So Much for Bipartisanship

By Richard Lacayo

To go with the abundant talk of wine and women, the John Tower controversy last week could have had a song: Stand By Your Man. Tammy Wynette's paean of loyalty to hard-drinking, two-timing guys would have made perfect background music for George Bush as he pledged devotion to his apparently hopeless nominee for Secretary of Defense. But it could also have served as theme music for Republicans rallying around their wounded leader.

The real focus of last week's rescue effort was not the would-be Defense Secretary but the President himself. Determined not to retreat in their first showdown with Congress -- and no less determined to squelch the spreading impression that Bush is off to a feckless start -- the President and his aides shifted their goal from saving Tower's nomination to tarring the Democrats with charges of character assassination and hypocrisy. Positioning themselves for the inevitable future battles over the budget and foreign policy, the Republicans hoped to rescue something from the wreckage of the Tower affair by lowering Congress in the public esteem.

Bush had already begun standing fast for Tower while heading home from the Far East. "I haven't wavered one iota," he said aboard Air Force One, "and I don't intend to." Over the next several days he summoned more than a dozen Democratic Senators to the White House for a personal appeal not to slap away the hand he offered them at his Inauguration. Yet the Administration seemed to know that Tower was a lost cause. By Thursday, when the Senate began its rancorous debate on the nomination, the President's advisers admitted they had failed to lock up a single Democratic vote. On Capitol Hill the Bush team's lobbying effort was being called "nonexistent."

Instead, the strategy had shifted to a plan sketched out by White House chief of staff John Sununu and Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole within hours of Tower's narrow rejection by the Senate Armed Services Committee: since the will-o'-the-wisp of bipartisanship was likely to evaporate anyway, a fight to the finish could provide the President with an opportunity to charge that it was the Democrats who spoiled the atmosphere first. "It's been so embarrassing already, what's a vote on the Senate floor?" said one operative working on Tower's behalf. "Besides, this way the Administration gets to identify exactly who's against them." Increasingly, the battle was drawn tightly along partisan lines, with pro-Tower Republicans headed by Dole facing off against Democrats lined up behind Sam Nunn, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Bush's appeals to the Senate may have been made more difficult by the fact that Washington has been regaled for years by stories of Tower's drinking and tales of women who were pinched or fondled when they encountered Tower on an elevator or in an office. Throughout the week Senators were going in and out of a guarded Capitol "secure room" to read the confidential FBI report on Tower's behavior. "The record is recent and overwhelming," said South Carolina's Fritz Hollings after seeing the report. "There are names, there are facts, there are absolute statements and the words crocked, bombed, excessive drinking, stoned, comatose." A Democrat who broke with his party to support the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, Hollings had been targeted by the White House as a man who might be nudged into Tower's camp. But he pointedly declined even to accept Bush's invitation to confer at the White House. His chilly explanation: "I hate to waste the President's time."

As the lobbying faltered, the pro-Tower forces shifted gears, pitching their appeal beyond the Beltway to the American public. Republicans began complaining about innuendo and unproved allegations, and the President remarked that the approval process must not offend Americans' "innate sense of fair play." Appearing before the National Press Club, Tower warned of the possibility that if "character assassination" were legitimized, it could usher in a "new and rather ugly phase in American politics." Later, retired Senator Barry Goldwater suggested what might happen if his former colleagues tried their finger-pointing on one another. Said Goldwater: "If they chased every man or woman out of this town who has shacked up with somebody else, or got drunk, there'd be no Government."

The G.O.P. tactics succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, but did little to help Tower with the public. In a poll taken for TIME and CNN last Thursday by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, just 31% of adult Americans who were ! familiar with the Tower affair said he should be confirmed as Secretary of Defense. This is only a slight increase from the 26% who, in a similar, larger survey Feb. 13-14, said Tower should be confirmed.

Whatever the mood outside Washington, on the Senate floor it was notably sour throughout the debate. Democrats tore into Tower's claim that there was nothing improper in his million-dollar earnings from military contractors. Maine Republican William Cohen complained that Tower was being attacked by UFWs -- "unidentified flying witnesses" -- and Democrat Hollings thundered that "it's our character that's being assassinated here, not John Tower's."

At one point Arizona Republican John McCain interrupted to protest that Democrat John Glenn of Ohio had disclosed some of the more damning adjectives that witnesses used in the confidential report to describe Tower's behavior. Though Glenn replied that the excerpted words had already appeared in the press, that was not enough for Dole. He reminded the chamber that the penalty for reading out loud from confidential documents was "expulsion from the Senate."

As leader of the fight for Tower, Dole appears to relish the opportunity to rescue Bush, who buried him in last year's New Hampshire presidential primary, and Sununu, who helped engineer the Bush victory in his state. "Dole was instrumental" in plotting the Tower strategy, said a senior Administration official. "He was the architect, and Sununu carried it out." Dole is known to be skeptical of the skills the White House brings to a battle. (With good reason: Bush's aides confessed last week that they did not even know in advance of Tower's pledge to swear off drinking, or that their nominee would admit to breaking his wedding vows. Portraying Tower as unfairly treated by the Democratic majority, Dole said he may ask the Senate to permit the nominee to make a rare appearance before the entire body so that he will have "his day in court" and can "answer his critics face-to-face."

Some Democrats were hinting that Dole and Sununu, who are both more combative than Bush, might be eager for a return to the confrontational days of the Reagan era. "If you're John Sununu and you're more conservative than your President," said a Democratic veteran, "this is a way to get ((him)) to take on Congress early on." Given the large Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, Republicans scoff at the idea. "We're not that dumb," said a top White House aide.

Nonetheless, players at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue who just a fortnight ago spoke of working together have dissolved their fragile partnership and reverted to form. Democrats now speak openly of responding to Bush's budget proposals with a plan of their own. For its part, the White House hinted that it may soon ask Congress for renewed nonmilitary aid to the Nicaraguan contras, a red flag to Democrats who repeatedly fought over the contras with the Reagan Administration. Meanwhile, the public is left with an image of the Senate as a cockpit of partisan squabbling, the White House as a center of questionable decision making, and the city of Washington as Sodom- and-Gomorrah-by-the-Potomac. It's enough to make the whole town start singing a different song. Anyone for Who's Sorry Now?

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Hays Gorey/Washington