More a Ladle Than a Knife

More a Ladle Than a Knife Weinberger’s performance at the Pentagon earns poor reviews

It was the quintessential performance by a supremely confident yet self-effacing man, ever gracious in manner, polite in speech, but implacably stubborn. As Senator after Senator fired questions at him, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger coolly presented the Administration’s case for the MX missile before the Armed Services Committee last week. Never once did Weinberger lose his temper or raise his voice. And no matter how heated the interrogation, Weinberger did not budge a millimeter from his position. “Once his mind is made up, he is impossible to bend,” says a close associate at the Pentagon. “He is a gentle man with a rod of iron in his back.”

Over the past two years, that gentle man with the iron spine has emerged, debatably, as the most influential member of the Reagan Cabinet. By dint of their position, he and Secretary of State George Shultz are the most powerful men in the Administration, but Weinberger enjoys a longstanding relationship with the President that Shultz can never match. As the man responsible for translating the defense imperatives of Ronald Reagan into dollars and cents, he is requesting the biggest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, one that will cost $1.6 trillion over the next five years. Yet criticism is growing that Weinberger, by pushing so fervently to carry out Reagan’s mandate to “rearm America,” has been creating opposition in a frustrated Congress, which must either cut defense costs, slash social services or raise taxes to reduce the projected deficit of at least $150 billion in fiscal 1983. By serving Reagan too well, Weinberger may be serving him unwisely.

Despite the poor reviews, Weinberger retains the absolute confidence and trust of Ronald Reagan. The pair first got acquainted in 1966, when Reagan was running for Governor in California and Weinberger, a Harvard-trained lawyer living in San Francisco, was serving as state G.O.P. chairman. In 1968, Governor Reagan tapped Weinberger to be his state finance director. “My personal Disraeli,” Reagan has called his aide. Weinberger left Sacramento less than two years later to join the Nixon Administration, where his budget-paring skills as Director of the Office of Management and Budget earned him the nickname “Cap the Knife.” The two men, who have become warm personal friends over the years, mirror each other’s qualities: a mellow California poise combined with a wide streak of stubbornness. The blend gives each man his air of serenity and self-assurance.

Shortly after his victory in 1980, when Reagan was mulling over appointments, he boasted that Weinberger could fill any Cabinet post. The Defense Secretary, for his part, is an extremely loyal team player who is fond of pointing out that Reagan is the “most underrated world leader of our time,” and often compares his boss to Winston Churchill.

Weinberger and Reagan get along so well in large part because the two men share the same world view: the Soviet Union can only be prevented from dominating the West by a rapid buildup in the military might of the U.S. In the White House, Weinberger is opposed by Chief of Staff James Baker and David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who feel that the defense buildup should be eased somewhat to curb the deficit. But Weinberger can carry the day singlehanded with the President by raising the specter of the Soviet threat. Says a top White House aide: “The President simply trusts Cap as a budgeteer more than he trusts Stockman as a budgeteer.”

Weinberger, moreover, skillfully presents his arguments in ways most likely to catch the President’s attention and approval. On at least one occasion, the Defense Secretary did not really need words at all: during a crucial budget session in September 1981, when many White House aides were urging Reagan to cut defense funds, Weinberger simply presented charts illustrating the various proposed budgets. The one with Weinberger’s numbers was labeled REAGAN BUDGET, and showed a figure of a brawny soldier hoisting an automatic weapon. The alternative was called OMB BUDGET, and pictured a puny man with a small rifle.

Weinberger and “the Governor,” as he still calls Reagan, talk on the phone almost daily, and he usually briefs the President in person twice a week. Though the Defense Secretary can have Reagan’s ear any time he wants it, he does not exploit his access. He is extremely businesslike hi his dealings with the White House and will usually relay his messages to the Oval Office through established channels. Yet when dealing with White House staffers, Weinberger often wears them down by restating his position relentlessly. In a remarkable demonstration of faith in his standing with the President, Weinberger did not even bother to attend many of the key budget meetings held between Election Day and Thanksgiving this year.

With such strong backing from Reagan, Weinberger has occasionally been emboldened to step into the foreign policy arena and make public pronouncements of a type that should be coming from the State Department, or should not be said out loud at all. On a tour of the Middle East last February, for example, Weinberger suggested that Jordan should receive an antiaircraft missile system from the U.S., forcing Reagan to write a soothing letter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. On the other hand, Weinberger has scant interest in mastering the complexities of arms control negotiations. He has no background or expertise in the field, and so relies on his aides to do his thinking for him.

As Pentagon chief, Weinberger has been a disappointment to many people both in the Administration and on Capitol Hill. No one questions his appetite for work: he generally rises at 5:30 a.m., jogs for 15 minutes, is at his desk by 7:30 and stays for the next twelve hours or so before packing his briefcase with papers to pore over at home. For relaxation, he spends an occasional night out at the National Symphony and squeezes in a weekend trip now and then to his vacation home on Mount Desert Island in Maine. But some Reagan aides and G.O.P. Senators had hoped that he would live up to his knife-wielding reputation and, while rebuilding the nation’s defense as Reagan wishes, still find savings in the Pentagon that would cut the budget deficit. Instead, Weinberger gave too much control of the budget to the individual services, then tended to accept all the major weapons on the Pentagon’s “wish list.” Says Democratic Representative Albert Gore Jr., who helped lead the assault on the MX: “He’s lost all credibility. Instead of Cap the Knife, he’s Cap the Ladle.”

In addition, Weinberger is criticized for failing to come up with an overall, coherent defense strategy that would at least justify the staggering costs. Without a national strategy, Weinberger cannot know if, say, the Navy will need 600 ships by 1990 or if the Air Force is asking for the right mix of expensive F-15s and cheaper F-16s. Even a hard-liner like Melvin Laird, who served as Secretary of Defense for Richard Nixon, questions the sense behind the vast sums. “The Navy is going wild by making all these commitments on ships,” Laird says. “It hasn’t been proved to me that you need a Navy that large. I don’t think we can afford it.”

Beyond these complaints, however, there is the larger criticism that Weinberger remains an amateur in defense matters. A poor administrator who does not run the Pentagon on a day-to-day basis, he relies on others, most notably Deputy Secretary Frank Carlucci, to plan, budget and analyze. Weinberger, unlike some of his predecessors, such as Robert McNamara and Harold Brown, does not immerse himself in the details of his job, and thus he is not as knowledgeable about his department’s programs as he should be. The result: he is much more likely to okay the recommendations handed him.

Perhaps the most damning charge leveled at Weinberger is that, amid all his dire warnings of Soviet intentions and strength, he has lost public support for the defense buildup that he so fervently pushes, as reflected in last month’s election. “By being so insistent and unwilling to compromise, he has hurt the consensus for the defense budget,” says an Administration official. “He’s a great disappointment.”

Weinberger denies, stubbornly, that he is being needlessly stubborn about the budget. “I am not contumaciously glued to any particular number,” he says. “But I do feel that the programs we have now are essential, and if we do not get them we are sending bad signals around the world.” Weinberger, moreover, points out that even if critics get their way and the Pentagon budget is cut by $5 billion to $10 billion, the slash will hardly make a sliver’s worth of difference in a projected deficit of $150 billion. The Defense Secretary has grown so protective of his budget domain that he adamantly refuses to heed requests from Congress to suggest parings. “I don’t want to participate in a process of that kind,” Weinberger says flatly. “I don’t have cuts to propose.”

But with last week’s defeat for the MX in the House, Weinberger has perhaps begun to show a willingness to compromise in order to save the missile altogether. Said a Government official: “Maybe the cold gray dawn of reality is finally coming to the Defense Department.”

—ByJames Kelly. Reported by Douglas Brew and Bruce W. Nelan/ Washington