The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (14 page)

After lunch, he rises to speak. “I can remember a time when this many people wouldn't dare to be seen at a Republican function in Austin, Texas,” he begins. “It wasn't safe. And it certainly wasn't politically rewarding. …”

It's a short, off-the-cuff speech, remembering the old days, urging the party to recruit good people and put up a fight next year. “You can't win a race simply with money alone if your candidate is a turkey,” he says. He offers to help. “You can count on me,” he says, his voice suddenly rolling like prairie thunder, “because that old political carcass that was hung by a lynch mob from an oak tree in Washington last March has now been cut down and is still alive.”

The Republicans stand up and cheer.

Later, several women ask to be photographed with him. “Your reputation may be hereby sullied,” he tells them as they pose. “You may wind up in
National Enquirer.”

At midafternoon he boards a private plane and flies on to Tyler for another fund-raiser, this one a $50-a-head reception in the garden of a stately mansion. He spent six years in Tyler during his itinerate boyhood as a Methodist preacher's son, and about 200 of the party faithful have gathered among the begonias and caladiums to greet him. While the katydids scream in the towering oaks, his friends recall old times.

“I've known John since he was just a kid running for the Senate,” says Ginny Pearson. “The party was small then, and we did a lot of things, and most of the things we did were wrong.”

Mr. Tower and Wilton Fair were Boy Scouts together. “I was a senior patrol leader, and he was a tenderfoot,” Mr. Fair says.

Mr. Tower has known some of them almost all his life, but he hasn't been with them in a long time. “Before the end of the evening, I want the old Hogg Junior High bunch to get together and sing our school song,” he says.

In the foyer, on an Oriental rug, surrounded by antique Chinese porcelain and women looking worried, a TV crew has set up lights and cameras. The reporter asks Mr. Tower if he's bitter about what happened to him in Washington.

He sighs a small sigh. He has answered the question many times, before many cameras. He's tired of it. “My clergyman father taught me that bitterness and rancor are more destructive to the person feeling them than to the person they're directed against,” he says. “So I try to avoid that. Life must go on.”

On the plane back to Dallas, Norman Newton, executive director of the Associated Republicans of Texas and ramrod of the fund-raisers, is ecstatic. “What a great day this has been,” he says. “A great day financially, a great day for John…. You have many friends, Senator.”

Another passenger says he's disappointed, though, that the Hogg Junior High song hadn't been sung. So, with twin turbo-engines for accompaniment, Mr. Tower sings:

John Tower had come home.

One night earlier in the summer, Penny Cook turned on the TV in the middle of
Saturday Night Live
. The cast was doing a spoof of
Cheers
. Sitting at the bar was an actor playing her father, John Tower.

“He was getting drunk and putting the move on women,” Mrs. Cook says. “I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I turned the TV off and said, ‘Let it rest.' I know it was a rerun, but. …”

Mrs. Cook's sister, Marian Tower, remembers the night David Letterman read his list of “John Tower's Top 10 Pickup Lines,” and the night Jay Leno said her father “looks like Yoda with a bad haircut.”

“Our family can laugh at just about anything,” she says, “but that really hurt a lot. Just to be sitting and watching TV, trying to get your mind off of what was happening, and then to have the really, really tacky jokes thrown at you. The only time my father really lost his sense of humor about the situation was when the comedians started making jokes.”

The “situation,” of course, was the two-month-long hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee about Mr. Tower's fitness to serve as President Bush's secretary of defense.

“The committee started out questioning my dad about issues of substance,” Mrs. Cook says, “about things he would do in the Defense Department, about his beliefs on certain weapons systems. He answered their questions very well. The committee seemed real satisfied with his answers. We all felt things were fine. We came back to Texas thinking we would be returning to Washington in a week or two for his swearing-in.”

But on Jan. 31, 1989, a conservative political activist named Paul Weyrich testified before the committee that he had seen Mr. Tower drunk and “with women to whom he is not married.” Mr. Weyrich's testimony was never confirmed, but other informants came forward with similar claims. Then the FBI, which already had completed its background check on Mr. Tower, was ordered by Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn to do another. Soon it seemed that half the population of the country was claiming to have spotted Mr. Tower at one time or another swilling booze and chasing skirts from Washington to Geneva to Bergstrom Air Force Base and dallying with a non-existent Russian ballerina in Houston.

“It was bizarre,” Mrs. Cook says. “It was a nightmare. The press would print something about a bad thing he was supposed to have done at a certain time at a certain place, and he would go through his calendar and show that he wasn't even at that place on that day, but that would never get printed. They would just go on to the next allegation. And each new rumor would feed another.”

On March 9, when the Senate voted 53 to 47 not to confirm Mr. Tower, some who voted against him told the press they were worried that Mr. Tower might endanger national security by buddying up to defense contractors, drinking too much or pursuing women while in charge of the military forces. His defenders claimed the vote—which had been largely along partisan lines—had less to do with Mr. Tower's alleged moral lapses than with the desire of the Senate's Democratic majority to embarrass the new Republican president, and with Sen. Nunn's own presidential ambitions.

“I am inclined to question the use of raw FBI files and uncorroborated allegations, made in many instances by anonymous accusers,” Mr. Tower says now, “and I am told by those who have reviewed the FBI files—I have not seen them—that the testimony of the people interviewed was overwhelmingly favorable.”

Whatever the senators' motives had been for rejecting him, Mr. Tower decided to leave Washington. “No public figure in my memory,” he said at the time, “has been subjected to such a far-reaching and thorough investigation nor had his human foibles bared to such intensive and demeaning public scrutiny. And yet there is no finding that I have ever breached established legal and ethical standards nor been derelict in my duty.” It was his plan, he said, “to load up my 1972 Dodge Charger 400 Magnum with all my possessions, mattress strapped to the roof…and head back to Texas.”

“John is a very
decent
man,” says Dorothy Heyser, his friend who sat behind him in the hearing room day after day. “And when you're decent, and you know you've told the truth, and someone lies or twists your comments, what
can
you do? How
do
you fight it?”

The Senate's vote was a sharp blow to George Bush's new administration and a deep hurt to Mr. Tower's family and friends. “It was like a death after a long illness,” says Martha Kirkendall, long-time manager of Mr. Tower's Dallas office.

Mr. Tower says it was simply politics. “That's Washington. It happens that way sometimes.”

In 1988, John Tower reported to the Armed Services Committee that he earned $665,277 in consulting and director fees, most of it from defense firms, $74,000 for making speeches, $50,000 for lecturing to political science classes at Southern Methodist University, and $48,743 in federal pensions.

Last December, when President-elect Bush asked him to run the Pentagon, he canceled his consulting contracts, resigned his corporate directorships, disbanded his Dallas consulting firm, closed down his offices in Dallas and Washington, took a leave of absence from his position as distinguished lecturer at SMU and prepared to move to the Pentagon, where he would earn a salary of $99,500 a year, but control one-third of the trillion-dollar federal budget.

“There is no question this is the summit of his experiences, one that he was looking for all during his career,” said Paul Eggers, Mr. Tower's longtime friend and Dallas business partner, when President Bush announced the appointment.

Indeed, during his years in the Senate, Mr. Tower had made national defense policy his special field of expertise. He rose to become the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, and hoped a Ronald Reagan victory in the 1980 election might mean the defense secretariat for him. That hope was squelched, however, when the voters gave the Republicans a majority in the Senate, in addition to the White House. For the first time in Sen. Tower's 20-year tenure, his party was running things, and suddenly he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill.

“It wouldn't have been practical to remove him from the chairmanship of such an important committee to make him secretary of defense,” says Mrs. Kirkendall. “We found out later that Caspar Weinberger was Reagan's absolute, only choice for secretary of defense anyway. Nobody else was even considered. But Sen. Tower would have welcomed the opportunity, and we had a few weeks of uncertainty.”

In 1984, Sen. Tower announced that he was “burned out” and would retire from the Senate the following year, at the end of his fourth term. He yearned for privacy and freedom, he says, but his return to private life kept getting postponed. Only two weeks after he left the Senate, Secretary of State George Shultz asked him to head the American side of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Geneva, a post he held for 14 months. And only eight months after his resignation on April 1,1986, President Reagan asked him to head the Iran-Contra review board that became popularly known as the Tower Commission.

He didn't enjoy the job, but the commission issued a tough report, criticizing the president for his lack of knowledge and control of the activities of Lt. Col. Oliver North and his associates, and recommending changes in the way the National Security Council had been operating. When he presented the report to President Reagan in February 1987, Mr. Tower was weary, emotionally drained and ready for a change of scene.

He returned to Dallas and formed a partnership with his old friend Paul Eggers and Timothy C. Greene, an attorney who formerly had been with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department. They incorporated the Tower, Eggers and Greene consulting firm with Mr. Tower as chairman.

The consulting work that the firm did for such defense companies as LTV, Martin-Marietta, Textron and Rockwell International—and which later would fuel the rumors in Washington that the defense secretary-designate was in the pocket of the defense contractors—provided the bulk of his income.

But he also had signed a contract with Cosby Bureau International, a Washington speakers' agency that handles such high-dollar banquet circuit riders as Dan Rather, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Tommy Lasorda; had signed a contract with Little, Brown to write a scholarly study of the conflict between Congress and the White House over foreign policy; was team-teaching a course on foreign policy with Dr. James Brown of the SMU Political Science Department; and, after a British friend recommended him to Robert Maxwell, the flamboyant London press lord who was becoming a heavy player in the American publishing industry, Mr. Tower became chairman of Brassey's Defense Publications, a Maxwell-owned publisher of technical defense journals.

When Mr. Tower helped him acquire
Armed Forces Journal
in 1987, Mr. Maxwell named him chairman of that publication as well. And in November 1988, when Mr. Maxwell paid $2.7 billion for Macmillan, Inc., one of America's largest publishing houses, he placed Mr. Tower on its board.

Private life was treating Mr. Tower fine. Then he heeded the siren call of George Bush.

“When they asked John to accept that job, he gave up everything,” says Mrs. Heyser. “And he was three months in Washington, living at his own expense, with no income. But he never complained about it. He said, ‘Something will work out.' He couldn't have been more marvelous about it.”

Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole described what happened to Mr. Tower as “an execution.” Mr. Eggers said the Senate gave him “a scar he will carry the rest of his life.” His daughter Marian thinks Mr. Eggers may be right. “This isn't something where you can say, ‘Oh, he's over it,'” she says. “I would guess that he has to wonder every day: ‘Why did this happen?'”

Mr. Tower won't reveal his deeper feelings about the experience. “I'll reflect on it later on,” he says. “I'm still reviewing what happened.” But he has been assigned a special niche in American history—one he never wanted and never expected to occupy. In the 200 years that the Senate has been confirming the president's cabinet appointments, he's only the ninth to be rejected, and the first to be rejected in the first 90 days of a new president's administration.

“The Senate's vote,” he says, “certainly brought to an end my full-time career as a public servant. The most difficult thing for me is turning away from the area that I've focused on for the last 20 years of my life. That, of course, is national security and foreign policy. But it's an adjustment I have to make.”

He acknowledges that his reputation has been damaged, “but probably not as much as it appears on the surface. Many people have talked to me and written me letters—some liberal Democrats, even—expressing outrage over the way this thing was done…. There is an innate sense of fair play in the American people, and I think there is a general feeling that I was not fairly treated.”