A Mayonnaise Sauce Fails to Foil Secretary’s Global ‘Disposition’ : From Taj Mahal to Rome, Weinberger Plots a Worldly Course

The Boeing 707, with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger aboard, was somewhere over the Persian Gulf. That was certain.

In the rear cabin reserved for support staff and reporters, Weinberger was poring over a map of aviation routes to pinpoint the location of his Air Force jet and trace its course over the Strait of Hormuz toward landfall over the Arabian Peninsula just north of Bahrain.

For Weinberger, it was a typical performance, reflecting the intensity of a man who never seems to lose his curiosity about new surroundings or his delight in talking about them with others--in this case, his fellow travelers.

The secretary, who reached Rome on Friday, began his circumnavigation of the globe on Oct. 4. The journey took Weinberger to Frankfurt, West Germany, on Sunday for dinner with a former military aide, then to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. It ends in Washington on Wednesday.

From Washington and Alaska, then to Hong Kong, Peking, New Delhi, Bangalore in southern India, Islamabad in Pakistan and on to Cairo, the Air Force jet has deposited Weinberger and his party in exotic lands--to carry forward the foreign policy interests of the United States, and, in some cases, to boost the local economies.

A memorandum distributed before arrival in Hong Kong advised: “All passengers are reminded that the cargo area of the aircraft is loaded to capacity and cannot accommodate bulky purchases.”

That was the first stop. Weinberger said later that he had no chance to get out to the shops offering jewelry, cameras and Japanese-made electronics. But, referring to the excursions by his wife, Jane, who accompanied him on the journey, he said dryly, “Some purchases were made in my name.”

None of which is to say that the secretary and his assistants were not busy with affairs of state. They were.

But what Weinberger has accomplished, at least in detail, he generally keeps to himself and to his senior aides. In other words, he does his best not to make news.

When Defense Department spokesman Robert B. Sims told him in advance of a news conference that a rehearsed answer was unlikely to get him in the newspapers, Weinberger replied that that was all he cared to say about the subject. He stuck with the answer, and it drew little attention.

The 68-year-old Weinberger has kept to a hectic schedule of lengthy meetings with foreign leaders, private briefings with his staff, and official dinners.

In the last two weeks, he has taken only one full day off, to visit the Taj Mahal. The monument was closed to tourists for several hours while the secretary of defense, his wife and others in the group took in the grandeur of the ornate memorial, which was completed in the mid-17th Century to honor the love between the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan and his wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

From Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, Weinberger flew in a chartered Indian airliner to Jaipur, where elephants were waiting to take the party up a hillside to the Amber Palace, built in the 11th Century. Weinberger reached the hilltop in a small Indian automobile but sampled a short, swaying ride atop an elephant, anyway.

Perhaps it was the pace of the journey, but more likely it was Weinberger’s refusal to heed the culinary warnings on Third World travel and avoid raw vegetables and most dairy products. And most likely, it was the rich, mayonnaise-based sauce on a shrimp cocktail that he ate one day at lunch.

Whatever the reason, he was felled for about 24 hours with a bacteria-caused intestinal upset. It forced him to cut short his meetings in India and reschedule sessions in Pakistan, where a newspaper said that the shifts were due to the secretary’s “disposition.”

For 24 hours, the Air Force major who is the trip’s flight surgeon found himself the most important person on the journey, up there on a par with Weinberger’s military aide, a vice admiral, and assistant secretaries of defense.

When it was brought to his attention that he had had a rare chance to visit the Taj Mahal without having to share the site with other tourists, Weinberger cracked: “You have to balance that with the mayonnaise.”

Despite his “disposition,” however, he managed to place a wreath at a monument to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leading figure of the Indian independence movement. Failure to do so would have shown a lack of confidence in Indian security--and a lack of nerve--because the memorial was the site just days earlier of an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

And so, his brief appearance there afforded an incongruous sight: Two U.S. Marines, in their blue and red uniforms, observing the Indian custom of going shoeless, out of respect, as they slowly marched forward with a floral wreath that the Pentagon chief placed at the site of the pacifist leader’s immolation.