Sam Nunn: Can He Escape The Respectability Trap?
Alter, Jonathan
SAM NUNN: Can He Escape The Respectability Trap? by Jonathan Alter From time to time the political landscape shifts in such a way that an aperture flicks open, revealing with some certainty...
...Nunn has seen enough of these witnesses trying to wriggle out from under his tough cross-examination to know that they are not exactly scurrying back to the Pentagon to “take responsibility” for eliminating expensive and dubious weapons...
...The difference is that in the case of the bureaucrat the fear may be justified...
...The Tridents will be based'here, too,atacostof $1.4 billion...
...Aides say Nunn was deeply shaken by how so ill-conceived a plan could have met with such approval by so many high-ranking officials...
...In fact, it will expand...
...Nunn and his wife Colleen are on the list...
...According to Record, Hollingsworth, then commander of U.S...
...But the feeling within the executive branch against telling the truth to Congress runs so strong that Nixon came under intense pressure from his own people to make sure the whistle-blower was forced out...
...John Stennis, committee chairman for 12 years until the Republican takeover of the Senate, is 8 1 years old...
...One former aide recalls, for inst,ance, that in 1975 Nunn believed he had ruined his Senate career when he voted to extend the Voting Rights Act...
...Moody includes a.wing of F-4s, and Dobbins features the largest aircraft factory in the world, which is owned by the government and leased to Lockheed .. Fort Benning does all infantry troop training for the Army, and Fort McPhers.on is where the Continental Army Command is headquartered...
...13,000 in its Marietta plant, 8,OOOmore if the C5B contract comes through...
...So Nunn naturally gravitated toward the Armed Services Committee...
...If Sam Nunn had a better understanding of the bureaucracy, he might know what was really happening among the men of “good faith” whom he trusts to build less expensive weapons-the pats on the back when an official returns to the office after a successful day of jousting on the Hill...
...Before reaching the Senate, he had but one year’s experience as a staff aide to Carl Vinson (who has an aircraft carrier named after him because he never said no to the U.S...
...One surprising explanation he offers for steering clear of most weapons issues is that he doesn’t often know very much about the technologies of various systems, an interesting admission from a senator with his reputation...
...Now We Have Nunn...
...This willingness on Nunn’s part to go head-on against the Pentagon has been growing in recent years...
...As usual it said nothing shocking, which suited the foreign policy establishment just fine...
...In 1979, Nunn didn’t say, “I’ll let the executive branch decide what our defense buildup should consist of...
...Georgia's bite of the defense pie decreased, but for each of the last five years, Georgia has been among the top three states in terms of new military construction...
...When combined with an unshakable respect for the military services characteristic of his region and upbringing, and with a personal nature that one former aide says is “trusting-willing to accept people at face value,” Nunn’s weak feel for the bureaucratic culture becomes a serious handicap...
...On nuclear questions, he has usually deferred to-or at least agreed with-Henry Jackson...
...Henry Jackson has other chairmanship choices and is in danger of losing his seat...
...by Jonathan Alter From time to time the political landscape shifts in such a way that an aperture flicks open, revealing with some certainty which issues will dominate the decades ahead, and which people will dominate those issues...
...That is, we share fifty-fifty-50 Percent for Georgia and 50 percent for the rest of the nation:" "Seriator Nunn, has tried to continue that very fair tradition," says Arnold Punaro, Nunn's aide on defense issues...
...Does it look as if Scoop Jackson is taking unfair credit in the press for originating the idea behind the crisis management post...
...Without a commitment by Carter to such an increase, Nunn told the press he could not support SALT I I , regardless of the specific merits of the treaty itself...
...For instance, Nunn has been one of the most active and insightful critics of the All-Volunteer Force but still has not introduced legislation calling for a draft or national service...
...Today, after several more of what Nunn’s defense aide, Arnold Punaro, calls “TwoJima-like battles,” there are 100 fewer such officers...
...Vandenberg’s conversion was marked by his support for the Marshall Plan and the creation of the NATO Alliance, the latter of which since has turned into the touchstone of this respectable (with a Capital R) approach...
...At that time [during the SALT debate] I felt the Carter administration was placing entirely too much emphasis on arms control to the exclusion of a sound national security program,” he said recently...
...In fact, some have suggested that the conservative drumbeat for more defense that started around that time helped pave the way for Reagan’s election...
...This may seem like a simple turf question, but it goes to the heart of Nunn’s position on SALT 11, which was seen for a time as pivotal in the Senate debate...
...The “consensus” approach would have been to back the president in a serious matter of this kind, or, if interested in some modification or deal on the treaty, to pass the word quiet!,, within the Senate club and the White House...
...They had a group of liberal Democrats just after the Vietnam war and each senator picked out one weapon system and made it his cause...
...Which can we pay for...
...It also means you keep your voice low...
...With only two years of placid Coast Guard duty behind him, he says he often defers to senators with first-hand experience, like Barry Goldwater and Howard Cannon-both pilots-on tactical air issues...
...That’s why his bold, highly partisan activity on a particular issue is so revealing...
...First, in the mid-l970s, Nunn met Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth, a salty soldier from the old school...
...When Nunn does make it, and the odds heavily favor it, his youth and impregnable Senate seat mean he is likely to run the committee well into the 21st century...
...Where three years ago he pushed for across-the-board increases in defense spending, he now says that administration “needs to give people the sense that we’re not just spending across the board...
...it takes remarkable courage for him to follow the instinct for truth to its logical conclusions...
...But it surely was...
...When a senator of Nunn’s stature and future position sounds willing even to consider questioning the emperor’s clothes, it’s cause for some relief on the part of those who despair of ever changing the dreary context of the defense debate...
...and lots of nervousness, but he was reelected with better than 80 percent of the vote in both the primary and general election, the highest of any Democrat in the country that year...
...that has to start in the executive branch,” and other such concessions to the tired old respectable consensus tradition...
...In terms of his career, Nunn was also an unlikely critic...
...All of his cautious, measured, respectable inclinations had been set aside in favor of a full-blooded battle cry in support of a particular position...
...The unwillingness to pursue his instincts is even clearer on the weapons side...
...For all of his efforts, Nunn can’t help coming off as a senator whose reputation is better earned than it is used, whose skepticism never quite comes to a conclusion, even if that conclusion is something he feels very strongly about...
...Sure enough, this year, Sam Nunn returned from Europe with his most recent report on the state of the Alliance, his third since joining the senate...
...Anyone who runs for president of the Chamber of Commerce at 24 and the U S . Senate at 34 can hardly be considered lacking the requisite moxie...
...The first of those is straight-forward enough, though Nunn is perhaps too conscious of the voting power of conservative Georgians...
...Take It from Ernie So through hard work and an open mind, Sam Nunn has avoided turning into another John Tower, and the American people can be thankful for that...
...Right now, Nunn knows what the premise of the new U.S...
...This deference to the wisdom of others has waned some in recent years, but it remains characteristic of Nunn, and it helps explain why he has not put his stature and knowledge to better use...
...forces in South Korea, didn’t have much respect for the “cookie-pushing” officers he believed were ruining the military...
...Specifically,” Stennis repeated, firmer this time...
...Within defense, Nunn has developed subspecialties, among them manpowerand personnel matters, which account for 60 percent of the Pentagon budget...
...The point is, if Nunn didn’t worry about kicking up a little fuss then, he shouldn’t worry now, when his position has been inverted...
...But in the case of the senator, courage isn’t really at issue...
...Nunn, along with many naval strategists, wants a larger Navy...
...This administration needs a strategy, a sense of priority,” Nunn says, adding that earlier administrations didn’t have these things either...
...The issue was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks(SALT) I 1 treaty that came up for debate in the Senate in 1979...
...In 1979, the jurisdictional question came up again...
...Nobody knows...
...What do you think we still need specifically?“ Stennis is said to have replied...
...Thomas D. Boellcher...
...Who will develop that consensus if not Nunn...
...Earlier, Nunn had urged that the Armed Services Committee take the unusual step of questioning President Carter’s nominee for director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Warnke-a task generally believed to belong exclusively to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...Aides to other senators, who like nothing better than to sit around assessing the competition, are impressed by that quality in Nunn, and by Nunn’s likability and capacity for hard work...
...Harry Byrd is retiring...
...He came up with the proposals himself, proposals he hastens to add that were much more detailed and comprehensive than a simple across-the-board increase of four to five percent...
...This approach was controversial (Warnke, now back in private law practice and free to speak more candidly, says, “It stinks-it’s perilously close to blackmail”), but it worked...
...Think of the challenges facing Sam Nunn this way: Each of his state's nine• largest cities has a military installation nearby, and in seven of those cities the largest employer of civilian residents is either a military base or a defense manufacturer...
...And he worries about spreading himself too thin-“spinning my wheels in an area I’m going to lose in...
...A Choice Not an Echo Because Nunn is still a bit confused in this matter of when not to trust people-because he still itches, against all experience, to give the benefit of the doubt to men in uniform-his positions have been characterized by a hesitant incrementalist approach...
...So are reporters and “military reformers,” two other groups that are hard to please...
...If he remains too conscious of his political base to be considered a full-blown creature of Washington, he is nonetheless highly attuned to the rhythms of life in the capital-the “rules...
...S. strategy...
...It makes him feel responsible...
...From the time he became president of the Perry, Georgia, Chamber of Commerce at age 24, Nunn has been not only ahead of his peer sin terms of career, but decidedly ahead in understanding the requirements this kind of world places on someone trying to get ahead...
...Well, unfortunately Nunn still hesitates to call for canobvious point extending from the analysis namely that the Reagan administration’s plan to build large AEGIS cruisers at $ I .2 billion dollars each should be scrapped in favor of greater numbers of smaller, less expensive boats...
...Unfortunately, even when they doscrutinize the bureaucracy, few members of Congress, of any persuasion, have the ability to go beyond locating the buried bodies to the more critical matter of how they are buried-how the truth gets squashed...
...For those whose attitude toward Fitzgerald has been colored by the interminable litigation of recent years, it is useful to recall that the only reason he originally was fired was that he told the truth-not to the Soviet Union, but to the U.S...
...Being from Georgia, which receives about $5 billion all told from the Pentagon each year, Nunn shares many of those interests...
...This skepticism about the Pentagon is unusual for someone of Nunn’s background, and not only because he comes from a part of the country known for its reverence for the military...
...Showing his always keen sense of political opportunity, he used the SALT debate as a partisan forum to push for a four- to five-percent real increase in military spending...
...Do we really need to project American power into every nook and cranny of the globe...
...He is 24 years younger than the next in seniority on the committee, but within a few years, if the Senate turns Democratic again, he will probably become chairman...
...The Georgia Rap: A State In Love With The Military I(Sam Nunn: has trouble following through on his proposal to rethink this country's defense aims...
...This is all standard enough for a prominent senator, but there is something about Nunn that allows him to operate in such an environment with particular ease...
...Nunn jumped in, echoing the concern...
...In 1978 his support of the Panama Canal treaties generated angry New Right epithets (“We Used to Have a Panama Canal...
...The senator believed that arms control, which in the past had been viewed as a foreign policy question, should not be separated from the issue of military strength...
...Nunn points with pride to his record on manpower issues-eliminating some generals and admirals, preventing last-minute promotions designed only to allow higher pensions...
...For ~ time after Richard Russell and Carl Vinson Jeft office...
...Does Nunn have an idea for a joint U.S.-Soviet crisis management post to monitor the possibility of accidental nuclear war...
...major maintenance for all the nation's C130s and.F-15s, houses a wing ofB-52s, and much of the Air Force's softwaTe...
...Nunn came to the Senate in 1972 at age 34 to fill the seat of the late Richard Russell, who from his position as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee helped run the U.S...
...We're very above-board in the way we approach where military bases ought to be located," Richard Russell used to say...
...It didn’t make any difference whether the mission had changed or the means had changed or whatever, they were going after it...
...One suspects that the real reason Nunn won’t take this step has little to do with his protest that it is beyond his capacity as a senator to do anything more than “get a dialogue going...
...Howard Cannon is the underdog this fall...
...Thus it was, for instance, discouraging to hear Nunn say that the purpose of his impressive cost overrun amendment was, in his mind, “not to alert Sam Nunn so that 1 can rundown and try to cancel the Bradley Fighting Vehicle [a new armored personnel carrier Nunn has criticized for poor design and cost overruns] but to alert the managers of the Department of Defense so the.\’ can take responsibility” (his emphasis...
...Except when a weapons issue directly affects his state, as in his impassioned support of Lockheed’s C-5B against Boeing’s 747 in the recent airlift debate, Nunn makes a policy of avoiding the role of crusader...
...By believing that HEW or HUD or other agency officials they faced were acting in the sincere interest of the country, congressmen have fallen into the habit over the years of granting the wish of nearly every bureaucrat who testified he really and truly needed more money for his program...
...Similarly, last November Nunn successfully pushed an amendment through the Senate requiring that Congress be alerted every time there is a cost overrun of 15 percent or more on a major weapon system...
...What he hasn’t been able to do is move from saying that American defense should be rethought-a respectable enough view for oped pieces and think tanks-to actually putting himself on the line with some concrete suggestions on which changes should be made, which parts of the world we should pull back from and which elements of our force structure would be superfluous under the new strategy...
...The notion of a consensus defense and foreign policy goes back to the late 1940s, when Arthur Vandenberg, an isolationist senator from Michigan, converted to internationalism...
...Another example of this trait that has especially annoyed some defense critics involves the B-l bomber, which Nunn supported in 1977 but now opposes...
...The respect will remain, the seat will be safe, the “credibility,” built up over many years, will not dissipate overnight...
...so was the Pentagon’s most powerful supporter on Capitol Hill, Republican Senator John Tower, now chairman of the Armed Services Committee...
...If I did I’d have to stop raising the cellation, except in extreme cases...
...One reason this matters so much is that Nunn is genuinely interested in breaking through the stale defense debates of recent years and rethinking the issue...
...Instead, Nunn went public...
...Rockwell, Pratt and Whitney, and other defense manufacturers employ at least seven thousand more...
...Tower eventually voted for the unanimously passed measure-“you can’t vote against motherhood,” he said at the time but Senate staff members say it was only because Nunn maneuvered the chairman into a position where he couldn’t publicly press the Pentagon’s case...
...Then came the West Point cheating scandals, where the Army went before Nunn’s subcommittee and tried to minimize the inadequacies of cadet training...
...What are this country’s military aims...
...Who will dominate defense...
...In 1974 Stennis appointed Nunn chairman of a new subcommittee on that subject, and for six years heused theassignment to project his own view of the way the military should change...
...Nunn feels perfectly comfortable calling up a reporter from The New York Times to straighten him out on which senator came up with the proposal first...
...But Nunn’s advances should not obscure the fact that he remains in many ways the product of his background-a background that makes it difficult for Nunn to act as skeptical as his questioning might suggest...
...If he steps out of line-if he tells Congress too much he fears his credibility back at the office might well be shot...
...I don’t think that’s productive...
...Jackson and Nunn said more strategic capability generally...
...But on the big manpower questions, he has ducked...
...Given that the first harassment of Fitzgerald had taken place during the Johnson administration, one might have expected Richard Nixon to seize the opportunity to embarrass his predecessor by publicly decorating Fitzgerald as a hero for fighting waste in LBJ’s Pentagon...
...One of the men Russell shared authority with was Carl Vinson, long-time chairman of the House Armed Services Committee...
...The reason these managers can be trusted to do so, he adds, is that they are “acting in good faith...
...But the effect is sometimes that same superficiality he strives so hard to avoid...
...Like the cautiousness of most senators, Nunn’s has its roots both at home and in his perception of the Senate as an institution...
...strategy should be-that we don’t have the money to project American power as we have in the past...
...The Department of Defense was adamantly opposed...
...As it is traditionally expressed in cloakrooms and salons and sober foreign policy journals, such respectability doesn’t just mean you cooperate with the other party and with the president...
...But it was true...
...Nunn says he doesn’t agree with everything in the controversial Spinney report, but he felt it necessary to air critical views publicly-the aim, even if the Pentagon didn’t appreciate it, being a better defense in the long run...
...In 1981 he enraged Pentagon brass by making public a study put together by a Department of Defense civilian named Chuck Spinney that took issue with the premise behind the military’s reliance on expensive and highly complex weaponry...
...That’s why it’s so disappointing to hear Nunn say things like, “I don’t think I’m capable of laying out a comprehensive defense strategy...
...Those seem like basic enough questions, but they have never been asked much except by those, like the military services, with unshakable interests in the answers...
...Nunn has no regrets about his role in 1979, and he won’t admit it was partisan...
...That is a tall order, but reachable for a man of Nunn’s abilities...
...Over the repeated-even desperate objections of senior military officers, Nunn finally prevailed in 1978 In enacting a modest six-percent reduction...
...And he knows that the Pentagon is having trouble building the right weapons weapons that are affordable and that actually work...
...The reason Nunn’s divisive tactic is relevant today has nothing todowiththemeritsofSALT11 or whether arms control should or should not be held hostage to other matters...
...Nunn was not responsible for killing the treaty-it died because of the tempest over Soviet troops in Cuba and the invasion of Afghanistan-but he was responsible for helping forge a large public constituency for increasing defense spending...
...Do we really need 15 aircraft-carrier task forces...
...The caution that grows out of his strategy for effectiveness in the Senate is ultimately more damaging...
...The reason he has not gone further-has not followed his logic where it leads-is partly that residual trust for all things military, partly the unreasonable fear of serious political consequences in Georgia, and partly an understandable concern about spreading himself too thin...
...Conservatives have quite justifiably blamed liberals for that trait, and liberals have quite justifiably replied that conservatives rarely apply their skepticism about big government to the Pentagon...
...the biggest thing standing in his way will be his own state of Georgia, where the military is now the economic . mainstay of the state, exceeding even agriculture...
...Nunn came to believe, for instance, that the military included too many generals and admiralsmore, in fact, than during all of World War II...
...If he still looks more like a small-town bank clerk than the stereotyped image of a silver haired senator, he has long since learned to project a mature, senatorial impression...
...Nunn craves that happy, safe middle ground...
...Congress...
...One former aide to another Democratic senator recalls an Armed Services hearing in the spring of 1978 when Jackson asked Stennis for authorization of more strategic nuclear weapons...
...Record believes a second, more important influence on Nunn’s thinking was his experience with the All-Volunteer Force, which the senator repeatedly criticized in his subcommittee as poorly manned (too many high school drop-outs who flunk skills tests) and overly reliant on hard economic times to meet recruiting goals...
...No, Nunn shuns the bold, inspired role because, right now, anyway, he must feel the price too high...
...If you still wonder what’s wrong with trust and respect and belief in “men of good faith,’’ look at the domestic side of the budget...
...In a recent analysis he explained how that goal is unaffordable given the Navy’s penchant for large ships...
...This was the traditionalist consensus-building approach Richard Russell always followed in such matters, but Nunn did nothing to embrace it and the Stennis position did not prevail...
...Albany is home of a Marine Corps logistics base that has 19 warehouses...
...And finally Desert One, the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission...
...The price of inching out a little on that limb of respectability, of occasionally risking error, of losing the warm feeling that comes with being popular among both the Walter Mondales and the Barry Goldwaters...
...In an institution of colossalegos, Nunn knows his colleagues resent those who try to hog the limelight on the floor and in the press...
...Whether the change results from shifts in his thinking, or the Reagan defense policy or both, it definitely has taken place...
...He talks about it a lot, he says he wants a bill, but he has put off acting on it, according to an aide, until a “consensus” develops...
...And that's just the military bases...
...The Navy can boast of Kings Bay Submarine Base, eastern port of asquadron of PoseidoOIwc\ear subs...
...Chairman Stennis strongly felt that it was not the role of the committee overseeing the military to pass judgment on a foreign policy question like SALT 11...
...Ambassador-at-Large Vernon Walters having a small dinner for outgoing CIA Deputy Director Bobby Inman...
...When the Army says the AVF is wonderful and you know it isn’t, then you begin to suspect that, hell, if they lie about this, then maybe they’ll lie about other things too,” Record says...
...and] that military men were by nature superior to other bureaucrats . ” Record attributes the change in Nunn to several major influences...
...military...
...You didn’t see Sam Nunn fighting the military’s controversial 20-year retirement rule, which allows many officers to retire, collect a half-pay pension, take another government job, and retire and collect another government pension...
...It has everything to do with how much Sam Nunn can be depended on to do what is required at present...
...In Congress, at least, the future can be easily associated with a name: for the next 25 years or more, military debate likely will revolve around a sharp-minded Democratic senator from Georgia named Sam Nunn...
...The same linkage of foreign policy and defense goals that in 1979 was used to build a constituency for a stronger military could, in 1982, be used to build a constituency for a more efficient-and less grandiose-U...
...Thel2 bases touch nearly ever aspect of the U.S...
...its members...
...Nonetheless, he wants to start the process...
...Nunn is, for all of his tenacious dedication to the interests of his constituency, a budding fixture in a certain highflying Washington orbit...
...Like the Spinney case, the cost-overrun amendment suggests that when he puts his mind to it, Sam Nunn can be a highly effective and imaginative friend of a sensible defense policy...
...One of the issues, of course, is national defense, a subject that relates not only to national security, but to the shape the American economy will take...
...military for a generation...
...In another sense, though, it really should be viewed as fear of responsibility, or even, if it can be said about an ambitious young senator, fear of leadership...
...And what if the weapon really deserves to be killed, and can be argued against without the Capital R Responsible From the time he first trooped into Mike Mansfield’s office with great-uncle Carl Vinson to seek a place on the Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn has sought to be a member of the Senate “club,” a word reserved for those senators who function especially well within the peculiar constraints of the institution...
...They didn’t lay a glove on you,” the happy coworkers are inclined to chime in on these occasions, which is, of course, another way of saying that the person testifying was able to get through the hearing without providing any facts or relevant details about the problems of his program...
...Fort Gordon is home of the Signal Corps, and Fort Stewart is the largest army base (in land area) east of the Mississippi...
...In the first I8 months, the Reagan administration’s problem has been exactly the opposite...
...So if Sam Nunn could break out of the club rules in the late 1970s on the need for more defense spending, he could certainly do so now on the need for less...
...This sense of comfort in a certain respectable, behind-the-scenes Washington life manifests itself politically in the idea of “consensus,” which Nunn stresses repeatedly as a way of explaining why he doesn’t believe it is his role to lead the charge for the Democrats against the Reagan defense plan...
...Right now, the state boasts 12 military complexes, which employ about 50,000 civilians and• 70;000 soldiers, airmen, and sailors...
...By waiting until the last minute to announce his opposition, Nunn missed any chance to affect the debate, and the B-l was approved...
...But it involves something else, too: life in what might be called Washington’s national security establishment, and the rules that establishment imposes on questions...
...Sam had no pre-Senate experience that would have habituated him to the skepticism that one should have for big, bureaucratic institutions, says Jeffrey Record, who served for four years as Nunn’s aide on defense issues...
...Sam Nunn may not know it yet, but everybody-even the cream of the Washington club-responds to 1eadership.Especially when it comes from a senator who is knowledgeable, hard-working, and the future chairman of the most powerful military committee in the Congress...
...He came to Washington believing that what was put out in Pentagon press releases was really true, that ‘duty, honor, country’ were really lived by...
...Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger invites the senator to the Pentagon for a private lunch to discuss it...
...This has not, however, led him to the senator looking obnoxious or “liberal...
...These employees are supplemented by 160,000 military dependents, 30,000 National Guard and Reserve personnel, 85,000 military retirees, and thousands of civil service retirees...
...Among the contractors, Lockheed...
...Jackson could not come up with a list, and neither could Nunn...
...Georgia, employs more thaI...
...Every time I raise a question I don’t have time to carry it to its logical conclusion,” he says by way of excusing his lack of boldness...
...Jonothan Alter is an editor/The Washington Monthly...
...Among the Air Force installations, Robins does the...
...The best illustration of how it happens is also the most familiar-the famous case of A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the Department of Defense analyst who testified in the late 1960s about the billion dollar cost overrun on the Lockheed C-5A transport, at that time the largest overrun on any military project ever...
...All they did in the military field was take on that weapon system for five years...
...This view of national security policy came under pressure during the 1970s-Vietnam and CIA disclosures almost shattered it-but it’s a tradition Nunn says he very much believes in...
...At bottom the fear isn’t really much different from that of the Pentagon colonel or planner Nunn faces so often across the table...
...Is U.S...
...As he and Nunn grew closer (in 1977, they traveled together to Europe to assess NATO), the senator came around to the Hollingsworth view, slowly beginning to resent the ethic in the military services that so often seems to place pay, benefits, and other creature comforts ahead of establishing an effective, well-disciplined fighting machine...
...Navy in his entire career), a few years as a small-town attorney, some unremarkable service in the Georgia state legislature, and precious little else in the way of preparation...
...The list goes on and on...
...Vinson, also a Georgian, was Sam Nunn’s great-uncle...
...In an interview, Nunn was entirely unaware, for instance, of an important and highly charged debate on the use of state-ofthe-art radar...
...He is widely considered to be among the one or two senators best informed on defense issues...
Vol. 14 • September 1982 • No. 7
