation’s military muscle. In January 1986, for example, Shultz called for swift reprisal against Libya for terrorist bombings. Weinberger cautioned against those who seek “instant gratification from some kind of bombing attack without being too worried about the details.” Three months later, after more terrorism, he relented in the raid against Libya, but only one swift strike.
At virtually every step, Weinberger resisted sending American Marines into Lebanon and escalating American military action there, as advocated by Shultz, Bill Clark (then national security adviser), and Bud McFarlane (then Clark’s deputy). “The hard reality is that diplomacy not backed by military strength is ineffectual,” Shultz argued in one speech. “Leverage, as well as good will, is required. Power and diplomacy are not alternatives. They must go together, or we will accomplish very little in this world.”
Later, Weinberger derided “theorists”—obviously meaning Shultz—who send troops into perilous situations for fuzzy diplomatic purposes. “Employing our forces almost indiscriminately and as a regular and customary part of our diplomatic efforts,” he declared, “would surely plunge us headlong into the sort of domestic turmoil we experienced during the Vietnam War, without accomplishing the goal for which we committed our forces.”
Even before the fateful truck bombing that took 241 Marine lives in October 1983, Weinberger was privately urging Reagan to pull those troops out of Lebanon. As fighting escalated, he argued that the United States was being sucked into taking sides in the Lebanese civil war. When Shultz, Clark and others wanted to step up American air actions, Weinberger warned against stumbling into a war with Syria. At times, Shultz needled Weinberger, once suggesting sarcastically that if Weinberger was not willing to use force, “maybe we should cut your budget.”
The most stunning episode occurred after Shultz and McFarlane, two former Marines, had persuaded President Reagan—over Weinberger’s objections—to authorize an aerial reprisal for the truck bombing, according to a top White House official. Shultz and McFarlane wanted a joint raid on November 17, 1983, with the French, who had lost fifty-nine lives to another truck bombing. French jets from the aircraft carrier Clemenceau carried out the raid, but the Americans did not. Weinberger called McFarlane at about 6:30 A.M. to say, “We just weren’t ready. We needed more time.” General John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me that he was notified so late “that there wasn’t time even to write alerting messages and get them out” to the American aircraft carrier Eisenhower. In short, a joint raid had been impossible.9
Shultz and McFarlane were deeply upset. The president was apparently angered, too. “He was mad about it,” a top aide told me. “But he didn’t pick up the phone and say, ‘What has gone wrong and why?’ He was visibly sighing and head shaking, but he’s not the kind of person who would ever sternly discipline anybody.”10
Eventually, Weinberger, bolstered by political pressures from Congress, got Reagan to pull the Marines out of Lebanon while Shultz was off on a trip to Grenada on February 7.
The Shultz-Weinberger policy disputes had a personal edge—a battle for image and standing as well as policy influence. The coin of success was not only who prevailed on policy but who was closer to the president. As a Reagan confidant, Weinberger goes way back. As a San Francisco lawyer, he had been Republican party chairman in California and was named by Reagan in 1965 to be state finance director—the key figure in Reagan’s California cabinet. Shultz met Reagan back in those days, but did not get seriously involved with Reagan politically until he became an economic adviser to the 1980 Reagan campaign.
Having been Nixon’s budget director, Labor secretary and Treasury secretary, Shultz put great stock in direct, private access to the president. “You have to involve the president in this strategy or he won’t be with you,” he advised me. “I have to be with the president, have opportunities to talk with him privately, and know what his bottom line is.”11
Shultz demanded—and got—the privilege of two private audiences a week with Reagan, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. To build up Shultz’s prestige in 1983, Mike Deaver arranged for him to be photographed often with Reagan and to take trips with the president, without Weinberger. “George feels very strongly that being with the president without the opposing view being there is always helpful,” one former national security adviser said. “He believes that the president’s quality of not wanting to counter anybody makes him vulnerable to collegial decision making and vulnerable to not doing what he would naturally prefer to do. And I think he’s right.”
On occasion, Shultz would get Reagan’s assent to policy initiatives that the Pentagon would have fought, had they known about them. Weinberger was upset, for example, that Shultz got Reagan to approve his unannounced trip to Nicaragua on June 1, 1984, to negotiate with Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader. Weinberger was even more infuriated that in October 1985, Shultz got Reagan’s approval for a proposed joint communiqué for Reagan’s 1985 summit meeting with Gorbachev. When Weinberger found out, the Pentagon protested so vigorously that the draft was eventually abandoned.
Shult
z’s regular private access to Reagan grated on Weinberger. “The timing of meetings with Reagan is very important because everybody knows that with people he likes, the last one to see him can usually carry the day,” one high Pentagon official told me. In 1986, when Rear Admiral John Poindexter became national security adviser, Weinberger established his own privilege of regular private meetings with Reagan. And in October 1986, one Pentagon official bragged to me, Weinberger used his special access to lobby Reagan not to bargain away the right to develop strategic defenses at his imminent summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavík.
SALT II: Battle of the Clans
Weinberger entered the war of bureaucratic clans over the SALT II treaty with distinct advantages. He had allies strategically placed in the bureaucracy: William Casey as head of the CIA; Ed Meese as Reagan’s personal counselor; first Richard Allen and then Bill Clark, as national security adviser; retired Army Lieutenant General Ed Rowny as first-term strategic arms negotiator; and first Eugene Rostow and then Kenneth Adelman as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Moreover, Weinberger had hired Richard Perle, one of Washington’s most canny infighters, as assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. Chubby and cherubic-looking, Perle was a tough, brilliant master of the intricacies of arms control. As aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington, he had been a no-holds-barred foe of both SALT I and SALT II.
Weinberger’s antagonism to all past arms-control treaties, especially SALT II, appealed to Reagan’s gut instincts. In a debate before a president who has no taste for details, subtlety and complexity lose out. The hard-line simplifier has important advantages. Uncertainty and ambiguity do not cloud his views or slow his maneuvers. One Weinberger-Perle gambit was to establish an appealing-sounding, hard-line position and then discredit anything less as “selling out.” State Department officials complained that the Weinberger-Perle terms were unrealistic because they required Moscow to restructure its nuclear forces without imposing equal burdens on Washington. State urged “negotiability,” something within reach of the Russians; Perle derided negotiability as “cowardice.” Weinberger hammered his line: Moscow could not be trusted to make and keep agreements, and no important American weapons system should be compromised unless Moscow gave up more. Weinberger was on the offensive.
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