America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

James Baker and Dick Cheney loaded their tents, sleeping bags and fly rods onto packhorses last week and trekked into the Rockies for five days of trout fishing. Before they left Washington, they made sure the word was out among their colleagues: a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense who can go camping together in the high country of Wyoming can deliberate -- and even disagree -- along the banks of the Potomac without tearing an Administration apart.

The conduct of U.S. defense and diplomacy has often been cursed by backstabbing at the highest levels of Government. The problem became both acute and chronic with Richard Nixon. He believed in keeping his underlings as suspicious of one another as he was of them, and he liked to hear the worst about people behind their backs. His National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, frequently sniped at the State Department, until Nixon put him in charge there.

Later Kissinger turned his fire on the Pentagon and contributed to Gerald Ford's decision to replace James Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. It was a Pyrrhic victory. In 1976 Rumsfeld undermined Kissinger's attempt to negotiate an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union. Why? Because detente had become a political liability to Ford in an election year.

The Carter term was marred by a running feud between the patrician, conciliatory Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the scrappy, viscerally anti- Soviet National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In the Reagan Administration, the brass knuckles were passed to George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. There is a Washington adage: where you stand is where you sit. As the nation's chief diplomat, Shultz naturally pressed for better relations with the U.S.S.R., while Weinberger, who was responsible for the military establishment, preferred to wage the cold war and to prepare, if necessary, for World War III. But the hostility between them ran deeper than the competing interests of their departments. Weinberger apparently resented having been a subordinate to Shultz earlier.

As a member of the Reagan Administration, Baker had a ringside seat on the Shultz-Weinberger rivalry. Similarly, Cheney, from his post as Ford's chief of staff, watched Kissinger wrestle with a tag team of bureaucratic opponents. Cheney and the National Security Adviser at the time, Brent Scowcroft, used to meet at the end of the day in the West Wing of the White House and commiserate about the damage that all the bickering was doing both to policy and to the presidency. Scowcroft is now back in his old job. He sees it as part of his task to stop tong warfare before it starts.

Baker and Cheney have had their disagreements. They differed over how many troops the U.S. should withdraw from Europe as part of an East-West conventional-arms agreement. Baker wanted larger cuts than Cheney felt were prudent. But they have preserved what Baker calls "civility and discipline" between themselves and their staffs. "That's what the President wants," says Cheney.

Nixon encouraged backbiting; Ford, Carter and Reagan tolerated it; George Bush won't stand for it. Shortly after his Inauguration, he distributed a list of commandments. "Be frank," reads one. "Fight hard for your position," is the next. Then: "When I make the call, we move as a team."

On that score at least, so far so good.