The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  One night earlier in the summer, Penny Cook turned on the TV in the middle of Saturday Night Live. The cast was doing a spoof of Cheers. Sitting at the bar was an actor playing her father, John Tower.

  “He was getting drunk and putting the move on women,” Mrs. Cook says. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I turned the TV off and said, ‘Let it rest.’ I know it was a rerun, but. …”

  Mrs. Cook’s sister, Marian Tower, remembers the night David Letterman read his list of “John Tower’s Top 10 Pickup Lines,” and the night Jay Leno said her father “looks like Yoda with a bad haircut.”

  “Our family can laugh at just about anything,” she says, “but that really hurt a lot. Just to be sitting and watching TV, trying to get your mind off of what was happening, and then to have the really, really tacky jokes thrown at you. The only time my father really lost his sense of humor about the situation was when the comedians started making jokes.”

  The “situation,” of course, was the two-month-long hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee about Mr. Tower’s fitness to serve as President Bush’s secretary of defense.

  “The committee started out questioning my dad about issues of substance,” Mrs. Cook says, “about things he would do in the Defense Department, about his beliefs on certain weapons systems. He answered their questions very well. The committee seemed real satisfied with his answers. We all felt things were fine. We came back to Texas thinking we would be returning to Washington in a week or two for his swearing-in.”

  But on Jan. 31, 1989, a conservative political activist named Paul Weyrich testified before the committee that he had seen Mr. Tower drunk and “with women to whom he is not married.” Mr. Weyrich’s testimony was never confirmed, but other informants came forward with similar claims. Then the FBI, which already had completed its background check on Mr. Tower, was ordered by Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn to do another. Soon it seemed that half the population of the country was claiming to have spotted Mr. Tower at one time or another swilling booze and chasing skirts from Washington to Geneva to Bergstrom Air Force Base and dallying with a non-existent Russian ballerina in Houston.

  “It was bizarre,” Mrs. Cook says. “It was a nightmare. The press would print something about a bad thing he was supposed to have done at a certain time at a certain place, and he would go through his calendar and show that he wasn’t even at that place on that day, but that would never get printed. They would just go on to the next allegation. And each new rumor would feed another.”

  On March 9, when the Senate voted 53 to 47 not to confirm Mr. Tower, some who voted against him told the press they were worried that Mr. Tower might endanger national security by buddying up to defense contractors, drinking too much or pursuing women while in charge of the military forces. His defenders claimed the vote—which had been largely along partisan lines—had less to do with Mr. Tower’s alleged moral lapses than with the desire of the Senate’s Democratic majority to embarrass the new Republican president, and with Sen. Nunn’s own presidential ambitions.

  “I am inclined to question the use of raw FBI files and uncorroborated allegations, made in many instances by anonymous accusers,” Mr. Tower says now, “and I am told by those who have reviewed the FBI files—I have not seen them—that the testimony of the people interviewed was overwhelmingly favorable.”

  Whatever the senators’ motives had been for rejecting him, Mr. Tower decided to leave Washington. “No public figure in my memory,” he said at the time, “has been subjected to such a far-reaching and thorough investigation nor had his human foibles bared to such intensive and demeaning public scrutiny. And yet there is no finding that I have ever breached established legal and ethical standards nor been derelict in my duty.” It was his plan, he said, “to load up my 1972 Dodge Charger 400 Magnum with all my possessions, mattress strapped to the roof…and head back to Texas.”

  “John is a very decent man,” says Dorothy Heyser, his friend who sat behind him in the hearing room day after day. “And when you’re decent, and you know you’ve told the truth, and someone lies or twists your comments, what can you do? How do you fight it?”

  The Senate’s vote was a sharp blow to George Bush’s new administration and a deep hurt to Mr. Tower’s family and friends. “It was like a death after a long illness,” says Martha Kirkendall, long-time manager of Mr. Tower’s Dallas office.

  Mr. Tower says it was simply politics. “That’s Washington. It happens that way sometimes.”

  In 1988, John Tower reported to the Armed Services Committee that he earned $665,277 in consulting and director fees, most of it from defense firms, $74,000 for making speeches, $50,000 for lecturing to political science classes at Southern Methodist University, and $48,743 in federal pensions.

  Last December, when President-elect Bush asked him to run the Pentagon, he canceled his consulting contracts, resigned his corporate directorships, disbanded his Dallas consulting firm, closed down his offices in Dallas and Washington, took a leave of absence from his position as distinguished lecturer at SMU and prepared to move to the Pentagon, where he would earn a salary of $99,500 a year, but control one-third of the trillion-dollar federal budget.

  “There is no question this is the summit of his experiences, one that he was looking for all during his career,” said Paul Eggers, Mr. Tower’s longtime friend and Dallas business partner, when President Bush announced the appointment.

  Indeed, during his years in the Senate, Mr. Tower had made national defense policy his special field of expertise. He rose to become the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, and hoped a Ronald Reagan victory in the 1980 election might mean the defense secretariat for him. That hope was squelched, however, when the voters gave the Republicans a majority in the Senate, in addition to the White House. For the first time in Sen. Tower’s 20-year tenure, his party was running things, and suddenly he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill.

  “It wouldn’t have been practical to remove him from the chairmanship of such an important committee to make him secretary of defense,” says Mrs. Kirkendall. “We found out later that Caspar Weinberger was Reagan’s absolute, only choice for secretary of defense anyway. Nobody else was even considered. But Sen. Tower would have welcomed the opportunity, and we had a few weeks of uncertainty.”

  In 1984, Sen. Tower announced that he was “burned out” and would retire from the Senate the following year, at the end of his fourth term. He yearned for privacy and freedom, he says, but his return to private life kept getting postponed. Only two weeks after he left the Senate, Secretary of State George Shultz asked him to head the American side of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Geneva, a post he held for 14 months. And only eight months after his resignation on April 1,1986, President Reagan asked him to head the Iran-Contra review board that became popularly known as the Tower Commission.

  He didn’t enjoy the job, but the commission issued a tough report, criticizing the president for his lack of knowledge and control of the activities of Lt. Col. Oliver North and his associates, and recommending changes in the way the National Security Council had been operating. When he presented the report to President Reagan in February 1987, Mr. Tower was weary, emotionally drained and ready for a change of scene.

  He returned to Dallas and formed a partnership with his old friend Paul Eggers and Timothy C. Greene, an attorney who formerly had been with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department. They incorporated the Tower, Eggers and Greene consulting firm with Mr. Tower as chairman.

  The consulting work that the firm did for such defense companies as LTV, Martin-Marietta, Textron and Rockwell International—and which later would fuel the rumors in Washington that the defense secretary-designate was in the pocket of the defense contractors—provided the bulk of his income.

  But he also had signed a contract with Cosby Bureau International, a Washington speakers’ agen
cy that handles such high-dollar banquet circuit riders as Dan Rather, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Tommy Lasorda; had signed a contract with Little, Brown to write a scholarly study of the conflict between Congress and the White House over foreign policy; was team-teaching a course on foreign policy with Dr. James Brown of the SMU Political Science Department; and, after a British friend recommended him to Robert Maxwell, the flamboyant London press lord who was becoming a heavy player in the American publishing industry, Mr. Tower became chairman of Brassey’s Defense Publications, a Maxwell-owned publisher of technical defense journals.

  When Mr. Tower helped him acquire Armed Forces Journal in 1987, Mr. Maxwell named him chairman of that publication as well. And in November 1988, when Mr. Maxwell paid $2.7 billion for Macmillan, Inc., one of America’s largest publishing houses, he placed Mr. Tower on its board.

  Private life was treating Mr. Tower fine. Then he heeded the siren call of George Bush.

  “When they asked John to accept that job, he gave up everything,” says Mrs. Heyser. “And he was three months in Washington, living at his own expense, with no income. But he never complained about it. He said, ‘Something will work out.’ He couldn’t have been more marvelous about it.”

  Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole described what happened to Mr. Tower as “an execution.” Mr. Eggers said the Senate gave him “a scar he will carry the rest of his life.” His daughter Marian thinks Mr. Eggers may be right. “This isn’t something where you can say, ‘Oh, he’s over it,’” she says. “I would guess that he has to wonder every day: ‘Why did this happen?’”

  Mr. Tower won’t reveal his deeper feelings about the experience. “I’ll reflect on it later on,” he says. “I’m still reviewing what happened.” But he has been assigned a special niche in American history—one he never wanted and never expected to occupy. In the 200 years that the Senate has been confirming the president’s cabinet appointments, he’s only the ninth to be rejected, and the first to be rejected in the first 90 days of a new president’s administration.

  “The Senate’s vote,” he says, “certainly brought to an end my full-time career as a public servant. The most difficult thing for me is turning away from the area that I’ve focused on for the last 20 years of my life. That, of course, is national security and foreign policy. But it’s an adjustment I have to make.”

  He acknowledges that his reputation has been damaged, “but probably not as much as it appears on the surface. Many people have talked to me and written me letters—some liberal Democrats, even—expressing outrage over the way this thing was done…. There is an innate sense of fair play in the American people, and I think there is a general feeling that I was not fairly treated.”

  Mrs. Kirkendall, Mr. Eggers and his daughters all describe his reaction as “stoic”—so stoic, in fact, that Mrs. Cook worries about him. “I think he’s the kind of person who might be more hurt than he would ever let on,” she says. “He’s going to hold his head up and go on, because that’s the kind of person he is. But I think about him. I’m concerned. I don’t want him to be sad.”

  Financially, Mr. Tower isn’t without help in picking up the pieces. Almost immediately after the Senate vote, Robert Maxwell called from London, offering him back the board positions at Brassey’s, the Armed Forces Journal and Maxwell-Macmillan. He accepted them. And although the pressures of the past two years had forced Mr. Tower to abandon work on his scholarly book on foreign policy, he has signed a new contract with Little, Brown for another book on the same subject. He’s at work on it now with his collaborator, Washington free-lance writer Kathy Maxa.

  “It’s going to deal with the struggle between the Congress and the executive branch on national security and foreign policy matters,” Mr. Tower says. “It’ll go into congressional activism in the field, which pre-empts presidential prerogative or traditional authority in the area. But unlike the other book I was working on, it’ll have a lot of anecdotal material in it. My own experience will be woven into the book, including the confirmation experience.

  “In the post-World War II period, there was pretty much of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy—not just bipartisan in the sense of Republicans and Democrats, but bipartisan in the sense of legislative and executive. That began to deteriorate during the Vietnam War, and with the erosion of the seniority system and the loss of a sense of discipline in the Congress. The old saying was ‘Politics ends at the water’s edge.’ And back in my early days, in the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, I was rarely critical publicly of the administration’s foreign policy, even under a Democratic administration. But that’s all changed now. And it’s a dangerous change for the country.”

  What should be done to correct it, he says, is “a long story, which we’ll be writing.” The book is going well, he says. “My collaborator is very diligent.”

  National security policy also is the topic of the speeches he makes to trade and professional associations, academic audiences and conclaves of corporate executives. Not long after the Senate vote, his agent, Joe Cosby, told a reporter that Mr. Tower was being paid $20,000 and up per appearance, but Mr. Tower says it isn’t so. “My fee is pretty well fixed, and it’s not that high,” he says. “I don’t want to discuss it… I also do some pro bono speaking in addition to what I do or a fee.”

  And perhaps more important for the long run, the firm of Tower, Eggers and Greene has been reincorporated and is open for business again. This time, however, there will be no full-time consulting arrangements with defense companies. “I just don’t feel like I want to go back to that,” Mr. Tower says.

  Mrs. Kirkendall, who has worked for Mr. Tower for 27 years, thinks the Senate hearings effected that decision. “He very strongly resisted any identity as a lobbyist,” she says. “He never wanted to be a promoter on behalf of his clients and their interests with the government. He knew his role to be as an adviser. But his motives were impugned. And to go back to doing the same thing now, even though he would still have honorable motives, would just be read wrong.”

  The firm now, Mr. Tower says, is “largely in the business of marrying up investors with investment opportunities. And we’re getting involved in some business opportunities that might give me a chance to gain some equity in something, instead of always working on a retainer basis.”

  One of the industries in which the firm is becoming involved is communications satellites, Mr. Eggers says, but neither he nor Mr. Tower will reveal more than that. “The company will have varied interests,” Mr. Eggers says, “and John will now have something he’s never had before—an interest in some assets that will make money for him, and someday for his children.”

  The only thing Mr. Tower hasn’t recovered since his Senate ordeal is his lectureship at SMU. Almost immediately after Mr. Tower went to Washington to join the Bush administration, the university gave the lectureship to Bob Krueger, the former Democratic congressman who in 1978 almost ousted Mr. Tower from the Senate and may have contributed to his decision to retire. “Bob has the reputation of being a very fine teacher,” Mr. Tower says.

  Nevertheless, he plans still to lecture on foreign policy matters at SMU from time to time. And, since he’s still a member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitors the government’s intelligence operations and makes recommendations to President Bush on how to improve them, he’s not entirely exiled from the corridors of power in Washington.

  “I still have many friends in government. I’m still socially acceptable in Washington,” he says with a shadow of a smile. “And if some board or commission were created for some temporary purpose, something like the so-called Tower Commission, I might go back in that capacity. But for the time being—and for the foreseeable future—I’ll be trying to build some business that will sustain me in my old age and give me something to pass on to my children. I want to help revive the economy of my state. I believe Texas and the Southwest are the wave of the future. Despite our recent travail over the declin
e of the price of crude, the decline in the value of commercial real estate and the accompanying decline of our financial institutions, Texas will come back.”

  In Austin, a reporter asks Mr. Tower how old he is.

  “Sixty-three,” he replies. “I don’t look it, do I?”

  He’s joking, but the veteran pols talking about him in the corridor aren’t. “He’s still young,” one of them says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran again for something.”

  “How about governor?” his friend says. “In 1990?”

  Mr. Tower smiles at the suggestion. “There’s enough good candidate material in the Republican Party that we are in the happy position of not having to recall and retread older politicians,” he says.

  But he’s home, and he intends to stay busy.

  “Daddy isn’t one to wallow in self-pity,” says his daughter Marian. “He just wants to put it behind him and live on. He’s very strong.”

  August 1989

  A FAMILY NIGHTMARE

  Of all the crimes of which a man can be accused, none is as slimy as sexual molestation of a child. So when one of my oldest friends sat across the table in a restaurant one morning and told me he had been accused of molesting his neighbor’s little daughter… Of all the stories I’ve written during some 30 years of journalism, this one was the most difficult.

  IN THE FRONT PEW OF THE COURTOOM, THE ACCUSER — BLOND, NOT quite four years old, pink ribbon in her hair, still clutching her doll and a bag of jelly beans—had fallen asleep in her father’s lap. Beside them sat her mother and her grandmother and grandfather.

  They had sat there nearly all the time since Judge Thomas Thorpe turned the case over to the jury at 11:07 a.m. on the fifth day of the trial, a Friday. Except for the intermittent comings and goings of bailiffs and clerks and lawyers concerned with other cases in the judge’s court, the family was alone in the courtroom. From time to time, one of the adults would turn to another and say something in a low voice, but most of the time they were silent, gazing into the middle distance like parishioners who had arrived too early for a church service.