Word: toweringly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reviews are going slowly, and the absence of a Pentagon chief to give military input could stretch them out for additional weeks or even months. Meanwhile, the rush of events may not wait. Said a State Department official: "We are going to pay a big price for sticking with Tower...
...confined to the Department of Defense. Senior White House officials began to speculate about whether chief of staff Sununu can survive in his post. Coming from a state dominated by Republicans, Sununu has failed to appreciate that in Washington it is necessary to deal with Democrats too. In the Tower case, he underrated the power of Sam Nunn, the owlish Democrat who has established such a reputation for disinterested expertise on military policy that he can take nearly all of his party with him on any vote on defense matters. Sununu compounded the trouble by turning over most...
After the vote, the White House went on a binge of finger-pointing. Some Bush aides blamed the stunning defeat on ex-Tower aides who, they said, had been lobbying ineptly on Capitol Hill without proper supervision. The Tower men scoffed back that they had been watched closely all the way by Sununu. Said one: "Sununu has been in on all the major decisions." But all sides agreed on the real villain: Sam Nunn. Several accused the chairman of deciding secretly two weeks ago that Tower had to go and then browbeating his Democratic colleagues into a party-line vote...
...Though Tower himself and Sununu helped engineer this debacle, Bush is also to blame. His insecurities and a stubborn streak make him leery of admitting outsiders, especially people who have independent followings, into his inner circle. Most new Presidents display this flaw to some extent, but Bush has it worse than, say, Ronald Reagan, who eight years ago put together an effective team that mixed old friends and talented people he barely knew, some staunchly conservative, others not. In contrast, says a former Bush adviser who played a large role in the transition, Bush "always asked...
Bush, at least initially, refused to admit defeat on Tower and stubbornly insisted that his nomination be debated before the full Senate. On the morning after the committee turned thumbs down on him, Tower reported to work at his temporary office at the Pentagon. In a meeting convened in Tokyo shortly before the committee vote, Bush forbade his aides even to speculate on possible successors to the Pentagon job. If any violators of that rule could be identified, the President declared, "I would like to kick some serious hide." Though a barrage of calls on Tower's behalf from Quayle...