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By Root 2092 0

to exercise my authority as secretary of defense to modify the contract to prevent the contractor from being in breach of its obligations to the U.S. government. Modification would result in significant additional cost to the government with no certainty that the program would get back on track. In December I directed the secretary of the navy to show cause why the contract should not be terminated. I said in the show-cause order, “If we cannot spend the taxpayer’s money wisely, we will not spend it.” I called a meeting in my office on Saturday, January 5, with General Powell, Pentagon Comptroller Sean O’Keefe, Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett, and Donald Yockey, the new undersecretary for acquisition. The group discussed whether I should bail out the contractor. I listened and made my decision.

Two days later I announced that we would not bail them out, a decision that resulted in termination of the program for default. No one could tell me how much more of the taxpayers’ money we’d have to spend to procure these planes. My decision not to provide a bailout and to withdraw support for the A-12 sent shock waves through the Pentagon and the defense industry. It was the largest weapons system cancellation in the history of the department, but the decision was the right one. And I am still convinced of that today, even with litigation about the cancellation in its twentieth year.

ON A SATURDAY IN the summer of 1992, I got a call at home from Brent Scowcroft, who was up at Camp David. The president needed a new chief of staff. Sam Skinner, who had taken over from John Sununu, was heading back home to Chicago. Brent wanted to know if I was interested. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t completely surprised to get the call. A year earlier when I had traveled with the president to California and Texas, he’d asked me to describe for him some of the problems I’d seen in the way Sununu was running the White House. I thought it was instructive to compare Sununu’s approach to Scowcroft’s approach, since Brent was running foreign policy for the president and Sununu essentially handled the domestic agenda.

We had talked about the importance of having someone in the chief of staff slot who would be a completely honest broker, as Brent was on the national security side. Those of us in the president’s national security team knew that he would give his views to the president privately, but he would make sure to convey accurately all sides of an issue so the president could make an informed decision. And Brent was deeply experienced in the issues he grappled with every day, having already served a term as President Ford’s national security advisor.

While I was flattered that Brent thought I might effectively serve as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, I told Brent I really was not eager to make the move back to the White House. I had already been chief of staff, and I was engaged in critically important issues at the Department of Defense. If the president had asked me directly, I would have done it, but I’m glad that he got Jim Baker to do it instead.

IN OCTOBER 1992 I attended a NATO meeting in northern Scotland, and it was from there that I watched President Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot compete in the second of the televised presidential debates. As defense secretary, I had no part to play in the presidential election, but I was looking on with enormous interest, and it didn’t seem to be going well for our side. The press was pushing a false narrative that had a president who was detached from the lives of most Americans up against a challenger who was younger, more energetic, more empathetic. And unfortunately this was the debate in which the president looked at his watch, a perfectly normal thing to do, but an action that our opponents seized on and wrongly characterized as symbolic of a distracted president. In 1991 George Bush had won a war, but in 1992 he lost the presidency. When the votes were counted in November, it was Bill Clinton 43 percent, George Bush 37 percent, and Ross Perot, 19 percent.

There were many farewells,