Crossfire over Defense

"I have never had a single person either with me or on the telephone ask me not to appoint Dr. Harold Brown for Secretary of Defense," Jimmy Carter insisted last week. In the narrowest sense that was apparently true. But the statement ignored the fact that some of Washington's sharpest political and bureaucratic infighters were flashing their knives to influence the President-elect's most difficult remaining personnel decision: whether to appoint the Caltech president to the Pentagon post or give the job back to James Schlesinger, who had been abruptly dumped by President Gerald Ford for resisting Ford's efforts to trim the defense budget.

Carter's first choice had been the remote but brilliant Schlesinger. In reporting to Carter on his private trip to China last fall, Schlesinger impressed the Georgian with his expertise and intellectuality. Although Schlesinger is widely seen as a hard-line hawk, Carter found they were in surprising agreement on many defense matters. Schlesinger supports Carter's call for a phased U.S. withdrawal from Korea, for example, and now agrees that $5 billion to $7 billion of waste can be cut from the Pentagon budget after all.

But liberal Democrats, notably Averell Harriman and Frank Church, privately advised against appointing Schlesinger. So did his successor, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Some of the Pentagon's uniformed chiefs, who felt that Schlesinger sometimes treated them with contempt, also opposed him. Hoping to avoid controversy, Carter turned to Brown, a physicist who had been one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's prize Whiz Kids and Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Secretary during the Viet Nam War. A skilled manager with a fuzzy ideological image (hawks consider him a bit dovish and vice versa), he seemed a safe compromise.

Then the Schlesinger advocates rallied. Aides of AFL-CIO Chief George Meany spoke in Schlesinger's behalf--though some officials speculated that labor's lobbying was partially designed to strengthen John Dunlop's chances of being named Labor Secretary ("You give us Dunlop, and we'll accept Brown," the labor aides seemed to be suggesting). Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson took up the Schlesinger cause. So, in a discreet way, did Admiral Hyman Rickover, Carter's early mentor. Also backing Schlesinger were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis and Appropriations Committee Chairman John McClellan.

As Senators and aides waged their fight in Washington, they persuaded some newsmen to re-examine Brown's Pentagon record. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak did so in a critical way, finding Brown to be inconsistent. First, he successfully resisted McNamara's efforts to abandon the bombing of North Viet Nam's military supply centers and transportation facilities (at one point Brown urged mining and bombing Haiphong harbor). Then, after the war, he pushed for faster disarmament agreements with the Soviets. In fact, the specific means of waging war are not really in conflict with ways of rendering a future war less likely or deadly. At the Pentagon, Brown is considered a master of advanced technology and as adept at handling the bureaucracy as is Schlesinger. At week's end the betting, though hedged, was still on Brown.

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