A Hawk Who Preferred Not to Fight

Caspar W. Weinberger, the anti-Soviet hawk who oversaw the nation’s huge peacetime defense buildup as the secretary of Defense during most of President Reagan’s two terms, died of pneumonia. He was 88.

Weinberger, who also had prominent roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations, died in a hospital in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, Jane; son, Caspar Jr.; and daughter; Arlin, by his side, according to Forbes magazine, where the senior Weinberger served as chairman.

“I was deeply disturbed to learn of the death of a great American and a dear friend,” former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a statement. “Cap Weinberger was an indefatigable fighter for peace through strength. He served his nation in war and peace in so many ways.”

As the nation’s 15th Defense secretary, Weinberger doggedly opposed reducing nuclear weapons, although he was eventually overruled when Reagan sought a partnership in arms control with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Still, the Defense Department under Weinberger increased overall defense spending by 50%, adding 90 ships to the Navy and two divisions to the Army as well as the B-1 bomber and other new weapons systems to the Air Force.

A native Californian, Weinberger’s long career in public service began with a stint in the state Assembly in the 1950s and culminated when Reagan named him secretary of Defense in 1981. He had the second-longest tenure in the post, after Robert S. McNamara, who served as secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Weinberger had left “the United States armed forces stronger, our country safer and the world more free.”

“His extensive career in public service, his support for the men and women in uniform and his central role in helping to win the Cold War leave a lasting legacy.”

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan said in a statement that she was “extremely saddened” by Weinberger’s death. “When Cap was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction in 1987, Ronnie said, ‘His legacy is a strong and free America -- and for this, and for a lifetime of selfless service, a grateful nation thanks him.’ I cannot think of higher praise.”

And former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who often clashed with Weinberger on defense issues, called him “a genuine patriot.”

“He had the interests of the country at heart all the time [and he] helped ensure a great improvement in our military forces, not just in the physical sense but in terms of their morale. He was a great American.”

A complex figure, Weinberger was indicted several years after leaving Washington in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal that had dogged the Reagan administration’s second term. He was ultimately given a presidential pardon.

Throughout his career at the Pentagon, Weinberger was a hawk who opposed excessive use of military force, earning him such high-level opponents in the Reagan administration as Shultz.

“To Weinberger, as I heard him, our forces were to be constantly built up but not used,” Shultz wrote in his memoir.

Weinberger and Shultz’s biggest dispute came in the early 1980s, when Reagan deployed U.S. forces in Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force trying to quell the violence in the civil war there. Shultz was a strong advocate of this deployment, but Weinberger initially objected, believing that the participation of the U.S. was not vital to its interests and that there was not a carefully defined objective. In October 1983, a suicide truck bombing killed 241 servicemen at a Marine barracks in Beirut -- the worst single casualty toll for the U.S. military since the Vietnam War.

Though opposed to the operation in Lebanon, Weinberger that same month endorsed the invasion of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, where a buildup of Cuban military forces was feared. That operation, though criticized by some as a diversion from the Lebanon debacle, helped restore a sense of confidence in the U.S. military.

A few years later, in April 1986, Weinberger also backed a U.S. strike against Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi for two incidents: firing missiles at U.S. airplanes over the disputed Gulf of Sidra and the terrorist bombing -- blamed on Kadafi -- of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. military personnel that that killed an American. The next year, during the summer of 1987, Weinberger also supported Reagan’s decision to offer help -- including the protection of the U.S. flag -- to Kuwaiti oil tankers that feared attacks by Iranians in the Persian Gulf.

During these years, Weinberger developed and put into use the “Weinberger doctrine” -- a set of six tests for when American troops should be deployed. Among the tests were the support of the American people, the willingness to employ overwhelming force and the use of force being a last resort.

Weinberger said his policy on the uses of military power sprang from his strong disapproval of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

“Some thought it was incongruous that I did so much to build up our defenses but was reluctant to commit forces abroad,” Weinberger wrote in “In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century” (with Gretchen Roberts, 2001). But, he added, “I did not arm to attack.... We armed so that we could negotiate from strength, defend freedom and make war less likely.”

Although widely endorsed by political conservatives and many in the defense establishment, Weinberger’s doctrine was dismissed by Shultz as “a counsel of inaction bordering on paralysis.”

“There had to be some way to deal with violent threats that lay between doing nothing or launching an all-out conventional war,” Shultz said. “The idea that force should be used ‘only as a last resort’ means that, by the time of use, force is the only resort and likely a much more costly one than if used earlier.”

Weinberger’s doctrine was later reformulated by Powell -- who had been a military advisor to Weinberger in the Pentagon and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush and secretary of State during President George W. Bush’s first term.

During Weinberger’s time in the Pentagon, defense spending reached $300 billion a year before leveling out. By some estimates, this peacetime defense buildup exceeded even that for the Vietnam War.

Among the major items pushed by Weinberger were the MX missile and the B-1 bomber -- costly initiatives that Reagan considered essential to the development and delivery of the Pentagon’s nuclear force.

Although initially a skeptic, Weinberger also strongly defended another of Reagan’s proposals -- the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based defense against ballistic missiles that never was proved to be workable.

SDI, commonly known as “Star Wars,” soaked up what one expert estimated as $17 billion of the defense budget. It was abandoned by President Clinton in the 1990s, though President Bush has made efforts to revive it.

Weinberger was among the hard-liners in the Reagan administration to oppose most efforts at arms control agreements, but urged by Shultz and others, the president went ahead anyway. Starting with a summit in Geneva 1985, Reagan met with Gorbachev, and in 1987, the two leaders agreed to major weapons cutbacks that greatly altered the relationship between their two countries and hastened the end of the Cold War.

While at the time loyally praising the 1987 agreement as “very good,” Weinberger told the New York Times shortly afterward that “the fact that Gorbachev came and didn’t throw his shoes at anybody” may have been promising, but “he’s got claws and every once in a while those claws come out. He remembers to retract them, but it’s like a person who has learned to speak very carefully, very well, and then every once in a while resorts to a guttural brogue.”

That was the year, as Weinberger was leaving Defense, that Reagan presented him with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can give.

But in 1992, Weinberger faced a federal indictment charging him with lying during congressional and criminal investigations of Iran-Contra -- the Reagan administration’s sale of arms to Iran in the hope that such a deal would help win the release of American hostages. The complicated scandal also involved the diversion of profits from the sale to support Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Negotiating with terrorists was against U.S. policy, and aid to the rebels was banned by Congress.

Weinberger, who had strongly opposed the Iranian arms sale, maintained in his memoir that he “did not lie to investigators about the state of my recollection” about plans for the weapons sales, but he was set for trial in early 1993.

Before the court could convene, however, President George H.W. Bush granted pardons to Weinberger and several others in the Reagan administration who had been indicted by the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh.

The scandal left a mark on an otherwise stellar career.

Caspar Willard Weinberger was born Aug. 18, 1917, in San Francisco, the son of a lawyer. Many people assumed that, because of his name, the family was Jewish, but “Cap,” as his father nicknamed him, was raised as an Episcopalian -- his mother’s faith.

A sickly child, Weinberger turned to books and mock battles with tin soldiers atop his bed. He had an early and strong interest in politics, following political conventions closely on radio and attending campaign rallies with his father. He said the Congressional Record was his bedtime reading and that, even as a child, he thought of himself as a Republican like his father.

Weinberger earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard in 1938 and 1941, respectively. A few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Weinberger entered the Army as a private in the infantry and served in the South Pacific during World War II. According to an official Pentagon biography, he was an officer on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence staff. He left the Army in 1945 with the rank of captain.

During the war, he met Army nurse Jane Dalton aboard ship on the way to the South Pacific. They married in 1942. In addition to his wife and son, both of Mount Desert, Maine, and his daughter of San Francisco, Weinberger is survived by three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

After the war, Weinberger returned to San Francisco as a law clerk to an appeals court judge before joining a law firm. But he was more interested in politics and, in 1952, he won a seat in the state Assembly representing a San Francisco area district.

In 1958, he ran in the GOP primary for state attorney general, but lost and returned to law practice. He kept a hand in politics as chairman of the state Republican Party, gaining a reputation as a true believer in conservative principles.

When Reagan was elected governor in 1966, Weinberger joined his administration, first as a member of the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state panel that evaluates government for lawmakers, and, in 1968, as California’s director of finance.

It was not long, however, before Weinberger made the jump to Washington as President Nixon’s choice to head the Federal Trade Commission and, later, serve as deputy director and then director of the newly formed Office of Management and Budget.

At the OMB, Weinberger’s special cost-cutting targets were the Great Society programs put in place by Nixon’s Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. He carried out his mandate with such energy that William Safire, then a presidential speechwriter, dubbed him “Cap the Knife.” The nickname stuck.

After the 1972 election gave Nixon a second term, he moved Weinberger to a Cabinet post as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. When Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford retained Weinberger in that post.

After Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Weinberger went to work at Bechtel Corp., a defense contractor in the Bay Area. But by 1981, he was back in Washington when Reagan, who defeated President Carter, tapped him for what would be the most important post of his career: secretary of Defense.

Alarmed about estimates of Soviet military strength, Reagan asked his old friend to oversee an immense expansion of military might. Weinberger enthusiastically complied, earning a new nickname -- Cap the Ladle -- as he spearheaded Reagan’s “peace through strength” policy.

“The price of peace and freedom is high, but whatever it costs, it’s worth it,” he told the Washington Post in 1983. He later wrote in “In the Arena”: “I felt that I was able to make a difference and perhaps help set our nation on a more stable, secure course than it had previously been following.”

After nearly seven years in the E Ring of the Pentagon, Weinberger, citing his wife’s health, left his post in 1987. Five years later, he was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal.

After leaving the federal government, Weinberger concentrated on writing.

Besides “In the Arena,” Weinberger wrote “Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon” (1990) and, with Peter Schweizer, “The Next War” (1996), which outlined five possible scenarios in which the U.S. would again go to war.

Also with Schweizer, he wrote the 2005 fiction thriller, “Chain of Command.” The New York Times, in reviewing the book, called it “gripping.”

Finally, Weinberger joined the business periodical Forbes as publisher and then chairman. He also wrote a column.

“He was a man of infinite energy,” Steve Forbes, chief executive and editor in chief, said Tuesday. “Right up to the end he could travel long distances around the globe, get off the plane and go freshly and enthusiastically to work.”

Times staff writer Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this report.