Known and Unknown (112 page)

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Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, wisely decided to reinstate the B-1, and it has remained a valuable weapon system for our country into the twenty-first century.
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Years later in a meeting with Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, I told him my story about the USS
Wisconsin
. “I was on that ship. I was the navigator,” Zumwalt replied. Astonished, I asked him, “How the heck did you become an admiral with that foul-up in your record?” Zumwalt answered that he had warned against the mooring location but had been overruled by the Navy Department in Washington. I then asked if my account about the tugboats was what he remembered. “You are exactly right, but you left one part out: The tide came up.” It was a lesson about the importance of teamwork, to be sure, but it is also best to have a little help from the Lord.

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Both Robson and Denny went on to have distinguished careers after Searle. John served as dean of the Emory Business School before going on to be deputy treasury secretary for the George H. W. Bush administration. Jim became chief financial officer for Sears, Roebuck & Co. and later chairman of Gilead Sciences. Their private investment activities, however, have been less exalted. The three of us banded together in the 1980s as TBM. Once when we were considering a project requiring legal disclosure, we were forced to disclose that TBM stood for “Three Blind Mice.”

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Since Searle did business outside of the United States, especially in Europe, one of the people I turned to was a man whom I had always found a reservoir of good sense and unique perspectives, former ambassador to North Atlantic André de Staercke, the Belgian who had long served as the dean of the North Atlantic Council.

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I cannot, however, claim to have sold the centrifuge company. Because of the power of the unions and French law, we weren't even able to give the company away. Our only solution was to pay the employees and the government so we would be permitted to transfer the business to the employees and be free of it.

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Searle sought new legislation to help every company affected by an FDA stay of approval. In January 1983, Congress passed an amendment to the Orphan Drug Act that provided any product that had been approved, and was subject to a stay of that approval which was later lifted, an extension of their patent to compensate for the time lost during the period of the stay.

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During the same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 grew 12 percent.

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Carter said, “My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous 2
¹
/2 years before that.”
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Others mentioned were former treasury secretary Bill Simon, former New York Congressman Jack Kemp, and Reagan's close friend Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada.
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Dr. Robert Goldwin had written an article on the Law of the Sea in June 1981 that pointed out the potentially unfortunate consequences of the treaty. Goldwin wrote that John Locke did not define “common” resources as belonging to everyone; he defined them as belonging to no one, and that ownership derived from the labor expended to harvest the resources. Remove the reward for the labor and you remove the incentive to work. Goldwin's article so impressed me that I sent it to George Shultz, who had succeeded Haig as secretary of state.
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Early in the administration, Bush came up to Joyce and asked, “What's your son addicted to?” It was a blunt question, to be sure—it was one of the first conversations Joyce had ever had with the President—but that was not unusual for George W. Bush. Perhaps reflecting on his own, well-known challenges with alcohol, he asked thoughtful questions and showed a comforting lack of any embar rassment over the issue. It quickly put Joyce at ease with the new President.

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There was one issue raised in early January 2001 when the
Chicago Tribune
ran a story about an exchange President Nixon and I had in the Oval Office. Nixon made some disparaging and offensive remarks about African Americans. The irony of the minor controversy was that in contrast to the
Chicago Tribune's
vigorous opposition to civil rights legislation, as a congressman I had supported the bills throughout the 1960s.

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The traditional model of a secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense was Mel Laird and his deputy, David Packard, who had cofounded Hewlett Packard and benefited from a long career in business.

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Secretary Cohen offered to be helpful in any way to smooth the transition, which I appreciated greatly. His deputy, Rudy deLeon, and a number of Cohen's senior staff graciously agreed to stay on during the many months it took to get President Bush's nominees selected, cleared, confirmed, and on the job.

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From the time we recommended someone for a position, it took the White House personnel shop seventy days on average to approve them, and then another fifty-two days for Senate confirmation.
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In the end, in October 2009, after labor unions representing federal workers spent many millions of dollars to help elect sympathetic lawmakers, Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress voted to kill the new pay-for-performance system we had put in place.

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In addition to our global posture, I also thought our bases and facilities in the United States should not be off-limits to review. In 2001, on my recommendation, the Bush administration proposed the largest U.S. military base realignment and closure (BRAC) effort in history. We reduced the number of bases across America to streamline DoD, improve its overall effectiveness, and cut costs. By closing bases we no longer needed, we projected that we could save the American taxpayer an estimated $5.5 billion every year. We also ended up earning criticism from a number of members of Congress who represented areas where bases might be closed.

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The only other signatory to the ABM Treaty, the Soviet Union, had ceased to exist.

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In our meeting, Deng was still trying to understand the American democratic system. He wondered how the U.S. Congress could enforce laws on China to reclaim American assets lost in Mao's Communist takeover twenty-five years earlier. “I could explain it,” I told him, “but it would take a great deal of mao tai,” referring to the Chinese liquor.
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In 1956, I learned that one of our close friends and a fellow Navy pilot, Jim Deane, had been shot down while flying a similar reconnaissance mission off the coast of China. Lieutenant Deane's remains were never recovered. There were rumors he might have survived the crash and was being held captive, but we were unable to get any conclusive information. Deane's wife asked her congressman, Gerald R. Ford, for his help in obtaining information. Later, on my 1974 trip to China with Kissinger, I was surprised when Kissinger handed me a memo about Jim Deane, whose fate he planned to raise with the Chinese. When I became secretary of defense in 2001, I tried to gather more information on missing American pilots, including Deane, when I met with Chinese officials. Despite our efforts, the Chinese never budged on the issue and Jim's widow, Beverly Deane Shaver, continues to search for answers.

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Of the forty-four Chinese Air Force interceptions of U.S. reconnaissance flights prior to April 1, 2001, six involved Chinese planes coming within thirty feet of U.S. aircraft and two involved Chinese planes coming within ten feet.
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The article went on to say that the U.S. reconnaissance plane had violated Chinese airspace, and in doing so was a “threat to the national security of China.” The article “modestly” closed with the demand that “the U.S. side…make a prompt explanation to the Chinese government and people about the U.S. plane's ramming of the Chinese jet and its infringement upon China's sovereignty and air space, apologize to the Chinese side and shoulder all the responsibility arising from the incident.”
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Under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the principal military adviser to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense. Though the chairman is not in the chain of command or a member of the NSC, he generally serves as the communication link for military actions between the national command authorities—the president and the secretary of defense—and the combatant commanders.

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Powell had an engaging sense of humor and could poke fun at himself and some of the stereotypes of the State Department. On one occasion, Cheney, Rice, and I were at the State Department for one of our regular lunches, which we took turns hosting. The rest of us periodically kidded Powell about the State Department's lavish meals. This time when we arrived, Powell had the table set elegantly with cloth napkins and matching silverware, and at each of our place settings silver platters with matching silver covers awaited. After we all took our seats, hovering waiters in tuxedos pulled off the silver covers simultaneously in a dramatic fashion. Underneath we found brown paper bags with sandwiches in them. Powell grinned, and we roared with laughter.
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A particularly egregious example appeared in the
Washington Post
in 2003 entitled “
POWELL AND JOINT CHIEFS NUDGED BUSH TOWARD U.N.
” The article claimed that Powell and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dick Myers overruled a reluctant Bush, Rice, and me about seeking the international community's help in postwar Iraq. It was so utterly untrue that both Myers and Powell took the rare step of publicly disputing it. This was the sort of storyline that continued throughout the administration. Other similar headlines included: “POWELL TRIED TO TALK BUSH OUT OF WAR” and “POWELL'S DOUBTS OVER CIA INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ PROMPTED HIM TO SET UP SECRET REVIEW.”
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I find that committing a point of view to paper sharpens my thinking. It also permits other participants in the discussion on a given issue to understand my perspective more precisely. This approach, of course, has its drawbacks. Stating one's position in a written document becomes part of history. It makes it hard to claim down the road that one was wiser than might have been the case, and it limits one's ability to wait to see how events unfold before being publicly committed to a specific course of action.

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For example, over one three-month period in 2003, there were thirty-one meetings at the White House scheduled by the NSC staff. We did not receive any papers in advance for these meetings. Further, 48 percent of the meetings were canceled and we received summaries of the conclusions for only 17 percent of the meetings held.
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Democrats were urging that any money from a projected budget surplus be directed to a so-called, nonexistent, Social Security “lockbox.” Unlike the internet, the lockbox idea was an Al Gore invention. During the 2000 campaign, Gore and congressional Democrats used the gambit in an attempt to turn any proposal they didn't like—such as cutting taxes to leave more of the American people's hard-earned money with them—into an effort to raid Social Security. The whole debate struck me as absurd. There was no budget surplus for a lockbox (it was only a theoretical projection), and the last people in Congress who tended to be worried about restraining spending were the proponents of the lockbox idea. Moreover, most everyoneknew that Social Security needed fundamental reforms that few were willing to confront.

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They included: Ed Giambastiani; Jim Haynes, the Department's general counsel; Steve Cambone, the deputy undersecretary of policy; Larry Di Rita, my special assistant; and Torie Clarke, the assis tant secretary of defense for public affairs.

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The last time the Defcon had been raised to that level was in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, when I was ambassador to NATO.

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Each of the other three hijacked aircraft had five al-Qaida terrorists onboard, and the difference between four and five terrorists may have meant the difference between failure and success. In 2002, the individual believed to be the twentieth hijacker—the missing hijacker from United Flight 93—came into U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The detention and interrogation at Guantánamo Bay of the suspected terrorist, Muhammed al-Qahtani, would later become a focal point of controversy.

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Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China all share borders with Afghanistan.

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He should not be confused with the terrorist who led the nineteen September 11 hijackers, an Egyptian also named Muhammed Atta.

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At my first meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels in June 2001, I made a point of meeting privately with the minister of defense of Uzbekistan, Kodir Gulyamov, which surprised some of our NATO allies.

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Until 2001, UAVs had been used mainly on an experimental basis. When they first had been ready for operations, Defense and CIA officials debated over who would control them and who would pay for their use. In both bureaucracies, some officials were eager to avoid responsibility and preferred not to be burdened with the cost. After 9/11, with coalition operations underway in Afghanistan, George Tenet and I began to sort out Defense-CIA joint Predator operations. We came to an agreement over who owned and paid for the assets, where they would operate, and who would “pull the trigger” on the very few UAVs that were armed at the time.