Death of a Cold Warrior

...He loved freedom and fought for it...

...His humor was dry and plentiful...

...And when you did a good job, he was happy to say so...

...Reagan and Weinberger were skeptical about the approach of previous administrations, and staunchly opposed the then-popular idea of a "nuclear freeze...

...Strategic forces had fallen behind those of the Soviet Union...

...I like your memos," he said to me after a few weeks on the job...

...So, placed in charge of the Department of Defense at what we now know to have been the apogee of half a century of Cold War, Cap went for increases...

...Weinberger's Defense Department, moving into high gear, would leave it in the dust...

...He once delayed for several days an important memo advocating a bold position on a controversial arms control issue (limiting medium-range missiles in Europe) so he could send it to the president from his airplane over the Atlantic...

...He was comfortable taking on the arms control lobby that had become a formidable advocate within the Departments of Defense and State and the establishment media...

...Two men, Ronald Reagan and Cap Weinberger, whose relationship was the product of close collaboration over many years, understood what needed to be done...

...A shove could speed it on its course...

...A third of the Navy was unfit to sail...

...The Soviets were near exhaustion from a decade of military spending that approached a third of their gross domestic product...

...Confident of Reagan's steadiness and support, Cap set about constructing the forces and budgets that could replace obsolete systems, provide adequately for the training and well-being of our men and women in uniform, and restore morale, indeed pride, to the armed services...

...Squeezing Moscow meant, among other things, rethinking whether it was in the American interest to negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviets that had the effect of leaving them with their newly modernized arsenal while restricting our freedom to catch up...

...And the addition to our defense plans of an energetic research and development program on ballistic missile defenses would drive the Kremlin to despair—and to the negotiating table...

...In the end, Reagan achieved treaties—on terms that liberal arms control advocates had, to a man, declared to be too favorable for the United States and therefore impossible to achieve...

...And he did so with the same intelligence and intensity he had displayed throughout his long and useful public career I remember some of the early briefings Cap received when he arrived at the Pentagon...

...The Air Force was losing more aircraft in Richard Perle was assistant secretary of defense for international security for most of the seven years that Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense...

...But Cap understood that when budgets were too large, you found ways to cut them...

...Reagan first, then Weinberger, understood that Soviet totalitarianism was headed for the "ash heap of history...

...His indictment for alleged wrongdoing in the Iran-contra affair was a travesty...

...Big increases...

...He was a man of integrity and humanity...

...So were the whisper campaigns suggesting that because he often disagreed with Israeli thinking, he was anti-Semitic...

...He knew how to construct bureaucratic alliances...

...Six years later, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed an agreement that did precisely that...

...And he encountered many...

...He knew that an encrypted message sent from abroad would reach the president without interception (by the State Department...

...That would take the form of an attack on the legitimacy of the Soviet ruling elite and a massive challenge to the only product its risible economy was organized and drained prodigally to produce: military power...

...Both the president and his secretary of defense understood that reviving American military strength had an important political as well as military purpose...

...Agreements would have to be on terms that served our interests— and if we couldn't get such terms, well, we would just have to do without the agreements...

...Cap enthusiastically supported the president's instinct on this...

...People who didn't understand him were puzzled that the budget-cutting, streamlining manager, who had come to be known as "Cap the Knife," could shovel money for national defense like coal in a locomotive...

...America owes him admiration and gratitude...

...If they were too small, you went for increases...

...BY RICHARD PERLE IN HIS LAST and most important public service, Caspar W. Weinberger, Ronald Reagan's secretary of defense, was at his best...

...He could be tough and demanding, but he was kind and considerate...

...And he knew how to maneuver...

...training accidents than it could replace...

...Called to Washington from around the world, one after another of the chiefs of the unified and specified commands explained that they could not perform their assigned missions: Too much of their equipment was obsolete, too many recruits fell below minimum standards for a modem fighting force, morale was in the basement...

...Cap was an unusual cabinet secretary, especially at the Defense Department, because he had ambitious goals and he drove to achieve them with both energy and political skill...

...Cap Weinberger was widely read, witty and urbane, a man of grace and charm...

...You don't split infinitives...

...The malaise that Jimmy Carter had famously diagnosed, even as he helped cause it, had descended on the Department of Defense...

...He is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Cap was an easy man to work with, and for...

...Cap suffered fools with remarkable equanimity...

...They saw an inconsistency...

...It did, and Ronald Reagan days later announced the famous "zero option," which called for the total elimination of medium range missiles, a proposal the Soviets immediately rejected...