Melvin Laird: Salesman for the Pentagon

...Let's make it clear-U.S...

...His relations with Congress are usually cordial, always correct...

...Nixon...

...A reawakened Congress subjects the defense budget to unprecedented scrutiny and actually orders some reductions...

...Steel . . . more than the combined total of the thirty largest companies...

...A television network devotes a full hour of prime time to a detailed and devastating expose of the Pentagon's vast and expensive propaganda operation, describing and demonstrating the junkets, the gimmicks, the hard-sell films and the soft-sell lectures, the little white lies and huge deceptions with which the taxpayers are cozened —at the taxpayers' expense...

...eight members occupied official positions with twelve different firms holding a combined total of at least $1 billion in military contracts...

...It was Laird who discovered, more than a year after the 1968 Presidential campaign, that "Vietnamization" was the "plan" President Nixon had in mind when he promised to extricate the United States from the Indochina quagmire...

...As you say, Mel, it's all a matter of semantics" It seems likely that in the months to come the task of explaining and defending "Vietnamization" may tax even the Secretary's ingenuity now that President Nixon, for the first time, has admitted that Vietnamization cannot, "except over a long period," end the war in Indochina...

...He no longer spoke, as he had in the past, of making "more effective use" of air strikes against North Vietnam, including bombing raids on Haiphong, the harbor for Hanoi...

...Laird still feels close to Congress— close enough to get his hair cut every week or ten days in the barber shop in the Longworth House Office Building...

...armed forces are bogged down—still bogged down—in a sordid, interminable—and expanding—war that has produced few heroes but that provides new names almost every week for a long and growing roster of accused war criminals...

...Because he is a professional politician, Laird says, the President solicits his advice not only on defense matters but on domestic issues as well...

...Not long after he moved into the Secretary's office, Laird talked about "the inheritance left to the Nixon Administration...

...A skeptical Congress and public whose frustrations about the war and domestic problems have generated frequent opposition to large outlays for essential national security purposes...

...After his appointment to the Cabinet, Laird modified some of his earlier views to bring them into line with official Administration rhetoric...

...Laird is only forty-eight years old...

...Laird is the nation's tenth Secretary of Defense and the first from a calling that he claims with pride—"professional politician...

...As a professional politician, Laird campaigned vigorously for Nixon in 1960 and for Barry M. Goldwater in 1964...

...close enough to spend hours with them on the telephone every week...

...Some disenchanted Republicans wistfully try to talk Laird up as a potential replacement for Spiro Ag-new on the 1972 Nixon ticket...

...Laird's strong suit, as befits a professional politician, is public relations, and it is a talent not to be despised in this most public relations-ridden Administration...

...Had the "meaningful recommendations" of the brass been followed, Laird wrote, "the chances are that accelerated efforts in many areas where we later tried frantically to make up for lost time would have been undertaken when they should have been— years ago...

...The approach is reminiscent of the method followed in the Eisenhower Administration, and many experts think it is likely to lead to the same result—an inordinate emphasis on procurement of major new weapons systems at the expense of training and maintenance, and an escalatory spiral in the arms race...

...Racial tensions in the armed forces run high, although the services congratulated themselves not long ago for setting the pace in "solving" the race problem...

...In recent months, however, he has discovered that the Gap tends to widen along with the war...

...In 1968 he again lent his unstinting support to Nixon—and traveled with him extensively during the campaign— after having flirted briefly and successively with the stillborn candidacies of George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller...

...Despite projected (but undisclosed) reductions in the cost of the war, the military budget is up by $1.5 billion, and a substantial increase is budgeted for research that will lead to development of costly and dangerous new weapons systems...

...In 1970, he issued a memorandum stamped Secret . . . Sensitive" (but subsequently leaked to the press by Pentagon sources) which declared: "It has come to my attention that misleading and even erroneous information is being disseminated concerning our negotiating positions at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Vienna...

...When Senator Prox-mire proposed last fall, however, that the "fly before you buy" principle be written into law, Laird successfully opposed the effort as "premature," declaring that "it would eliminate flexibility in acquisition strategy...

...Much of the day-to-day administrative responsibility is borne by Deputy Secretary David Packard, who built a major electronics firm—and a huge personal fortune— as a defense contractor...

...A Congressional committee makes daily headlines with new disclosures of graft and corruption on the part of high-ranking officers who have found a way of turning a buck or two out of the gin mills and cabarets and sundry other entertainments provided to ease the burden of the troops in Indochina...

...A substantial majority of Americans believe, for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, that the nation is spending too much for "military security...

...It contained some strong language—"Frankly, we think it's an impossible organization to administer," Fitzhugh said of the Defense Department—and no less than 113 recommendations, many of which have, Laird claims, already been put into effect...

...In fact, Laird has put into practice his frequently asserted conviction that the brass know what they are doing, and what ought to be done...

...He returned from a visit to Vietnam in January, as Defense Secretaries have since the dawn of time, with news that splendid progress was being made...

...Another frequent golfing partner is Secretary of State William P. Rogers, with whom Laird is reported to have serious differences from time to time, and whose foreign policy responsibilities have, to a considerable extent, been usurped by the Pentagon...

...Desertion rates have tripled in the last five years, reaching a total of almost 90,000 in fiscal 1970...

...A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the former Pentagon management expert who was fired for disclosing to Proxmire the $2 billion cost overrun on the C-5A cargo plane, has written that the Fitzhugh panel's report was, in its total impact, "a whitewash written by whitewashees...

...They are right, and the credit, if that is the word, belongs to one man— the Secretary of Defense...

...But Laird's deputies for "public affairs" acknowledge that he is as adept as any of the professionals in the skills of salesmanship...

...I see some strong and convincing evidence for possible defense budget increases in order to meet urgent requirements, many of them too long deferred...

...In public, however, he responded in the best tradition of the professional politician: he denied everything, but promised that it wouldn't happen again...

...The public, according to the polls, has lost all patience with the war and favors its termination on terms that only recently would have been derided as "surrender...

...his closeness to Congress pays handsome dividends for the Administration and the Pentagon/1 When he is not cultivating his contacts at the Capitol or consulting at the White House, the Secretary maintains virtual open house for members of the high brass...

...Acknowledgement of U.S...

...Victory through Air Power Laird's evasive and disingenuous handling of the raid on the prisoner-of-war camp at Son Tay last November and the accompanying bombings near Hanoi was egregious even by Johnson Administration standards...

...He is mistaken...

...A little past the half-way mark, it remains intact to be passed on to his successor...

...Some Pentagon sources report that the Secretary was angry—not because the military spied on civilians, but because he had not been kept fully informed...

...He does not behave that way...

...After two years in a job that no sane man could want —and that Laird didn't—he is at peace with the embattled military, admired by the captious staff surrounding the President, esteemed by Mr...

...Its assets (about $200 billion) are greater than the combined assets of the sixty-five largest industrial companies...

...But he reaffirmed his conviction that "our military leaders are dedicated men of the highest competence whose purpose is peace," and he declared his intention of bringing the Joint Chiefs into "full participation" in the shaping of military policy...

...The promise has been deferred but not forgotten...

...among the civilians and career soldiers who preside over the military apparatus, morale is good, confidence is high, predictions are optimistic...

...It was Laird who propagated the myth that the Indochina War was being "wound down" even as it was being expanded far beyond the confines of South Vietnam...

...And a Laird associate helpfully reminds a reporter that the late President Eisenhower once called Laird "one of the ten men in America best qualified to serve as President of the United States...

...Laird's principal rival as a decision-maker on matters of national security, Presidential Assistant Henry A. Kissinger, frequently comes to the Pentagon to have breakfast or lunch with the Secretary...

...It is against this background that a visitor to the Pentagon supposes that that he will find an atmosphere of siege, demoralization, and disarray— or at least defensiveness—at the Department of Defense...

...Disclaimers of American ground involvement in Laos have been too transparent to be accepted even by the true believers...

...Their friendship is of long duration...

...His warnings, increasing in frequency and intensity, about the "basic asymmetry between what the United States has been doing and what the Soviet Union has been doing in the field of strategic nuclear weapons," fall on receptive ears in Congress though they are discounted, privately, even by some of the Pentagon's own experts...

...cle was being written, Laird was laboring mightily to dispel the impression that the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos might be turning into a major disaster...

...There's much more of a sense of participation by all in getting the job done," one officer says...

...air activity in Laos and Cambodia trickled out of the Pentagon—reluctantly, belatedly, incompletely—only after repeated denials were incontrovertibly refuted by on-the-scene press accounts...

...Within the services, disaffection is at an all-time high and discipline is at an all-time low...

...You cannot have a violent disagreement with Mr...

...Perhaps the most far-reaching change was the downgrading of the Office of Systems Analysis, home base of McNamara's "whiz kids" and principal target of his military and Congressional critics...

...It's amazing how effective he has been with all this news about the Son Tay raid...

...It was as a professional politician, he says, that he was prevailed upon by the President to accept the post after Mr...

...We are now in a period of negotiations, and I think that should be considered as we face the future...

...A month ago, just before the opening of a Senate investigation into the surveillance activities, Laird sought to blunt the impact of the probe by announcing formation of a "civilian-dominated" board to review the military's domestic intelligence efforts...

...A second was his reputation as a Cold War hardliner committed to maintaining American nuclear "superiority" over the Soviet Union...

...During most of its stages Secretary Laird remained relatively aloof—not only because of his philosophical commitment to "decentralization," but because neither his background nor his temperament suit him for detailed administrative supervision...

...An overheated economy with a high rate of inflation that forces restraint on Federal spending, higher taxes, tighter money, or a combination of such actions...

...he intends to serve no more than four years, and then resume—or, rather, continue— his career as a professional politician...

...Among its components he listed: "War in Vietnam with no end in sight...

...Laird's strong suit, as befits a professional politician, is public relations . . Despite his lively intellectual curiosity and a remarkably retentive memory, Laird has succeeded no better than his predecessors in mastering the intricacies of the Pentagon's far-flung enterprises...

...On the eve of Election Day in 1968, Nixon campaign headquarters disclosed the price tag for the candidate's policy of military "superiority"—a Pentagon budget of $87 billion by 1972...

...The only possibility Laird discusses, even with close friends, is a return to the House of Representatives, but other opportunities may present themselves...

...A recent tally shows that the Secretary has made about seventy-five public speeches, held some sixty news conferences, submitted to more than 100 interviews, and uttered some 1.2 million words for the record before audiences ranging from the AFL-CIO to the Economic Club of New York and the Civic Clubs of Du-luth, Minnesota...

...Reports from Vietnam tell of "fraggings"—the use of fragmentation grenades by enlisted men against their officers and senior non-coms...

...the Cheyenne attack helicopter, missile-armed tanks, a new surface-to-air antiaircraft missile system, and "automated battlefield" devices for the Army...

...The sky's the limit...

...Aides to both men assert that their rapport is excellent, as well it might be, considering their joint dedication to Vietnamization and Cold War concepts...

...The transition is complete, and the policy for the 1970s is taking shape...

...A year ago or so it was fashionable among some columnists and commentators to characterize Laird as a "secret dove" who was arguing in Administration counsels for rapid disengagement from Vietnam and prevailing over the hawkish views of the Pentagon brass...

...He is convinced that McNamara's public relations failure was a principal cause of the Johnson Administration's Credibility Gap, and he is determined to avoid duplication of this and all other McNamara errors...

...The panel was headed by Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (which held more than $34 million in stock of two dozen large Pentagon contractors and had outstanding loans of more than $1.3 billion to corporate members of the military-industrial complex...

...Occasionally they play golf together at the Burning Tree Country Club...

...He has been the prime mover in the Administration's decision to "go public"—Laird's term—on the issue of American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, and the persistent trumpeter of the "success" of last spring's Cambodian invasion...

...the abortive Son Tay raid was celebrated as a success...

...close enough to drop in for frequent visits with his old friends in the House and Senate...

...Defenders and beneficiaries of the mess are still trying to cure it by pouring money on it, then scratching dirt over it...

...A third was his prominence as a critic of McNamara, and especially of McNamara's efforts to subject the military to civilian restraints...

...Complex and cumbersome decision-making and management procedures which cause unnecessary work and sometimes obscure objectives...

...Navy and Air Force fighter-bombers was justified as "protective reaction...

...Second only to Attorney General John N. Mitchell, Laird has frequent and direct access to Mr...

...Such Orwellian phrases as "limited duration, reinforced protective reaction air strikes against missiles and anti-aircraft gun sites and related facilities" trip off his tongue with a facility that leaves even such articulate critics as Fulbright almost speechless...

...An official of the Nixon Administration told a New York Times reporter: "By taking the offensive himself, Laird has pushed the bombing issue and the understanding into the background...

...The President's proposed budget for fiscal 1972 makes good on the Secretary's prediction...

...In 1969, Laird professed his deter- mination to "permit defense personnel, military and civilian, to express differing opinions freely...

...The Fitzhugh Panel's massive, 237-page report was released with much fanfare last summer...

...Among the artifacts on display in the Secretary's third-floor office at the Pentagon—military artists' renditions of Vietnam war scenes, an AK-47 rifle captured from the Vietcong—is a metal casting replica of Abraham Lincoln's right hand with an engraved plate inscribed, "To Mel Laird with deep appreciation from Pat and Dick Nixon, November 1960...

...But to a steadily growing number of thoughtful Americans who recoil from the Administration's warlike policies, Laird's behavior is understandably suspect...

...Okinawans riot against the storage of poison gases on their island, and American politicians protest the shipment of toxic weapons through their back yards...

...A year ago^ in presenting his "rock bottom budgget" for fiscal 1971 to Congress, Laird called it "a transitional program . . . designed to move the nation's defenses in a safe and orderly way from the national security policies of the 1960s to those deemed more appropriate for the 1970s...

...Another leading critic, Chairman J. William Fulbright of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Laird in a burst of anger of "misrepresenting the facts" about last November's U.S...

...Over the past two years, the functions which McNamara struggled— with only mixed results—to bring under the centralized control of the civilian Office of the Secretary have again been decentralized and returned to the military services...

...Once the slogans are disposed of (fly-before-you-buy and civilian control), the Fitzhugh panel's report amounts to a non-solution...

...the attack by 250 U.S...

...The military chiefs, who grudgingly went along when Laird told them they would have to take some cutbacks in the last two years, when he insisted on a faster rate of troop withdrawals from Vietnam than they deemed expedient, when he forged ahead with plans for a "zero draft," are beginning to make out the shape of the long-range payoff...

...It's such a big department that it's hard to fix responsibility...

...One can only speculate on how much more effective last year's Congressional assault on the military budget might have been had it not been for the professional politicking of Melvin Laird, but the judgment both in the Defense Department and on Capitol Hill is that his influence was profound...

...Senators probe arms shipments to America's "allies," and question military "commitments" that have gone unchallenged—indeed, unnoticed—for ten years or more...

...The Secretary laid the groundwork last November when he told the Economic Club of New York that "we cannot look forward to any further significant reductions in total defense spending...

...You'll find no blood in the corridors," says a high-ranking civilian official...

...What form the career may take is uncertain at this time...

...Narcotics use is rife at military installations at home and abroad...

...It appears much more likely that the defense budget must at least remain stable in terms of real purchasing power...

...They have their shopping lists in hand: a new strategic bomber, an "air superiority" fighter, the Airborne Warning and Control System for the Air Force...

...A little more than half-way through President Nixon's four-year term, Melvin R. Laird is the outstanding success story of the Nixon Cabinet, the one appointee who has fully delivered the "extra dimension" the President promised when he announced his choices...

...One was the expertise he had acquired as a senior Republican on the House defense appropriations subcommittee, and the use he had made of that expertise in pressing for procurement of major weapons systems...

...Melvin Laird: Salesman for the Pentagon by ERWIN KNOLL Not since the bad old days between the wars—the days of From Here to Eternity—has the American military establishment been in so much trouble...

...The Secretary has been equally effective in selling the antiballistic missile and the multiple nuclear warhead, though in doing so he has probably damaged—if not destroyed—the prospects for a strategic arms limitation agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Systems Analysis, with its concern for "cost-effectiveness," its contempt for parochial inter-service rivalries, and its responsibility for initiating annual detailed planning of military forces and logistics, had come to symbolize all that the military found objectionable in the McNamara regime...

...The widening of the war, as well as the resumption of air strikes against North Vietnam, reflect his susceptibility to the generals' perennial pleas for just one more round of escalation that will turn the tide of "victory" in Vietnam...

...Laird is, as Professor John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, remarkably adept at frightening people...

...Nixon, and respected even by some of his severest critics on Capitol Hill...

...close enough to contemplate the serious possibility that he may run for Congress again some day, if he does not run for some other, higher office...

...I want to be sure you understand, however, there must be no speculation which would indicate, or even imply, that a MIRV or ABM deployment moratorium is desirable...

...Nixon's first choice, Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, turned it down...

...Laird's most effective public relations effort to date has been "Vietnamization," which virtually eliminated the war as an issue in last fall's Congressional campaigns and sent the domestic peace movement into a deep torpor from which it is only beginning to emerge as a result of the Laos invasion...

...As long as I am Secretary of Defense," Laird has pledged, "there will be full and free access to all information that can be made available without danger to the nation's security...

...Consider this partial catalogue of its woes: • U.S...

...Come what may, Melvin Laird will not be Secretary of Defense in 1973...

...Quite a legacy, that, and Melvin Laird has taken good care of it...

...The complex planning process for the fiscal 1972 military budget, submitted to Congress by President Nixon in January, began at the Pentagon more than a year ago...

...Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat who has led the fight against Pentagon waste and who recently denounced the Department for "unmanagement," is notably reluctant to criticize the Secretary...

...He gave up the likelihood that he would become the Republican Leader in the House, and the possibility that he might some day be Speaker...

...The trend is up...

...He has the support, of course, of a huge and costly army of publicists— the apparatus Senator Fulbright has described as "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine...

...There will be no cover-up, no concealment, no distortion...

...Sometimes he arrives early to confer with the President before meetings of the Cabinet or the National Security Council...

...bombing raid on the outskirts of Hanoi...

...The contrast with Laird's predecessors, and especially with former Secretary Robert S. McNamara, is implicit but emphatic...

...It was Laird who sold most of Congress, the press, and the public on the notion that the Saigon government and its army would be able to achieve on their own what they had been unable to accomplish with the support of more than half a million American troops...

...So far as his acceptance by the military is concerned, Laird brought several strong assets with him when he came to the Pentagon in 1969...

...At least he says so, and there is no reason to doubt his word...

...As this artiERWIN KNOLL is Washington Editor of The Progressive...

...He's in a tough spot," Proxmire says...

...the North Vietnamese were denounced for violating an "understanding" to which they had never agreed, and the Secretary explained that the reason he had not given the Foreign Relations Committee the full facts was because the Senators had forgotten to ask...

...The office survives, in truncated form, charged with playing an "advisory" role, but its chief functions have been supplanted by a system Laird likes to call "fiscal guidance," under which the armed services are given broad discretion to determine their own priorities within budgetary limits imposed by the Administration...

...We annually engage in more than 200,000 individual procurement actions of $10,000 or more involving more than 100,000 prime and sub-contractors across the nation...

...But Laird's greatest public relations challenge lies immediately ahead: reversing the overwhelming trend of sentiment in the country and the Congress by obtaining approval for an increased budget for the Pentagon...

...However, the Secretary has no plans to implement one key recommendation: that the Joint Chiefs be restricted to general strategic planning, and that their control over military operations be transferred to a new civilian Deputy Secretary with his own military staff...

...When he served on the House Appropriations Committee, Laird was the ranking—and most knowledgeable—Republican on the health, education, and welfare subcommittee, and his views have undoubtedly helped shape the Administration's approaches to welfare reform and medical care...

...Fulbright has not retracted his charge, but the Senator's aides now stress that he and the Secretary "try to get along...

...Laird reluctantly gave up sixteen years of Congressional seniority as Representative from what was then— but is no longer—a safely Republican district in Wisconsin...

...He believes that staying on the job too long was Mc-Namara's biggest blunder...

...There is still hope for 1973...

...thirty new destroyers, a fourth nuclear aircraft carrier, a "multimission fighter, and the Undersea Long-Range Missile System for the Navy...

...The Joint Chiefs of Staff call him "Mel," and report with satisfaction that he "listens" to the military...

...A massive Defense community without adequate controls...

...He could run for the Senate against either of Wisconsin's anti-Pentagon Democratic incumbents, Proxmire or Gaylord Nelson, though both won resounding victories the last time they were up for reelection...

...I do not believe that Department of Defense officials have been involved in indicating any positions which could be construed as favorable to a MIRV or ABM deployment moratorium...

...Meanwhile, his closeness to Congress pays handsome dividends for the Administration and the Pentagon...

...A majority of the fifteen-member Fitzhugh Panel was similarly weighted down with actual or potential conflicts of interest...

...Leading scientists, for the past thirty years the willing handmaidens of military technology, accuse the Army of committing "ecocide" by the random use of chemical defoliants against Vietnamese forests and civilian crops...

...The invasion of Laos was cloaked in a five-day "embargo" on news from South Vietnam which left the American people— but not the North Vietnamese or the rest of the world—in the dark on what was taking place...

...Laird has described the Department of Defense as "this mammoth organization," and has noted in awe that it employs "more than twice as many people as are employed by a combination of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, General Electric, Jersey Standard, IBM, and U.S...

...Events of the past year— notably the invasions of Cambodia and Laos—have demolished this view of the Secretary (though it is still clung to by Joseph Alsop, who contends, in his undiminished fervor for the war, that Laird is "betraying" the South Vietnamese...

...This is why hopes at the Pentagon are high, despite the dispiriting headlines in the daily press...

...sometimes he lingers after the meetings have adjourned...

...The Defense Secretary is the propagandist-in-chief for the "Nixon Doctrine," the author and apostle of "Vietnamization," the super-salesman of the "Safeguard" ABM, the Cassandra who warns of Soviet strategic "superiority," the determined defender of the "bare bones" military budget...

...It was a public relations triumph...

...In his 1962 book, A House Divided: America's Strategy Gap, in which he set forth his conviction that the United States must maintain a "first-strike capability" against the Soviet Union, Laird complained about the tendency to exclude the "highly intelligent citizens" in the military from the formulation of political policy...

...His book, he said, had been written "in a period of confrontation...

...He was apparently caught by surprise by at least the scope of the military intelligence intrusions into domestic politics that were disclosed late last year...

...Laird," one of his former colleagues in the House of Representatives has commented...

...We intend to put a lot of landfill in the Credibility Gap...

...In the area of military procurement, the Fitzhugh Panel's main suggestion was that the Pentagon adopt a system of developing and testing prototype weapons before going into production —a process that Laird has enthusiastically endorsed and publicized as "fly before you buy...

...The climate, says a senior military man, is "more productive" than it has been in years...

...infantrymen would be in Laos only to rescue our helicopter crews, who are there only to protect Vietnamese troops, who are there only to protect American troops in Vietnam, who . . ." Laird's principal response to the increasingly disturbing disclosures of monumental waste and mismanagement in the Pentagon—and particularly in its procurement processes— was to do what any professional politician would do: He appointed a "blue-ribbon panel" to look into the matter...