Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  By the middle of 1963, I had a wife, a son, and a law degree. And I owed the first of many debts to my country. I had received a military deferment while in law school, but now my time was up, and we shipped out. Our first stop was Fort Benning, Georgia, where we were greeted by a blast of humidity and an unpleasant introduction to the military’s family housing barracks. Happily, the end of basic training brought a transfer to the U.S. Army Intelligence School outside of Baltimore, where our second son, Carmelo—named after my father—was born in 1964 at Mercy Hospital.

  I was next scheduled to move to Washington to work in defense intelligence, but as we were preparing to go, we received word that my mother had been diagnosed with colon cancer. I requested and received a compassionate reassignment and headed home. Soon my mother had recuperated, and I took up duties at Ford Ord, just a few miles from where I grew up, working as an intelligence officer and assigned to brief young men on their way to Vietnam even as Joan Baez and other protesters demonstrated against the war just a few miles away. Those were hard briefings, many to soldiers who didn’t want to be there and didn’t understand why they were being asked to fight. One consequence was that we had a major problem with soldiers going AWOL. We’d round them up, and then, of course, they shipped out. A lot of those kids never made it back. In 2014, I presided over a commemoration of the Vietnam War as secretary of defense and spent a few minutes perusing the wall of names at the starkly beautiful memorial in Washington. I spotted a few familiar ones, young men who gave their lives to a war that neither they nor their leaders fully understood.

  But there were rewards to my posting as well. As an intelligence officer, I was responsible for operations and plans for security in the event of crisis—good training for the future. I also had the support and friendship of some great fellow officers and enlisted men and women. In particular, my commanding officer, Colonel Harry Fair, was a tough but compassionate officer who taught me about leadership and did me the honor of awarding me the Army Commendation Medal for my service.

  As a lawyer, I also was asked to represent servicemen in courts-martial, and found I enjoyed the life of a defense lawyer. I defended lots of AWOL cases, but also some more serious charges—assaults and the occasional rape. I got good enough and was called on so frequently that Sylvia joked my name must be up on a stockade wall someplace. In fact, one commanding general warned me that if I kept it up, I’d find myself reassigned to Fort Irwin, a post in the California desert. Thanks to Colonel Fair, I was able to stay at Ford Ord as long as I promised to spend my remaining time as an intelligence officer. I gave up my legal work a little reluctantly—I must admit that I enjoyed the chance to challenge authority in military courts, where most defendants were more likely to be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

  When I was preparing to muster out of the military in 1966, I faced the future that had been awaiting me ever since I finished law school but that had been delayed by the fulfillment of my service obligation. I was intrigued by the idea of working in Washington—Kennedy’s speech still rang in my ears—but I had no contacts there or any real insight into the place. On a lark, I tossed off a letter to Joseph Califano, then working as a lawyer in the White House (later that year he was named general counsel of the army), and already a formidable Washington insider. We were both lawyers, and he’d worked in the army too, but my appeal to him was a little more basic. I wrote him because he was Italian, and I asked if he would lend a hand to another. Amazingly, he did, calling me a few days later and offering to make some introductions around Washington.

  In those days, servicemen flew on major airlines for half-price if they were in uniform, so I donned mine and headed for the capital. Califano had made appointments for me at Defense and Justice and the Office of Personnel Management, among others, and I dutifully made my way around town. But it was a chance trip to the Senate office buildings that landed me my first civilian job since college.

  I was an admirer of Senator Tom Kuchel, who had been appointed to his post by Governor Warren when Richard Nixon vacated it to become Ike’s vice president. Kuchel was another of those centrist, forward-looking Republicans who dominated California at the middle of the century. Warren had moved to the Supreme Court by 1963, but Kuchel had won reelection and was still holding down that tradition in the Senate.

  I didn’t know Kuchel any better than I knew Califano, but I figured there was no harm in asking, so I went to Capitol Hill, presented myself to his secretary, and asked if there were any openings. As it turned out, one of the senator’s two top aides—in those days, he had a principal aide for foreign policy and another for domestic policy—had recently left, so there was in fact a vacancy. And there I was, armed with a law degree, a native of California and in a U.S. Army uniform. Kuchel wasn’t in, but his administrative assistant, Ewing Hass, an old pal of Kuchel’s throughout his political years, looked me over and figured it might be worth a chance. He arranged for me to meet with Kuchel back in California a few weeks later, and I did, chatting at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. He offered me a spot on his staff and a salary of $10,000 a year. I accepted it right there.

  A few days later, I broke the news to my parents, who had hoped I would stay in Monterey. I assured them it was a great opportunity and predicted I’d be back in a couple years after picking up some useful experience. Sylvia and I then packed up our blue VW bug, strapped a luggage rack to the roof, and put the boys, still in diapers, in the back. Our first stop was Disneyland, which had just opened a few years earlier. Then it was across the country—Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, St. Louis—one Holiday Inn at a time. We arrived in Washington on a cold April day, and soon found a house for rent in Northwest D.C. We had made it across the country to the nation’s capital. Our Washington life began that spring.

  I was twenty-seven years old, four years older than my father was when he came to America. He had arrived in the East, gone west, and reaped the rewards of a generous nation; I had begun where he ended up and now was back east, determined to return the favor.

  TWO

  “Look at Yourself in the Mirror”

  We are not always able to pick our mentors, and some of those who take on those roles later disappoint. Not so with Tom Kuchel. He was a good, principled, moderate man, unafraid of being attacked, unwilling to give up on what was right in order to adapt to what was popular. His career was studded with accomplishment and riddled by base and false accusations. It was my great luck to work with him early in my career, when his lessons could leave lasting imprints.

  His father was a crusading California journalist who had helped expose and oust the Ku Klux Klan from elected positions in Anaheim early in the twentieth century. Kuchel inherited a taste for combat, a love of stories, and appreciation for a punch line. His friend Ewing Hass collected jokes, and as the two of them walked side by side from the Old Senate Office Building to the Capitol whip office, Hass would share the latest, and Kuchel’s laugh would boom through the underground train tunnels.

  Kuchel radiated strength. His will matched his voice, and he even strode with purpose. He was not very tall, but was one of those men whom others remember as taller than they were, perhaps because he met friends and adversaries eye to eye. He would seal deals over a bourbon, and he deeply believed that in politics, your word was your bond. He expected the same from others. For him, politics was not trivial or cynical, but rather a commitment to public service.

  Kuchel’s rise through California politics was largely the work of Earl Warren. First elected to the California State Assembly in 1936 and then the State Senate in 1940, Kuchel was called to active duty in the Naval Reserve, where he served until 1945. When he returned, Warren saw a young senator with similar beliefs, experience in Sacramento, and a war record; ever canny, Warren appointed him state controller in 1946, a move that reflected well on both of them. And of course it was Warren a few years later who put Kuchel in the U.S. Senate.

  B
arely had I begun to comprehend my duties when I received my first lesson from Kuchel. We met in his Capitol office, a space just off the Senate chambers reserved for the minority whip. Kuchel could be warm and welcoming, but in this session he was stern.

  “Look,” he said, “you’re going to be tempted in this town. There are going to be a lot of people who will want to take you to lunch. They’ll try to give you gifts. They’ll try to use you to get to me on issues. And I just want you to remember that our job here is to serve the public interest and the people of California. That’s number one.”

  He spoke with such conviction that I’m sure I swallowed hard at that. But he wasn’t done.

  “And number two, remember: When you get up in the morning, you have to look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Some may regard those sentiments as corny or old-fashioned, out of kilter with the wry cynicism that pervades so much of Washington today. I received those words differently. They spoke to my sense of obligation and even to the self-importance that I felt as a young aide suddenly thrust into the fast currents of national policy. They meant something genuine, and they came from a man worthy of admiration. I have never forgotten them, and I have always tried to live up to them.

  As I came to know Kuchel better, I grew to appreciate what an uncommon character he was—principled without being particularly ideological, forceful without being doctrinaire. He was supportive of the president on foreign affairs, which meant that in 1966, when I arrived, he was a determined backer of President Johnson on Vietnam, as he had been of Eisenhower’s foreign and military policy. He greatly admired Senator Richard Russell on national defense questions, and consistently voted to increase defense spending. He subscribed to the notion that politics stopped at the water’s edge.

  On budget matters, he was reliably conservative, again in the Eisenhower tradition. He believed the nation should balance its budget, and he carefully scrutinized spending for hints of waste or misuse.

  In those senses, he could be considered a modern conservative, but he also felt deeply about causes that would be associated with today’s liberals. He was a committed environmentalist who devoted much of his work on the Interior Committee to protecting California redwoods. When he introduced a bill to create a redwood preserve in Northern California, he did it with typical aplomb. He wanted the legislation passed, Kuchel said, “because God’s magnificent, awe-inspiring northern California virgin redwood giants ought to be preserved for humanity, rather than be chopped down from mountainsides to be made into 2 by 4’s.”1 Kuchel described the passage of that bill, in 1968, as “a most satisfying note on which to close my Senate career.”2

  Kuchel supported federal aid to education and the Atomic Test Ban Treaty, and he voted for Medicare, which he cited as an example of “governing for the many.”3

  Perhaps most important, he was a leading advocate for civil rights: Working closely with Senator Hubert Humphrey, Kuchel delivered Republican votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—landmark bills in President Johnson’s legacy that could not be won on party-line votes because southern Democrats, led by Russell, bolted from the president’s coalition. Kuchel, joined by such Republican moderates as Jacob Javits of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, and George Aiken of Vermont, made possible the passage of those bills.

  For Kuchel, politics was personal, and he both worked the relationships that made progress possible and appreciated others who did it well. One year, Lyndon Johnson called Kuchel’s mother on her birthday. Kuchel was delighted, and Johnson knew he’d sealed a friendship.

  Kuchel also understood enemies, and he had his share. Just before I went to work for him, a Los Angeles police officer and a New Jersey publisher determined to smear him had conspired to fabricate a police affidavit alleging that he was homosexual. Needless to say, those were different times, when the mere accusation that a politician was gay carried strong negative consequences. The senator, who was married and had a daughter, was shocked. He flew to California and met with the Los Angeles district attorney and chief of police, who promised an investigation. It concluded that the allegations were false, and the LAPD officer was fired. Kuchel sued for libel and the defendants pleaded no contest. Nevertheless, the damage was done, and suspicion would long hover around him.

  Among my first responsibilities as Kuchel’s assistant was to coordinate our office’s efforts on federal housing legislation to strike at racially discriminatory practices in that field. Housing was a contentious issue at the time, particularly in California. In 1964, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 14, which overturned a fair housing law passed by the legislature. The proposition specifically permitted all property owners the right to refuse to sell or rent to anyone based on his or her race or religion. It was one of my home state’s periodic populist convulsions, and like some of the others, it raised the specter of leading other states to follow.

  In Washington, the civil rights leadership in and out of Congress concluded that the best way to head off a state-by-state stampede for such measures was to enact federal legislation that would preempt any such state action. That meant that Congress’s civil rights attention moved from public accommodations and voting to housing. Kuchel, having played an influential role in those other debates, was naturally well suited to help lead this one as well, this time with me as his legislative aide.

  We established a legislative team to work for passage of the bill, the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The key players were legislative aides from the offices of senators Phil Hart of Michigan, Robert Kennedy of New York, Jacob Javits, and Hugh Scott, among others. We were working on revisions of the bill to attract more votes when Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the minority leader, made the decision to support it because “the time had come.” His support was critical to passing the bill because he brought along other conservative Republicans.

  Kuchel was up for reelection in 1968, the year that the center seemed to collapse in American politics. Consumed by the war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson stunned the country on March 31 when he concluded a national address by announcing that he intended to devote the remaining months of his term to the war and that, consequently, “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Less than a week later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and city after city, including Washington, dissolved into riots.

  It was early evening in Washington when word of King’s death swept the city. Kuchel was meeting in a Capitol office with a group of Hollywood CEOs. I was in the Senate Office Building. I could see police officers putting sandbags in place, as if expecting an assault on the Capitol. Worried that we might be about to be trapped, I rushed over to pull Kuchel from his meeting.

  “Senator, these riots are getting out of control,” I told him. “We probably ought to let these people go.”

  He went to the window and took in the dismaying sight of smoke curling from distant fires and nervous guardsmen taking positions. “You’d better get moving,” he announced to all of us. Everyone left, the CEOs to their hotels and planes, and the staff scattering to our homes.

  As I drove home that night, it felt as though the efforts of the past two years had come to nothing. We had passed important bills to give the government new power to enforce and extend civil rights. School districts that discriminated on the basis of race now stood to lose federal funding. State efforts to enforce all-white neighborhoods now violated federal law. And yet King’s assassination peeled back the frustration and anger of those who felt those efforts to be far too little. Detroit burned. Washington burned. Baltimore and Chicago erupted. Other cities, large and small, North and South, trembled with violence and apprehension.

  It was difficult to believe that the Capitol of the United States was under siege and that the work of civil rights was going up in all too literal smoke. Was everything w
e had tried to achieve lost? The American promise of equality was truly being put to the test, and so were all of those, like Kuchel, who had embraced that promise.

  What’s more, Kuchel still had a reelection to win. His support for civil rights and antidiscrimination legislation solidified support from the left, but the phony allegations about his sexual orientation and his general disdain for the right wing of the Republican Party—Kuchel had refused to endorse Richard Nixon for governor in 1962, Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, or Ronald Reagan for governor in 1966—made him vulnerable to an attack from the right. In 1968, he got it from Max Rafferty. Rafferty may not warrant more than a footnote in most histories, but in 1968 he played a decisive and tragic role.

  Rafferty was the California superintendent of public instruction, best known for educational writing that advocated a rejection of modern teaching methods and a return to “basics.” Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been much of a résumé to challenge a sitting U.S. senator who occupied a leadership position in his party in Washington, but the personal allegations against Kuchel found purchase in the right-wing crannies of the California party, and the John Birch Society saw its opportunity to tear down a senator who had long aggravated its leadership.

  The Birch Society’s charge against Kuchel seems almost absurd to mention today. The group had alleged that a group of Chinese communists were training in Mexico in preparation for an invasion of California. Society members wrote to Kuchel to demand that he take action. He investigated, concluded that the scenario was ridiculous, and sent back form letters to his correspondents dismissing the entire idea. For this, he was accused of “treason.” Kuchel, who had fought for his country in wartime and devoted his life to service on its behalf, was flabbergasted and furious.