Heart: An American Medical Odyssey (14 page)

After winning the election, Bush began to put together his cabinet. One of the choices he made was to nominate former senator John Tower of Texas to be secretary of defense. Initially there was a general consensus that Tower could be easily confirmed. For many years, he had served on and been chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the committee that would have to approve his confirmation. Furthermore, no senator nominated for a position in the executive branch had ever been denied confirmation by his former colleagues.

But this time would be different. During the confirmation process, questions were raised about Senator Tower’s fitness to serve based on reports of womanizing and drinking, and in early March, the Senate voted not to confirm Tower to be secretary of defense. A majority of the members of the Armed Services Committee opposed his nomination.

The Tower vote was scheduled for Thursday, March 9, and that morning before the vote, I received a phone call from John Sununu, President Bush’s chief of staff. John asked me to go to the White House after the vote and meet with him and General Brent Scowcroft, the president’s national security adviser, to discuss what the administration’s next move should be. I agreed to the meeting, assuming they wanted to consult with me because I had previously been in their situation, recruiting cabinet members for President Ford, and because I was a senior member of the congressional leadership.

We met in Sununu’s office, the same one I had during the Ford administration twelve years before. They began by asking if I had any recommendation for someone to serve as secretary of defense. I offered a recommendation, which was quickly rejected. Then Brent said, “What about you? Would you consider taking the job?” This was not a question I had expected. After a general discussion of the subject, I indicated I would have to think about it and discuss it with my family. We agreed that if I decided I wanted to pursue the matter further, I would call John the next morning and he would arrange for me to talk directly with the president.

That evening at home as Lynne and I discussed the possibility of my becoming secretary of defense, I received a phone call from my old friend Jim Baker who had just been tapped for secretary of state. Jim urged me to accept the defense job and indicated he had recommended me. I must admit I was intrigued with the proposition. I had an abiding interest in national security issues. I had held George Bush in high regard since I first met him in 1969 and believed he was going to be a good president. Jim, Brent, and I had been friends since we had all worked together for President Ford, and I liked the idea of the three of us working together in the top national security positions in the new administration.
On the downside, if I accepted the post, it would most likely mean the end of my career in elective office. I had devoted the previous ten years to working my way up to the number-two position in the House GOP leadership and could look forward to becoming the leader when Bob Michel retired. But the job of secretary of defense was enormously important to the nation and very attractive in its own right. I would be responsible for some four million men and women: two million active duty, one million reservists, and one million civilians. I would be second to the president in the chain of command if we were called on to use force. As secretary I would be responsible for overseeing a larger portion of the intelligence community than the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. As a statutory member of the National Security Council, I would be involved in all of the major national security issues of the time.

I decided that Thursday evening that I was definitely interested in taking the next step, and on Friday morning I called Sununu. We agreed that I would meet the president at noon in the family quarters of the White House.

Our meeting was held in the president’s private office on the second floor of the residence, where the cabinet used to meet before the West Wing was built. As I walked in I noticed the famous painting on the wall. It’s called
The Peacemakers
, and it shows President Lincoln meeting with General Ulysses S. Grant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Admiral David Porter at City Point, Virginia, just before the end of the Civil War. My great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, had served throughout the war as a captain in the Twenty-First Ohio, a volunteer infantry regiment. In 1864–1865 he had served under General Sherman and been with him in the siege of Atlanta and on the March to the Sea. In May 1865, after the war ended, he had marched in the Grand Review, a great military parade in Washington. I wondered to myself what he would have thought about his great-grandson meeting in the White House with the president to discuss becoming secretary of defense.

After the president greeted me warmly, we covered a wide range of topics,
including his priorities for the Defense Department. We talked about procurement reform, Central America, arms control issues, and the Soviets. I wanted to make sure he knew about my misspent youth. I had flunked out of Yale twice and twice been arrested for driving under the influence in my early twenties. I had the impression that he already knew about these episodes. He assured me he did not believe they would create any problem for my confirmation. (The FBI had known about them before I was cleared to work at the White House in the Nixon and Ford administrations.)

One subject that didn’t come up was my health. It had occurred to me by now that George Bush’s question in January about how I was doing may have had a motive I didn’t suspect at the time. He was already thinking of me for the Defense Department, and by way of friendly inquiry at the GOP leadership meeting had satisfied himself that I was up to the job.

Scowcroft and Sununu joined us for the latter part of the meeting, and then I returned to my office on Capitol Hill. Less than an hour later, the president called and offered me the defense position, and I readily accepted. That afternoon we announced the nomination from the White House briefing room.

The entire process of confirmation from announcement to final vote in the Senate took only one week, near record time, from March 10 to 17. The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was warm and friendly. I was introduced by my colleagues from Wyoming, Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop. I had worked with many of the members over the years when I was at the White House and in Congress. The chairman, Sam Nunn of Georgia, arranged to have my misspent youth discussed in closed session. Senator John Glenn of Ohio asked how I had been able to “clean up my act” as a young man, and I explained that I had gotten married and given up hanging out in bars.

The committee was interested in the status of my health. My cardiologist, Dr. Allan Ross, submitted a letter to the committee summarizing my history of coronary artery disease. He wrote that I had undergone
successful coronary bypass surgery in August 1988 and that my high cholesterol level had been successfully treated with lovastatin, a new cholesterol-lowering drug. He reported that I had “no functional limitations whatsoever, and a prognosis not substantially different from men of the same age group without such a previous cardiologic history.” He added, “Finally and additionally, he takes no medication which should be expected to influence his mood or intellectual performance. I see no medical reason for him not to perform well in the highest and most sensitive of public offices.” Both the Armed Services Committee and the entire Senate voted unanimously to confirm my nomination to be the seventeenth secretary of defense.

Of all the jobs I’ve held, if I had to choose just one as my favorite I would have to say secretary of defense. There are several reasons that my time at Defense stands out in memory. The US military is one of the finest institutions in the world, and it was a very special privilege to lead it from 1989 to 1993 as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and we rolled back Saddam Hussein’s aggression in the Persian Gulf. If I were asked to design a commander in chief for that set of circumstances, he would look a lot like George H. W. Bush: combat veteran from World War II, director of the CIA, ambassador to China and the UN, and vice president. He was a great boss. He made clear what he expected, set clear objectives, then trusted the members of his national security team to get the job done. When one of us had to make a tough or controversial decision, he would give his complete support and never second-guess. I feel proud and privileged to have been a part of his national security team.

I am certain that everyone who ever served as secretary of defense will tell you that his time at the Pentagon was special, but the period from 1989 to 1993 was undeniably so because of all that we had to deal with as the Cold War ended. The president had to manage a very delicate situation with the Soviet Union as the Berlin Wall came down, Russian forces withdrew from Eastern Europe, Germany was reunified, the Soviet Union imploded, and there was an attempted coup in Moscow.

All of these developments had major ramifications for the Defense Department and the US military. The liberation of Eastern Europe led to a surge of interest from nations that once belonged to the old Warsaw Pact in joining NATO. At the same time, the commitment the United States had maintained throughout the Cold War, to have ten divisions deployed in Western Europe within ten days of a decision by NATO to mobilize against a Soviet invasion, was no longer necessary. For decades we had maintained several army divisions forward-deployed in Europe and more at home ready to deploy. We now were able to plan to reduce our overall force structure by 25 percent, which included cutting the army from eighteen to twelve active divisions and closing a number of bases at home and abroad. After a complete review of our nuclear inventory and strategy within the Department of Defense, we enabled the president to take the initiative to put forth bold proposals to reduce our tactical and strategic nuclear forces, which President Mikhail Gorbachev and the Russians then matched.

The rapidly changing circumstances also required dramatic new thinking about our national security strategy. We shifted from focusing on having to fight an all-out global war with the Soviets to a strategy of being able to defend the regions of the world where vital US interests were at stake. We also needed to maintain the quality force we had inherited from the Reagan administration, in terms of both personnel and equipment. At the same time, we had to persuade the Congress that while budget cuts were in order, they had to be done in a manner that wouldn’t do long-term damage to our military capabilities. The Congress had to be persuaded to avoid a meat-axe approach that would sacrifice essential items; their thinking was sometimes driven more by political considerations than military requirements.

In the midst of all these changes in our strategic situation, Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, invaded Kuwait in early August 1990. With little notice and within a matter of hours, Iraqi forces swallowed up Kuwait and were poised on the border between that country and Saudi Arabia. If Saddam continued south and occupied the eastern portion of the Saudi Kingdom, he would control a significant percentage of the world’s
oil production and reserves. Saudi Arabia and many of the other Gulf countries looked to the United States as the guarantor of their security. The Iraqi aggression generated the first major crisis in the post–Cold War world and placed significant demands on President Bush and his national security team.

On the first weekend of the crisis, the National Security Council met at Camp David to review our options, including a review with senior officers of our capabilities if we found it necessary to use military force. That Sunday, the president sent me to Saudi Arabia and Egypt to consult with King Fahd and President Mubarak and to seek from them permission to begin deploying US forces to the region. King Fahd agreed to our use of bases in the kingdom but wanted a commitment that we would send enough forces to do the job and that we would leave when it was over, which I gave him. I called the president afterward, and he authorized me to begin the deployment of a force that eventually exceeded five hundred thousand troops. President Mubarak agreed to grant us overflight rights and approved sending our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers through the Suez Canal. Mubarak was very angry with Saddam and volunteered to send two Egyptian divisions to serve alongside the Americans. With the leadership of President Bush, the enormous capability of our military, and support at home and abroad, Operation Desert Storm was a great success.

•  •  •

The period from August 1990 to March 1991 was one of the most intense of my career. It was a special privilege to be part of the Bush national security team and to be responsible for the men and women of the US military. They were superb. From the standpoint of my health, these years marked a period that was relatively trouble free. I am sometimes tempted to call them the “golden years,” when my medical condition had significantly improved as a result of my quadruple bypass and the availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

I left the Defense Department in January 1993 and the following summer took an eight-thousand-mile road trip. The ultimate objective
was to meet some friends for a week of fly-fishing for steelhead on a remote section of the Dean River in British Columbia. En route, I stopped for speeches in West Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Wyoming. For the first time in a long time I was alone—no staff and no security. And I was driving.

I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and particularly about running for president. By then, I had worked for three presidents—Nixon, Ford, and George H. W. Bush—and watched a fourth, Reagan, up close as part of the House Republican leadership team for eight years. I had served as White House chief of staff and done well in one of the toughest and most difficult assignments as secretary of defense in wartime. I believed I knew what was needed in a president and that I had the experience and knowledge to do the job well.

As secretary of defense, I had not been in a position to be active politically. By tradition, the defense secretary stays away from partisan political activities. I made a decision as I returned to private life that I wanted to get involved in the 1993–1994 election cycle. As a midterm election and because of a lot of good work building the party, 1994 looked like a potentially good year for congressional Republicans.