Weinberger Proteges in Line for Top Jobs

Frank C. Carlucci, one of Washington’s quintessential bureaucratic survivors, is expected to be named defense secretary this week, capping a government career that began 31 years ago when Ronald Reagan was still an actor and Caspar W. Weinberger was a member of the California Legislature.

At the same time, Army Lt. Gen. Colin L. Powell is in line to become Carlucci’s successor as director of the National Security Council. He would move up from the post of NSC deputy director, which he reluctantly accepted last January after President Reagan personally urged him to give up command of the Army’s 5th Corps in West Germany, a key stepping stone to a top military career.

Carlucci and Powell are both proteges of Weinberger, who is expected to resign this week as defense secretary after almost seven years as Reagan’s military point man. Carlucci was Weinberger’s deputy in three Cabinet posts--budget director and secretary of health, education and welfare under President Richard M. Nixon and defense secretary under Reagan.

Cleared in Iran-Contra Affair

Powell was Weinberger’s military aide at the Pentagon, handling a variety of sensitive tasks, including one in which he strongly recommended against the transfer of TOW missiles and other military equipment to the CIA for later shipment to Iran. The House Armed Services Committee investigated Powell’s role in the Iran-Contra affair but determined that he had done nothing wrong.

For Carlucci, now 57, the Pentagon post would mark the pinnacle of a varied government career that began in 1956, when he joined the Foreign Service, and has included such seemingly disparate jobs as deputy director of the CIA, deputy secretary of health, education and welfare, deputy defense secretary and ambassador to Portugal.

But, for Powell, 50, the NSC may be a pitfall for a military officer who was considered an odds-on favorite to become the Army’s first black chief of staff. Powell can expect to keep the NSC job for no more than the remaining 14 months of Reagan’s presidency, after which he might encounter great difficulty in resuming his Army career.

Although John M. Poindexter served as NSC director while he was on active duty as a Navy vice admiral, Capitol Hill sources say that Powell almost certainly will be urged to retire from the service.

‘A Fine Officer’

“As a matter of policy, it isn’t good to have the guy in that slot in uniform,” one congressional aide said. “Some people will want to make an exception for Powell because he is considered to be such a fine officer. But others would complain that, if we let it happen twice in two years, how can we ever stop it again.”

Carlucci was named NSC director last December after Poindexter was forced to resign because of his role in the secret sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of some of the proceeds to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels. Since then, Carlucci is generally credited with restoring order to the council staff and with taking a firm hold on a post that had almost seemed to be haunted during the Reagan Administration.

When he was named to the job, Carlucci became the fifth NSC director in less than six years. Powell would become the sixth director in just under seven years.

Carlucci was a Princeton University graduate and a former Navy officer with two years of graduate work at the Harvard School of Business Administration when he joined the Foreign Service in 1956. Four years later, as a diplomat in the newly independent Congo (now Zaire), Carlucci was attacked by a mob after the government car in which he and three other Americans were riding killed a Congolese on a bicycle.

Stabbed in Back

He remained with the Navy driver while the others escaped, he said at the time. It was not until later that he realized he had been stabbed in the back during the fracas.

Much later, Carlucci was U.S. ambassador to Portugal in 1975 in the aftermath of a coup by left-leaning military officers who overthrew a rightist, but pro-American, dictatorship. With bitter memories of the Vietnam War still fresh, President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger concluded that there was little Washington could do to keep Portugal from becoming communist. Kissinger wanted to cut off all U.S. aid to the country and to devise ways to deny the secrets of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Portuguese leaders.

Nevertheless, Carlucci did not give up. He continued to work with the Portuguese government despite charges in the country’s mostly leftist press that he was a CIA operative and despite Kissinger’s complaints that he was too “soft” on the new government. In the end, Carlucci was vindicated when Portugal ousted the leftists and evolved into a solid democracy.

Son of Immigrants

Powell was born in New York City to Jamaican immigrants. He was graduated from the City College of New York and entered the Army as a second lieutenant in 1958.

According to a former Pentagon official who knows Powell well, the general loves to command troops in the field, although he has spent much of the last decade in increasingly high-level staff jobs in Washington. He was military aide to the deputy defense secretary in the Jimmy Carter Administration before serving as Weinberger’s military aide and Carlucci’s NSC deputy.

One source said that Powell’s strongest attribute as a bureaucrat is his ability as a mediator. In that regard, he is expected to get plenty of practice while trying to resolve the often-conflicting viewpoints of the Pentagon and State Department.

Powell and his wife, Alma, have three children, a family that is so closely knit that one friend compared it to the one portrayed on the popular Bill Cosby television series.