Known and Unknown (27 page)

Among the most important issues that faced us at the Pentagon in the mid-1970s was the selection of a new main battle tank for the Army. At the time, the expectation was that the new tank would be used to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. As ambassador to NATO, I had worked to achieve a higher level of standardization of military equipment among our NATO allies as a way to save taxpayer dollars and improve logistical efficiencies. NATO standardization also helped to off set the Soviets' advantage of a free hand to standardize weapons systems among the Warsaw Pact countries. Early in my tour at the Pentagon, I issued a memorandum to the department that set forth the importance I placed in standardization, and that I expected planners working on the new main battle tank to follow that lead.
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The Pentagon, however, was going in a different direction. Late in the afternoon of July 20, 1976, Deputy Secretary Clements and Secretary of the Army Martin Hoffmann asked to see me, along with a number of other senior officials. They were in sharp disagreement over competing tank proposals from Chrysler and General Motors.

The Army leadership strongly recommended the General Motors tank design, which had a standard diesel engine and a 105 millimeter Howitzer cannon, the weapon size the Army had used for years. The Army had no doubts its position would prevail. Its leaders seemed to assume my role in the decision would be to approve their recommendation. In fact, they were so certain of their position that they had already sent out a press release to members on the relevant congressional committees announcing that General Motors had won the contract. It was a classic example of the iron triangle in action.

However, Deputy Secretary Clements and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Dr. Malcolm Currie had come to a different conclusion. They favored Chrysler's design: It could be filled with a larger, 120 millimeter cannon and it had, for the first time, a turbine engine instead of a diesel. They pointed out that our major NATO allies—including the British, French, and West Germans—had tanks with 120 millimeter cannons. They also argued that the turbine engine would be more agile and efficient than the diesel.

I listened to both sides in the assembled group in complete amazement. This was the biggest weapons decision for the Army in years. Yet they had arrived in my office with conflicting positions without giving me any advance warning or briefing to allow me the time to make an informed decision. Further, both sides insisted that I decide that complicated issue, which would have such long-term consequences for our country's fighting force, then and there. I was notably unhappy about being put in that impossible position. After listening to their arguments, I told them I was going to delay a decision for a period of weeks until I could make an informed judgment. I needed more than fifteen minutes to decide the fate of a major weapons system that would serve the country for many decades.

Army officials were stunned at my reaction. “This can't be delayed,” they argued. “The press releases announcing the decision are already out. Everyone's going to be furious. Capitol Hill will explode.” Of course, I knew they were right. Angry contractors would take their grievances to Congress and the press. Members of Congress on both sides of the issue would be outraged.

I replied: “I'd rather deal with an explosion on Capitol Hill and in the press than with the problems our country will have if we make the wrong decision.” I told the Army to pull back its premature press releases. I added that I would release a statement of my own announcing that the decision would be delayed.
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Soon, various reports appeared in the press that civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense had defied the advice of the United States Army. That had the benefit of being true, except that it wasn't nameless “civilians,” it was one civilian in particular.
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This led to a ferocious pushback from elements in the Army, active and retired, as well as in the Congress and the media.
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As I studied the issues in the days ahead, I concluded that Clements and Currie had been right in opposing the Army's recommendation. Although some were still steaming, Hoffmann and some of his senior Army tank officials began to pull together to help move my decision forward. Not surprisingly, some on Capitol Hill were less than persuaded. A number of congressional districts and states stood to benefit from one or the other tank, and their representatives in Congress aggressively argued their positions. Threats of issuing congressional subpoenas for testimony were tossed around.
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Accepting all the pyrotechnics, I tried to make sure the goal remained clear: to get the tank that would best serve our armed forces and our country well into the next century.

The XM-1 tank contract taught me that overruling a recommendation by the military services would almost certainly lead to upheaval and come at the cost of additional scar tissue. It also proved the rule that “if you do something, someone won't like it.” But the decision to delay was the right one.

The contract with Chrysler was announced on November 12, 1976, fourteen weeks after that meeting in my office. The episode over the XM-1 tank, now known as the M-1 Abrams tank, was an important lesson in reexamining fundamental assumptions on which we based our decisions. Over time, the turbine engine proved to be successful. And the additional benefit of NATO standardization on the 120 millimeter cannon served to strengthen our collective security and to reduce costs. Some fifteen years later, the main battle tank I had authorized in 1976 was used in battle for the first time—except not in Western Europe as had been contemplated, but in Kuwait and Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. The tank performed brilliantly.

B
y 1976, the national security team that President Ford had inherited and then reassembled proved to be a capable group. It included several figures who would leave their imprint on American foreign and defense policies for decades: Secretary of State Kissinger, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, CIA Director George H. W. Bush, and White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney.

While Kissinger emerged from the Ford cabinet shake-up unenthusiastic about losing his second hat as national security adviser, he characteristically found humor in his situation. While briefing congressional Republican leaders on foreign aid around that time, he joked, “I've been so busy figuring out what jobs I have left that I haven't had time to study this.”
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In truth, President Ford's surprise moves flummoxed the wily Kissinger—a man not easily flummoxed. So entrenched was his well-deserved reputation as a master strategist who could predict the actions of leaders like moves on a chessboard, that some people even assumed he had to be the one behind the Halloween massacre, to eliminate me as an obstacle in the White House.
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Surely, some reporters contended, Ford's moves had to have been part of some grand Kissinger plan. And if it was not Kissinger's plan, then it must have been Rumsfeld's. Once again, the conspiracy theorists prevailed in the press, and the conventional wisdom didn't give Ford the credit he deserved.

Privately, Kissinger thought it was “scary” to, as he put it, “monkey around with the whole NSC machinery when things are going reasonably well.”
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Kissinger, who had worked for Vice President Rockefeller and knew him to be his unfailingly strong ally in the Ford White House, at first believed Rockefeller's assertions that I was behind his removal from the NSC post.

“The guy that cut me up inside this building isn't going to cut me up any less in Defense,” Kissinger told Treasury Secretary Bill Simon immediately after the shake-up.
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If in fact Kissinger was angry, it did not last. Indeed, one of Ford's stated reasons for moving me to the Department of Defense was that Kissinger and I were able to work together.

My relationship with Kissinger changed when I moved to the Pentagon. As secretary of defense, I was now a statutory member of the NSC. Since the days he had elbowed out Bill Rogers as secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Kissinger had become accustomed to making national security decisions with the President pretty much alone. As Kissinger knew well, my relationship with Ford went back to our days in Congress. I also wasn't hesitant to express my views. Perhaps because Kissinger wasn't either, the presumption, particularly in the press, was that we would be in constant conflict.

Though differences did exist, they were not many and they were on substance. One point of tension was unavoidable. Kissinger and I led institutions that were different in mission and makeup: One focused on sustained diplomatic engagement; the other focused on preparing for, deterring, and, when necessary, engaging in military conflict. Given the different perspectives, I thought it particularly important that Kissinger and I base our dealings on a common understanding of the facts and an open flow of information. This led to an early test of our relationship. As a former ambassador and State Department official, I knew that the distribution of sensitive cables sent to Washington from overseas posts would often be narrowly restricted by the Department of State, despite the fact that some needed to be read by a wider group of senior national security officials. I asked my staff to prepare a chart that tracked the flow of the restricted-distribution cables from the State Department to the Pentagon.
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The tracking chart made clear that the sensitive cable traffic to DoD had decreased precipitously.

With the chart in hand, I met with Kissinger and not too subtly suggested that he open the flow of information to the Pentagon. He knew well that information was power. Kissinger seemed, or more likely acted, surprised by the statistics and vowed to improve the situation. Still, there never was the free exchange of information that I sought. It was a sign that even our good personal relationship had its limits.

 

I
knew I had to do all I could to persuade Congress and the public that the United States had to bolster its military capabilities if we were to deter the Soviets in the years ahead. We needed to ensure peace not only by being strong, but by being perceived as strong by those who would do harm to our country and our allies. I was all for fiscal responsibility, but in this case I was certain that an increase in the U.S. defense budget had to be the administration's highest priority. This effort was controversial in some circles—even within the White House and Pentagon.
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As I campaigned to increase defense investment, there was a consensus within the Democratic-controlled Congress that the proposed defense budget would be cut by $5 billion to $6 billion, or about 5 or 6 percent.
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During my first weeks at the Pentagon, I met with Andy Marshall, the Defense Department's Director of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, which examined the relative strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union.
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Marshall demonstrated that the Soviet Union had been gaining ground relative to the United States. America had been slipping toward a position of rough equivalence. The projections of future trend lines did not bode well for the United States.

I compiled the data into a booklet called Defense Perspectives that provided an easy to understand set of statistics, charts, and graphs—numbers of personnel, tanks, helicopters, submarines, ships, and the like. The data told an important story: While the United States and the USSR were still roughly equivalent in their respective capabilities, the trend lines were clearly adverse to America, and if our respective levels of investment were to continue, we would drop below the band of rough equivalence.
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In addition to the Defense Perspectives booklet, I organized briefings, which I led along with John Hughes, a respected, long-serving intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Hughes had briefed President Kennedy and his national security team during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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He prepared classified overhead photography from U.S. satellites and other sources that showed in vivid, powerful pictures the Soviet military buildup. The Hughes presentations—at varying degrees of classification, depending on the audience—gave an impressive visual texture to the data we had assembled.
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Beginning in early 1976, I began to host early evening briefings for small groups of senators and congressmen in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, directly across from the Oval Office. We called them “smokers” back in those days, since many of us still smoked cigars or pipes. Our invitations to the White House for a private, classified briefing were well received. Attendance was excellent. President Ford and other senior national security officials would drop by, giving the briefings added weight and a sense of unanimity within the administration.
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After one of the briefings, Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a Democrat and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, walked out impressed. An opponent of increasing military investment, he muttered, “I can see I'll have to invent a new set of arguments.”
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We conducted unclassified briefings for a variety of influential Americans—labor leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, and public policy experts with national security backgrounds. I knew that more opinion leaders needed to know the facts about the Soviets' military capabilities if I was to successfully convince them of the imperative for more investment in our military.
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Moscow began to take notice of our efforts. The Soviets condemned my briefings as “disgraceful.” In the fall of 1976, after the Senate moved toward increasing the defense budget, I received an intelligence cable from American officials in Moscow that cited a report in the Soviet government's news service that condemned me “for justifying the US military build-up on the basis of the ‘hackneyed myth about the ‘Soviet threat'…despite repeated Soviet assurances that the USSR threatens no one, does not increase its defense expenditures from year to year and seeks instead a reduction of all nations' defense budgets.”
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The record is now clear that the Soviets lied about their defense budget. The Soviet government was attempting to achieve strategic military superiority over the United States at the expense of the nonmilitary sectors of its economy. The Soviets were successful in this approach for a period of time, but they now were rattled by having their buildup revealed to the world. The Soviets' strong and disingenuous reaction was powerful evidence to me that we were on the right track.

I could feel we were gaining traction. The Ford administration proposed an increase in the defense budget for fiscal year 1977, and Congress appeared to be moving in our direction. While the increase was modest, it was a marked change from the earlier series of decreases, and it was the first increase in real terms in the U.S. defense budget in almost a decade.
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It was a reassuring achievement, especially for an administration that was under fire from all sides in an election year, and with the Congress controlled by the opposition party. The powerful facts we had marshaled and presented proved to be persuasive. Had President Ford been reelected, I have no doubt that our defense buildup would have continued. As it happened, however, after four years of the Carter administration's inattention, it was left to Ronald Reagan to increase defense investments appreciably.

 

M
y situation as a new secretary at the Department of Defense was made more complicated because of the approaching presidential primary and general election campaign. I felt that a secretary of defense should not involve himself in domestic politics. That was easier said than done in a gripping and contentious primary challenge that hinged on national security issues.

Ronald Reagan declared his candidacy against the President two days after I was confirmed. Having become acquainted with California Governor Reagan when I was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, I knew his campaign was not to be dismissed lightly. He was an effective executive, had an impressive talent for communication, an able staff led by Ed Meese and Judge Bill Clark, and was developing a growing list of influential supporters around the country.

At first, Reagan avoided direct attacks on Ford, focusing instead on the administration's policies and, more specifically, on Henry Kissinger.
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Reagan took direct aim at the administration's foreign policy by forcefully redefining “détente” as an American concession to, and accommodation of, the expansionist Soviet Union. As Reagan mounted his offensive, the term “détente” was becoming poisonous. To conservative critics the term encapsulated American fecklessness and a sense that America was a declining power in the world.

Well into the primary campaign, the President stubbornly kept using the term even when he knew it was hurting him politically. Ford eventually realized that his spirited defense of détente was not worth the damage it was causing his election chances. “[L]et me say very specifically that we are going to forget the use of the word détente,” he said. “The word is inconsequential. What happens in the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, what happens in the negotiations between the People's Republic of China and the United States—those are the things that are of consequence.”
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The primary election season did not start out well for Governor Reagan. Written off by the Eastern establishment and short on funds, Reagan lost most of the early primaries. The Californian seemed to be headed for his last stand in the March 1976 North Carolina primary. Reagan seized on what initially had seemed a relatively obscure issue: the negotiations to turn over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government. Reagan said, “[W]e bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and…we going to keep it!”
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The line drew loud applause, perhaps because it represented a reassertion of American will that many felt had gone missing since the fall of Saigon. The North Carolina results—Reagan beat the sitting president of his own party by six points—startled the political pundits and the Ford campaign team. And it soon put me in an awkward position.

Building on his success, the California governor fashioned yet another issue that resonated with many Americans who felt the United States was slipping into a position of weakness. In the face of the Soviet threat, Reagan said, “The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.”
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What Reagan could not have known was that he had zeroed in on the issue at the center of an ongoing internal debate Kissinger and I had been having in front of Ford.