Bring on the Admiral

By Richard Lacayo

Maybe it's Mission: Impossible to be Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Just how do you bridge the gap between a White House focused on domestic problems -- and headed by a man with no time in uniform -- and a military wary, to put it mildly, of the new Commander in Chief? And how do you act convincingly at a time when the U.S. is still defining how it should project its power in a world where the ideological certitudes of the cold war have been replaced by raucous warlords and wild-eyed nationalists? When Clinton made his choice for the job last December, he could be sure that Les Aspin, who had made a career in Congress as an expert on defense policy, possessed the necessary devotion to the task. As it turns out, he should have wondered more whether Aspin also + had the bureaucratic agility and credibility to work with the armed services.

By last Tuesday Clinton had his answer. No one spoke the word fired when he and Aspin appeared at a quickly arranged press conference to announce that the Secretary would be leaving his job in January. But Washington gossip had been building for months that one or more members of the President's foreign-policy team would have to go. The October battles in Somalia that left 18 American servicemen dead had merely provided a focus for the growing sense that every time the Administration stepped abroad it stumbled. Though Aspin may not have been the man most responsible, he was one of the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the problem.

It was a sign of how long the White House had been mulling over the Aspin departure -- and how badly it wanted to head off another cycle of news stories about the frailty of Clinton's foreign-policy team -- that it took just one day for the President to rush out his next choice for the job. Retired Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a former CIA deputy chief, inherits some of the same problems that bedeviled Aspin from the day he stepped into the job, including gays in the military and the question of when and how American forces should be used in a world of small regional conflicts. It also remains to be seen how even an adroit bureaucratic navigator like Inman will manage to court the brass while squeezing their budgets. But from the start it appeared that he would have the stature with both the Pentagon and the public that Aspin never achieved. Even Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, a man accustomed to shaking his head mournfully over Clinton's judgments on military matters, was full of praise for Inman. "I think it's a good selection," said Nunn, adding that he had been consulted in the choice.

Aspin's problems had as much to do with his lumpish style as his policy positions. Rather than narrowing the cultural gap between the Oval Office and the war rooms, Aspin seemed to symbolize it. To the creased uniforms at the Pentagon, Aspin's rumpled suits and looping, ruminative pronouncements made him seem tweedy and hapless. Oddly for a man who first came to the Defense Department in the mid-1960s as one of the chart-toting whiz kids ushered in by Robert McNamara, Aspin was poor at organizational matters. In a place accustomed to firm decisions and stopwatch timing, he drove Pentagon planners crazy with meetings run like academic seminars, marked by late starts, later ^ finishes and stretches of sedative analysis in between.

The informality that can make Aspin agreeable as a man also made him unsuitable as a front man. At congressional hearings he was apt to put his elbow on the table and cradle his chin in one hand. He can irritate colleagues by referring to them by their last name only, or sometimes just the first. Military brass were startled to hear Aspin refer to General Colin Powell at a briefing by saying "Colin will take care of that." A senior Administration official summed up the problem: "Lacks gravitas."

Even more damaging in the view of the White House were Aspin's frequent wobbles when he tried to articulate Administration policies in the media. During the first weeks of the fight over gays in the military he appeared on Face the Nation to air the view that Congress and the military brass had the power "to derail this thing." When he added that "if we can't work it out, we will disagree, and the thing won't happen," it sounded like an open invitation for opponents of the change to mobilize. Political insiders, however, sensed in the ousting of Aspin what they termed "inoculation" politics: the White House wanted to ward off Republican criticism of defense cuts. Though White House officials say there was no single incident that led to Aspin's departure, the murderous firefight in Mogadishu made it a foregone conclusion, especially after it was followed by a disastrous closed-door briefing to Congress at which Aspin was reportedly at a loss to describe the Administration's intentions in Somalia. But as far back as September, Aspin was seeing signs that Clinton's doubts about the foreign-policy team were beginning to focus upon him. During his regular meetings with the President, the Secretary had begun to detect a certain "crispness" in Clinton's manner. "Things just deteriorated," says an aide. "Each time was worse."

When he sensed that his job was in danger, Aspin "put up quite a fight," says a White House aide. He bought some new suits creased in the right places and a few camera-friendly ties. By mid-November Clinton had quietly asked White House chief of staff Mack McClarty to come up with a list of potential replacements. Working with Vice President Al Gore, he assembled the names.

Inman, who was at the top of Gore's list, had the advantage of having already been vetted by the White House last year as a potential CIA chief. At Gore's suggestion, the President invited Inman to the White House for a two- hour afterdinner chat about national-security issues. Though it wasn't intended as a job interview, it was enough to impress Clinton that he may have found his candidate. Not only was Inman a policy expert and a businessman with managerial experience, like Clinton he was a small-town boy from the South (East Texas) who had risen to the top.

It may have been harder to sell Clinton to Inman, a Bush voter who didn't much feel like returning to Washington. "The President had to talk him into it," says a senior White House official. "It wasn't about defense or budgets. They just needed to get to know each other." The admiral was taken aback when the White House contacted him about the job two weeks ago. He agreed to take it only after he was satisfied that Clinton was personally committed to building a strong, forward-looking national-security policy with bipartisan support. Though impressed by Clinton, Inman still hesitated until his old friend "Chris," as Inman calls Secretary of State Warren Christopher, stepped in with an appeal. When the deal was finally cut, the President was particularly pleased that word of Aspin's departure had not leaked. On Wednesday he remarked gleefully to an aide, "It is absolutely astonishing that this thing has held."

Inman did not ask Clinton for a specific dollar commitment on the defense budget. Long convinced that the Pentagon procurement process is bloated and slow, Inman strongly believes more prudent spending could achieve savings, and is likely to make procurement reform a major goal. Aspin never really got control over the budget process. Early this year he sent memos to service chiefs telling them to propose $11 billion in reductions in addition to cuts the Bush Administration had already made in the Defense Department for fiscal 1994. But when he introduced his first Pentagon budget in March, it failed to terminate a single major program. As Aspin told after his resignation, "It's obviously better to be Secretary of Defense when budgets are going up than when they're headed down."

Though Inman will be the first career military officer to become Defense Secretary since George Marshall left the job in 1951, the admiral might not be any more forthcoming with the military than Aspin was. That's because, matters of style aside, the outgoing Secretary took few positions that led to friction with Pentagon brass. Though he came to the job willing to entertain the idea that the U.S should be prepared to use force selectively to solve regional problems like Bosnia and Haiti, he quickly became a defender of General Powell's all-or-nothing view that in places where the U.S. is not prepared to commit the full extent of its power, it should not commit any.

The Pentagon had become accustomed to light supervision by civilians under Reagan and Bush, when Defense Department officials routinely had their staff work done by uniformed personnel of the Joint Chiefs. Inman may be less likely than Aspin to fill Pentagon offices with former congressional aides. But if Inman's wise, he will fill posts more quickly. Aspin launched one of the major undertakings of his tenure, a "bottom up" review of military-force needs in the post-cold war era, even as dozens of high-level vacancies remained, including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

In fact, his most serious problem in the Secretary's job was not related to his policy decisions but to the overall drift of the Administration he was part of. "Les Aspin was dealt a difficult hand," says Oklahoma Representative Dave McCurdy, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which Aspin once chaired. "The first card was gays and lesbians: faceup. Then came the three regional problems -- Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti -- for which nobody in the Administration had real answers." The heaving and rocking of the Clinton White House as it struggles to define America's role in the world may prove to be Bobby Ray Inman's biggest vexation too. If the Secretary of Defense is supposed to symbolize the President's policy, maybe Les Aspin, with all his vagueness and indecision, did that job all too well.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Bruce van Voorst/Washington