Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  But politics is not about appreciating the complex layers of a person’s psyche or his emotional effort to come to terms with the subtleties of issues like war and peace. Instead, Clinton’s opponents painted him as a draft dodger, and worse. His decision not to go to Vietnam and his criticism of the military buildup of the Reagan years fit perfectly into his detractors’ image of the naïve, weak-willed liberal who is both too ignorant and too cowardly to defend and strengthen the country. The construct played right into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who wrote tracts about Clinton’s plans to break the military and hand the country over to the communists. But it didn’t take a conspiracy theorist to hate Bill Clinton and what he seemed, to some, to stand for: imposing a selfish, irresponsible, decadent, dangerous lifestyle throughout the country, which would leave the nation vulnerable to life-threatening military and moral weaknesses.

  Clinton was aware of his damaged reputation in military circles that Thursday when he met Powell at the Hay-Adams Hotel. He knew that his public promises to lift the gay ban using executive power sounded to many military men like one more prong in a misguided effort by young liberals to impose a radical social agenda on a traditional culture they did not understand or respect. And Clinton was determined to finesse the situation at their meeting that afternoon. Not backing down, he repeated to Powell his intention to lift the ban but signaled that he wanted to include top military leaders in the process. Powell repeated his opposition, but said that military leaders would offer greater cooperation if they were consulted over the next year. The general suggested that the president move very cautiously to study the issue, rather than simply issue an executive order to mandate the change.29

  Though both men dug in their heels, the meeting appeared productive. By the beginning of December, the press was reporting that Powell had “softened” his opposition. Powell said that he and the Joint Chiefs were pleased that Clinton had agreed to consult them on the issue. He also made it very clear that his concerns about the impact of gay service were qualified: “I’ve never been of the view it will break the armed forces of the United States if we went in this direction,” he said, adding that if the president lifted the ban, the military would follow orders. “Nor will there be large resignations” if gays are allowed to serve. “I hope we can keep some of the emotionalism out of this issue,” he concluded, in an apparent plea for rationality, “until we have time for a full debate.”30 Once the debate began in earnest, presumably, emotionalism was fair game.

  Clinton’s willingness to “consult” the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed like a natural gesture toward cooperation. But coming in the context it did—amid fierce resistance and questions about Clinton’s level of commitment—it was also an early sign of difficulty for the anti-ban forces. The decision was both a reminder of the Clinton team’s failure to reach out to the Pentagon brass early enough and the first step toward what would become a months-long delay, allowing the opposition to fester and snowball. In any event, the détente did not last long. In mid-December, Newsweek reported, Powell and the Joint Chiefs warned Clinton’s aides that the lot of them would resign if the new administration forced their hand on the gay issue.31

  Clinton’s “consultation” effort was led by John Holum, a friend and aide to Clinton who had been a defense adviser to George McGovern during his failed 1972 anti-war presidential bid. Holum’s name was being floated as a possible secretary of the navy, which made the navy brass apoplectic. Holum was still known as a McGovernite. He had advised McGovern when the candidate pushed for a retreat on Vietnam as well as major funding cuts for defense. Now Holum was Clinton’s point man on how to let gays infest the military.32

  Holum spent the Christmas season meeting with top military brass and gay rights advocates in an effort to eke out a compromise. He also visited ships and military bases, where he was surprised to find a “live and let live attitude” from enlisted personnel. “What I drew from my consultations was that it was doable,” Holum said, but he encountered resistance from some of the military brass. Colin Powell gathered the other members of the Joint Chiefs who served under him and made a clear show of force, telling Holum in front of them what a bad idea it would be to lift the ban. Individually, some of the Joint Chiefs displayed a reluctant “problem-solving” approach, saying they didn’t approve, but would weigh the options for how to lift the ban if it was so ordered. Carl Mundy, head of the Marine Corps and the most outspoken opponent of gay service on moral grounds, gave Holum a copy of Horn’s film. Despite this opposition, Holum drew from his consultations that lifting the ban was “doable, that the military is probably better than the rest of society in dealing with social change.”33

  In January, Holum sent the Pentagon and the president his recommendation. He suggested the president issue an executive order, but not one that would lift the ban immediately. Holum had heard again and again from military brass that they didn’t feel adequately consulted, and he could sense that his own role as a former McGovernite go-between didn’t butter the biscuit. So Holum proposed that the executive order should delay any substantive change until the matter could be studied for up to a year. Eventually, a “memorandum of instruction” from the president to the Defense Department could lift the ban, once the early opposition died down. Holum never got a formal reply to his recommendation. And he was happy enough to leave the ball in the White House’s court, as he had already taken too much time away from his law practice.34

  Into the void stepped Nunn, Bob Dole and the new secretary of defense, Les Aspin. On Sunday, November 15, 1992, Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, and Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, went on the Sunday talk shows to warn Clinton publicly that Congress would not watch idly as he let the gay lobby push around the world’s most powerful military. Dole said that lifting the ban “would cause real problems in the military,” but his most vocal opposition was grounded in politics: Letting gays serve could “blow the lid off the Capitol,” he cautioned. He suggested that the incoming president put the issue on the back burner and appoint a commission to study it. “In my view he’s going to get in more trouble than he can add up right now if he starts with an executive order on that issue.” Dole made clear that if Clinton went forward as planned, Congress would take a vote on whether to override the president, “and I’d be surprised if he won that vote.”35

  If the Republican Dole’s opposition to Clinton was unsurprising, Sam Nunn’s was only slightly less predictable. In the spring of 1992, having twice considered and aborted a run for the White House, the Democratic senator watched as Bill Clinton edged slowly toward the world’s most powerful job—the same post Nunn had once thought could be his. While Nunn had given up on the presidency, he still hoped to hold at least one of the reins of power, perhaps as secretary of state or defense. The latter ambition was telling. When the first President Bush took the White House in 1988, Nunn led Senate opposition to Bush’s choice for defense secretary, former senator John Tower. One of his main objections was that Tower was alleged to have a drinking problem. As the battle heated up, Nunn was forced to admit that he himself had a drunk-driving accident in his past, which involved leaving the scene of the crime.36 It was perhaps a partial explanation for why Nunn opposed Tower’s nomination—the projection of his own, even minor, moral failings lent an added layer of competitiveness to the political rivalries for which Washington is famous—and offered a disturbing window into Nunn’s modus operandi.

  Nunn’s interest in becoming secretary of defense hardly seemed an idle ambition. Although his own military experience consisted of only one year in the Coast Guard,37 he represented a state with many military bases and had spent twenty years building a reputation as Mr. Defense. Nunn was considered so powerful in military circles that he was thought to have been the only person capable of stopping the first George Bush from invading Iraq. Of course, he failed. (The fact that he took a beating in opposing a Republican president’s plan to go to war s
uggested either that he was a man of great principle or that he was determined to assert his prowess in military matters against the GOP.) Nunn was even rumored to have been considered by the first President Bush to be named defense secretary. Ultimately, went the joke, such an appointment was unnecessary; in practice, he already was. “Nunn’s numbers,” his suggestions for each year’s proposed defense budget, were considered sacrosanct in military circles and often accepted uncritically in Congress, even as Nunn’s attachment to cold war weapons and strategies became as dated as his views on homosexuality.

  After Clinton’s election, as Nunn’s name was floated around for secretary of defense, gay rights groups became angered. A conservative southern Democrat who had backed the fiercely segregationist George Wallace in 1972, Nunn was no friend of gay rights. “He seemed to have bought into the 1950s line that there was some kind of disconnect between being gay and being of good moral character,” said Urvashi Vaid, who was head of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force in 1992. In fact, Nunn’s unabashed antipathy to gay equality—which would become even more obvious with his hostile questioning during Senate hearings on gay service that he would lead the following spring—rendered his opposition to lifting the ban a foregone conclusion. He had backed Senator John Glenn’s bid for the White House in 1984, citing his courage in expressing his “strongly held moral belief that homosexuals should not be the role models for our children.” Nunn had also dismissed two political aides because they were gay. He defended his actions by blaming the military’s anti-gay policy, saying the aides could not work for him effectively on classified matters because the military and intelligence agencies considered them a security risk. But the crusade he was about to lead to protect that very same anti-gay policy gave the lie to his effort to pin his discrimination on the policy. Mainstream gay groups clamored that someone so outspoken against the rights of gays should not be secretary of defense. The activist group Queer Nation even staged a kiss-in at his office to protest his homophobia.38

  It was clearly with horror that, partly due to the opposition of gay groups, Nunn watched another longtime rival, Les Aspin, step over him to become secretary of defense. Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, was an Ivy League economist, while Nunn was a small-town southern lawyer. Aspin had ultimately opposed the Vietnam War and was far more ready than Nunn to support cuts in the defense budget. He was known as a supporter of gays in the military, and his nomination was greeted with relief by gay groups. But he was also respected by many Republicans, despite his support for Pentagon budget cuts. Aspin’s early comments on the gay ban seemed to straddle the two constituencies fairly well, while remaining firm and decisive. The current policy, he said, “has got some serious flaws,” and must be dealt with “head-on.” There would be no chance to “try and patch up the old program or sideslip the issue,” he said. But he also tried to lower the temperature of the debate, saying the Clinton administration was only doing what public pressure or the courts have forced the Pentagon to do anyway. The idea, he said, is “to deal with this thing very, very carefully, but to deal with it very, very deliberately.”39

  With Aspin’s acceptance of the post, the stage was set for a mammoth battle of wills between Aspin and Nunn, one that, at times, had far more to do with the power struggles and personal psychology of individual personalities than with what was best for the military or for the country. One top Pentagon official close to Nunn said the senator viewed the skirmish over gay service as a “mano a mano test of manhood about who runs defense policy.” For Nunn, it was a chance to “take Les Aspin down a notch or two.” In the view of Democratic politicos, “Nunn was not given the deferential treatment he expected during the transition.” In response to this and other perceived slights, Nunn sought “to embarrass Clinton.”40 Indeed, keeping gays out of the military became a way for Nunn to pay back those he felt had disrespected him and to bolster his commitment to moral purity.

  Of course, like Powell, Nunn sought to take the high ground, maintaining a firm but decorous public face on the issue that avoided the most vituperative anti-gay rhetoric. Yet Nunn could scarcely conceal his antipathy toward gays. “We’ve got to consider not only the rights of homosexuals,” he said days after Clinton reiterated his promise to lift the ban, “but also the rights of those who are not homosexual, and who give up a great deal of their privacy when they go into the military.” He said he thought “there could be some very emotional feelings,” and that if things changed too quickly, “I fear for the lives of people in the military themselves.”41 Nunn was a master of language that sounded superficially fair but was actually not: Here he asked the nation to respect the rights of those who were so hateful toward an innocent minority that they might be driven to murder if this minority were granted the same rights as everyone else. Could Nunn have gotten away with considering the rights not only of blacks but of those who hated blacks enough to kill them?

  Nunn’s willingness to scuttle Clinton’s first major initiative was curious. The new president was the first person from Nunn’s party to occupy the White House in twelve years, and a product of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, a group Nunn himself had helped start after Walter Mondale’s loss in 1984. (Mondale had supported laws protecting gays from discrimination, one of the inspirations behind Nunn’s effort to push the Democratic Party rightward.) Once Nunn had bowed out of the 1992 race, he had worked hard to help get Clinton elected, and had helped advise Clinton on military issues during the campaign.42 But their relationship was also awkward and brittle. Clinton viewed Nunn’s support as unpredictable and sometimes fair-weather. He was highly sensitive to perceived snubs, while Nunn was equally sensitive to congressional prerogatives and the threat of executive overreach.

  Gay rights groups would come to see Nunn’s stalwart opposition to gay service as a product of these sensitivities and resentments. “Nunn’s basic problem with this issue was not the issue but that he was passed over for a job,” said Urvashi Vaid, “and he turned his fury on the administration as a way of punishing them.” Perhaps Nunn’s opposition to gay rights should not have been surprising, Vaid said, but his vehemence on this topic didn’t seem explainable even by his record of anti-gay sentiment. “Why did Sam Nunn suddenly become a crusader against this, holding hearings, going to submarines to talk about close quarters?” she asked rhetorically, suggesting that it was motivated in large part by his sense of being snubbed.43

  But as Vaid has also acknowledged, gay rights groups faced several challenges that they did not meet successfully during the war over gay service. They underestimated both the vehemence of opposition to homosexuality in the United States and the organizing will and know-how of the religious right, and they consequently took insufficient steps to formulate a successful battle plan. Their overconfidence was exacerbated by assurances from Clinton and his team, conveyed through David Mixner, that lifting the gay ban “won’t be a big deal.” Yet the well-oiled machinery of the religious right outnumbered, outflanked, outspent, and overwhelmed any semblance of organized lobbying by the gay movement. The methodical anti-gay organizing by Christian conservatives, which took off nationally starting just days after Clinton’s election, would prove impossible to best. Gay groups developed their own coalitions, but even their Hollywood dollars and political know-how, buffed by decades of anti-war organizing skills, could not match the spiritually and culturally inspired tactics of the anti-gay lobby and the vast telecommunications technology of the New Christian Right. As one gay rights organizer put it, gays were lobbying “the old-fashioned way,” writing letters and setting up meetings with their members of Congress.44 They had nothing like the three to four hundred thousand American churches on which the religious right could draw to mobilize voters and rein in recalcitrant politicians. Liberals had been shut out of the White House for a generation, and their sudden return to power meant a double whammy: overconfidence that the road to justice was suddenly an easy ride and inad
equate experience in how to actually navigate the halls of power.

  Short on money, broadsided by resistance, and low on numbers, the anti-ban forces belatedly scrambled to organize, unable to avoid the attendant turf wars that so often accompany shifts in power, tactics, and strategy. It wouldn’t be until February 1993 that Mixner hastily brought together the Campaign for Military Service, an alliance made up of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a dozen other pro-gay groups. With talented gay rights lawyers like Tom Stoddard and Chai Feldblum at the helm, the group did all it could to work privately and publicly to build support for reform. They hoped that, whatever was happening in Nunn’s dramatic hearings, they would be able to convince enough Democrats to go with a plan that would keep the reins of control in the executive branch and not relinquish it to Congress, where a statutory gay ban would be far harder to reverse down the line.45

  But it was too late. Supporters of gay service could not build the momentum they needed, and ultimately no effective strategy emerged to revive their cause after the first round had been lost. Instead champions of reform were dismissed by at least one commentator as “career activists, urban reformers, marchers in whatever good cause needs a champion, liberated women and men, AIDs [sic] demonstrators, a fair number of members of Congress and the trailing media band,” and if that wasn’t enough, they were “politically correct groups and individuals whose military experience and insights are about the equal of Clinton’s.” Even the few retired military officers who supported letting gays serve admitted privately that pressure from former colleagues in the military was too much for them to brook and they were unwilling to publicly oppose the military brass.46