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Pentagon Quickly Learns That Cheney Is in Charge

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Times Staff Writer

In his first day on the job, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney got lost in the basement of the Pentagon. Two and a half weeks later, people are asking him for directions.

Three days after taking office on March 17, Cheney fired the acting Air Force secretary and told the Navy secretary to start looking for a job. The next Friday, he publicly dressed down the Air Force chief of staff, a four-star general, for “free-lancing” defense policy on Capitol Hill. The next Wednesday, he dismissed the undersecretary of defense in charge of weapons acquisition.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. April 6, 1989 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday April 6, 1989 Home Edition Part 1 Page 2 Column 6 National Desk 2 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
An article in Wednesday editions of The Times said that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had fired the acting Air Force secretary, James F. McGovern, and the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Robert B. Costello. Both men said Wednesday that they had planned to leave government before Cheney indicated that they would not be kept on in the new Administration.

Ten weeks into the Bush Administration, the Pentagon finally has a boss.

Cheney denied in an interview Tuesday that his goal is to put the generals and admirals “back in a box” or that he sees a need to reassert civilian authority at the Defense Department. But his actions have sent an unmistakable signal to everyone in the sprawling agency, 2 million men and women in uniform and 1 million civilians, that Cheney is running the show.

Power Struggle Denied

“Obviously, I believe in civilian control,” Cheney said, speaking to a small group of newspaper reporters in his gold-carpeted Pentagon conference room. “That’s my job--to run the department. To do that, it’s necessary from time to time to lay down markers of what is expected. But I don’t feel as if I’m engaged in any kind of a struggle with anyone for control of the department.”

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The six-term Wyoming congressman compared his Pentagon job to that of a cowpuncher in charge of a wayward herd. “It’s a big department with a lot of bright, capable, talented people in it. Oftentimes, they don’t move in the same direction. Sometimes, you’ve got to get them herded up and headed down the right trail.”

Cheney entered the Pentagon under extraordinary circumstances. The department had been essentially leaderless since President Bush took office on Jan. 20. Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV, a holdover from the Ronald Reagan Administration, ran the agency while the Senate bitterly debated former Texas Sen. John Tower’s fitness to be defense secretary.

In the ensuing vacuum, all sorts of decisions were deferred, from budgetary matters to key personnel appointments. Only one of the department’s two dozen top officials--Deputy Defense Secretary-designate Donald J. Atwood--had been named.

Tower was rejected by the Senate, 53 to 47, on March 9 because of his history of heavy drinking and his close ties to defense contractors. Bush nominated Cheney the next day; the Senate confirmed him a week later.

Cheney already has sent the White House a list of his choices for most of the top policy-making positions at the Defense Department. He has rejected most of the “Tower Mafia” who were expected to get top jobs had Tower been confirmed.

Cheney brought with him a number of former House aides, including David Addington, who will hold the title of special assistant to the secretary of defense and who will occupy a spacious office adjacent to Cheney’s suite.

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The office previously housed an Air Force colonel who controlled the critical paper flow to the secretary and who has been moved to a smaller office down the hall. The secretary’s paper work is now routed through Addington.

Addington formerly served as Cheney’s aide on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He has also worked at the Central Intelligence Agency and at the White House as a legislative affairs aide.

“I feel I have the requirement to have the best possible people available around me,” Cheney said Tuesday. “I think there are duties and obligations, responsibilities that are most appropriately given to a military officer; others are most appropriately given to a civilian.”

Cheney said that replacing the colonel with a civilian was not intended to downgrade the military officer’s post or to freeze the uniformed services out of the secretary’s office. But that is how the move is being read throughout much of the building.

Addington’s appointment “gives policy power to civilians who are supposed to be making policy,” said an approving senior military officer who formerly was a military assistant to a senior civilian official at the Pentagon.

“Cheney, if he curbs the military influence in the office of secretary of defense, will be off to a good start,” the officer said. “These guys are advocates for their services more than anything else. (Cheney’s office) ought to be all civilian.”

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