38 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Republican party politics. Bush was content with proposals to open
talks with the USSR. Others in the administration felt differently – and
Shultz knew that he was going to have to surmount their resistance.
He was also aware about the doggedness of people like Weinberger.
The two of them had worked together in the Bechtel Corporation in
San Francisco. They had never got on. Shultz found Weinberger
impossibly inflexible in business; Weinberger thought Shultz too ready
to concede to litigious complainants.^19
The President trusted his Defense Secretary despite his lack of
enthusiasm about eliminating nuclear weaponry.^20 They had been
friends since Reagan’s appearance on the Californian political stage,
and Weinberger knew which ideas would best appeal to the President.
He was also careful to avoid intruding unduly on his free time. Wein-
berger wanted the Soviet leadership to understand that a true warrior
occupied the Department of Defense. He had indeed seen active ser-
vice in the Second World War, but his experience in government
under Nixon and Ford had been in the civilian sector as Director of
the Office of Management and Budget and then as Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare. He was short, neat and dapper. He was cour-
teous of manner but had a short temper and lacked much of a sense of
humour.^21 He had little notion about how to win over people who did
not already agree with him. He could handle a gentle interview on the
TV evening news, but proved helpless at a news conference when
asked a troublesome question.^22 Media professionals tended to dislike
him as a warmonger. He gave an interview to the New York Times in
an attempt to rectify this image: ‘We aren’t planning to fight any war, if
we can avoid it. We’re planning to deter war . . . We’ve said many times
that we don’t think nuclear war is winnable.’^23
It was Weinberger’s aim to achieve unconditional military superi-
ority for America, and he reckoned that it might take the rest of the
decade. American armed forces had to be modernized. Weinberger
adopted an extravagant tone: ‘When I left California . . . I expected
to find some problems in Washington. But frankly, I was surprised to
find conditions as bad as they are. The Defense Department reminded
me of a business that had been neglected far too long.’^24 He had a brief
to cut out financial waste from American armed forces and set about
cost-saving exercises with gusto. He pursued this objective while
stressing his determination that America should catch up with Soviet
offensive capacity.^25 With this in mind he pushed hard for an increase
in the Defense Department’s yearly budget. Even the Republicans on