Time to Withdraw

President Bush vows to stand by John Tower as his nominee for secretary of defense and fight for his confirmation by the Senate. Such a show of implacable loyalty is traditional when Presidents find their appointees are in deep trouble; often it’s a sign that the search for an alternative candidate has begun. But in this case Bush may mean what he says. If so, then he isn’t thinking clearly. The odds are that Tower will be rejected by the Senate, and so Bush would only be wasting precious time and squandering scarce political capital by doggedly sticking with him. If by some chance Tower should win confirmation he would take office under the darkest cloud of suspicion to hang over a Cabinet officer in more than a generation, a burden that would hardly allow him to serve his President, the armed forces or the nation well.

The Armed Services Committee’s 11-9 vote to reject the Tower nomination sends an unmistakable message. This is the congressional body that Tower would have to work closest with as secretary. Most members of the committee have now said they don’t trust him. Much has been made of the panel’s vote on party lines, implying a degree of blind partisanship by its Democratic majority. But it’s hard to discern anything partisan in the votes cast against Tower by conservative Democrats like committee chairman Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Shelby of Alabama. The statements made by the anti--Tower majority reflect a principled and indeed agonized thoughtfulness. In the end the majority simply couldn’t accept the conflicts of interest implicit in Tower’s dealings with defense contractors, or overlook the questions about his ability to perform raised by his history of heavy drinking.

For all of the expertise he is said to have accumulated in 24 years as a senator Tower simply was not a good choice to serve, in effect, as the nation’s deputy commander-in-chief. The ethical issues raised by his revolving-door relationship with the defense industry and the behavioral questions raised by his problems with alcohol should, had they been thoroughly investigated by the FBI, have disqualified him from consideration.

The Senate for 200 years has been generous in giving Presidents the Cabinet members they wanted; only eight nominees in all that time have been rejected. But an impulse to be generous doesn’t lift the Senate’s responsibility to be scrupulous when the time comes for it to advise and consent. The Armed Services Committee has done the right thing. John Tower would be doing the right and the honorable thing if he now asks Bush to withdraw his nomination so that a new defense secretary can be quickly chosen, screened and confirmed, and the Defense Department can get the leadership it lacks.