Word: towers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...