Collapse of A Confirmation

By Ed Magnuson

It was the stuff of which high drama, as well as low comedy, is often made. John Tower had served on the powerful Armed Services Committee for 20 years, four of them as its strong-willed chairman. Now a majority of former colleagues blocked his efforts to climb one more rung in his distinguished career. Moreover, and perhaps most demeaning, they ostensibly turned against him because of questions about his life-style, although his professional activities also worried them.

The committee's struggle over Tower began some five weeks ago in a friendly fashion and on loftier issues. The members were aware that the FBI had extensively probed the twice-divorced Tower's personal life, including allegations that the onetime Senator had carried on flagrant affairs, even while serving as the chief U.S. negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva. But after George Bush, who was then President-elect, declared that Tower had been given a "clean bill of health" by the FBI and then nominated him to lead the Pentagon, those concerns temporarily subsided.

Another issue then came to the forefront. Even Bush and his advisers had been concerned about whether Tower could be expected to clamp down on defense spending. After all, he had enthusiastically advanced Ronald Reagan's $2.2 / trillion arms buildup. Prepped by Rhett Dawson, one of his former committee aides who had moved to the Reagan White House and was tapped by Bush to be Secretary of the Army, Tower impressed the President-elect with a plan to implement neglected Pentagon reforms advocated in 1986 by the Packard commission.

Thus when the committee finally began confirmation hearings on Jan. 25, Tower performed with the zeal of a new convert to Pentagon parsimony. He assured the Senators that he backed cuts in the Pentagon budget, including reduced funding for strategic missile defense. At the end of Tower's crisp testimony, the Senators burst into rare applause.

The collegial mood changed abruptly on Jan. 31 with the testimony of Paul Weyrich, an archconservative spokesman for right-wing causes. Weyrich openly declared that he had seen the nominee drunk in public and with women other than his wife. That caused the committee's teetotaling chairman Sam Nunn to ask Tower pointedly and in front of television cameras whether he had "any alcoholic problem." Replied Tower: "I have none, Senator. I am a man of some discipline."

Quizzed behind closed doors, Weyrich was unable to cite specific incidents of Tower's misbehavior, but the genie was out of the bottle. The committee was inundated by telephone calls, many anonymous, reporting "sightings" of Tower misbehaving in public. The White House asked Nunn to delay a committee vote while some of the accusations were being checked out by the FBI. Referring to the leaks to the press, Tower privately protested, "They've practically got me dancing naked on top of a piano."

Now the committee began moving more cautiously. Some veterans recalled that in 1982, when Tower was chairman, the committee had blithely approved the nomination of Melvyn Paisley to be an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, even though he had some curious ties to defense contractors. Paisley later became a key figure in the FBI's Operation Ill Wind, which turned up a scandal involving consultants who had profited from inside information about Pentagon procurement. Some Senators wanted to avoid repeating that kind of mistake. While Tower's own lucrative consulting on defense matters after leaving his START post carried no criminal implications, it would raise a conflict-of- interest problem if he became Defense Secretary.

Behind the committee doors, another latent source of friction came into play. Some old-timers on the staffs of the Democratic Senators, and even a few of the Senators, had long chafed under Tower's high-handed rule as committee chairman. Now his nomination was being urged on the committee by many of his former staff aides, who have since moved on to prestigious White House and Pentagon jobs. Most notably, Frederick McClure, the top legislative lobbyist for Bush, was resented for trying to round up votes on the committee where he had earlier made staff enemies.

As the nomination lost momentum, the committee re-examined a 1984 maneuver by Tower's former staff director James McGovern, now Under Secretary of the Air Force. In the final hours of a House-Senate conference, McGovern slipped a provision into the defense bill ordering the Army to choose a contractor for a new 120-mm mortar in three months. To meet this deadline the Army, violating its own rules, was about to hand the contract to an Israeli company favored by McGovern when senior committee members blew the whistle. McGovern told Senate investigators in 1985 that Tower had directed him to insert the deadline. Tower vigorously denied involvement when he was asked about the affair in his nomination hearings.

Despite such worries about Tower, Sam Nunn of Georgia, the committee's current chairman, had not been seeking a clash with the Texan. He and Virginia Senator John Warner, the committee's ranking Republican, had even worked out an arrangement under which they would take press questions on the nomination only jointly. The committee's approval of Tower seemed assured.

But on Feb. 7 the Administration blundered. White House ethics chief C. Boyden Gray and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole invited committee Republicans to be briefed on the latest FBI findings about Tower. They accepted. Nunn, who thought this violated his understanding with G.O.P. Senators, was angered by the partisan approach. He declared publicly that if the committee were to vote as quickly as the White House was now demanding, he would have to vote against Tower.

Continually underestimating Nunn's influence in the Senate, some of Bush's Washington newcomers began spreading the word that the Georgian was power hungry and wanted to run the Pentagon from his committee chair. In fact, he had been exerting great leverage on Pentagon policy late in the Reagan Administration, working with Defense Secretaries Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. Still, Nunn's motives have rarely been openly challenged. He became even angrier.

Nunn thus readily agreed to a second White House request to postpone a committee vote while the FBI looked into yet another Tower problem. This time it was an allegation, surfacing in the Ill Wind scandal, that some officials affiliated with Unisys Corp., a defense contractor under investigation, gave money in the early 1980s to a Tower associate, apparently to arrange meetings with the Senator. The payment was allegedly made as a campaign contribution.

It was not until last week that the FBI finally finished the last of its six reports on Tower. On Monday White House aides put the best possible spin on the findings, claiming that "there is nothing in this report to indicate that Tower is unfit for office." Next day the President joined the steamroller, declaring flatly, "The allegations that have been hanging over this ((nomination)) have been gunned down."

Even for some Republicans on the committee, Bush had gone too far. When he got to read the FBI report, Warner conceded that the document could readily lead to "credible differences of opinion" on what conclusions could be drawn from it. Bob Dole, who is not on the committee, noted that the President "was not totally accurate" in assessing the report. Nunn observed coldly, "That's the President's opinion, and I'm sure he thought carefully about it. It's not my opinion."

By Wednesday the committee Democrats were in open rebellion against what they saw as an attempted White House whitewash. Nebraska's James Exon declared that the President should start seeking a different nominee. Michigan's Carl Levin asked for more time to look into even newer allegations against Tower. Reading the growing sentiment, Warner suggested that a committee vote be delayed at least until week's end.

But Nunn had heard enough about Tower. In a closed meeting on Thursday afternoon, he proposed that the committee meet publicly that night, deliver any explanations it wished on how the members had made up their minds, then cast their votes. All along, Tower's fate in the committee had depended on Nunn's own decision. As the Senators debated Tower's strengths and frailties during the three-hour executive session, it was clear that Nunn would not accept the nominee.

Before casting his decisive veto in public, Nunn declared that Tower's "record of alcohol abuse cannot be ignored" and that he could find no evidence that the nominee had sought help to correct it. Nunn also judged some of the Texan's conduct with women to have been "indiscreet." Once again, a man's public career had been indelibly tainted by reckless personal behavior.

With reporting by Michael Duffy with Bush and Hays Gorey/Washington