In My Time (39 page)

It had been my experience that too often everyday challenges prevent top policymakers from taking the time to think strategically. It is much easier to accede to the moment, blunting crises or responding to opportunities. It takes time and discipline to force yourself and those in the bureaucracy to take a step back and think about America’s strategic goals and challenges, but it is essential. You can’t hope to adopt the wisest policies without a sense of where the country should be heading and how we should steer the ship to get there. There are places set up to do this in the government, such as the policy planning shop at the State Department and the office of the undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. But often the individuals in these offices either get drafted to help manage day-to-day crises or their strategic work is so removed from the real-time policymaking that it has little impact.

The Defense Department, in my experience, is better at both strategic policymaking and at producing rigorous “lessons learned” reports than any other agency in government, and the individuals I had in key slots, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Andy Marshall, Scooter Libby, and Eric Edelman, were some of the best strategic thinkers around. It was to this group I looked when I determined that we needed a new defense strategy for the post–Cold War world. Working with retired Lieutenant General Dale Vesser and Zalmay Khalilzad, who were also part of the policy planning shop, they produced the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was a fundamental revision in U.S. defense policy and strategy.

The
DPG represented a shift
from a focus on the global threat posed by the Soviet Union to defense planning based on regional threats. It also noted that we would work to “preclude hostile, nondemocratic domination of a region critical to our interests” as well as work to preclude the emergence of any hostile powers that could present a global security threat. There was a focus on alliances among democratic nations and the enhanced security that cooperation could bring. We would not
only anticipate and plan for a future security environment, but also work to shape it so that we could advance U.S. security objectives.

We would actively encourage former Warsaw Pact countries and, in time, even former Soviet republics to join in the alliances of democratic nations that had so effectively kept the peace. We would strengthen our common defense arrangements. We also recognized the growing threat of proliferation and emphasized that we would work to update our strategy for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance was very significant in the way that it addressed critical global strategic shifts and set out a sound basis for the United States to continue to enhance its own security and that of its allies in the years to come. As I left office in January 1993, we published the “Regional Defense Strategy,” an unclassified strategic plan that incorporated much of the thinking in the Defense Planning Guidance.

The RDS emphasized that U.S. leadership would continue to be crucial in the new defense environment. Our preference was to counter threats whenever possible with friends and allies at our side, but we were clear that America must lead. “Only a nation that is strong enough to act decisively,” it said, “can provide the leadership needed to encourage others to resist aggression.”

IN RESPONSE TO THE fall of the Berlin Wall I had ordered a review of our major aircraft needs across the military services. I asked the services to look at whether we should move forward in building and buying planes like the B-2, F-22, C-17, and A-12, in light of the changed global security environment. I came into office inclined to support the construction of the A-12, the navy’s carrier-based stealth bomber, and in April 1990, I testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in support of moving forward with it. “It’s a good system,” I said, and “the program appears to be reasonably well-handled.” A few months later, when I was informed that the contractor had cost overruns they could not absorb and would not be delivering the planes on
time, I was, needless to say, not pleased. I had testified to the Congress in good faith that the program was on track, only to learn later that it wasn’t. We launched a review to determine why the information I had received was not accurate. As a result a number of individuals involved with the program inside the Pentagon were disciplined and removed from the program. Ultimately, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition resigned.

Over the coming months it became clear that there were more significant cost overruns, technical problems, and delays. If the program were to proceed, I would have to exercise my authority as secretary of defense to modify the contract to prevent the contractor from being in breach of its obligations to the U.S. government. Modification would result in significant additional cost to the government with no certainty that the program would get back on track. In December I directed the secretary of the navy to show cause why the contract should not be terminated. I said in the show-cause order, “If we cannot spend the taxpayer’s money wisely, we will not spend it.” I called a meeting in my office on Saturday, January 5, with General Powell, Pentagon Comptroller Sean O’Keefe, Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett, and Donald Yockey, the new undersecretary for acquisition. The group discussed whether I should bail out the contractor. I listened and made my decision.

Two days later I announced that we would not bail them out, a decision that resulted in termination of the program for default. No one could tell me how much more of the taxpayers’ money we’d have to spend to procure these planes. My decision not to provide a bailout and to withdraw support for the A-12 sent shock waves through the Pentagon and the defense industry. It was the largest weapons system cancellation in the history of the department, but the decision was the right one. And I am still convinced of that today, even with litigation about the cancellation in its twentieth year.

ON A SATURDAY IN the summer of 1992, I got a call at home from Brent Scowcroft, who was up at Camp David. The president needed a new chief of staff. Sam Skinner, who had taken over from John Sununu,
was heading back home to Chicago. Brent wanted to know if I was interested. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t completely surprised to get the call. A year earlier when I had traveled with the president to California and Texas, he’d asked me to describe for him some of the problems I’d seen in the way Sununu was running the White House. I thought it was instructive to compare Sununu’s approach to Scowcroft’s approach, since Brent was running foreign policy for the president and Sununu essentially handled the domestic agenda.

We had talked about the importance of having someone in the chief of staff slot who would be a completely honest broker, as Brent was on the national security side. Those of us in the president’s national security team knew that he would give his views to the president privately, but he would make sure to convey accurately all sides of an issue so the president could make an informed decision. And Brent was deeply experienced in the issues he grappled with every day, having already served a term as President Ford’s national security advisor.

While I was flattered that Brent thought I might effectively serve as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, I told Brent I really was not eager to make the move back to the White House. I had already been chief of staff, and I was engaged in critically important issues at the Department of Defense. If the president had asked me directly, I would have done it, but I’m glad that he got Jim Baker to do it instead.

IN OCTOBER 1992 I attended a NATO meeting in northern Scotland, and it was from there that I watched President Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot compete in the second of the televised presidential debates. As defense secretary, I had no part to play in the presidential election, but I was looking on with enormous interest, and it didn’t seem to be going well for our side. The press was pushing a false narrative that had a president who was detached from the lives of most Americans up against a challenger who was younger, more energetic, more empathetic. And unfortunately this was the debate in which the president looked at his watch, a perfectly normal thing to do, but an action that our opponents seized on and wrongly characterized as symbolic of a
distracted president. In 1991 George Bush had won a war, but in 1992 he lost the presidency. When the votes were counted in November, it was Bill Clinton 43 percent, George Bush 37 percent, and Ross Perot, 19 percent.

There were many farewells, but the finest was at Fort Myer’s ceremonial hall, where the United States military had a chance to say goodbye to the man who had commanded them so ably—and I had a chance to make my farewell too. I noted that it was easy to look back on historic events and regard them as inevitable, but that it mattered who was in command:

We are, indeed, fortunate that George Bush was our president when the nation faced the first major crisis of the post Cold War era—the invasion of Kuwait. . . . From the earliest days of the crisis, he refused to ignore or pander to aggression. His clarity of purpose focused the world on the need for action.

I offered my personal thanks as well. “I will always be grateful to you, Mr. President, for the opportunity you’ve given me to serve as your Secretary of Defense.” George Bush had been a tremendous leader. His wisdom had seen us through changes more significant than any of us could have imagined we would see in our lifetimes. Serving as his secretary of defense was one of the highest honors of my life.

A
s noon approached on Inauguration Day, I gathered my few remaining belongings in the office, said goodbye to my staff, and left the Pentagon for the last time as secretary of defense. Although I would still be secretary for another few hours—until the Senate confirmed Les Aspin and he was sworn in later that afternoon—the moment at which Bill Clinton was taking the presidential oath seemed to be the appropriate time for me to leave.

I was out of public office for the first time in fourteen years, and Lynne and I were moving home to Wyoming. We packed a big U-Haul truck full of furniture and the boxes of my congressional papers, and with help from my new son-in-law, Phil Perry, I strapped a large display case filled with the battle streamers earned by the U.S. military during my time as secretary of defense to the back of the truck. The streamers were a unique and thoughtful farewell gift from the military, but because each one was about four feet long, the glass-fronted display case was too big and too fragile to pack inside the truck with our other belongings.

Phil, who had married Liz just three weeks earlier, would be joining me on the cross-country drive to Wyoming. It takes someone with a strong constitution to agree to make a two-thousand-mile road trip alone with his father-in-law less than a month after joining the family, but Phil stepped up to the task. Luckily he is a man of few words, just as I am, so neither of us worried much about having to make small talk along the way.

When we got to Wyoming, we stopped at the university in Laramie so I could drop off my papers and the battle streamers for safekeeping at the American Heritage Center. The staff seemed surprised when we pulled up in the U-Haul to deliver the materials personally, but it never occurred to me to get them there any other way. Lynne met me that night in Jackson, where we began unpacking and planning for our new life in the private sector.

I KNEW AT LEAST two things for sure: I wanted to spend more time with my family, and I wanted to spend more time fishing. Of course, I also needed to earn a living—hopefully doing useful things—and I wanted to continue to contribute to the major policy and political debates of the day. So, I signed on with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. I also agreed to join the boards of directors of Procter & Gamble, Union Pacific, US West, and Morgan Stanley. Having spent most of my career in government or academia, I knew I’d learn a lot by serving on the boards of some of the finest corporations in the country.

During that first summer out of office, I had plenty of time to think about the future on an eight-thousand-mile road trip I took alone across the country. I drove from Washington, D.C., to British Columbia, and then doubled back to Wyoming, giving speeches along the way, some paid and some unpaid, and traveling through beautiful country in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and the Canadian Rockies, including Banff National Park, with its forests and rivers, and Glacier National Park, with some of the most rugged mountain territory in North America. I also enjoyed some great fishing for rainbow trout in the headwaters of
the North Platte and steelhead in the Dean River in British Columbia. It was on this trip that I began seriously to contemplate the possibility of running for president myself in 1996.

The idea of serving as president was very appealing. I had worked in the White House or served in the cabinet of three presidents—Nixon, Ford, and Bush—and I had watched Ronald Reagan from the perspective of my eight years in the House leadership. I had seen presidents succeed and fail. And I believed I knew what it takes to make an effective chief executive.