Military service After graduating from Harvard Law School, Weinberger enlisted in the U.S. Army as a
private. He was sent to the Army's
Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was commissioned a
second lieutenant. During World War II, he served with the
41st Infantry Division in the Pacific; by the war's end, he was a
captain on the intelligence staff of General
Douglas MacArthur. Early in life, Weinberger developed an interest in politics and history, and, during the war years, a special admiration for
Winston Churchill, whom he would later cite as an important influence in his life. From 1945 to 1947, Weinberger was a law clerk for U.S. circuit judge
William Edwin Orr of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then entered private practice at a San Francisco law firm.
California politics In 1952, Weinberger entered the race for
California's 21st State Assembly district in the San Francisco Bay area as a Republican at the persuasion of his wife,
Jane Weinberger, who also served as his campaign manager. He won and was reelected in 1954 and 1956. As the chairman of the Assembly Government Organization Committee, Weinberger was responsible for the creation of the
California Department of Water Resources and was instrumental in the creation of the
California State Water Project. Weinberger also unsuccessfully opposed the construction of the
Embarcadero Freeway, saying it would ruin the view of the Bay and damage property values. Weinberger felt vindicated when the freeway was removed after the 1989 earthquake. Although unsuccessful in his 1958 campaign for
California Attorney General, Weinberger continued to be active in politics and was chosen by Nixon in 1962 to become chairman of the California
Republican Party. Governor Ronald Reagan named him chairman of the
Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy in 1967 and appointed him State director of finance early in 1968. Weinberger moved to Washington in January 1970 to become chairman of the
Federal Trade Commission. He is credited for having revitalized the FTC by enforcing consumer protection.
Nixon cabinet Weinberger subsequently served under President
Richard Nixon as deputy director (1970–1972) and director (1972–1973) of the
Office of Management and Budget and
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (1973–1975). While serving in the Office of Management and Budget, Weinberger earned the nickname "Cap the Knife" for his cost-cutting ability. For the next five years, Weinberger was vice president and general counsel of the
Bechtel Corporation in California.
Relf v. Weinberger In 1973, the
Southern Poverty Law Center named Weinberger as a defendant in a case that sought restitution for the forced non-consensual sterilization and medical experimentation on three young Black American girls,
Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, and Katie Relf in Montgomery, Alabama. An employee of Montgomery's federally-funded
Community Action organization took the Relf sisters to a family planning clinic under the pretext of needing “shots.” Staff gave Katie Relf a then-experimental birth control shot as well as inserted a contraceptive IUD device 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 suit, the
Office of Economic Opportunity was preparing to hand over funding and control of its associated family planning clinics to Weinberger's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The SPLC's complaint shows that the O.E.O. recently began providing funding for such sterilization procedures, while top OEO personnel intentionally did not distribute a medical memo containing guidelines on obtaining patient consent for such operations.
Dr. Warren M. Hern authored the memo, and ultimately resigned in outrage that the guidelines were not distributed. Copies of the memo, which included age of consent laws whose criteria the Relf girls did not meet, sat undistributed in a DC warehouse. At the time of the suit, Weinberger's most recent approved Health, Education, and Welfare budget included specific funding allotments for sterilization procedures, and thus he was named a defendant in the case. A district court involved in Relf V. Weinberger hearings found that anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were sterilized annually using federal dollars, and some among those sterilized were coerced into the procedures by doctors who threatened to cut off welfare benefits. The case shone fresh light on numerous state sterilization and eugenics programs nationwide and led to compensation funds and settlements for some victims.
Secretary of Defense General
David C. Jones during
Senate Armed Services Committee Hearings at
Capitol Hill. , 1982|alt=|222x222px Weinberger was vying for Reagan to appoint him as Secretary of State but was given the position of Secretary of Defense instead. Weinberger took the lead in implementing a
rollback strategy against Soviet communism. In 1984, journalist Nicholas Lemann interviewed Weinberger and summarized the strategy of the Reagan administration to roll back the Soviet Union: Lemann notes that when he wrote that in 1984, he thought the Reaganites were living in a fantasy world. But in 2016, he says, that passage represents "a fairly uncontroversial description of what Reagan actually did". Although not widely experienced in defense matters, Weinberger had a reputation in Washington as an able administrator; his powers as a cost cutter earned him the sobriquet "Cap the Knife". He shared Ronald Reagan's conviction that the
Soviet Union posed a serious threat to the United States, and that the defense establishment needed to be modernized and strengthened. Belying his nickname, at
the Pentagon Weinberger became a vigorous advocate of Reagan's plan to increase the
Department of Defense budget. Readiness, sustainability, and modernization became the watchwords of the defense program. In his early years at the Pentagon, Cap Weinberger was known as "Cap the Ladle" for advocating large increases in defense spending. on April 22, 1983|alt=|222x222px As Secretary of Defense, Weinberger oversaw a massive rebuilding of US military strength. Major defense programs he championed included the
B-1B bomber and the "
600-ship Navy". His efforts created economic and military-industrial pressures that were associated with the beginning of
Perestroika and the beginning of the end of both the
Cold War and the
Soviet Union. However, this thesis was contested by a study on the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union by two prominent economists from the World Bank –
William Easterly, and
Stanley Fischer from
MIT: "...the study concludes that the increased Soviet defense spending provoked by Mr. Reagan's policies was not the straw that broke the back of the
Evil Empire. The Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Soviet response to Mr. Reagan's Star Wars program caused only a relatively small rise in [USSR] defense costs. The massive US defense effort throughout the period from 1960 to 1987 contributed only marginally to Soviet economic decline." While the
Reagan Doctrine was not a key factor in causing the economic implosion of the USSR, which was driven by
internal contradictions, the Reagan proxy-rollback policy of the 1980s (which replaced
Détente that Nixon and Carter generally pursued during the 1970s) was the
key factor in preventing
expansion of the
Soviet economic empire, and
sustenance of their declining
domestic economy from
external sources. Reagan was one of the
few people to
predict this possibility. The final piece of the puzzle was the Soviet leadership:
Brezhnev,
Andropov, and
Chernenko were hardline Communists, and prevented any significant changes, but
Gorbachev was a reformer—and once
economic reforms and
political reforms began, they became unstoppable. British journalist Bernard Levin wrote in 1977: These events came at the cost of helping to triple the US
national debt, and funding
radicals. Weinberger pushed for dramatic increases in the United States'
nuclear funding, and was a strong advocate of the controversial
SDI, an initiative which proposed a space- and ground-based missile defense shield. Weinberger was reluctant to commit the armed forces, keeping only a token force of American marines in Lebanon that then became victims in the October
1983 Beirut barracks bombing. In the wake of that terrible event, he laid out his engagement policy in a November 1984 speech on "The Uses of Military Power" at the
National Press Club as the Six Tests. Unlike President
Reagan and Secretary of State
Shultz, Weinberger did not regard any of
Gorbachev's actions—whether it was
perestroika or
glasnost—as reassuring indicators of his stated intentions. "Not only did Gorbachev give up all of the Soviet 'non-negotiable' demands [regarding the
INF Treaty], but he gave us precisely the kind of treaty that the President had sought for seven years. That act of course does not mean—any more than does the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan—that the USSR has given up its long-term aggressive designs." Initially, Reagan's views were in line with Weinberger's views, but he began to reevaluate his perception of Gorbachev's intentions in 1987, the year Gorbachev accepted the U.S. proposal on INF. Weinberger resigned as Secretary of Defense on November 6, 1987.
Iran–Contra affair The
Iran–Contra affair concerned the selling of US missiles to Iran. The funds received from Iran were then channeled to guerilla rebels known as
Contras, who were fighting the socialist government of Nicaragua. Such funding had been specifically denied by the US Congress. Though he claimed to have been opposed to the sale on principle, Weinberger participated in the transfer of United States
Hawk and
TOW missiles to
Iran at that time. Iran–Contra resulted in a major scandal with several investigations which resulted in fourteen Reagan administration officials being indicted. After his resignation as Secretary of Defense, legal proceedings against Weinberger were continued by
Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. On June 17, 1992, Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges related to the Iran-contra affair, including accusations that he had lied to Congress and obstructed Government investigations. He was defended by defense attorney Carl Rauh. Prosecutors brought an additional indictment just four days before the 1992 presidential election. This was controversial because it cited a Weinberger diary entry contradicting a claim made by President
George H. W. Bush. Republicans claimed that this action contributed to Bush's later defeat. On December 11, 1992, Judge
Thomas F. Hogan threw out this indictment because it violated the five-year statute of limitations and improperly broadened the original charges. Before Weinberger could be tried on the original charges, he received a
pardon on December 24, 1992, from Bush, who had been Reagan's
vice president during the scandal.
Later career Weinberger had been Secretary of Defense for six years and ten months, longer than anyone except for
Robert McNamara and more recently
Donald Rumsfeld. After Weinberger left the Pentagon, he joined Forbes, Inc., in 1989 as publisher of
Forbes magazine. He was named chairman in 1993. Over the next decade, he wrote frequently on defense and national security issues. In 1990, he wrote
Fighting for Peace, an account of his Pentagon years. In 1996, Weinberger co-authored a book entitled
The Next War, which raised questions about the adequacy of US military capabilities following the end of the
Cold War. He was a member of the Founding Council of the
Rothermere American Institute at the
University of Oxford and a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the
University of Edinburgh. In 1996, Weinberger was the first host of
World Business Review, a television infomercial series. ==Personal life==