Tower Case May Signal Threats to His Leadership : Harmony Has Its Limits, Bush Learns

With Thursday’s vote by the Senate Armed Services Committee against the nomination of John Tower as secretary of defense, the Bush Administration ran smack into the limits of “bipartisan” government.

For weeks, Bush has basked in the glow of bipartisanship--on issues ranging from the budget to the savings and loan crisis. Now, the President’s own political vulnerabilities and the strength of the Democratic majorities in Congress have brought him face-to-face with what could be the first in a series of significant threats to his leadership.

The Senate committee’s rejection of Tower, coming as it did on the same day that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) declared the President’s plan to cut the capital gains tax dead-on-arrival, suggests that the Tower case may be only the beginning.

Officially, Administration aides vowed Thursday to fight on. “We’re going to work hard and try to turn it around on the Senate floor,” said one senior aide. Asked, however, if he thought the effort was likely to succeed, the aide reluctantly said: “No.”

The possibility of a Bush victory in the full Senate cannot be discounted. The power of the presidency can be formidable in such struggles.

Yet in keeping with his overall strategy of seeking peace with the Democrats, Bush so far has avoided a fight-to-the-death battle over Tower. And that is exactly the sort of battle that probably would be needed to turn the nomination around.

Already, some Bush advisers have begun talking about who might be able to go to the former Texas senator and ask him to withdraw. They are convinced that unless Tower quits voluntarily before next week’s scheduled floor vote, Bush has little choice but to follow along as the nominee goes down to defeat.

“I don’t think they can back away from him,” said one longtime Bush adviser. “If necessary, they have to lose with him.”

The magnitude of the potential loss is reflected in the long-standing though unwritten rule that Presidents have virtually total discretion in picking the members of their team. Only five Presidents in U.S. history have ever had Cabinet nominees rejected by the full Senate. Of the eight nominees rejected, the last one came some 30 years ago in the lame-duck days of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.

Bush, however, entered the White House with particular vulnerabilities. He has less partisan support in Congress than any other President in this century. He lacks the rock-solid base of personal and ideological support that gave Ronald Reagan a measure of political strength even after the political going got tough in his second term. And changes in the climate of political morality have given the opposition new weapons to use against presidential appointees such as Tower.

As a result, Bush strategists from the outset have felt constrained to seek at least the appearance of cordial relations with the other side. Throughout the debate over the nomination, some members of the White House staff privately have accused Tower’s senatorial opponents of partisanship and unfairness. Periodically, they have suggested that the White House was about to go on the offensive, defending Tower by attacking his critics as Reagan did when his nominees were in trouble.

But Bush has limited himself to objections about “innuendo” directed against Tower. The President has avoided criticizing anyone by name. Mindful of the enormous struggles ahead over defense spending and national security policy, Bush has gone out of his way to praise the leader of the opposition, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).

“You have not had a real nasty fight between the White House and the Hill” over Tower, one Bush adviser said. As a result, he added: “I don’t think the honeymoon is over” because of the Senate committee’s vote.

But the downside of that cautious strategy is both the perilous state of a key nomination and grumbling by Tower supporters that the White House did not do its all for their man.

In part, White House officials, including Bush, may have simply misread the depth of opposition to Tower. Bush aides repeatedly told reporters that Tower would be confirmed because the FBI report on him contained no “smoking gun.”

At least until Wednesday, many leading Democrats also thought that an absence of hard evidence of impropriety would be enough to get the nomination through the committee vote.

It was not. As Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the Senate’s former majority leader, put it Thursday: “There is no smoking gun in the FBI reports. But there is enough smoke to cause one to be most uneasy with this nominee for this position.”

Even allowing for the element of miscalculation and surprise, the White House effort for Tower has been noticeably less intense than campaigns waged for other troubled nominees. When Louis W. Sullivan, Bush’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, got into verbal trouble over conflicting statements on abortion, even Sullivan’s strongest opponents conceded that he was sure to be confirmed.

Despite that assurance, Bush assigned Peter Teeley, a longtime aide, and Tom Korologos, Washington’s top GOP lobbyist, to shepherd the nomination through the Senate.

By contrast in Tower’s case, White House aides had told reporters that Tower himself would have to make the case for his nomination with the Senate, a stance that appeared to distance the White House from the nominee. As late as Thursday afternoon, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said in Tokyo that Bush had not made any calls to senators on Tower’s behalf and had no plans to do so. Friday morning in Tokyo, Fitzwater said that Bush had made some calls back to the United States, including one to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu also called some senators, as did Vice President Dan Quayle.

As Fitzwater tacitly acknowledged after the committee vote, it will take much more than that to win the fight on the Senate floor. And whatever the final outcome, Thursday’s turn of events demonstrated conclusively that appeals to “bipartisanship” offer no easy path to success for the Bush Administration.