In My Time (28 page)

When I took the podium that morning, I knew I would be asked about the
Post
story. It was the first question out of the gate. “Are we in fact close to a compromise on those two weapons systems?” a reporter asked. “I have as yet made no decision,” I answered. “To say that a compromise is near, I think would be premature.”

Then the second question: “General Welch, the chief of staff of the air force, apparently has been up on the Hill working this program himself. Is that a change of policy for the Defense Department to have a service chief negotiate his own strategic system?”

I answered directly. “General Welch was freelancing. He was not speaking for the department. He was obviously up there on his own hook, so to speak.” Then I was asked whether I accepted this. “No, I’m not happy with it, frankly. I think it’s inappropriate for a uniformed officer to be in a position where he is in fact negotiating an arrangement. I have not had an opportunity yet to talk to him about it. I’ve been at the White House all morning. I will have the opportunity to discuss it with him and I will make known to him my displeasure. Everybody’s entitled to one mistake.”

My statement sent a clear message through the building about who was in charge. And that’s what I had intended. I found out later that Welch believed he had gotten approval to go ahead with the Hill talks from Will Taft, the department’s outgoing deputy secretary, who had been acting secretary until I was confirmed, and I came to regard Welch as a fine officer. But in the meantime I had signaled my intention to exercise control and authority over the Department of Defense.

I TOOK OFFICE EXACTLY thirty-nine days before I had to present my first defense budget to the Congress. Although I had inherited this first budget, I was determined to master it, knowing that being able to answer any and all questions about it was the best way to get off to a good start. Being knowledgeable about the budget during that first
session with my former colleagues on the Hill helped set a tone for my long-term relations with the Congress.

For subsequent budgets, we established a unique arrangement for preparing the department’s requests. Typically cabinet and agency heads negotiate for their budgets with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but during my time at Defense, the president and I would sit down at the beginning of the process with Dick Darman, the director of OMB, and agree on an overall top line for Defense. This arrangement allowed Darman to get a fix on the largest discretionary item in the budget so that he’d know what was left for everyone else. It allowed me to avoid the give-and-take with OMB and know exactly how much I had to work with. As long as I stayed within that agreed-upon top line, I was free, with few exceptions, to put together the defense budget.

My strongest ally in the Congress was Democrat Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, whom I’d gotten to know when we served together in the House. Murtha was chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and at the beginning of each legislative session, I would invite him over for breakfast in my office at the Pentagon. We would discuss which items were high priority for each of us and put together a back-of-the-envelope outline of a bill.

Murtha was a master legislator. Once he got behind a proposal, it usually got approved. One year he arranged to pass the defense appropriations bill worth many billions of dollars on a voice vote without amendment. At the end of each session, the bill enacted was very close to what we had agreed to back in January at the beginning of the process.

The years I’d spent as a member of Congress, most of the time as a member of the leadership, were invaluable in working on the issues important to the Defense Department during my tenure as secretary. The friendships developed over ten years were vital in everything we did on the Hill, from the annual appropriations and authorization, to winning the fight over the resolution to go to war to liberate Kuwait. But I don’t mean to suggest that all was always clear sailing with the Congress.

Every year, for example, I tried to kill the V-22 Osprey, a Marine
Corps aircraft, but the Congress funded it. The Marines had decided before I became secretary that they needed something to replace their Vietnam-era helicopters. The problem was, instead of buying new helicopters, they decided they needed the Osprey, which would take off and land like a helicopter, but once airborne its rotors would swivel so it could fly like a conventional airplane. The requirement used to justify this project was that when landing under fire on an enemy-held beach, the Marines needed an aircraft that could move from ship to shore faster than a helicopter could manage.

There were several problems with this approach. The tilt-rotor technology was difficult to develop and the cost was at least double that of a conventional helicopter. By the time I arrived at the Pentagon, the project was significantly behind schedule.

I realized early on as secretary that I wasn’t likely to succeed in killing the Osprey, but I went ahead and knocked it out of my budget each year anyway. I figured that if the Congress was busy fighting to restore the Osprey, members wouldn’t have time to go after something I really cared about.

Years later, when I was vice president, I landed in Air Force Two at New River Marine Corps Air Station in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where a large contingent of V-22 Ospreys is based. As I disembarked from my aircraft, the Marines arranged for two of their Ospreys to do a flyover, very low and very slow, right over my head. I smiled at the gentle reminder that the United States Marine Corps had prevailed in the battle of the Osprey.

AS I WRITE THIS, looking back twenty years and more, it’s clear that 1989 was a turning point in modern history. The Cold War was ending, but the great historical change under way wasn’t so clear from the vantage point we had in March of that year. As I took office, there was a strong push from some in Congress urging us to make significant cuts in our defense budget. I was wary of cutting too deeply. Although we had seen initial signs of change in the Soviet Union, there was no denying that they still had thousands of missiles aimed at the United
States. They had some six hundred thousand troops stationed in Eastern Europe. I felt strongly that it would be irresponsible to make deep cuts or changes to our strategic defense systems on the promise of change from the Soviets.

I was skeptical about whether Mikhail Gorbachev was the agent of change that many perceived him to be. When he had visited the United States in December 1987, Lynne and I were invited to the state dinner in his honor at the White House. I was seated on one side of First Lady Nancy Reagan and Gorbachev on the other, and I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions. Although he had begun making efforts to open up the Soviet Union’s economy, he still seemed to think that communism was a workable system. He also bristled when I asked him how he came to be general secretary of the Party. I told him that in our system the job of secretary of agriculture, which he had held, wasn’t normally a path to the presidency. He said he had been much more than an agriculture secretary and detailed his service in the Communist Party leadership structure. I came away from the evening thinking that he wasn’t as serious a reformer as some believed.

My view hadn’t changed by 1989. But the month after I took office, I learned an important lesson about the difference between sharing your view when you’re a member of Congress and sharing it when you’re secretary of defense. Appearing on CNN’s
Evans & Novak,
I said I believed Gorbachev’s efforts would “ultimately fail.” I hadn’t been off the air long when I got a call from Jim Baker telling me I was out of my lane, that my comments, now that I was a member of the administration, would have a direct impact on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jim was right. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Eight years later I was at a reception at Robert Mosbacher’s home in Houston when George H. W. Bush, a former president now, told me he had someone he wanted me to talk to. He took me by the arm and walked me into the dining room, where a lone person sat at the table—Mikhail Gorbachev. The president said he thought we should know each other better, seated me next to Gorbachev, and left. On that fall afternoon for a half hour or so, the two of us, with help from
an interpreter, talked about the bygone days when we had been adversaries.

I must give Gorbachev credit. He could have done as his predecessors did and used force to preserve the U.S.S.R. The fact that he did not is enough to make him one of the twentieth century’s historic figures.

ONE OF THE FIRST challenges on my watch as defense secretary was a problem we had inherited from the Reagan administration—Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega. America had significant interests at stake in Panama. Although President Carter had signed the treaty turning over control of the Panama Canal to the government of Panama, the turnover would not take effect until 1999. In March 1989, America was still in charge, and protecting the rights of transit through the canal was our responsibility. We also had twelve thousand American troops stationed in Panama, and I was responsible for their welfare.

Noriega was a thug, guilty of a long string of outrageous actions, and he was under indictment by federal grand juries in Florida for money laundering and drug trafficking. In early May 1989, when Noriega’s preferred candidates were defeated at the ballot box by presidential candidate Guillermo Endara and others, Noriega threw out the results of the election and sent his “dignity battalions” into the streets to bloody the opposition. Newscasts in the United States carried footage of one of the opposition’s vice presidential candidates, Guillermo “Billy” Ford, trying to flee along a street in Panama City as he was beaten by Noriega’s goons.

We weren’t prepared at this point for a major military action in Panama, but we needed to generate options for the president. The Panama Canal was a strategic asset, there were American lives at stake, and President Bush wanted to make clear that our country’s patience was running thin.

Our plan was to send a clear message by deploying an additional three thousand U.S. troops into Panama, but we ran into an obstacle in
the person of our commanding general, Fred Woerner, who headed up Southern Command. He basically told us no thanks when we informed him we’d be sending reinforcements. His response was the same when we told him we would be sending some of our special operations forces into Panama to be ready in case we needed them. Not necessary, he said. Having a general who wouldn’t accept reinforcements was clearly a problem.

After a conversation with Brent Scowcroft, I realized Woerner was going to have to be replaced. At about the same time my old friend Jack Marsh invited me for lunch. Jack was now the secretary of the army, a job he loved and was terrific at. He was a very effective back channel for me a number of times when I was secretary of defense. Marsh knew I would be looking for a replacement soon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Crowe. “Have you thought about Max Thurman?” he asked. Thurman was currently serving as commanding general of the Training and Doctrine Command, getting ready to retire in two months. Although he wasn’t well-known outside the army, he was a legend inside it. He was a bachelor, married to the army, really. He’d been heavily involved in creating our all-volunteer force. And he got things done. If you gave Max an assignment, he might break a lot of china along the way, but he would deliver. He carried the well-earned nickname Maxatollah.

I was intrigued and asked Marsh to set up a session where I could talk with Thurman face-to-face. A few weeks later, he joined us for lunch in Marsh’s office, and he didn’t disappoint. As secretary, I had run into plenty of general officers who told me what they thought I wanted to hear and, frankly, that wasn’t very helpful. Thurman was something completely different. A combination of being near retirement and having a tell-it-straight personality made him direct and forceful. I appreciated it. As I sat in Jack’s office eating my lunch and listening to Thurman, I thought to myself, here is the kind of guy we need in Panama.

Before we could offer him the job I would have to retire Woerner. Telling people they have to go is never pleasant, and firing a four-star general is not something that is done every day. But we had no choice.
I knew from experience that it was more responsible and more honorable to move quickly to make a change when it was clear things weren’t working out. And I knew I owed it to General Woerner to deliver the news directly and in person. I asked my military aide, Admiral Bill Owens, to have Woerner make the trip to Washington.

A few days later Woerner and Admiral Crowe took seats at the round table in my office. Looking General Woerner in the eye, I told him, “General, the president has decided to make a change.” He wanted to know why. I told him it wasn’t personal, it was just time for a change. Though he was not pleased with the decision, he understood it was final and handled it with grace and dignity. On July 20 I announced that General Fred Woerner would be retiring and the new CINC, or commander in chief, for Southern Command would be General Max Thurman.

BY THIS TIME, THE summer of 1989, I had pretty well decided that I wanted General Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job unique in the U.S. military. The chairman is not only the senior uniformed officer but also the key link to the civilian leadership, providing military advice to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, and the president. For most of the post–World War II period, the chairman offered only military advice that all the members of the Joint Chiefs concurred in. Unless there was a consensus among the chiefs of the services, the chairman’s hands were tied.

All of that changed with the enactment of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which emphasized the importance of “jointness” (as opposed to service-centered advocacy) among the services and made the chairman the principal military advisor, freeing him from the constraint of offering only the consensus views of the chiefs. I had cosponsored the legislation in the House, believing it provided badly needed reforms.