Ex-Weinberger Aide Says He Was Ignored
Caspar Weinberger’s former colleague in private life--brought in to the Pentagon to bring order to the procurement process--says he quit in frustration last fall because Weinberger and President Reagan failed to support his management reforms.
“I differ 100% with (Weinberger, the former) secretary of defense, who said the system is fine but we have a few bad apples,” said Richard P. Godwin, the former undersecretary of defense for acquisition.
Godwin, former president of Bechtel Civil and Minerals Inc., also said Weinberger was “100% wrong” in defending the way the Pentagon buys weapons.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Godwin called the Pentagon procurement process a “national crisis,” as serious for the United States as drug trafficking and the AIDS epidemic.
‘Institutionalized Bad System’
“We have institutionalized a bad system,” said Godwin, 66, who worked with Weinberger at Bechtel before Reagan’s election in 1980.
Bechtel Civil and Minerals was a division of Bechtel Group Inc., the huge construction company based in San Francisco. Between assignments in Republican Administrations, Weinberger served as vice president and general counsel of the Bechtel Group. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was president of Bechtel Group from 1975-82.
Godwin said he accepted his job at the Pentagon in 1986 with the understanding that he would stay only as long as he felt he was effective.
The post was created by Congress in the wake of a report by a presidential commission headed by another Californian, industrialist David Packard, recommending changes in procurement practices.
‘Job Not Do-Able’
“I determined the job was not do-able in large part because of the unwillingness to make some hard decisions,” Godwin said.
Specifically, Godwin said Weinberger and Reagan refused to give him the support he needed to create a central management system for acquisitions, giving one person control over Pentagon buying and stripping service chiefs of some of their authority to decide which weapons system should be bought.
His goal, Godwin said, was to run the Pentagon purchasing system like a corporation.
