Secretary Laird: on the Other Side of the Table

THE tenth U.S. Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, seemed to have unpopular lines to speak onstage all week. Returning from a four-day trip to Viet Nam, he rendered the disappointing (if far from final) verdict that no reduction in the number of U.S. troops there seems foreseeable now. Testifying before two Senate committees, he vigorously defended the Administration's proposed anti-ballistic missile system, which has widespread opposition, by reporting that the Soviet Union has made considerable advances in offensive weaponry. Then he disclosed that the new defense budget could be cut by no more than $500,000,000--after President Nixon had earlier held out hope of a $2.5 billion slash from the Johnson Administration's $81.5 billion estimate.

Laird is well-cast as the bearer of such news. He has long prided himself on his hardline, no-nonsense approach to military affairs. He developed a considerable expertise on the subject as a member for 14 years of the House Appropriations subcommittee, which oversees all defense expenditures. Twice, in fact, he taxed Robert Mc-Namara with underestimating costs in Viet Nam and produced his own calculations, which McNamara rejected. On both occasions, Laird turned out to be right.

Two months is a short time in which to master the intricacies of the Pentagon from inside, but Laird has made an energetic start. Since he lacks administrative experience, he fought hard to get as his deputy David Packard, the centimillionaire co-proprietor of a West Coast electronics firm that has had sizable defense contracts. While Laird has immersed himself in day-to-day Pentagon business in order to learn the nuts and bolts of the Defense Department, Packard has taken on the long-range tasks. He heads the studies on ABM, the aftermath of Pueblo's seizure, the defense budget for fiscal 1970, and long-range strategy.

Laird has brought to the defense job the easy informality of the skilled politician. He usually ducks down from Suite 3-E 880 to eat in the staff mess. This week he will take 30 of his top aides, military and civilian, down to Airlie House in Virginia for strategic discussions. In a gesture unheard of under his two predecessors, Laird invited their wives along.

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Besides recruiting the experienced Packard, Laird has kept on two key men: Secretary of the Army (since 1965) Stanley Resor and the Pentagon's research and engineering chief, Dr. John Foster, an extremely articulate scientist who has had the job for four years. When Laird wanted to provide a questioning Senator with technical data during last week's hearings, he turned either to Packard or Foster. Laird is hardly unsympathetic to the uniformed military Establishment, but he has laid down one ground rule for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under McNamara, top generals and admirals often aired their policy differences with the civilian Secretary by taking their case before congressional committees hostile to McNamara. Laird has ordered that all such disputes will be resolved inside the Pentagon, not in public.

In the past, Laird's tough stance on military questions earned him the reputation of a better-dead-than-Red hawk. In his 1962 book A House Divided--America's Strategy Gap, he wrote: "We will, every one of us, die either in the latter years of the 20th century or in the early part of the 21st. Therefore, the question of physical life is already answered for us, as it has been for each generation of man. Only details of days, months, years --or hours--are unresolved." Since natural or unnatural death is inescapable, he suggested, life must be risked to give "that inevitable death a nobility of purpose." He went on to argue that the U.S. should have responded far more aggressively to Soviet challenges in Cuba, Hungary and Berlin, and contended that in some circumstances the U.S. would be justified in making a preemptive first nuclear strike against Russia. Laird today obviously does not adhere to such views, and in his new post realizes that they are no longer applicable.

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With his piercing brown eyes and close-cropped, balding head, Laird resembles an Oriental warlord. Though formidable in public, he is relaxed and jovial among friends. He has no intellectual pretensions, reads few books or magazines but meticulously studies the abstruse questions of national defense. Besides his tenacity, Laird's biggest plus is his familiarity with the ways and whims of Congress. Elected to the House at 30, he won the unusual accolade of appointment to the Appropriations Committee as a freshman. His adroit maneuvering helped replace aging Charles Halleck with Michigan's Gerald Ford as minority leader in 1965. It was only reluctantly that Laird left the House to join Nixon's Cabinet. He cherished the hope of becoming Speaker one day, but losing his seniority probably meant abandoning that aspiration.

Laird's congressional experience may yet become one of the Nixon Administration's greater assets. In a difficult week on the Hill, he met sometimes brutal opposition with bonhomie and bland humor. His toughest antagonist, Arkansas' William Fulbright, acknowledged wryly that it would be a mistake to ask Laird a question, because the Secretary knew enough to consume the rest of Fulbright's ten-minute time allowance by answering that one question at length. When Fulbright asked him for a list of independent scientists who opposed ABM deployment, Laird parried for a time but ended the exchange candidly: "I get the message." Later, he bantered amiably with Fulbright in a corner of the Senate Caucus Room. Then the two on-camera enemies smiled broadly and patted each other on the back.

"I have always been a critic," Laird confessed last December after Nixon had named him to head Defense. "I used to have the reputation of being a good questioner," he said last week. He began his ABM testimony with a disarming prologue. "I come before you today with rather mixed emotions. On the one hand, I am happy to be back in the familiar surroundings of the committee hearing room. On the other hand, I have an uneasy feeling that I may be on the wrong side of the table--where one is expected to have good answers and not just good questions." Laird concedes that it is easier to be an inquisitor than an advocate. At a time when even the best-laid plans and pronouncements of the military Establishment are increasingly subject to public skepticism, he may face a tougher job than any of his predecessors.

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