Casper Weinberger

From The Age:
CASPAR Weinberger, the hawkish US defence secretary who was the architect of unprecedented peacetime spending on military hardware — including the Reagan administration's Star Wars program — has died of pneumonia. He was 88.

Weinberger, who also served the Nixon administration, gained renown as the defence supremo who raised US defence spending by 50 per cent annually in real terms, at a weekly cost to the American taxpayer of $US6 billion.

He met virtually every demand put forward by the armed services — there were 90 more ships for the navy, two divisions for the army, costing $US10 billion a year to maintain, and 94 B-1B bombers, worth $US200 million each, for the air force. And then there was Star Wars, the wildly expensive strategic defence initiative, which has still not been made workable after an investment of $US50 billion.

Nevertheless, it is widely credited with hastening the downfall of the Soviet Union, which could no longer keep pace in the arms race that fuelled the Cold War.

Halfway through Weinberger's tenure, auditors uncovered fraud in 10 per cent of defence contracts. Manufacturers bumped up their charges in this period of defence largesse so that the Pentagon could be charged $US2000 for a small standard nut and $US33 for a canteen sandwich. In addition, by 1985 the country's largest defence contractor, General Dynamics, had paid no federal taxes for 13 years.

Weinberger's abrasive personality left him convinced that his policy was the only valid option. His memoirs contained waspish attacks on officials such as budget director David Stockman for disloyalty; on secretary of state Alexander Haig for ignorance of the US constitution; and on national security adviser Robert McFarlane as "a man of evident limitations which he could not hide". His running feud with Haig's successor at the state department, George Shultz, repeatedly paralysed US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.

Weinberger's public career ended in near ignominy when he became the most senior member of the Reagan cabinet to be indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice during the Iran-Contra scandal.

The charges arose from his testimony to a congressional investigation that he had known nothing about the illegal sale of arms both to Iran and to anti-government guerillas in Nicaragua. (Had he admitted such knowledge he would have had to testify that Reagan possessed it, too.) In December 1992, despite congressional opposition, President George Bush granted Weinberger an executive pardon days before the case came to trial.

Weinberger was born in San Francisco. His father, Herman, was a lawyer and his mother, Cerise, was from an English background. Under his father's influence, he had been steeped in politics from childhood, and by adolescence his instincts were firmly conservative. He thought the election of Franklin Roosevelt a terrible mistake and at university became notorious for his right-wing editorials as editor of the Harvard Crimson.

A brilliant academic, he was offered a scholarship to Cambridge but followed his father into law and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1941.

By now a convinced Anglophile, he tried to enlist in the Canadian air force but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. He volunteered for the US Army and, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, was sent to New Guinea with the 41st Infantry Division and finished up on General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff.

After a brief spell practising law, he was elected to the California state legislature in 1952 as a liberal Republican. He became chairman of the California Republicans in 1962, but blotted his copybook with conservative members by supporting Nelson Rockefeller as the 1964 presidential nominee instead of Barry Goldwater.

Two years later, Weinberger initially backed Reagan's opponent in the California gubernatorial primary, but when Reagan secured the nomination, he joined his campaign team. Weinberger was ignored in the initial appointments but, after a year of financial chaos, Reagan was urged to appoint him as director of finance. At first he raised state taxes, then lowered them, and then raised them to a point where personal taxation had doubled.

California wound up with a vast revenue surplus, which, though it eventually generated a taxpayers' revolt, sufficiently impressed President Richard Nixon to make Weinberger head of the federal trade commission in 1970. Within six months, he had shed two-thirds of the senior staff and created a highly activist bureau of consumer affairs. Among its early campaigns, the bureau mounted a fierce attack on the car industry's quality control and called for greater regulation on vehicle design, which did not win him many friends among conservative Republicans.

He did better when Nixon made him budget director in 1972. His assault on social spending earned him the soubriquet "Cap the Knife" and he was soon in deep conflict with Congress. When the legislature refused to reduce appropriations for social programs, Weinberger simply impounded the money.

He continued this policy as secretary for health, education and welfare. In 1973, he seized more than $US1 billion of federal health funds, until he was ordered by a federal court to release the money.

Because of his wife Jane's ill-health, he resigned from the Nixon administration in 1975 and returned to California. The Bechtel Corporation created the job of special counsel for him and eventually made him a vice-president at the then huge salary of $500,000 a year.

By the time Reagan made him defence secretary, he was a multimillionaire.

After leaving the federal government in November 1987, he became publisher and chairman of Forbes Magazine and joined a Washington law practice. In 1988, he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the Thatcher government for the support he had given British forces during the Falklands war.

He is survived by Jane, and his son and daughter.