As the trip progressed, her role emerged. Alma became a handy go-between. She could tell hostesses things that Jane Weinberger could not—for example, that the Secretary’s wife was overtired (Jane was just beginning to suffer painful osteoporosis), and perhaps the tour of the Etruscan ruins might be cut short. Jane felt comfortable with Alma, and after the last receiving line had folded and the last formal dinner ended, they would unwind, comparing notes on the day’s doings before turning in.
I always left Alma off the foreign trip passenger lists. Weinberger always put her on. “Mr. Secretary,” I said on one occasion, “there is really no basis for Alma to come this time.”
“Nonsense,” he replied. “A unique addition to the traveling party. I wish for her to come. Say no more about it.”
Alma had found her niche. She was Jane’s lady-in-waiting.
On October 13, we learned that Judge William Clark, the President’s current National Security Advisor, a man struggling in a job for which he had little bent or taste, was stepping down to become Secretary of the Interior. Clark, along with Weinberger, was part of the Reagan California crowd. Clark’s replacement was an outsider who filled Weinberger with apprehension. Clark’s deputy, a former Marine lieutenant colonel now in his mid-forties, was Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane. McFarlane was not the sort of man whom Weinberger could regard as a peer. McFarlane had, furthermore, an infuriating manner of expressionless noncommitment. “Hmmm. Thanks for calling. Have a nice day,” he would respond to the Secretary’s phone calls, behavior which drove Weinberger mad. Bud McFarlane replaced Judge Clark as National Security Advisor on October 17.
McFarlane’s most visible subordinate turned out to be the brash Marine from the Central American trip, Ollie North, now a lieutenant colonel. North was fast becoming a legend, the guy you went to to get things done. North displayed remarkable imagination and energy, but every now and then, strange things happened. One day, one of my assistants came to my office and said, “General, Colonel North wants a permit to carry a gun.”
“Why does he need a gun around the National Security Council?” I wanted to know.
“People are out to get him,” my assistant said.
“Who?” I asked.
“He didn’t say.”
Ollie North’s personal security had nothing to do with the Secretary of Defense. Let the Navy figure out if he needs to be armed in the Old Executive Office Building, I said, since Marines come under the Navy Department.
On October 23, six days after Bud McFarlane became National Security Advisor, I received another middle-of-the-night call from the National Military Command Center. This time there was no question about alerting Weinberger immediately. A terrorist truck bomb had struck a U.S. Marine barracks at the airport near Beirut, Lebanon. Again, the news came out in dribbles. Each time, I had to convey the mounting horror to a Defense Secretary who I knew was squeamish about death. On taking over his Pentagon office, Weinberger had gotten rid of a portrait of James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, who had taken a suicide plunge from the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Weinberger replaced Forrestal’s picture with a rosy Titian on loan from a Washington museum. This night, each of my calls was like a physical blow to the Secretary. Eighty bodies pulled out. A hundred. A hundred and fifty. In the end, the toll reached 241 Marines dead. A near-simultaneous terrorist attack at a barracks in downtown Beirut killed seventy-seven French soldiers.
Our Marines had been stationed in Lebanon for the fuzzy idea of providing a “presence.” The year before, in June 1982, the Israelis had invaded Lebanon in one final push to drive out PLO terrorists. This move had upset the always precarious Middle East balance. The United States, consequently, was attempting to referee the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon. The Marines had been deployed around the Beirut airport as what State Department euphemists called an “interpositional force.” Translation: the Marines were to remain between two powder kegs, the Lebanese army and Syrian-backed Shiite units fighting it out in the Shouf Mountains. Weinberger had opposed the Marines’ involvement from the start, but lost the policy debate in the White House to McFarlane and Secretary of State George Shultz.
I was developing a strong distaste for the antiseptic phrases coined by State Department officials for foreign interventions which usually had bloody consequences for the military, words like “presence,” “symbol,” “signal,” “option on the table,” “establishment of credibility.” Their use was fine if beneath them lay a solid mission. But too often these words were used to give the appearance of clarity to mud.
On August 29, before the airport truck bombing, two Marines had been killed by Muslim mortar fire; on September 3, two more, and on October 16, two more. Against Weinberger’s protest, McFarlane, now in Beirut, persuaded the President to have the battleship U.S.S. New Jersey start hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would. When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American “referee” had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target, the exposed Marines at the airport.
What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon was America sticking its hand into a thousand-year-old hornet’s nest with the expectation that our mere presence might pacify the hornets. When ancient ethnic hatreds reignited in the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and well-meaning Americans thought we should “do something” in Bosnia, the shattered bodies of Marines at the Beirut airport were never far from my mind in arguing for caution. There are times when American lives must be risked and lost. Foreign policy cannot be paralyzed by the prospect of casualties. But lives must not be risked until we can face a parent or a spouse or a child with a clear answer to the question of why a member of that family had to die. To provide a “symbol” or a “presence” is not good enough.
The Beirut bombing was soon followed by our invasion of Grenada on October 25. The Caribbean island had fallen under control of a young Marxist, Maurice Bishop, whose regime was building a jet runway with Cuban aid; the strip was going to be made available to the Soviet Union. Then Bishop was assassinated, and the chaos following his murder threatened nearly a thousand American medical students studying on Grenada.
We attacked with a combined force of Army paratroopers, Marines, and Navy SEALs. It should have been easy enough to take over a country of 84,000 population defended by a Third World militia of about two thousand poorly armed troops and a Cuban construction battalion. Yet, it took most of a week to subdue all resistance and rescue the medical students. The invasion was hardly a model of service cooperation. The campaign had started as a Navy-led operation, and only at the last minute was Major General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, then commanding the Army’s 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), added to Vice Admiral Joseph Metealf’s staff to make sure someone senior was on board who understood ground combat. Relations between the services were marred by poor communications, fractured command and control, interservice parochialism, and micromanagement from Washington. The operation demonstrated how far cooperation among the services still had to go. The invasion of Grenada succeeded, but it was a sloppy success. I was only a fly on the wall at the time, but I filed away the lessons learned.
Weinberger was a man of stubborn principle. His critics would have said “stubborn” period. He would battle like a lion against any cabinet peer or antagonistic congressman. But he could not bear to cross probably the most pliable man in the administration, President Reagan. Weinberger’s attachment and loyalty to the President were total and visceral. He disliked causing discomfort to the man he idolized. Consequently, when Ronald Reagan was persuaded to put Marines in an untenable position for an imprecise purpose in Beirut, Weinberger would not confront him on the issue.
While Weinberger never hesitated to battle with George Shultz and oth
ers in White House policy disputes, he hated any unpleasantness involving his own workaday staff. I could not get him to fire a driver who was so drunk when he went to pick up the Weinbergers after a Thanksgiving holiday that he greeted them with “Happy Easter.”
Cap Weinberger was a man who worked grooves into his life and then stayed in them. I would arrive in my office by 6:30 A.M., and at exactly 6:58, Weinberger’s driver would inform me by car phone that the Secretary would arrive in two minutes. On the dot, Weinberger stepped from his private elevator, followed by the driver, lugging an old-fashioned lawyer’s briefcase with a big metal clasp on top. Weinberger headed for the Pershing desk, an elaborately carved walnut piece over nine feet long, formerly belonging to General John “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. Weinberger unloaded the briefcase of its homework, papers that would launch multimillion-dollar defense purchases, make people admirals or generals, or send surface-to-air missiles to anticommunist guerrillas. The briefcase empty, Weinberger sat down and, for a few seconds, simply gazed ahead, as if bracing himself for the day ahead. He next buzzed in the CIA courier who delivered the President’s Daily Brief, a heavy vellum report containing the cream of overnight intelligence. I preferred the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories. In the evening, Weinberger packed up the ancient satchel and adjusted his chair so that it fit flush, exactly centered, against his desk. He tapped his foot on the base of the chair, signaling the end of the workday. The ritual was unvarying.
Weinberger’s outward gravity concealed an impish wit and unexpected quirks. My job, and hence my borrowed power, was to control the Secretary’s time, the one commodity he could not stretch. Consequently, I was in and out, conferring with him a dozen times a day. One morning, I surprised him reaching for something from his top right-hand drawer. Before he could close it, I spotted the contents. The drawer was full of chocolates, candy kisses and chocolate bars, treats I subsequently discovered that he munched on when no one was around. The Secretary of Defense was a closet chocoholic. On another day, when I surprised him polishing off a Hershey bar, he said, “Colin, the only real power I exercise in this building is that I can order the kitchen to prepare a chocolate dessert when I entertain important guests.”
My duties had no specific definition and ran from Weinberger’s strategic advisor to bag carrier. On one occasion, I had to retrieve his tuxedo from home so that he could change in his office for a soiree. I stood there briefing him on the evening’s event while he emptied his pockets, the contents of which revealed an unexpected side to this formal man. Out came a little stub of a pencil. He had carried it, he explained, since he was a child. An Australian halfpenny emerged, a memento of his wartime courtship of his wife in the Pacific. “I’m always more comfortable with these around me,” he explained shyly.
Like Harold Brown and John Kester, Cap Weinberger was a cultivated man. His tastes ran to the classics in literature and music. We bought him a small clock radio with a cassette player, and he worked when alone to the accompaniment of Bach and Beethoven. I found the cultured side of the man appealing, something not found in that many infantrymen; and at times, I felt my own cultural inadequacy. But, if anything, my reading habits got worse during this period. By the time I got home at 9:00 P.M., I might get two pages into a good book before I dozed off.
Weinberger also had a taste for pomp. Long before my return to the Pentagon, the CIA had reported that Libyan hit men were en route to the United States to assassinate the President and other American leaders. It was a false alarm, but, among other measures, sentries in service dress uniform were posted outside the suites of the Secretary and the deputy secretary. We wound up with twelve useful men and women working in shifts assigned to an essentially useless duty, since the Pentagon had perfectly adequate civilian police. When I took over as military assistant, with the assassination threat long since proved only a rumor, I wanted to end the guard detail. Weinberger would not hear of it. He loved having these strapping troops, the American equivalent of the Tower of London’s Beefeaters, posted outside his doorway. He saluted the sentinel on duty whenever he left the office and saluted again whenever he came back.
Frank Carlucci had once counseled me that wise subordinates picked their fights with Weinberger selectively. “If it’s small potatoes,” Frank had warned, “don’t waste your energy. Even if he’s dead wrong. Save yourself for the serious stuff. And even then you’ll probably hit a stone wall.” Weinberger could indeed be obstinate, as I was to find out in the case of “Star Wars.”
On March 23, 1983, about four months before I had returned to the Pentagon, President Reagan delivered a major policy speech announcing that the United States intended to pursue a “Strategic Defense Initiative.” The President had been persuaded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other advisors that we could create a defensive shield in space, controlled by satellites and capable of destroying incoming Soviet missiles. The President immediately grasped that such a shield could change the nuclear equation. The present situation was a balance of terror, Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD. You destroy us, and we will destroy you. But if, because of this shield, they could not destroy us, then the huge nuclear arsenals still growing on both sides made no further sense.
Immediately following the President’s SDI speech, Senator Ted Kennedy branded the idea a “reckless Star Wars scheme,” a term which, because of the wildly popular movie, stuck. This phrase scared the hell out of people with the prospect of nuclear megabursts going off in the heavens and radioactive debris raining down to earth. I am not ideologically liberal or conservative, but I believe the liberal community made a serious mistake by ridiculing this concept out of hand as unwise even if it could be done. The real problem, I think, was that Ronald Reagan’s critics could not bear the thought that he had proposed a major conceptual breakthrough in the nuclear stalemate.
Weinberger became more Catholic than the Pope on the subject of SDI and served as the administration’s point man in hearings on the Hill. One day, on his way to testify before Congress on the subject, Weinberger sought to defuse Star War fears by asking the Pentagon’s head of research and engineering, Richard De Lauer, if the x-ray lasers that would destroy Soviet missiles would be powered by nuclear explosions. “Is it a bomb?” Weinberger asked De Lauer. That was how you generated the laser beams, De Lauer explained, by detonating a nuclear device in space.
“But it’s not a bomb, is it?” Weinberger asked, looking for semantic elbow room. De Lauer found a useful euphemism: “No, not a bomb, it would be a nuclear event.” Thereafter, Weinberger in congressional testimony and elsewhere refused to admit that SDI required a nuclear blast. He would begin rolling two No. 2 yellow pencils between his fingers, a Captain Queeg talisman indicating that his mind had gone into combat mode. He preferred the word “generator” to “bomb.”
Technically he was wrong. And I feared that in his obstinacy he would look evasive. When the two of us were alone in his office, I tried to explain. “Mr. Secretary, a nuclear device does have to explode in space to generate the enormous energy required to make the system work. The power is not supplied by Con Edison.”
“Generates energy, you say,” he repeated with satisfaction. “Then you agree with me. It is not a bomb. It’s a generator.”
After a time, I realized that there was method in his stubbornness. As long as he never yielded on this point, no headline could ever scream, “Weinberger Confirms Nuclear Bombs in Space: Kennedy Demands New Star Wars Hearings.”
I soon understood why Weinberger was not overawed by Congress. Members often displayed a well-developed talent for hypocrisy. We endured torrents of righteous wrath from lawmakers shocked by Weinberger’s budget requests. But the same guy whipping us on the floor one day would be on the phone the next, begging us to add to the Pentagon budget some vaguely military program for a community college in his district. As one committee chairman put it to me, no matter how high-flown the debate, a
t the end of the day, he had to have one vote more than 50 percent, or no budget passed. And what swung votes was what some people called pork and others called national defense. I soon understood the difference. Pork was national defense spending in another member’s district.
It was not easy to stand up to members of Congress, since we needed their votes. But the line had to be drawn somewhere. Once, while serving as Weinberger’s military assistant, I got a call from Congressman Charles Wilson of Texas. Charlie Wilson was a defense stalwart and a particular rainmaker in winning aid for the mujahedin who were fighting the communist regime and Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Charlie had earlier called our Legislative Affairs Office to arrange military transportation for a trip to the region. He wanted to bring along his girlfriend. He had, quite correctly, been turned down. He then called me. He complained about nitpicking bureaucrats, and knew I would straighten them out. I was well aware that Wilson was a vote we counted on, and I took a deep breath before answering. “Charlie,” I said, “that’s unauthorized use of government aircraft. The Secretary cannot approve it.”
My American Journey Page 36