In My Time (26 page)

The result was the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, formally known as the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 and named after Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and Democratic Congressman Bill Nichols. The purpose of it was to streamline the chain of command and to emphasize “jointness” in an effort to mitigate interservice rivalries. Although the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 95–0 and the House by 383–27 and was signed by President Reagan on October 1, the administration was less than enthusiastic about the legislation. Caspar Weinberger, who was secretary of defense, called me to protest. I understood that no administration wants to be told how to run the Pentagon, but I felt this was one case where Congress had properly asserted itself.

As it would turn out—though I could not have guessed it at the time I was supporting and voting for Goldwater-Nichols—I would be the first secretary of defense to serve a full term under the act.

ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1984, while I was in the Capitol Building, I had a sense that something wasn’t right with my heart. I had no pain. I’ve never had pain with a heart attack. But I knew enough to ride the elevator down to the physician’s office. The doctors there put me in an ambulance to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where I spent several days
recuperating from my second heart attack. I rested at home for about a month after that, going to Capitol Hill only once. On October 2, the Wyoming Wilderness Bill was up, and hard as I’d worked for it, I wanted to cast my vote. Two weeks later, I headed home to campaign for my fourth term in Congress.

After the election I decided it was time for me to find a doctor with whom I could establish a long-term relationship. I needed a guide through my coronary artery disease, and I wanted a good one. Lynne sought advice from John Pekkanen, an award-winning journalist at
Washingtonian
magazine who specialized in health. One of the cardiologists he recommended was Allan Ross at George Washington University Hospital, who agreed to take me on.

In 1988, after I had a third heart attack, Dr. Ross thought it was time for bypass surgery. I agreed and scheduled the operation for August 19, the day after the Republican convention. I’d been appointed chairman of the Rules Committee at the convention, a responsibility I definitely wanted to fulfill. I was on Spanish Plaza on the sweltering day when our nominee, George H. W. Bush, announced from the deck of the steamboat
Natchez
that Dan Quayle would be his running mate, and I was in New Orleans to get phone calls from political friends frantic at how badly the vice presidential nominee had been rolled out. One of my clearest memories, however, is of sitting with Larry King on the stairs in the convention arena that led up to the CNN booth. He had recently had open heart surgery, and at my request, he explained his operation and his recovery step-by-step.

I left the convention on August 18 and watched George H. W. Bush give a terrific acceptance speech while I was being prepped for surgery at George Washington University Hospital. The next day, Benjamin Aaron, a talented surgeon who had also operated on Ronald Reagan, performed quadruple bypass surgery. My recovery went well. In the fall I was back on the campaign trail running for my sixth term in Congress, and after the election, I ran unopposed to become minority whip, the second-ranking position in the Republican leadership.

By Christmastime I was skiing.

T
he Senate had never turned down a nominee to a new president’s initial cabinet, nor had it ever turned down one of its own—and John Tower wasn’t just any former senator. He had served in that body for nearly a quarter century and been chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the very committee in charge of his nomination. He seemed like a sure bet for confirmation when President-elect George H. W. Bush chose him to be secretary of defense.

But then came allegations of drinking and womanizing, and Tower’s prospects sank. On Thursday, March 9, 1989, the day of the Senate vote on the Tower nomination, I got a morning phone call from John Sununu, President Bush’s chief of staff. The White House knew it didn’t have the votes for confirmation, Sununu said, and the president wanted to move forward quickly with a choice for the job who could be confirmed and get to work. Could I come by the White House and offer some advice on a Plan B?

Sununu wanted to meet at four in the afternoon, but I had a conflict, an appearance on the television show
Evans & Novak
that I had
agreed to tape. I said I would stop by the White House afterward. At the
Evans & Novak
taping, the Tower nomination’s imminent defeat and the question of whom the president would turn to next were the main topics. Neither Bob Novak nor Rowland Evans asked me who I thought the next nominee would be, but as I sat listening, cameras rolling, they discussed the next steps with each other. With an air of great authority, Novak declared, “I’ve got it, guaranteed, it’s going to be Bobby Inman!” After the announcement of my nomination the next day, Evans and Novak had to scrap the show and scramble to tape a new one. Novak, whom I liked a lot, despite his irascibility, later said that he was furious with me, but, in my defense, it’s worth noting that nobody had asked for my prediction.

After the taping I headed down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill to the White House, where I met with Sununu and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft in John’s office in the southwest corner of the West Wing, the same office I had occupied when I was chief of staff more than a decade earlier. By this time John Tower’s nomination had been voted down, 53 to 47, and Brent began the conversation by asking my advice on possible replacements. “What about Rumsfeld?” I asked. Don had been secretary of defense before and was a man of enormous talent. That idea was quickly rejected, though, because there was a history of hard feelings that had been made worse by the New Hampshire primary in 1988. Rumsfeld had endorsed Bob Dole the weekend before the primary, which George H. W. Bush then won. I never heard Bush say anything negative about Rumsfeld, but Sununu made it clear at this meeting that Rumsfeld was a nonstarter.

Not long into the conversation, Scowcroft asked me directly, “What about you? Would you consider it?” I wasn’t completely surprised. I had begun to catch on that there was something going on here beyond just consulting me for my views. We talked about the job of secretary of defense, its importance, and the president’s priorities for the department. I told them I needed some time to think about it and to talk to my family, and we agreed I would call Sununu in the morning to tell him whether I wanted to take the next step. If I did, they would arrange
for me to see the president. This was a pretty standard way of handling big personnel decisions such as this one. A president’s staff never wants to put him in the position of offering someone a job until they know his offer will be accepted.

Lynne and I were scheduled to have dinner that night at La Colline restaurant, near the Capitol, with old friends from Wyoming, Tom and Marta Stroock. Tom had recommended me for admission to Yale thirty years earlier, and despite my less than stellar record there, we’d stayed close friends. I wasn’t able to talk about the White House meeting at the dinner, and I couldn’t talk about it with Lynne on the way home, either. As the House Republican whip I had a car and driver, and I didn’t want to discuss something this sensitive in front of anyone except my family.

When we got home and I finally told Lynne, she was suitably impressed with the poker face I’d managed through the evening. Our daughter Mary, home from Colorado College on spring vacation, told us that while we had been at dinner, she had answered a call from a White House operator. Secretary of State Jim Baker was trying to reach me. As the three of us sat around the kitchen table, I called Jim back. He talked about how well we had worked together during the Ford years when I was chief of staff and he was running President Ford’s 1976 campaign. He stressed the importance of the Defense job, told me he had recommended me to the president for it, and said he hoped I would take it. I appreciated the call and told him I would sleep on it and get back to him in the morning.

AS LYNNE AND I talked more that night, we went over the choice between staying in the House of Representatives or leaving to become secretary of defense. As the whip I was the second-ranking Republican in the House. Bob Michel, a mentor and a man for whom I have tremendous respect, was the minority leader. There was a good chance that I would become the GOP leader myself if I stayed in the House, but that might be a long time away. I was a buffer of sorts between the Old Guard, personified by Michel, and the New Guard, the Young Turks, led by Newt Gingrich. As long as I was there, Bob was comfortable
staying where he was, so as I looked ahead at the next four years, the choice boiled down to spending them as Bob’s understudy in the House or spending them as secretary of defense. As much as I loved the House and my time there, it really wasn’t a tough decision.

I had no way to predict the magnitude of the historic events we were about to live through—the liberation of Panama, the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the defense of Saudi Arabia and the liberation of Kuwait in Desert Shield and Desert Storm—but issues of national security and defense were of great interest to me. In Congress I had served for four years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cosponsored the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which reorganized the Department of Defense, and been an active member of the Military Reform Caucus. I knew this would be a critically important job—and it also promised to be fascinating.

The prospect of being able to work for George H. W. Bush and with others such as Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft, who were old friends and for whom I had a lot of respect, was also very appealing. I had to face the fact that if I went to the Pentagon my career in elective politics was probably over, but I was willing to accept that for the opportunity and high honor of leading the Department of Defense. I knew then what has been affirmed for me so many times in the two decades since—that the men and women of the U.S. military are among the finest Americans you will ever meet.

The next morning I called John Sununu and told him I was interested and wanted to take the next step. He arranged for me to meet privately with the president at noon. In order to keep the meeting a secret, Sununu asked me to come into the White House through the Diplomatic Entrance, which faces the South Lawn and doesn’t ordinarily have news cameras focused on it.

A little before twelve I walked through the Diplomatic Reception Room, turned left down the ground-floor hallway past the portraits of former first ladies, and got on the small elevator that goes up to the White House’s private quarters. At the top, one of the White House ushers met me and showed me to the Treaty Room, the president’s second-floor
office, a room where the cabinet had met before the West Wing was built, but that since the early twentieth century has been a sitting room or private office. The room was dominated by
The Peacemakers,
a large painting of President Lincoln meeting with Generals Sherman and Grant and Admiral David Porter in 1865 aboard the
River Queen,
anchored off City Point, Virginia. I thought for a moment of my great-grandfather who served under General Sherman and named one of his sons for the famous Civil War leader. What would he have thought of his great-grandson there in the White House residence meeting with the president about leading the nation’s military?

As President Bush greeted me genially, I remembered when I’d first encountered him twenty years before. I’d been working for Congressman Bill Steiger of Wisconsin and Bush was a rising star in the House GOP. Our paths had crossed again during the Ford administration when he became CIA director the same day I became White House chief of staff. I remembered Jerry Ford singling out George Bush, as well as Don Rumsfeld, as the future of the Republican Party.

Some weeks earlier, about the time the Tower nomination’s troubles were becoming apparent, President Bush had attended a meeting with the House Republican leadership in the Capitol. As the meeting was breaking up, the president had crossed the room to speak to me. “How are you doing, Dick? How are you feeling?” he asked. It had been eight months since my bypass surgery, and I told him I was feeling fine, fully recovered, and had spent a week skiing in Vail during Christmas. As I entered the president’s private office that day, it occurred to me he might already have been thinking about me as a possible replacement for Senator Tower when he’d made those inquiries into my health.

President Bush began by talking about the importance of the job of secretary of defense, about what he was looking for in a defense secretary, about his priorities, and about some of the problems the next secretary would face. We discussed issues like Central America, arms control, and procurement reform. During the course of our conversation, I raised two issues I thought he needed to be aware of. The first was my academic record at Yale, and, in particular, the fact that I’d been
kicked out twice. Second, I wanted him to know that I had a police record, that I’d been arrested twice for driving under the influence in my twenties. The president assured me that he didn’t believe my misspent youth would cause any trouble for a potential confirmation. Governor Sununu and Brent Scowcroft joined us for the last part of what I thought was a very good meeting, but I left and headed for my office on Capitol Hill without having been offered the job.