In My Time - Dick Cheney [90]
I was intrigued and asked Marsh to set up a session where I could talk with Thurman face-to-face. A few weeks later, he joined us for lunch in Marsh’s office, and he didn’t disappoint. As secretary, I had run into plenty of general officers who told me what they thought I wanted to hear and, frankly, that wasn’t very helpful. Thurman was something completely different. A combination of being near retirement and having a tell-it-straight personality made him direct and forceful. I appreciated it. As I sat in Jack’s office eating my lunch and listening to Thurman, I thought to myself, here is the kind of guy we need in Panama.
Before we could offer him the job I would have to retire Woerner. Telling people they have to go is never pleasant, and firing a four-star general is not something that is done every day. But we had no choice. I knew from experience that it was more responsible and more honorable to move quickly to make a change when it was clear things weren’t working out. And I knew I owed it to General Woerner to deliver the news directly and in person. I asked my military aide, Admiral Bill Owens, to have Woerner make the trip to Washington.
A few days later Woerner and Admiral Crowe took seats at the round table in my office. Looking General Woerner in the eye, I told him, “General, the president has decided to make a change.” He wanted to know why. I told him it wasn’t personal, it was just time for a change. Though he was not pleased with the decision, he understood it was final and handled it with grace and dignity. On July 20 I announced that General Fred Woerner would be retiring and the new CINC, or commander in chief, for Southern Command would be General Max Thurman.
BY THIS TIME, THE summer of 1989, I had pretty well decided that I wanted General Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job unique in the U.S. military. The chairman is not only the senior uniformed officer but also the key link to the civilian leadership, providing military advice to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, and the president. For most of the post–World War II period, the chairman offered only military advice that all the members of the Joint Chiefs concurred in. Unless there was a consensus among the chiefs of the services, the chairman’s hands were tied.
All of that changed with the enactment of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which emphasized the importance of “jointness” (as opposed to service-centered advocacy) among the services and made the chairman the principal military advisor, freeing him from the constraint of offering only the consensus views of the chiefs. I had cosponsored the legislation in the House, believing it provided badly needed reforms.
Goldwater-Nichols also took the chiefs out of the chain of command. The air force and army chiefs as well as the Marine commandant and the chief of naval operations would no longer command forces when they were deployed. They were responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping the force, but not for using it in combat. That role was reserved for the CINCs, the commanders in the field. The secretary of defense may, at his option, send military orders to the field through the chairman, which I chose to do.
The chairman about to be appointed would be the first to serve his entire tenure in the consequential position that Goldwater-Nichols had created, and I wanted to make certain that the man I picked was not a “political” general, someone who’d had his head turned by the rarefied atmosphere of the White House. I needed to know that General Powell was happy to be back commanding troops and satisfied with the idea of serving out the rest of his career in uniform. To find out if that was the case, I made a stop at FORSCOM headquarters at Fort McPherson and visited with Powell face-to-face. I came away impressed, my mind made up to recommend him to the president.
I knew Scowcroft had some