A New View at Defense
Rumsfeld's No. 2 heralds a more pragmatic approach.
By Daniel Klaidman, John Barry and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Dec. 12, 2005 issue - Shortly after the start of President George W. Bush's second term, a high-level "deputies" meeting was called at the White House. Issue one on the agenda was how to improve the administration's message in the face of allegations that the U.S. government condoned torture. Philip Zelikow, the powerful counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, spoke up first. He argued firmly that the problem was not how the policy of interrogation and detention was presented to the world; it was the policy itself. No one was surprised by that stance: State, after all, is the diplomatic caretaker of America's global image, and for some time Rice has been quietly campaigning to dial back detention policies.
But what happened next shocked everyone. Gordon England, the Pentagon No. 2 recently installed as Paul Wolfowitz's successor, enthusiastically endorsed Zelikow's views. The critical question from England's perspective was: are we better or worse off using these methods? Worse, he concluded. "He was utterly pragmatic," recalls one senior official who declined to be named because the deliberations were private.
Pragmatism at high levels? State and Defense working hand in hand? This doesn't sound like the Bush administration of popular imagination. In fact, the ascent of England as Donald Rumsfeld's deputy Defense secretary is the best evidence yet that a new array of career professionals—the post-neocons, if you will—has emerged as a powerful force in Bush's second term. They have, for the most part, displaced the first-term "cabal" of political true believers, as Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, called the group around Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. While Rumsfeld and Cheney remain, their sway in White House deliberations is not what it once was.
England is a striking example of how the administration has corrected what critics saw as an excess of "vision"—and shortage of management—at the Pentagon. The media had mistakenly portrayed former CEO Rumsfeld as a hands-on guy. But he was preoccupied running two wars, while he spent much of his time pursuing expansive visions of military transformation. Meanwhile, his deputy, Wolfowitz, was preoccupied with an equally grand dream of transforming the Middle East.
Yet the Pentagon is a vast establishment of 3 million personnel. With its top men casting their eyes to the horizon, too few people were watching the ground. The results were damaging: many of the scandals over detainee treatment and interrogation can be traced to failures of top management.
Rumsfeld, his associates say, was aware of this managerial deficit and regularly reached down to the service chiefs to run things. And he relied on no one more than England, a self-effacing secretary of the Navy and defense-industry executive. Now England is resolving the swirling in-house debates over the Quadrennial Defense Review—the Pentagon's strategic rethink of the kinds of threats America faces. And on detention and interrogation policy, England's qualms at that early 2005 White House meeting reverberated throughout the government, encouraging reformers. That eventually led to compromise discussions with Capitol Hill that have left Cheney's hard-line chief of staff, David Addington, somewhat isolated inside the administration.
Raised in a blue-collar Baltimore row house, England is widely admired for both his drive and humility. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin called him a "Mr. Fix-It" who seems to be without enemies in Washington. That's not entirely true: England is still officially the "acting" deputy Defense secretary because a Republican senator, Olympia Snowe, has held up his confirmation over a shipbuilding dispute. But he and his can-do crowd are certainly setting a new tone in Bush's second term.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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