The President now had to appoint a new National Security Advisor, and I heard through the Armitage-Batjer back channel that Frank Carlucci was the leading candidate, a wise choice. I was immediately wary, however, when Judi Reaume called out that Frank was on the line. I congratulated him, but his first words made my heart sink. “Colin, you’ve got to come back. I’ve taken over a mess and I need you to help me clean it up. I want you to be my deputy.”
“Frank, I didn’t make the mess,” I said. “You can find a dozen guys to do that job as well as I can.” I pointed out to Carlucci my thin credentials. “Why don’t you pick one of your friends from the Foreign Service?” I asked. “Or what about Jon Howe?”—the sharp admiral who had replaced me as Carlucci’s military assistant at Defense. “Jon’s already been a policy planner at the State Department,” I pointed out.
“I’m not looking for a foreign policy expert,” Carlucci said. “I’m looking for someone who knows how to make things work. I need what you did for Cap and me, someone who can impose order and procedure on the NSC.”
“Frank, I’m finally back in the real Army,” I pleaded. I told him that I did not want to leave until I had proved I was an able corps commander. I did not want to be the guy who ran a company for a couple of months, a battalion and a brigade for a year, skipped a division, and ran out on a corps after just five months. And after the experience with Poindexter and North, I could not believe the country would stand for another military man in the NSC.
“We need you, Colin,” Frank went on. “This is serious. Believe me, the presidency is at stake.”
I played my last card. “You know I had a role in this business.” I described my arranging for the delivery of the TOWs under President Reagan’s Finding of Necessity.
“I’ll have Justice and the White House lawyers look into it,” he said.
“Frank, you’re gonna ruin my career,” I told him.
“We’ll talk again,” he said and hung up.
Like a man fallen overboard grasping for a life ring, I called General Wickham. He was sympathetic but gave me the old line: “I told you long ago, Colin, you may not be destined to be a commander. It’s your decision, but I believe you should do what they ask you to do.” He added, however, that he would see that if I took the post, I could still come back to the Army as soon as the crisis passed. I knew he meant it, but Wickham was due to retire. His replacement might not take the same accommodating attitude. If I took this job, I feared it would probably mark the end of my Army career. Still, the pressure mounted. Soon Cap Weinberger was on the line. “Colin, I’m sure you’ll do what’s right in this hour of the President’s need,” he said.
Two days later, Carlucci called again. He had checked out any potential legal problems regarding the TOWs, and I was clean. I became blunt, as I saw the last exit closing. “There is only one way I can make this departure honorable, the only way I’ll be able to face my fellow officers,” I said. “It can’t come from you, Frank. It has to be a request directly from the commander in chief. That’s the one thing my world will understand.”
“Okay,” he said.
Two days passed and nothing happened. I dared hope that I had dodged the bullet.
On December 12, Alma and I had just come home from a Christmas party and were sitting in the kitchen when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard the commanding voice of a White House operator. The President was calling. Ronald Reagan came on the line and spoke in an intimate, homey tone, hoping, gee, he had not called at an inconvenient time, and gee he wasn’t used to giving orders to generals. He started going down the “talking points” (prepared by Ken Adelman, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who was helping Carlucci with the NSC transition). What a pleasure it had been to have me along on that inspiring trip to Grenada, the President said. He knew what a fine job I was doing with V Corps. He knew how much the command meant to me. He knew how happy Alma and I were in Frankfurt. It would only be a detour in my military career, but it was critical for the country that I come home. He needed me to help Frank Carlucci straighten out the mess at the NSC.
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “I’ll do it.” I had no choice.
“God bless you,” he said.
My appointment as deputy assistant to the President for national security affairs was announced on December 18, 1986. I went back alone to Washington for a few days to arrange for quarters, buy a car, and enroll my daughter, Annemarie, in the school she had been pulled out of just five months before. And I met briefly with Frank Carlucci about the job we faced at a rudderless, drifting, demoralized NSC. I returned to Frankfurt in time for a chaotic Christmas with our house torn apart by the movers, and formally gave up my command of V Corps on the last day of 1986.
I had commanded V Corps for just over five months. Had I stayed for a full tour, I might have had a shot at promotion to four stars and command of all U.S. Army forces in Europe. I had taken over a crack corps from Sam Wetzel, and my team had made it even better. Two initiatives that I had set in motion paid off soon after I left. V Corps won the next two major NATO competitions, the Boselager Cavalry competition, which the United States had never won before, and the Canadian Army Cup tank competition, which we had not won recently, even with the M-1 Abrams tank, the best in the world. These competitions may mean little to the layperson, but in NATO this was the equivalent of winning the World Series and the Super Bowl in one season. My successor, Jack Woodmansee, was kind enough to call me at the White House and share the credit. But I sure wish I had still been in Germany to watch the trophies being presented.
On January 2, 1987, I found myself wearing one of my old civilian suits and sitting in the West Wing of the White House in a cubicle about the size of the bathroom in my V Corps office. Next door, in an airy, prestigious corner office, sat my new boss, or rather my old boss in his new job, Frank Carlucci, now National Security Advisor to the President. The White House was eerily quiet. The President, along with much of the staff, was still not back from the Reagans’ holiday vacation in California.
Frank and I were asking ourselves the same question: What do we do now? Our situation was similar to taking over a demoralized battalion where the commanding officer has just been relieved, or inheriting a losing team after the coach has been fired, or acquiring a company recently looted by its officers. Ken Adelman, Marybel Batjer, and Grant Green, Carlucci’s former military assistant, had already come over to the NSC to help Frank through the changeover. Adelman had the hardest job, sandblasting the old staff down to bare metal before returning to his job at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. What Carlucci and I had to do was rebuild almost from the bottom up.
I was still trying to figure out how my phones worked when a hearty, nasal voice called out, “Is he in there?” Suddenly, my doorway was filled by a tall, lean, exuberant figure, hand extended. “George Bush,” he said. “Want to welcome you to the White House. So glad you and Frank have come over. Going to make a grrreat team.” At this point, I was still, in my mind, an infantry general, and the Vice President of the United States had just popped in to greet me on my new job. I felt like a bonus-baby rookie welcomed by one of the club owners. The Vice President and I were even going to share the same bathroom, I learned. This was something to tell Alma tonight.
The National Security Council had been created in 1947, the year the old War Department, Navy Department, and other services were folded into one Department of Defense. Its charter was brief and not particularly instructive: to advise the President “with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security.” In plain English, a lot of different agencies and people compete for the President’s ear where war and peace are concerned, and consequently he needed a “referee,” a body with no ax to grind that would present to him, balanced and unbiased, the views of each contender, along with the National Security Advisor’s own position. A good advisor was an honest broker. Henry Kissinger had taken the office t
o the heights of power, eclipsing the State Department and running China and Soviet policy directly out of his West Wing office. When he became Secretary of State, he held on to the NSC post for a while to make sure no one could do the same to him.
Under McFarlane, Poindexter, North, and company, the NSC had gone off the rails. The situation was not entirely their fault. They worked for a President who did not like to step between his powerful cabinet members and make hard choices. They worked for a President who said he wanted the hostages freed and the contras kept alive and did not much concern himself with details as to how it was done. Consequently, the NSC had filled a power vacuum and had become its own Defense Department, running little wars, its own State Department, carrying on its own secret diplomacy, and its own CIA, carrying out clandestine operations. The result had been the Iran-contra fiasco.
I had my first fight the first day. Carlucci had always hated dealing with speeches and sent me to represent the NSC at a senior staff meeting where a draft speech for the President on the defense budget was being reviewed. Pushing the draft was chief speechwriter Tony Dolan, a scrappy former investigative reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner, now occupying the far-right stall in the Reagan speechwriting stable. I asked if the speech was not a bit shrill. Dolan jumped up and delivered a finger-pointing tirade on my microscopic credentials to critique anything beyond an infantry manual. I understood what was going on. The new kid on the block was being tested. I held my ground, but this was going to be an even tougher neighborhood than the Pentagon front office.
A few days later, after the President had returned, Carlucci poked his head into my doorway. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to brief him.” Senator John Tower was heading an investigation of the Iran-contra affair, and one failing he had encountered in the White House was the absence of any record of what the National Security Advisor or his staff had said to the President and what he had agreed to. My duty, Carlucci explained, was to close that gap. “Feel free to speak out,” he said, “but your main job is to take notes on what I tell him and what he decides.”
As we entered the Oval Office, the President was being briefed on other matters by his Chief of Staff, Donald Regan. On our arrival, the President rose, smiled warmly, and moved to an armchair to the left of the fireplace. He apologized again for taking me out of Germany. Vice President Bush came in and took the armchair to Reagan’s left. Carlucci sat on a couch. I sat at the other end. On another couch across from us sat Don Regan. The President started off by telling a joke (which, I learned, was standard procedure). My eyes went to his feet, where I spotted something odd. How could his shoes, besides being mirrorlike, have none of those creases across the instep caused by normal wear? On this and every other occasion, his shoes always looked as if they were being worn for the first time.
After going over world events of the past twenty-four hours, Carlucci got to the immediate challenge, how we intended to rebuild the NSC from the wreckage of Iran-contra. “First, Mr. President,” Carlucci said, “we’ve gotten rid of Ollie North’s office. We’re taking the NSC out of covert operations.” He explained further that I would be conducting a review of all current covert operations being conducted by the CIA. “We’ve come up with four tests,” Frank continued. For every such operation we were asking: (1) Is it legal? (2) Do we know what it is supposed to achieve? (3) Is it achieving its objective? (4) If this operation should suddenly appear on the front page of the Washington Post, would the American people say, “Aren’t we clever little devils,” or would they say, “What a bunch of boobs”? If a program could not pass these tests, Carlucci said, we would recommend its elimination. “And,” he concluded, “we’re hiring a lawyer, Paul Stevens, to make sure everything we do is kosher.”
At this first briefing, President Reagan listened carefully and asked a few questions, but gave no guidance. This became the pattern almost every morning when we briefed him. We would lay out the contrasting views of various cabinet officers and Congress and wait for the President to peel them back to get at underlying motives. It did not happen. Most unnerving, when Carlucci presented options, the President would say little until Frank gave his recommendation. And then the President would merely acknowledge that he had heard him, without saying yes, no, or maybe. Frank and I would walk down the hall afterward with Frank muttering, “Was that a yes?” We eventually assumed that the President knew we had balanced competing views and had given him our best judgment. He evidently felt it unnecessary to do more than acknowledge what we would be doing in his name. That, at least, was our optimistic interpretation.
The President’s passive management style placed a tremendous burden on us. Until we got used to it, we felt uneasy implementing recommendations without a clear decision. Would the decision hold if criticized later by one of the losers? Would the President recall it? One morning after we had gotten another decision by default on a key arms control issue, Frank moaned as we left, “My God, we didn’t sign on to run this country!”
Carlucci noticed that between us we had inherited five secretaries. My principal secretary was a capable, gracious woman named Florence Gantt who had been at the NSC for over twenty years. I asked Florence why we needed so many secretaries. Because, she explained, in the past the staff tended to work twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and weekends too. I discussed the situation with Carlucci, who said, “Transfer two of them.” We could do enough damage working reasonable hours. It was the around-the-clock fanatics who had driven the administration to the brink of ruin. And that was how we worked, out by 7:00 P.M., occasionally in on a Saturday, and never in on Sundays. Carlucci was capable of slipping off for tennis at 3:00 P.M. on a Friday and not coming back at all. And he could still make sounder decisions and cover more ground than the previous midnight moles. We were going home at a more civilized time. But it was not in the nature of these jobs to conform to regular hours. I brought work home and was soon back to the Weinberger pace. The good old days of Frankfurt were behind me.
The faithful John Wickham had arranged a temporary Georgian mansion for us at Fort McNair on the Washington Channel, the handsomest Army residence we had yet occupied. The first time the family approached it, Annemarie threw up her arms in her best Scarlett O’Hara impersonation and said, “I swear I’ll never be poor again!” All very splendid, except that Fort McNair was cut off from the world. Every time Alma needed a spool of thread, she had to drive over the 14th Street Bridge. The place was so quiet I called it Menopause Manor. And worst of all, there was no garage where I could tinker with my cars. We were just as happy when Wickham got us a more modest house at bustling Fort Myer. This was going to be the third family move in less than a year.
On February 26, the Tower Commission released its report on the Iran-contra affair. It depicted President Reagan as confused and uninformed and found that his hands-off management style was the reason he did not know what was going on in his own presidency. The Tower Report became our owner’s manual. We did what it recommended. Carlucci issued an order that the NSC was not to become involved in operations. We advised Presidents; we did not run wars or covert strategies. We had a Defense Department and a CIA for those roles.
With the issuance of the report, pressure built up for the President to give the American people his explanation of Iran-contra, which, so far, he had resisted doing. Landon Parvin, a veteran speechwriter, was brought in, and, at Carlucci’s instructions, I worked with Parvin on what was to be the definitive Iran-contra address.
The Tower Commission had come down hard on Cap Weinberger and George Shultz for not being aggressive enough in finding out what Poindexter’s NSC was up to. This was an unfair rap. I vividly remembered sitting in Weinberger’s office and hearing him rail against the idiocy of the arms deal. I had helped him try to limit the Defense Department’s role to minimum compliance with NSC requests and instructions. And I knew that Weinberger, as well as the rest of us at Defense, had no knowledge of the most illegal aspect of the affair, the diversion of
Iranian arms sales profits to the contras.
Learning that I was involved in preparing the President’s speech, Weinberger let me know that he hoped his role could be clarified. Since he and also George Shultz had opposed the scheme, I tried to get the President to say something exonerating these two reluctant players. We came up with suggested language for the President: “As a matter of simple fairness, however, I must say that I believe the [Tower] commission’s comments about George Shultz and Cap Weinberger are incorrect. Both of them vigorously opposed the arms sales to Iran, and they so advised me several times. The commission’s statements that the two Secretaries did not support the President are also wrong. They did support me despite their known opposition to the program. I now find that both Secretaries were excluded from meetings on the subject by the same people and process used to deny me vital information about this whole matter.” In the last draft of the speech that I worked on, this language clearing Weinberger and Schultz was included.
On March 4, President Reagan addressed the nation on television from the Oval Office, probably the least pleasant speech he ever delivered. “A few months ago,” the President began, “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower Board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake.”
My American Journey Page 41