[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 86 (Tuesday, May 23, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7258-S7259]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         THE DEATH OF LES ASPIN

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this morning's Washington Post 
carried a fine editorial describing the long and distinguished public 
career of the Honorable Les Aspin, the former Secretary of Defense and 
our former colleague. The editorial observed that Secretary Aspin ``was 
above all a man engaged in the most important, high-stakes issues of 
his time.''
  Having read this excellent account of Les Aspin's three decades of 
service to his country, I do not know what more I could say about my 
friend. I would accordingly ask that the editorial from today's 
Washington Post be printed in the Record, and I urge every Senator to 
read it.
  The editorial follows:

                [From the Washington Post, May 23, 1995]

                               Les Aspin

       We are trying to recall a moment in the past several 
     decades when someone or other--or this political group or 
     that party wing or the other lobby--wasn't mad at Les Aspin. 
     And we come up empty. That is because the former defense 
     secretary and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, 
     who died of a stroke at the age of 56 on Sunday, was above 
     all a man engaged in the most important, high-stakes issues 
     of his time. From his days as a college academic star and 
     then a Defense Department whiz kid, as an internal government 
     Vietnam War critic, a teacher and, for 22 years, a member of 
     Congress from Wisconsin, Les Aspin never [[Page S7259]] lost 
     either his capacity to master the most complicated issues of 
     public policy or his frankly kid-like, ebullient enthusiasm 
     for trying to resolve them. He was also a politician, and 
     generally a pretty successful one.
       Some of the problems Mr. Aspin had, especially on the Hill, 
     were the all but inevitable lot of anyone trying to navigate 
     the shoals of military defense policy in a (then) majority 
     Democratic Party that was bitterly and irreconcilably divided 
     between hawks and doves; unsurprisingly, his maneuverings as 
     chairman of Armed Services frequently infuriated one or the 
     other side, especially in the unending struggle over 
     developing weapons systems. His own inclinations evolved from 
     the more dovish to the more hawkish over the years. As Bill 
     Clinton's first defense secretary, Mr. Aspin had the equally 
     challenging job of trying to reconcile Pentagon thinking with 
     Democratic Party thinking in the matter of Mr. Clinton's 
     proposals for altering the status of gays in the military. 
     His most notable accomplishment as secretary was the review 
     of Pentagon budgeting and procurement procedures that he 
     worked up in his 11 months there. His most notable public 
     stand was that taken--rightly, in our view--in support of 
     President Bush's policy on Kuwait at a time when so many 
     other Democratic Party leaders in Congress were in doubt or 
     in flight.
       Mr. Aspin was humiliated by being pushed out of the Defense 
     Department by Mr. Clinton and the other rivalrous members of 
     Mr. Clinton's national security team. But the thing about the 
     former defense secretary was that he couldn't stay humiliated 
     or give vent to personal bitterness over such things. He came 
     back to serve as head of the Clinton advisory group reviewing 
     national intelligence. The faults for which Mr. Aspin was 
     allegedly fired--imprecision, inability to manage the huge 
     defense establishment and slowness in coming to clear-cut 
     action decisions--were presumably real. Such defects would 
     certainly go with the general makeup of the man: 
     intellectually restless, always turning the thing over and 
     over in his mind, more given to trying to imagine and grasp 
     all the aspects of a problem than to measuring or indexing 
     them. We can understand how this came to grief for Mr. Aspin 
     in the Clinton administration. But you need only read the 
     recently published confessional book by Mr. Aspin's 
     predecessor and onetime employer, Robert McNamara, to 
     understand, as well, that an opposite, superefficient turn of 
     mind is not exactly the key to defense policy salvation. 
     Maybe Les Aspin was the wrong man for his months in the 
     Clinton Cabinet. The same cannot in any respect be said of 
     his roughly three decades of productive public 
     service.
     

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