It Shouldn’t Be Tower

President Bush is said to have nominated John Tower as his defense secretary because he was grateful for the early support that the former Texas senator gave to his presidential campaign. Rewarding loyalty, though, is no substitute for putting the right person in the right job. Our concern with Tower from the outset has been that he lacks the managerial experience needed to run the Defense Department and, given his background, the commitment to steer the Pentagon through leaner budgetary times. The Senate Armed Services Committee hearings have further persuaded us that the Tower nomination is a mistake, both politically embarrassing and ethically insupportable. It is a nomination that the President should withdraw or the Senate should reject.

Much attention has been given to the spicy allegations concerning Tower’s woman-chasing and drinking, both when he was a senator through the early 1980s and later, while he was briefly an arms negotiator in Geneva. The issues raised by these rumors aren’t frivolous; they directly touch on matters of judgment, self-control and alertness--qualities important in every public official and none more so than the secretary of defense. Even more pertinent, and certainly more documentable, are the questions of propriety evoked by the enormous consulting fees that Tower was paid by six big defense contractors over a period of about two years. Tower has pooh-poohed the importance of the advice that he gave to his clients. That those clients were willing to fork over more than $760,000 for his advice immediately after he resigned as a delegate to the Geneva strategic-arms talks suggests that they put a high valuation on his services.

At the very least the appearance of a major conflict of interest has emerged. John Tower moved with indecent haste from a government job where he was privy to significant information regarding policy and weapons to a private-sector advisory role where he had the chance or the temptation to trade on his insider information. Whether he in fact did so isn’t and can perhaps never be known. What is apparent is that if Tower became defense secretary his earlier lucrative ties with major weapons suppliers would raise inevitable suspicions about conflicts of interest.

The Defense Department, as everyone knows, is about to enter a phase when hard decisions will have to be made about strategic planning and reduced weapons procurement. Those decisions will affect the earnings of more than a few major defense contractors. That is reason enough, we think, why Tower is not the right choice to head the Pentagon. The President, says the White House spokesman, is sticking by his nominee. If that doesn’t change, it will be the responsibility of the Senate to deny Tower confirmation.