Caspar Weinberger

• 1. Introduction

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  Caspar Weinberger spent six years and ten months as Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, longer than anyone except Robert McNamara and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld. That tenure placed him at the center of one of the most consequential arms buildups in American history, a criminal indictment, a presidential pardon on Christmas Eve, and a debate that still runs today over who actually ended the Cold War. He arrived at the Pentagon with a nickname earned for slashing budgets. He left it known for the opposite. How a San Francisco lawyer became the architect of a six-hundred-ship Navy, why he was charged with lying to Congress, and what Queen Elizabeth II saw fit to reward him for are the threads this story pulls on.

• 2. San Francisco Beginnings

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  Herman Weinberger, an attorney of Jewish descent from Bohemia in Austria-Hungary, and Cerise Carpenter Weinberger, a music teacher of Christian descent from Wisconsin, raised Caspar in San Francisco after his birth on the 18th of August 1917. The household had no formal denominational ties, though it carried a socially Christian orientation. Weinberger would later describe his mother's Episcopal faith as an enormous influence and comfort throughout his life, and he became an active Episcopalian as an adult.

  At San Francisco Polytechnic High School, Weinberger stood out academically. Harvard University admitted him, and he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. Cambridge offered him a scholarship, but he chose Harvard Law School instead, earning his Bachelor of Laws in 1941. After graduation he enlisted in the Army as a private, was commissioned a second lieutenant through Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and served with the 41st Infantry Division in the Pacific during World War II. By the war's end he held the rank of captain on the intelligence staff of General Douglas MacArthur.

  During those war years, Weinberger developed a deep admiration for Winston Churchill, whom he later cited as a formative influence. From 1945 to 1947 he clerked for U.S. circuit judge William Edwin Orr of the Ninth Circuit, then entered private practice at a San Francisco law firm. The transition from soldier to lawyer to politician came quickly, and it came at the direct urging of his wife.

• 3. California Statesman

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  In 1952, Jane Weinberger persuaded her husband to run for California's 21st State Assembly district. She also served as his campaign manager. He won, then won again in 1954 and 1956. As chairman of the Assembly Government Organization Committee, Weinberger was directly responsible for creating the California Department of Water Resources and played a central role in launching the California State Water Project. He also fought unsuccessfully against the construction of the Embarcadero Freeway, arguing it would spoil the view of the Bay and damage property values; the freeway was ultimately removed after the 1989 earthquake, and Weinberger considered himself vindicated.

  A 1958 run for California Attorney General failed, but Weinberger stayed in Republican politics. Richard Nixon chose him in 1962 to chair the California Republican Party. Governor Ronald Reagan then named him to lead the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy in 1967, and appointed him State director of finance early in 1968. In January 1970, Weinberger moved to Washington to chair the Federal Trade Commission, where he is credited with revitalizing the agency through aggressive consumer protection enforcement.

  Nixon brought him deeper into the federal government, where Weinberger served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1970 to 1972, then as director from 1972 to 1973. His relentless cost-cutting there earned him the nickname "Cap the Knife," a label that would follow him to far larger budgets and, eventually, be turned on its head.

• 4. The Relf Case

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  In 1973, while Weinberger led the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit naming him as a defendant. The case centered on the forced sterilization of three young Black American girls in Montgomery, Alabama: Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, and Katie Relf. An employee of a federally funded Community Action organization brought the sisters to a family planning clinic under false pretenses. Staff gave Katie Relf an experimental birth control injection and inserted an IUD without parental knowledge or consent. On a separate occasion, doctors surgically sterilized Minnie Lee and Mary Alice, who were twelve and fourteen years old respectively.

  At the time of the lawsuit, the Office of Economic Opportunity was preparing to transfer funding and control of its family planning clinics to Weinberger's department. The SPLC's complaint documented that the OEO had recently begun funding sterilization procedures while top personnel deliberately failed to distribute a medical memo on patient consent guidelines written by Dr. Warren M. Hern. Hern resigned in protest. The memo, which cited age-of-consent laws the Relf girls did not meet, sat in a Washington warehouse, undistributed.

  Weinberger was named a defendant partly because his most recent approved HEW budget contained specific funding for sterilization procedures. A district court involved in the hearings found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor people were being sterilized annually using federal funds, and that some were coerced by doctors who threatened to cut off welfare benefits. The case brought renewed scrutiny to state eugenics programs across the country and led to compensation funds and settlements for some victims.

• 5. The Pentagon Years

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  Weinberger had wanted the State Department job. Reagan gave him Defense instead. He arrived without deep experience in military affairs but with a reputation as a skilled administrator, and he shared Reagan's conviction that the Soviet Union posed a genuine threat requiring a stronger, modernized American military. At the Pentagon, "Cap the Knife" became "Cap the Ladle" as he championed dramatic increases in the Defense Department budget. Readiness, sustainability, and modernization became the watchwords of his program.

  Major programs he backed included the B-1B bomber and the drive toward a 600-ship Navy. He was also a forceful advocate for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the proposed space- and ground-based missile defense shield that critics called Star Wars. In 1984, journalist Nicholas Lemann interviewed Weinberger and summarized the Reagan administration's strategy: that the Soviet Union, economically weak and unable to enter the information age, had thrown everything into military production, and that sustained American spending would eventually break it. Lemann wrote in 1984 that he thought the Reaganites were living in a fantasy; by 2016 he called the same passage a fairly uncontroversial description of what Reagan actually did.

  Not everyone agreed with the causal claim. A study by economists William Easterly and Stanley Fischer from MIT and the World Bank concluded that increased Soviet defense spending provoked by Reagan's policies caused only a relatively small rise in Soviet defense costs, and that the massive American effort from 1960 to 1987 contributed only marginally to Soviet economic decline. The study pointed to centrally planned industrial expansion as the real culprit, noting that France and Japan were flagged in 1994 as centrally planned economies that could face similar troubles.

  Weinberger was also reluctant to commit troops. He kept only a token force of American marines in Lebanon, and those marines became victims in the Beirut barracks bombing of October 1983. In the aftermath, he delivered a November 1984 speech at the National Press Club titled "The Uses of Military Power," laying out what became known as his Six Tests for committing the armed forces. He resigned as Secretary of Defense on the 6th of November 1987, the same year Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• 6. Iran-Contra and the Pardon

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  The Iran-Contra affair involved selling American missiles to Iran and channeling the proceeds to Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's socialist government, a use of funds that Congress had specifically prohibited. Weinberger claimed to have opposed the missile sales on principle, but he participated in the transfer of American Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran. Fourteen Reagan administration officials were ultimately indicted across the various investigations that followed.

  Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh continued pursuing Weinberger after his resignation. On the 17th of June 1992, Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges, including accusations that he had lied to Congress and obstructed government investigations. He was defended by attorney Carl Rauh. Four days before the 1992 presidential election, prosecutors brought an additional indictment that cited a Weinberger diary entry contradicting a claim made by President George H. W. Bush. Republicans argued this late move contributed to Bush's defeat. On the 11th of December 1992, Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out that second indictment because it violated the five-year statute of limitations and improperly broadened the original charges.

  Before the original charges could come to trial, Bush pardoned Weinberger on the 24th of December 1992. Bush had been Reagan's vice president during the events at the center of the scandal. The pardon arrived on Christmas Eve, and Weinberger never faced a jury. The honorary knighthood Queen Elizabeth II had awarded him in 1988, specifically recognizing his contribution to military cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States during the Falklands War of 1982, remained untouched by the legal proceedings.

• 7. After the Pentagon

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  Weinberger joined Forbes, Inc. in 1989 as publisher of Forbes magazine and became chairman in 1993. Over the following decade he wrote regularly on defense and national security. In 1990 he published Fighting for Peace, his account of his Pentagon years. In 1996 he co-authored The Next War, raising questions about whether American military capabilities were adequate after the Cold War ended. That same year he became the first host of World Business Review, a television infomercial series.

  He held memberships that reflected a transatlantic focus: a seat on the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. While residing on Mount Desert Island, Weinberger developed pneumonia and died at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine, on the 28th of March 2006, at the age of 88. He was buried in Section 30, Grave 835-1 at Arlington National Cemetery on the 4th of April 2006, survived by his wife Rebecca Jane, their two children, and several grandchildren. His wife, a World War II Army nurse and later an author and publisher of children's books, outlived him by three years, dying in 2009.