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Tower Effort Bungled by White House, Critics Say

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Times Staff Writers

Two weeks ago, when Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) complained that the White House had failed to deliver promised documents about John Tower’s nomination as defense secretary, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater blamed the minor snafu on “confusion and incompetence” in the fledgling Bush Administration.

Administration critics say he might have been describing the White House’s entire handling of the crippled Tower nomination, which after Thursday night’s negative vote in the committee now appears in danger of defeat by the full Senate.

An Administration lobbyist assigned to guide Tower’s nomination through the Senate said Friday: “I don’t know what the White House could have done” to prevent the 11-9 party-line vote against Tower.

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But the record of the Tower nomination is littered with missed warnings, blown opportunities, faulty intelligence and inept relations with key lawmakers.

Even before the November election, Nunn and Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the Armed Services panel’s senior Republican, warned President Bush in a letter that whomever he chose to head the Pentagon would be subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

At that time, both already had strong doubts about Tower, a 24-year Senate veteran whom they knew to be Bush’s top choice for the post. Nunn, coming from a tradition of Southern reverence for the military and a deep sense of senatorial privilege, was concerned by Tower’s reputation for hard drinking and womanizing. Warner, a former secretary of the Navy, was deeply troubled by the example Tower’s past conduct would set for American men and women in uniform.

Indeed, Warner was prepared to vote against Tower as late as Thursday morning, when he was browbeaten by GOP colleagues and relentlessly lobbied by the White House to “stick with the program” and vote to confirm Tower, several Republican Senate sources said Friday.

Longtime Washington operatives, from both sides of the aisle, said Friday that Bush and his aides had been slow to recognize the problem he faced and inept in handling it.

“The thing that’s bothersome is where the heck have these guys been since Nov. 8,” one longtime Republican adviser said. “They brought this on themselves.”

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Cabinet Member Cites Enmity

One Bush Cabinet member, who asked not to be named, suggested that it was crazy to have chosen Tower in the first place because of questions about his private behavior and the wide swath of enmity he had created by his brand of body-contact politics.

In the end, Bush, who has long trusted and admired Tower, may have been lulled into a false optimism by Tower’s assurances that he had conquered earlier drinking problems, and he accepted his friend’s word that the many allegations against him were groundless.

Now, the Bush Cabinet officer said, the Tower appointment is dragging the President down like “an anchor around his neck.”

Other critics list several missteps, each of which gradually brought disaster closer for Tower.

First, they argue, lengthy and public airing of Tower’s problems for five weeks between Bush’s election and the announcement of Tower’s nomination Dec. 16 made defending him more difficult.

After Bush aides had taken more than a month to review Tower’s qualifications and controversial background, they could hardly complain when the committee took a similarly deliberate pace, critics noted.

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Once the nomination had been made and the committee’s investigation began, the Administration made its problem worse by underestimating the opposition to Tower and the degree to which the rules of the game have changed.

“They were counting on the honeymoon carrying them through,” said a former longtime Bush aide. In addition, he said, Bush advisers believed that the Senate’s traditional deference to its former members would protect Tower.

Then, when the committee moved from investigating into the crucial phase of rounding up votes, the Administration appears to have misjudged the one person who was held to be the key to the proceedings--Nunn, the Senate’s most influential force on defense issues.

“It was pretty inept,” said one longtime congressional lobbyist, a Democrat who has worked on controversial nominations in the past. Administration officials antagonized Nunn by being tardy in delivering documents and pressing him for an early vote.

Even when Nunn told them two weeks ago that he was leaning against Tower, one GOP adviser said, White House officials did not recognize the gravity of the situation. And until as late as the night before the vote they still assumed that Tower would survive. They devoted little effort to lobbying the Democratic votes he would need.

Richard C. Shelby, a conservative Democrat from Alabama and a prime candidate for suasion, said Friday that the White House never even contacted him. Sometime Wednesday, Shelby, previously leaning toward Tower, decided to vote with his party colleagues after he changed his mind, or as one Senate staffer said: “Somebody broke his knees.”

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Defections Held Surprising

Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said the defections of Shelby and two other committee Democrats that the White House was counting on came as a surprise. “Our intelligence wasn’t very good,” he acknowledged Friday.

The most the Administration could do was try to ensure that it kept the committee Republicans in line by “putting the screws to Warner,” one source said. Bush himself called Warner on Tuesday afternoon to insist that he remain loyal.

Working against them was Nunn, who made a solid Democratic vote against the nomination “a test of his loyalty to himself, to his party, to his chairmanship,” one Republican Senate aide said.

John M. Broder reported from Washington and Jack Nelson from Tokyo. Staff writers David Lauter, Melissa Healy and William Eaton also contributed to this story from Washington.

President Bush vows to save the Tower nomination. Page 16.

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