As the battle over the nomination of John Tower to be Secretary of Defense raged across the television screens of the republic, careering from White House press conference to talk show to Senate debate courtesy of C-Span, it looked like the attack on Robert Bork all over again.
Like Bork, who was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, Tower had been named by a Republican President to a high government post. Like Bork, ex-Senator Tower was unusually well-qualified for his new job. He had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1981 through 1984 and, after retiring from the Senate, he had headed the U.S. team negotiating arms reductions with the Soviets in Geneva in 1985. He was widely acknowledged as a defense expert.
Yet in the end Tower, like Bork, was denied confirmation by the Senate’s Democratic majority after weeks of vilification whose intensity surprised even cynical old Washington hands.
In both cases, the campaign against the nominee caught the White House unawares. In both cases, a counterattack was launched late in the day. In both cases, the White House failed to shake loose even the few Democrats needed to make a majority for confirmation.
These similarities are misleading, though, because in more significant ways the battle over John Tower was different.
Both sides in the Bork fight acknowledged that their dispute was largely ideological in nature. Both sets of partisans were debating the question of whose notions about the role of the Constitution and the judiciary in American public life were going to be declared legitimate and given the power to shape our legal institutions. And underlying this institutional debate was another sort of ideological struggle—over the many controversial issues, such as crime and abortion, that the Supreme Court has massively affected in the past three decades.
The Bork nomination also engaged a great many people outside Washington. It mobilized interest groups on the Right and, more decisively, the Left. The anti-Bork groups exerted great influence on the decision-makers inside the Senate through TV ads that stirred up much anxiety in the viewing public and through intense pressure from constituency organizations.
Finally, the issues raised by the Bork battle stayed very much alive after the nomination fight itself. In the presidential campaign of 1988 they rebounded, with great effect, against the anti-Bork organizers who had thrust them into the public eye.
In contrast, Tower’s defeat was a much smaller-gauge affair.
Tower was a hawk, but he had not come to symbolize any specific ideological positions, and President-elect George Bush did not nominate him for ideological reasons. Tower’s critics, unlike Bork’s, did not say that the nominee held unacceptable, “out-of-the-mainstream” views. They said that what was unacceptable about Tower was his degenerate character. Accordingly, the attack on Tower did not set loose vast armies of activists fighting for their most fundamental political beliefs. This was an inside job, and people beyond the Beltway seemed to view it chiefly as an entertaining part of the hazing rituals of the Washington tribe.
Nevertheless, precisely because the rejection of Tower was driven neither by ideology nor by outside pressure, it represented a deeper cut into the customary prerogatives of the presidency than the rejection of Bork.
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By the time George Bush was elected President, he and John Tower had long been political allies. Each of them had played a major role in the rebirth of the Republican party in Texas. During the 1988 presidential campaign Tower remained loyal to Bush even in the worst of times, providing valued advice in crises ranging from Bush’s loss in the Iowa primary to the furor over the choice of Dan Quayle as his running-mate. Tower wanted to be Secretary of Defense, and after the election it was not surprising that Bush, sure of Tower’s competence and loyalty, wanted to give him the job.
Yet some members of Bush’s entourage objected to the idea of Tower at the Pentagon. They suggested that Tower, who as a Senator had staunchly supported growth in defense spending and who had become a consultant for defense contractors after his retirement, was not the man to carry out the far-reaching Pentagon reform that candidate Bush had promised. The inside critics also feared that Tower’s reputation for liking liquor and ladies would spell trouble in the nomination process.
Tower fought off the first criticism by taking the offensive and drawing up his own Pentagon reform program to present to Bush. As for the other problem, that of Tower’s personal life, Bush thought he had countered it by putting a “hold” on the nomination and running an especially thorough FBI check on Tower before declaring him clean and naming him to the Defense post in mid-December.
The “hold,” meant to strengthen the nomination, instead hurt it. Washington’s ever-waving antennae took it as a signal that something was indeed wrong with Tower. So the talk about his personal life did not stop. By the time Tower’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee began in late January, some were already writing about him as a “wounded figure.” The chairman of the committee, Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), had already warned, “We’re not going to play the ‘old-boy-go-around’ with him this time.”
Still, neither the White House nor Tower himself anticipated anything like terminal trouble. Shortly before the hearings Tower refused an offer of help from an outside attorney because, as he put it, “If I came there with a lawyer, it would look as if I had a serious problem. And I don’t think I do.” During the hearings Tower even took a break to fly to Munich, West Germany, and address a NATO conference.
This sort of confidence stemmed, it is now clear, from a serious failure of political intelligence. Yet the optimistic outlook was not so unreasonable as it seems in retrospect. Most observers outside Bush’s circle, too, thought the nomination would ultimately succeed. After all, Tower had passed the FBI check. What was more, the weight of precedent seemed decisive here: never in the country’s history had the Senate refused to confirm a Cabinet nomination of a new President.
At the start of the confirmation hearings on January 25, 1989, an Associated Press reporter on the scene, reflecting the prevailing wisdom, said Tower had been named after “an exhaustive background check.” A liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, describing the tone of the early hearings, concluded that “There was . . . no question about his confirmation.” A member of the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), allowed that when he and Tower had served together on that same committee, “I didn’t always agree with Senator Tower, but I respected him and am looking forward to working with him as Secretary of Defense.”
In the committee’s public hearings, the Senators questioned Tower mostly on defense-policy issues and on his relationships with the defense contractors for whom he had worked as a consultant. Then came a day set aside for the testimony of outsiders. One of those who asked to testify was Paul Weyrich, for years a spokesman in Washington for conservative groups concerned with the preservation of traditional moral values. Weyrich did not like what he had seen of Tower’s fidelity to those values, and on top of that considered him insufficiently strong in his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Weyrich testified in open session and voiced his general doubts about Tower’s moral character. Then Nunn, as the New York Times put it, “expressed frustration with the second-hand nature of the allegations” he had been hearing from Tower’s critics. Weyrich responded with his “J’accuse”: “Over the course of many years, I have encountered the nominee in a condition—a lack of sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married.”
Nunn, having elicited this public charge, then stopped Weyrich, who continued his testimony in closed session. Senators emerged from the session declaring themselves unimpressed. “I haven’t heard anything,” said Senator James J. Exon (D-Neb.), “that would disqualify him from being Secretary of Defense.”
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The day after the Weyrich episode, however, the White House started receiving new allegations about Tower’s drinking and womanizing, some of them conventional and others bizarre and exotic. An unidentified woman, the press reported, had told authorities that she had seen Tower chase a secretary around a desk. An Air Force colonel claimed that Tower had had fourteen separate liaisons with women while he was heading the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva. Someone charged that back in Houston, Texas, Tower had kept a Soviet ballerina.
This new round of allegations might mean that the FBI had missed something serious. Or, also quite plausible, it might mean that Weyrich’s charge, in the familiar dynamic of the Washington scandal, had drawn out of the woodwork additional accusations based on malice, opportunism, and mild hysteria. In order to resolve these questions, the committee vote on Tower was postponed and the FBI called back into action—at which point two widely read defense-industry publications called for the withdrawal of Tower’s nomination on the grounds that the delays in his confirmation were leaving the Pentagon without a leader.
As the FBI report neared completion and the White House started briefing members of the Armed Services Committee on its contents, the proceedings became more openly partisan. The Republicans on the committee went to a briefing and came away saying publicly that the new allegations against Tower were groundless. They began pressing for a committee vote. In response, Nunn maintained that the White House had not offered him a similar briefing and was maneuvering behind his back.
Meanwhile, yet other allegations emerged for the FBI to check out, including one involving contributions to one of Tower’s Senate campaigns by a contractor implicated in the recent Pentagon procurement scandal. Nunn announced that he wanted the new FBI report in hand before going any further. If he were forced to vote on Tower without the additional information he needed to ease his doubts and worries/he would have to vote no.
Republicans now rallied around Tower. The President himself consistently expressed his confidence in the nominee and included Tower in Cabinet meetings and discussions of Pentagon business. He denied that he was already considering alternative nominees, and in the main kept his staff from telling the press otherwise. Senate Republicans rose to attest to Tower’s sobriety on the job and pointed out that no Democratic Senator had testified to the contrary.
Tower himself let it be known via the White House that these days he drank only two glasses of wine a day, on the advice of his doctor. He also released a report from a physician who had attended him during his recent cancer surgery, confirming that he showed none of the physical signs of alcoholism.
None of this stopped the stream of charges. But when the newest round of FBI findings was delivered to the Armed Services Committee, the President declared that they had “gunned down” the latest accusations. Nunn, however, said he still had a problem with the overall picture provided by the information in the report.
By the time the committee finally voted on February 23, the partisan nature of the debate had become undeniable. Each of the eleven Democrats on the committee announced that he had read the FBI report, carefully considered it, and conscientiously decided that he agreed with Nunn’s interpretation and his doubts. The nine Republicans, after the same dispassionate and independent consideration, announced that they agreed with the White House. The committee recommended by a straight party-line vote of 11-9 that the nomination be turned down.
Committee Democrats explained their votes in various ways. “I cannot in good conscience,” Nunn said after his negative verdict, “vote to put an individual at the top of the chain of command when his history of excessive drinking is such that he would not be selected to command a missile wing, a SAC bomber squadron, or a Trident missile submarine.”
“There is no smoking gun in the FBI report,” another Democratic member of the committee, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, acknowledged, “but there is enough smoke to cause one to be uneasy.”
Senator Kennedy, going along with his fellow Democrats, did not mention the drinking issue. He said he was voting no because he feared that with all the defense-consulting work Tower had done, the nominee would probably not be able to bring an open mind to the Pentagon.
Some of the Republican committee members, explaining their votes, took refuge in the procedural argument that a President must have the power to appoint his own Cabinet. Others shared the view of their colleague on the committee, Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, who denounced the collection of informants populating the FBI report as “voices in the dark, some of whom failed lie-detector tests, some of whom would not put their names to their allegations, and some of whom were crazy.”
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Now the nomination went to the Senate floor, where Republicans pushed it with a vigor for which the supporters of Robert Bork would have been grateful. President Bush, still on the trip to Asia that had begun with his attendance at the funeral of Japanese Emperor Hirohito on February 25, began lobbying Senators from Air Force One. White House operatives continued their campaign to show how tenuous were some of the allegations against Tower, and they succeeded well enough so that Nunn threatened to reopen the hearings in retaliation for the leaks. Republican Senators plunged into a spirited floor debate, where they protested the way in which the Democrats were trying to do in Tower on the basis of secret, inconclusive documents.
Tower himself, who was bearing the ordeal with acknowledged grace, halted the slide in his fortunes the weekend after the committee vote. Appearing on a Sunday-morning news show, he produced a fuller version of his doctor’s report. He also displayed a document notarized by two witnesses pledging that “if confirmed, during the course of my tenure as Secretary of Defense, I will not consume beverage alcohol of any type or form.” Tower then added, “I’ve never broken a pledge in my life.”
Some people thought the pledge was ridiculous, but with it Tower had succeeded in making his adversaries’ job somewhat harder. In order to oppose him now, they would have to call him not just a drunk but a man whose word meant nothing.
At the same time, a small backlash was developing among the news commentators. The problem was the FBI report. Nunn did not have firsthand charges to make against Tower, and was therefore forced to lean heavily on the report. Thus, instead of the report’s being used in the traditional way, as a private aid to presidential decision-making, it became the property of two men with interests in using it in two contradictory ways. Thus, too, the report’s allegations, many of them anonymous and disputed, became the ugly center of the Tower debate. In reaction, a Washington Post editorial said that though the nomination proceedings were not a criminal trial, and Tower’s accusers did not have to prove his drinking problem beyond a reasonable doubt, “they should be able to show at least that the possibility is serious.” Several days later, the Post added that the burden was now on Nunn to state his case clearly, and a week after that the paper editorialized more sternly about the “awful precedents established by such total reliance on the kind of material found in FBI files and even appearing to adjust the criteria for confirmation of presidential appointees in an arbitrary or political fashion.”
Sounding a similar theme, but in even more explicit terms, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who opposed Tower’s nomination, wrote: “Reliance on untested accusations evokes one of the nastiest periods in our national life, the McCarthy era.”
And in the category of political hardball, the Wall Street Journal editorial page reprinted a 1964 article from the Atlanta Journal that told how the young Sam Nunn had left a party late at night, sideswiped a parked car, crashed his own car down an embankment, and left the wreckage. The police docket and summons showed charges of hit-and-run and leaving the scene of an accident, but the subsequent court docket contained only the charge of leaving the scene, to which Nunn had pleaded guilty. Confronted with the twenty-five-year-old story, Nunn admitted that he had drunk enough that night to impair his driving and judgment, claimed that he had been guilty of leaving the scene but not of hit-and-run, and said he had “learned a valuable lesson which I have not forgotten.”
In the course of the confirmation fight, Washington was treated to some moments of comedy and jaw-dropping amazement. Three days after taking the pledge, for instance, Tower delivered a speech at the National Press Club. In the question period a reporter asked him, “You said Sunday you’ve never broken a pledge in your life. Does this include wedding vows?” “As a matter of fact, I have broken wedding vows,” Tower answered. “I think I am probably not alone in that connection.” Afterward a Tower spokesman rushed to make sure journalists understood that this statement did not contradict Tower’s previous claim, made to the Armed Services Committee, that he had never been unfaithful to his second wife.
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The Tower fight also produced some revelatory moments in modern journalism. As the debate in the Senate was drawing to a close, the Washington Post created a stir with a front-page article by the well-known journalist Bob Woodward reporting on an interview with one Robert Jackson, a retired Air Force sergeant who claimed that he had seen Tower drunk and fondling women. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) came to Tower’s defense on the Senate floor, citing a witness who said Tower had not done what Jackson said he had done. McCain also produced evidence that Tower could not have been at the scene of the crime at the time in question. Most embarrassing of all, McCain produced a letter from the Air Force according to which Jackson had been diagnosed as having a “mixed personality disorder with antisocial themes and hysterical features” and had been discharged from the service for psychological reasons. The Post ran a corrective story on its front page. But the New York Times, not satisfied, sent its own reporter to visit Sergeant Jackson and ran a substantial story about some of the earlier, nicer things from his service record that McCain had left out.
Readers of these and other news stories on the subject might have thought that the battle for uncommitted Senators was raging down to the wire. But the signal that the end for Tower was near came as early as March 6, with what to the uninitiated might have appeared a piece of good news for him—the first announcement by a Democrat, Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, of his intention to vote for Tower.
In 1987, Heflin was the swing vote in Bork’s Supreme Court nomination. A member of the Judiciary Committee, he was also a former judge and was viewed as a conservative among Democrats. His no vote was a precedent that could be cited by any Senate Democrat who wanted to oppose Bork without looking like a simple liberal partisan.
Heflin’s anti-Bork position caused him trouble with his conservative constituents in Alabama. He found it necessary to tell some of them, in fact, that he had voted no because Bork was some kind of radical. Now, in 1989, Heflin was declaring for Tower, thus saving himself from yet more grief back home. Yet the very fact that Heflin felt free to support Tower meant that the Democrats were by now becoming confident that they had the votes to defeat the nomination without him.
The very next day, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut became the second Democrat to declare for Tower. Dodd, too, had a special reason for doing so.
Christopher Dodd’s seat in the Senate had once been held by his father, Thomas Dodd. Tom Dodd, a thundering anti-Communist, was an ally of Lyndon Johnson’s and had been mentioned as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate in 1964. In 1967 the Senate censured the elder Dodd for influence-peddling and diversion of campaign funds. There had been no such act by the Senate against one of its members since the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954.
Tom Dodd’s censure marked a watershed in the way American political institutions dealt with questions of ethics and morality. It also destroyed Dodd, politically and personally.
Tom Dodd’s defender on the floor of the Senate, Russell Long (D-La.), argued that Dodd had violated no law or established rule and that the Senate was punishing him for practices that many Senators engaged in. Yet only five Senators voted against censuring Dodd. One of them was John Tower. In 1989 the younger Dodd, announcing for Tower, closed a somber circle in American politics. But unfortunately for Tower, Dodd’s announcement was yet another sign of the confidence of the Democratic majority.
Then, right on schedule on day number three—the very same day that Lloyd Bentsen, a fellow Texan, became the last Democratic Senator to announce for Tower—four more Democratic Senators declared against the nomination, making its defeat certain. The vote took place the next day and Tower was rejected 53-47.
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During the confirmation fight, we frequently heard that Tower was being done in by the country’s rapidly changing standards in areas from conflict of interest to drink and sex. Such changes certainly did play a part in the Tower story, since one sure method of catching someone at scandalous behavior is suddenly to expand the definition of what sort of behavior is scandalous.
Take, for instance, the matter of conflict of interest. After Tower’s last job in government, as arms negotiator in Geneva, he started a defense-consulting firm that worked for big military contractors. He was never accused of having broken any law or violated any fixed rule in the process. Some of his supporters even contended that this work of Tower’s gave him an unusual amount of knowledge about the way defense procurement works and—exactly contrary to what his critics thought—would make him just the man to outsmart those contractors in reforming the Pentagon. Moreover, when Tower was about to be nominated as Secretary of Defense, he cut all ties with the contracting firms and announced that when questions involving them had to be decided, he would recuse himself from more types of decisions than was legally required.
As is not surprising in today’s Washington, the steps Tower took to obviate his conflict-of-interest problem did not keep him from being flayed with the issue during the confirmation fight. Nunn and others had a whole series of complaints. Some argued that Tower’s going into the consulting business so soon after retiring as chairman of the Armed Services Committee represented an unseemly selling of his relationships with Washington decision-makers. Some went further and suggested that he might have given his clients government secrets. Some claimed that his connection with the defense industry was bound to have distorted Tower’s policy views in its favor. And some said it was not the contracting per se but the number of different clients that posed the problem, because Tower would have to recuse himself from so many decisions that he would become ineffective as a Pentagon manager.
A number of Senators did cite the conflict-of-interest issue as their reason for voting against Tower. What is more, every charge made against Tower during the confirmation debate added to the burden of doubt that ultimately sank him. But the specific effect of the conflict-of-interest issue on the outcome was limited. By the end of the debate some commentators were noting how ironic it was that the large structural issue of Tower’s conflicts of interest was getting so much less attention than the more colorful but probably less important issue of drink.
If anyone had established that Tower retained any sort of interest in any firm he had worked for, the effect of the story would have been big. If anyone had turned up proof that Tower had given his clients national secrets, the effect would have been even bigger. But the subtler and very real questions about Tower and the contractors never took center stage. The reason, perhaps, was that many decision-makers in the Senate could foresee the day when they would be in Tower’s position. If a Senator charged that Tower’s quick move to defense consulting was inherently corrupt, was he proposing new, stricter post-employment rules for everyone in the Senate? If a Senator said that having taken money from the contractors would inevitably distort Tower’s policy views, what would he say about the views of all his colleagues who had taken political contributions from the very same contractors Tower worked for?
So changing conflict-of-interest standards weakened Tower but did not do him in.
The same was true of changing standards in the area of sexual behavior. The public skirt-chasing of which Tower was accused, though even in the old days considered in certain quarters a mark of poor judgment, was looked upon in other circles with tolerance and even admiration. With the arrival of the women’s movement, however, a man’s pursuit of sexual conquests (instead of the approved “meaningful relationships”) began to be seen more widely as a fundamental character flaw.
The issue of womanizing certainly received media attention. But it did not get a similar amount of overt attention from people actually involved in the confirmation process. The reticence was not surprising. First, although news about sex is more abundant in this country than ever before, and greedily devoured, political figures still do not like talking about the subject. Also, hypocrisy in this area is more dangerous than, say, hypocrisy about alcohol. If a Senator calls an ex-colleague a boozer and is then found with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his desk drawer, he is embarrassed. If the Senator accuses his ex-colleague of philandering and then gets caught fooling around with his secretary, he is in trouble.
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Perhaps it is this reticence that explains why the public discussion of John Tower’s morals focused so centrally on drink.
Drinking ethics are now changing so rapidly that from month to month it is hard to be certain which way of addressing the issue is properly sensitive and up-to-the-minute and which has already been consigned to the cultural dustheap. There was a time, not yet past in the minds of many people in public life, when a politician who drank a lot, even one who became publicly drunk, was not necessarily viewed as having a deep and general character problem. Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post summed up this attitude when she wrote during the debate that to judge by the stories floating around, Tower’s drinking in earlier years bore little resemblance to the furtive disease described by people who today admit that they are alcoholics. “The drinking of which Tower is being accused,” she remarked, “while conceivably just as serious and disqualifying, doesn’t sound like this kind of lonely thing at all. Rather, it seems to have been unreconstructed old roistering about, excessive social drinking, oblivion-seeking revelry of the ‘Hey, is everyone having a good time?’ sort.”
By sharp contrast, the newer language about alcohol heard in the Tower debate had no room in it for the concept of such revelry. This newer language grew out of ideas that have proved useful in the treatment of alcoholics, but its influence has spread more widely. Excessive drinking, the logic goes, is “problem drinking,” close kin to if not synonymous with the disease of alcoholism. Moreover, a major symptom of the disease is an individual’s refusal to admit that he has it. Therefore, each time Tower insisted he was not an alcoholic, some sage journalist reporting his claim would add in the very next sentence something like: “Experts in alcoholism say that one of the chief symptoms of the disease is denial.” Similarly, if Tower found it necessary to promise not to touch alcohol, this was cited as evidence that he had an “alcohol problem.” Here was the new language of therapy at its most unforgiving.
But a third language was also being spoken in the debate on alcohol, and Tower noted its existence. When Tower took the pledge, the words he used in saying that he would not “consume beverage alcohol of any type or form” sounded strange and quaint. For here Tower was speaking in the terminology of the 19th-century temperance movement, whose successor is alive and well in many parts of the country, especially in the South.
There is a difference between the old temperance concern about drink and the new concern with alcoholism. In the older version, the individual who takes the pledge against alcohol must admit he did wrong but is assumed to have the independent ability, through his own will and with the help of God, to determine his own future conduct. Thus it was no accident that when Senator Heflin of Alabama announced his intention to support Tower, he pointed to Tower’s pledge as justification.
But the new anti-alcohol ethic is different. Under the new dispensation, the individual’s pledge by itself means nothing. After all, he has a disease that has overcome his will. He is not fully in control of himself. He cannot simply make himself clean. Instead he must recognize that he is sick and submit to a course of medical treatment and an approved form of group therapy.
Under this newer standard, Tower could never be considered cured unless he first admitted his sickness—and thereby acknowledged that he was unable to serve as Secretary of Defense. It is no wonder that he chose to take the pledge instead.
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Some observers warned after the vote that no one should read too large a social meaning into it because the outcome depended so heavily on the idiosyncratic personality of John Tower. And indeed, there is no question that Tower’s personality turned him into an easier target than he would have been otherwise.
Tower retired from the Senate without many friends in that body, and first-hand accounts from people who encountered him on the Hill during his Senate days make the reason plain. When Tower was in a position of superior power in his dealings with other Senators’ staffers, or even other Senators themselves, he and his staff left them—even more than U.S. Senators usually do—feeling ignored or condescended to or belittled or humiliated. This behavior clearly colored the community attitude toward Tower’s vices.
He was not the heaviest drinker in the Senate, but he had a reputation for being loud and exhibitionistic rather than quietly sodden in his bouts with the bottle. The word “exhibitionist” also applies to his reputation with women. He was not necessarily the Senate’s biggest “womanizer,” to use the current euphemism again, but he was outstanding in the public, unabashed nature of his pursuits.
There are those who speculate that the highhandedness and exhibitionism were connected to his being only 5′3″ tall, more or less, and feeling the constant need to assert himself. His height probably affected other people’s reactions to his behavior as well. During the confirmation debate the commentators made constant reference to his stature. “Tough little bastard,” “feisty little man,” “Despite the name, Tower doesn’t”—all entered the phrase book, as if there were something noteworthy and unusual about a man of his height aspiring to an eminence as lofty as the post of Defense Secretary. During Tower’s Senate days, any expansive roistering on his part or any aggressive attempts to assert his authority over other men must have caused the same visceral resistance. Of such things are the resentments born that live forever. These resentments, too, must be assumed to have influenced the way the people who knew Tower read the reports of his drinking or womanizing during his later, post-Senate years.
Still, personality does not account for the size of the Tower affair any more than does the fact of shifting standards. Tower also suffered from one of the fairly constant factors in modern political scandals, and that is the failed counterattack. Sometimes the failure stems from panic, with the victim trying to cover up and seeing the scandal balloon as a result. Sometimes it stems from the inability to devise an effective counter-story to offer to the press. Sometimes it stems from a blindness to danger.
Once it became clear that the Tower nomination was in trouble, Washington insiders were quick to begin their usual chant in such circumstances: the White House (no matter who happens to occupy it at the moment) is losing its battle because it is filled with incompetents stumbling all over themselves and making perfectly obvious technical mistakes.
For starters, George Bush was accused of being bull-headed and insular in having named John Tower in the first place. After all, went the story, some of his clear-eyed and prescient political aides had warned him about the trouble Tower could cause. Yet the loyal Bush had gone heedlessly ahead anyway.
Bush was charged with being even more pigheaded in sticking with Tower after the sounds emanating from Sam Nunn’s cave grew ominous. A smart President, said the cognoscenti, would have acted quickly, persuaded Tower to withdraw his name, and hustled to come up with a nominee more agreeable to Nunn. Instead, the administration dug in for a fight that could only embitter relations between the White House and the majority Senate Democrats who were so vital to the President’s success.
White House lobbying techniques also came in for criticism. The President left for Asia, it was pointed out, in the middle of the fight in the Armed Services Committee and without asking for a postponement of the committee vote. White House operatives terminally offended Nunn by not showing him the proper deference. The White House lobbying effort was critically understaffed.
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Yet whatever the merits of these criticisms, operational flaws were not the real problem. Indeed, such flaws were only the symptom of a much larger failure—the failure to understand the lessons of the fight over Bork.
The Bork battle gave warning that something new and important had begun to happen to the confirmation process. A President now had to assume that any weakness in his operations or his nominee was going to be exploited and pushed very far.
As in the case of Bork, the Tower vote was a blow struck by a Democratic Senate facing the prospect of yet another four years with a Republican President. To be sure, Democratic leaders denied they had orchestrated the votes against Tower, and no eager investigative reporter rose up to challenge their account. But the widely recognized truth is that we can expect more such confirmation battles so long as the Democrats assume they cannot capture the presidency in the foreseeable future and will never have to stand on the other side of the institutional divide defending its prerogatives.
Nor, it seems, will it any longer take some great ideological issue (as with Bork), or the smoking gun of actual corruption, to serve as a cover for partisan opposition. All it will now take is something like the conviction that a nominee has generally bad morals.
Sam Nunn was a highly appropriate leader for this most recent exercise in the extension of congressional power. There has been much speculation on the degree to which Nunn’s moralistic personality, or his personal distaste for Tower, or his political ambitions may have determined his implacable position throughout the struggle. Clearly factors like these were at work, but at least as important is the role Nunn has played in the growth of Senate influence over foreign and defense policy at the expense of the presidency. Thus only last year, in the debate over how the ABM treaty of 1972 affects SDI, Nunn singlehandedly led the fight to establish the idea that an American treaty with a foreign country is not the treaty the President negotiated but the treaty the Senate imagined it was ratifying. During this fight he urged a very broad view of the Senate’s prerogatives and showed a willingness to play rough personal politics in its pursuit.
Similarly, in the Tower case, by all reports, Nunn did not hesitate to tell Democratic colleagues that he would see their votes as an index of their personal respect for and confidence in him.
If Nunn was tough in this sense, Bush was not. He stood by his nominee to the bitter end, but he also sent the Senate signals that conflicted with the White House position of support for Tower. Democratic Senators lobbied by President Bush reported that the President had spoken of his need to choose his own Cabinet, but had shown no anger or vindictiveness, and refrained from threats. When Tower was finally defeated, the President went to work almost immediately to minimize the importance of the dispute. “Too much time has been wasted here,” he said.
The Tower episode, though, was no mere waste of time. The success Senator Nunn achieved here will assume its place as another marker on the path Congress has taken in asserting powers that have by tradition belonged more fully to the executive. The President’s adversaries, looking back over the Tower affair, will see little reason why, whenever a promising opportunity arises, they should not try again.
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