PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Weinberger Had Reagan’s Ear, Kept It for a Generation

In an association spanning more than a generation of public life, Caspar W. Weinberger’s ties with Ronald Reagan brought him from a career as an aspiring Republican politician in Northern California to a post in the top reaches of national government.

Now, those ties have brought a felony indictment.

“A very strange series of events,” Weinberger said, sadly, as he shook his head when reporters at a lunch earlier this month tried to ask him about the possibility that he would be indicted.

Tuesday, at a brief but emotional press conference, Weinberger angrily said more, implying that it was his unwillingness to implicate his former boss and friend of many decades that led to the charges against him.

But prosecutors have a very different view. Weinberger, they say, tried to conceal meetings he attended with Reagan about the illegal sale of U.S. arms to Iran. At the time, Reagan himself denied knowledge of those meetings.

Whichever interpretation eventually prevails, it is clear that Weinberger’s loyalty to the former President was unfailing.

At age 74, Weinberger now serves as part-time publisher of Forbes magazine and as a consultant to Rogers & Wells, one of the country’s oldest-line Wall Street law firms. Three decades ago, however, he was the chairman of California’s Republican Party--a moderate who had supported Nelson A. Rockefeller for President against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Because of his moderate views, GOP conservatives opposed him. But when Reagan, the conservative champion, ran for governor of California in 1966, Weinberger knocked on doors, working precincts on Reagan’s behalf. And after a year, when Reagan’s Administration ran into serious budget problems, the governor turned to Weinberger to bail him out, appointing him state finance director.

Two years later, another California Republican, Richard M. Nixon, called Weinberger to Washington to revive the moribund Federal Trade Commission--the first step in a federal career that saw him serve as the Nixon Administration’s budget director and secretary of health, education and welfare.

Weinberger left government in 1975, a few months after Nixon resigned. But in 1980, one of Reagan’s first decisions after his election as President was to name Weinberger secretary of defense.

In a statement released from his office in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Reagan praised Weinberger, saying that he had “served his state and his country honorably and with great distinction for more than a quarter of a century.”

“I know him to be a man of the highest integrity and am confident he will be fully vindicated of the charges against him,” Reagan said.

At the Pentagon, Weinberger, who had won the nickname “Cap the Knife” for his earlier budget-cutting ability, campaigned tirelessly for higher military spending, for strict limits on the use of American military forces overseas and against nearly all arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, including some that Reagan eventually adopted.

He was a master, after his long association with Reagan, at pitching an argument that would gain in the President’s attention. For example, David A. Stockman, the former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, recalled in his memoirs how Weinberger showed Reagan large charts on the effect of different budget plans in one budget battle. One chart, displaying Weinberger’s proposal, depicted the American military with a drawing of a strong, virile soldier. A second, displaying Stockman’s proposed defense cuts, showed a drawing of “a four-eyed wimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny rifle,” Stockman recalled. Weinberger won.

Weinberger also clashed often with Secretary of State George P. Shultz. During the mid-1970s, the two men both served as executives at Bechtel Corp., the giant construction firm. In Reagan’s Cabinet, Shultz argued for arms treaties but also for the use of military force against terrorists, which Weinberger opposed.

Both men, however, opposed Reagan’s plan in the fall of 1985 to use Israel as a conduit to sell missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of Americans held captive in Lebanon. Doing so would violate U.S. law, they argued.

Reagan, however, went ahead with the sales and Weinberger kept his doubts from the public. The question of whether he went one step further and actively tried to hide Reagan’s knowledge from prosecutors now will form the heart of a criminal case that--one way or another--almost certainly will be the last act of one of Washington’s longest and most celebrated careers.