“You’re our fondest dream,” Dellums went on, “if we can get you on the ticket as Vice President. After that, there’s no way we can lose. Now, here’s the nightmare. You turn out to be a Republican, and you’re on their ticket. Then, the Black Caucus can’t leave the house. Dellums has to stay home. You split the black vote, and we don’t have a prayer.”
“Ron, keep snowing me,” I said. Dellums went on for another twenty minutes. His theme was that, compared to, say, a leader like Jesse Jackson, I was a “jelly maker, not a tree shaker.” “What I want to know is this,” Dellums finally asked. “Are you going to be our dream, or are you going to be our nightmare? Or are you going to do nothing?”
“I’m flattered,” I said, “but I’m not going to answer you because I’m a military officer on active duty. I don’t want to say anything that could start rumors. My intention is to serve the country in uniform until I retire.”
We shook hands, and he looked reasonably pleased. I assumed he had the message he wanted to bring back to his party. Powell will not come to us. But he won’t go with them.
… … …
That Christmas Day, the unimaginable happened. The Soviet Union disappeared. Without a fight, without a war, without a revolution, it vanished as leaders of the former Soviet republics met in the remote Kazakhstan capital of Alma Ata and dissolved the world’s only other superpower with the stroke of a pen. Mikhail Gorbachev was out of a job. There was nothing left for him to govern. As he had told George Shultz and me back in 1988, he would do as much as he could before someone else came along and replaced him. I don’t think that Gorbachev ever imagined that the entire Soviet empire would be tossed out along with him. He was a realist who accepted that he had been handed a dying patient. He had hoped to revive the body without replacing its Marxist heart. He could not do it. Fortunately, he came along at a time when the United States had a President, in Ronald Reagan, who was willing to take risks for peace from America’s position of superior strength. Together, these two men practiced a bold brand of leadership that began to end the Cold War.
It was now more important than ever, I believed, that we get the Base Force accepted by Congress. The Base Force was a realistic military posture for a future in which two superpowers would not be flexing their muscles at each other. On February 5, Cheney and I headed to Capitol Hill for yet another hearing. This time it was to testify before the House Budget Committee as we tried to maneuver the proposal through a Congress in which key members thought the Base Force did not cut deep enough, especially with our old nemesis not only down but out. As we entered the hearing room, my legislative affairs officer, Colonel Paul Kelly, tipped me off to be ready for questioning on a different subject from Congressman Barney Frank.
During most of the hearing, the questioning moved along predictable tracks—were we getting the right mix of reserve and active forces; how many troops could we bring home from Europe? Then the chair recognized Congressman Frank. The Massachusetts lawmaker turned first to Cheney. “When the Secretary was here last time,” Frank began, “he said that the security argument was not part of the reason for keeping gay men and lesbians out of the military.” Frank then turned to me. “Are we to some extent dealing here with a prejudice that a majority has against a group of people?” he asked. And was this prejudice “a valid reason for telling gay and lesbian people they are not wanted in the armed forces?” There it was, out in the open, the hottest social potato tossed to the Pentagon in a generation.
“I think it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline to try to integrate that in the current military structure,” I said. “And I think …”
Frank interrupted me. “For some time, as you know, the Secretary has acknowledged there have been gay men and lesbians in the military. Is there any evidence of behavior problems?”
“No,” I answered, “because as a matter of fact they have kept, so-called, in the closet…. If I have heterosexual young men and women who choose not to have to be in close proximity because of different sexual preferences, am I then forced to face the problem of different accommodations for homosexuals and heterosexuals, and then by sex within the homosexual community?” Congressman Frank let the subject drop for that day.
Subsequently, however, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado sent me a letter expressing unhappiness with my testimony. Schroeder quoted a 1942 government report and claimed that the same arguments used then against racial integration in the military were being used against gays today. “Your reasoning would have kept you from the mess hall, a few decades ago,” Schroeder said.
“I need no reminders concerning the history of African-Americans in the defense of their nation,” I wrote back. But she had her logic wrong. “Skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic,” I pointed out. “Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”
The linking of gay rights and the civil rights movement got a mixed reaction in the African-American community. The Congressional Black Caucus favored removing the ban on homosexuals in the armed services. But other African-American leaders were telling me that they resented having the civil rights crusade appropriated—hijacked, some of them put it—by the gay community for its ends. I heard from black clergymen who adamantly opposed removing the ban. The battle was joined, and we had a touchy election-year issue.
America’s racial legacy was raised for me in quite a different context that same year. I had first gone to Africa in 1978 as Charles Duncan’s budding military assistant during the Carter years, a quick trip to the eastern half of the continent which did not have much emotional resonance for me at the time. On March 8, 1992, as chairman, I was in Africa again for official visits to Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. Alma came with me. I was especially curious to visit Sierra Leone, our second stop, because my cousin Arthur “Sonny” Lewis, Navy enlisted man turned diplomat, had served there as the American ambassador. We arrived in Freetown, the capital, on March 9, and, it turned out, we were able to have a mini family reunion, since Sonny was in the country on business.
We went through the usual round of official receptions, banquets, toasts, and speeches. Then, early on the morning of the third day, Alma and I were picked up at the American embassy by Joe Oppala, an American Peace Corps veteran who had settled in Sierra Leone. Oppala was going to be our guide on a visit to Bunce Island. “I was one of the people who excavated and restored what you’re going to see there,” Oppala told us proudly.
On our arrival at the island, he led our party to an area of crumbling fortifications. “Bunce is where the slaves were brought after they were captured in the hinterland,” he explained. “And you see over there?” He pointed to the remains of what once must have been handsome homes. “That’s where the slave traders and government officials lived.” Oppala took us past tumbledown outbuildings, describing one, then another. “Here is where the slaves were inventoried. And here is where they were fed. Here is where they were examined to make sure no damaged goods took up space on the ships.” He led us up the stone steps of a large building and out onto a balcony. We looked down into brick-walled pens. “The slaves were held here before they were loaded,” Oppala explained. He described how the “cargo” was packed, how long the voyage took across the Atlantic, and how much “spoilage” could be expected.
I felt something stirring in me that I had not thought much about before. The previous February, Alma and I had made the trip to Jamaica. Until now, roots, to me, had always meant the West Indies, the homeland of my parents. But I now began to feel an earlier emotional pull, my link to Africa. I mentioned my reaction to Alma. “I feel the same thing,” she said. Gazing down into those cattle pens for human beings, I could imagine the smells of packed bodies. I could picture the overseer, whip in hand, herding terrified men, women, and children aboard the ships. A great-great-great-great-grandfather or -grandmother of mine must have stood in a place as horrible as this.
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br /> That afternoon, I spoke at a brief departure ceremony at the Freetown airport. “As you know,” I said, “I am an American. I am the son of Jamaicans who emigrated from the island to the United States. But today, I am something more. I am an African too. I feel my roots, here in this continent.”
After the visit to Nigeria, Alma and I headed home with a new awareness of our heritage. What we had witnessed of the African past was tragic. But the experience, in its way, had been uplifting too. It demonstrated, no matter how far down people are driven, how high they can rise when they are allowed to slip their chains and know freedom, in Africa or any country, including our own.
By early 1992, we were deeply into reductions to bring the armed forces down by the 25 percent the administration had announced earlier. We started paying troops to leave the service after years of paying them bonuses to stay in. We cut back on recruiting, taking in just enough new people so that we would have the required sergeants and chief petty officers come on line ten years from now. We were bringing home thousands of troops from Germany every week, along with their families, cars, pets, and other possessions. We had to have an assignment and a home waiting for them at a stateside post. I felt a part of my life vanish the day that my first post, Gelnhausen, was shut down. The keys were given to the Germans, and a U.S. rear detachment marched out to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” The Fulda gap became a tourist attraction in the middle of a reunified Germany.
Even before the end of the Cold War, we already had too many posts. Some had been built to fight Native Americans (Indians in those days) during the westward expansion of the last century. Some bases were left over from World Wars I and II. Some were Cold War creations, such as Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County, Maine, built to serve as a base for limited-range B-36 bombers to reach the Soviet Union. The B-36S were long gone, but we had a hard time closing Loring, which was helping to prop up that economically depressed northern Maine county. Shutting down overseas installations was a breeze compared to closing stateside bases. People in Gelnhausen did not vote in American elections and did not have congressmen fighting for the folks back home. As Congressman Les Aspin once put it to me regarding questionable defense installations, one man’s pork is another man’s axle grease to keep the wheels turning.
Frank Carlucci, when he was Secretary of Defense, had worked out a deal with Texas Congressman Dick Armey to create an independent commission to review, every two years, closings proposed by the Pentagon. The idea was to insulate these closings from political pressures. After presidential approval, the commission submitted a “take it or leave it” list for the Congress to vote up or down. This system worked, since the majority of members were not affected by base closures and consequently were unworried about approving the closings. Nevertheless, our having to go through this song and dance to shut down expensive but unneeded facilities is an example of Congress’s shameful unwillingness to abandon the pork barrel and make the hard decisions the people elect it to make.
Cutting the National Guard and the Reserves proved even harder than base closings. President Reagan and Cap Weinberger had built up reserve strength by 250,000 troops to 1.1 million, to deal with the Soviet threat. These part-time warriors have been indispensable to our military readiness, and they showed their stuff in Desert Storm. They represent citizen soldiery at its finest. But now that the Cold War was over, we no longer needed as many guardsmen and reservists. When we tried to cut back to sensible levels, however, we had our heads handed to us by the National Guard and Reserve associations and their congressional supporters. We were threatening part-time jobs, armories, money going into communities. We managed some reductions, but could still save much more money on the Guard and Reserves without hurting national security.
Attempts to cut an unneeded program could convert a dove into a hawk overnight. Chris Dodd, the liberal Democratic senator from Connecticut, consistently lambasted us for unnecessary defense spending, as long as it was unnecessary outside of his state. When we tried to cut attack submarine production at the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, Chris squealed to the heavens about the resulting damage to national security. Dodd was hardly alone in his deathbed conversion to preparedness. He found plenty of support among other members of Congress delighted to discover a likely ally when their pet programs might be eliminated.
On one occasion, I suggested to the admiral in charge of the Atlantic Command that we remove our AWACS warning planes from Iceland and send them to look for drug-running aircraft in the Caribbean. He fought me tooth and nail. I pointed out that the only Soviet bombers now approaching the United States from the direction of Iceland were those on their way to an open house at their new “sister” unit at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. He was unpersuaded, so I just took the planes away without further argument and reassigned them to the drug beat.
We had planned to stockpile no million barrels of oil so that when World War III broke out and we found ourselves cut off from foreign sources, we could still operate. But with only regional wars now likely, we could always find alternative foreign oil supplies. Consequently, we reduced the stockpile by 50 percent and saved the taxpayers $400 million. Another cost cutter: the Army wanted a new radio jammer to thwart Soviet commando attacks in NATO’s rear. What attacks? What rear? What Soviets? We cut the request, and $200 million more was saved.
Despite bureaucratic resistance, our reductions went forward and began to bite. Bases closed, troops and civilians left the service. Program cuts affected the economy and would become an election issue in 1992. The reductions, however, were carefully calibrated so that we were not whacking the forces with a meat ax as had happened before. There are still unneeded programs in the Pentagon. There are still pockets of waste and fraud that have given us a black eye in the past. I hope those scandals stay in the past. Under Cheney, the service chiefs and I tried to be responsible stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the American taxpayer. We were determined to build a leaner, more efficient, high-quality force capable of any mission. That, I know, remains the objective of the nation’s military leaders.
It was May 1. I turned on the TV set in my office, and what I saw made me sick at heart. I was watching the latest news on the riot in Los Angeles triggered the day before by the acquittal of four policemen charged with beating Rodney King. King, an ex-con and no saint, was an unlikely candidate for martyrdom. Still, no fair-minded person seeing the now famous videotape could deny that he had been the victim of excessive police force. The not-guilty verdict ignited rage in the black community.
It can’t be happening, I kept thinking, as I watched the burning, rioting, and looting. It was nearly thirty-five years since President Eisenhower had sent troops into Little Rock to quell violence over school integration; twenty-nine years since Bull Connor had turned the dogs and hoses on blacks protesting Jim Crow in Alma’s native Birmingham; twenty-four years since American cities had burst into flames over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the whole ugly spectacle was being reenacted again, after we had come so far.
While I was watching, I got a phone call from the National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. “Colin,” Brent said, “I know this isn’t your bailiwick. But we could use some help on the speech the President’s going to give on the riot.” The President was going on television that night, Scowcroft explained, to spell out federal action to end the turmoil. “I’m going to send you a rough draft,” Brent said. “Take a look at it and come on over and give Sam Skinner your reaction.” Skinner had replaced John Sununu as White House Chief of Staff the previous December.
Nancy Hughes brought me the President’s speech off the fax. I read it with dismay. I thought the tone was all wrong. Yes, the rioting was criminal, and law and order had to be restored. But the violence had not incubated in isolation; it had deep social roots. The speech, as it stood, recognized only the former and ignored the latter. In this election year, I saw the fingerprints of the far ri
ght all over the draft.
I found Skinner in his West Wing office. “Sam,” I said, “do the law-and-order bit. But there’s language here that’s only going to fan the flames.” Even Rodney King, I pointed out, was preaching racial reconciliation. “You heard what he said—’Can we all get along? … Let’s try to work it out.’” Turn down the heat, I suggested. “Get some reconciliation into the President’s message.”
Sam was nervous. Speech time was only hours away. He could not keep tearing the text apart and have it ready in time for the broadcast, he said. Still, he would see what he could do.
I left the White House and went home to dress for the annual Horatio Alger scholarship dinner that I was to attend that evening at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Later that night, as soon as I could excuse myself from the dinner, I told my security agents to find me an empty room in the Hyatt where I could watch the President’s speech, set for 9:00 P.M. I reached the room just in time to hear him deploring the violence. He then said, “I’m also federalizing the National Guard, and I’m instructing General Colin Powell to place all those troops under a central command.” This was the first time I had ever received military orders via television, and it was a sad moment. After the upheaval of the sixties, I had hoped that we would never again have to call out American troops to restore order in an American city. To my relief, the President went on to say that the beating of King was “revolting.” People were “stunned” by the acquittals, he said, “and so was I, and so was Barbara, and so were my kids.” He recognized that we had to offer a better future to minority Americans, and he asked everyone “to lend their hearts, their voices, and their prayers to the healing of hatred.” I felt I had earned my pay in Sam Skinner’s office that afternoon.
That weekend, with Los Angeles still smoking, Alma and I traveled to Fisk University in Tennessee for her thirty-fifth class reunion. She was particularly pleased that she had managed to produce me as the commencement speaker. I took the opportunity to build on what the President had said. “The problem goes beyond Rodney King,” I told the Fisk graduates. “We must remember that America is a family. There may be differences and disputes in our family. But we must not allow the family to be broken into warring factions…. I want you to find strength in your diversity. Let the fact that you are black or yellow or white be a source of pride and inspiration to you. Draw strength from it. Let it be someone else’s problem, but never yours. Never hide behind it or use it as an excuse for not doing your best.”
My American Journey Page 68