Word: aspin
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...