The Ordeal of Kenneth Adelman

BY JAMES FALLOWS

LAST JANUARY 12, A Wednesday morning, Kenneth Lee Adelman arrived late at his office at the United Nations, in New York, where he was the U.S. deputy representative. Adelman, a sturdy man of medium height with curly brown hair and a thick moustache, had been having breakfast that morning at the Carlyle Hotel with a friend.

The friend was James Chace, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Adelman had many such friends from the world of letters and ideas. Although Adelman, then thirty-six, had spent most of his career in the government or on its periphery, his dream was to soar into the ether of the intellectual life.

He enjoyed seeking out writers and offering line-by-line explications of their latest work. Magazine editors knew him as a brimming fount of article proposals. He took great satisfaction from his involvement with the Lehrman Institute, in New York, where every month or two he would join a dozen other academics, journalists, and intellectuals for three hours of argument about an essay one of the participants had submitted. He had taught a course on Shakespeare at Georgetown University, in Washington, and had written an article for Harpers comparing Julius Nyerere, of Tanzania, to Richard II. He was a Sherlock Holmes buff and had contributed to the Baker Street Journal. He smoked a pipe, dressed in clothes that looked comfortable rather than stylish, and wore a Holmesian deerstalker cap.

He seemed openly, even innocently, friendly. Many of his friendships proved to be professionally expedient, but he did not play them against each other, nor drop a friend when the connection ceased to be handy. He was generous with his time and praise. He seemed to lack the capacity for cunning or duplicity. As a result, his ambition was perfectly plain.

While many men involved in politics yearned to be written about, Adelman yearned to write. Through his writing, he hoped to become known for his intellectual honesty, his willingness to puncture hypocrisy, his ability to present the truth in a fresh and compelling voice. He had been writing for newspapers and magazines since shortly after leaving college, but he began to establish his name in the late seventies, when he identified himself more clearly with conservative political views. He wrote about foreign policy for conservative journals and became one of conservatism’s promising young men.

Adelman had no natural affinity with conservative forces of the New Right, who were of southern and western populist origins and stressed a fundamentalist-C-hristian point of view. But he was entirely at home among the neo-conservatives, the urban, educated, largely Jewish branch of the movement, whose members believed that intellectual courage and proficiency in the battle of ideas were their special strengths.

Adelman knew everyone who was anyone in this movement, especially those a generation older than himself. He worked for one such figure: Jeane Kirkpatrick, the permanent representative to the UN. Adelman had served as her deputy since August of 1981, reinforcing her in the war of ideas against the regnant hypocrisies of international diplomacy.

On January 11, the very evening before his breakfast with Chace, he had a long talk with another neo-conservative leader: Eugene Rostow, former dean of the Yale Law School, former undersecretary of state in the Johnson Administration, exemplar of the mainstream Democrats who felt themselves betrayed by their party’s nominees in 1972 and 1976 and who had swung to the Republican Party in 1980. In the Reagan Administration, Rostow was the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, known as ACDA. In the contrast between Rostow and Paul Warnke, Jimmy Carter’s first ACDA director, conservatives saw the same message conveyed by the contrast between Jeane Kirkpatrick and her counterpart under Carter, Andrew Young. In place of squeamishness was resolve; in place of apology, self-confidence. Tough-mindedness about American values and American interests had at last replaced mushy romanticism about international harmony and the Third World.

That evening, Rostow and Adelman talked about the seemingly endless war between Iraq and Iran. They also traded bureaucratic gossip. Rostow had recently lost a power struggle within the Administration, which left him without a deputy director at ACDA. He had heard rumors that Adelman might be in line to fill the vacancy. Rostow said that if Adelman was interested in the job, he wished he had known about it sooner. After all, as both men remembered, Rostow had tried to interest Adelman in the deputy’s job two years earlier, at the start of the Reagan Administration.

Adelman thanked him, sincerely; he said that Rostow’s confidence meant the world to him. But he had not been interested in the ACDA job at the beginning of the Administration, and he was not interested now. It was too much fun doing what he was doing at the UN. They agreed that the politics of arms control and of ACDA were turbulent; Rostow said he had an appointment with George Shultz, the secretary of state, in Washington the next day. That should iron things out, he said.

When Adelman reached his office the next morning, he found it in uproar. White House telephone operators had been scouring the city for him. William Clark, the President’s national security adviser, had made an urgent request to talk with him. When Clark came on the phone, he told Adelman he wanted to talk about ACDA. Thinking that Clark, like Rostow, was talking about the deputy directorship, Adelman began to explain why he wasn’t interested. Clark cut him off. You don’t understand, he said. We’re talking about the director’s job.

The irony of the previous evening’s conversation was quickly apparent to Adelman. What, exactly, was Rostow going to “iron out”? Adelman deduced that he was learning Rostow’s fate before Rostow himself knew. As he expressed his surprise to Clark, and fumbled to cope with the news, Clark told him that the President wanted to announce his appointment that afternoon, along with Rostow’s dismissal. So the President needed an answer now. Adelman said yes, called his wife and several close friends, and wondered how long he should wait before trying to contact his old friend Gene Rostow.

Thus began the three-month ordeal of Kenneth Adelman.

PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS USUALLY SAIL THROUGH the Senate. In the past twenty-five years, the Senate has approved more than a million and a half nominations and rejected only three. They were Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, Richard Nixon’s nominees for the Supreme Court in 1969 and 1970, and Lewis Strauss, Dwight Eisenhower’s nominee as secretary of commerce in 1959.

The vast majority of successful candidates are those approved en bloc for routine military and foreign-service promotions. For instance, on the same day it began debating the Adelman nomination, the Senate received, for its “consideration,” some 4,000 military nominees, whose names filled fourteen pages of single-spaced, multi-column type in the Congressional Record.

Even when nominees to prominent positions are considered, confirmation disputes are so rare that they are easily remembered. Before Kenneth Adelman, the only Reagan nominee to receive an unfavorable vote from a Senate committee was Ernest Lefever, the President’s original candidate for assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. He withdrew before the full Senate could consider his case. Before Adelman, only twelve nominees in the twentieth century had come up for Senate consideration after a negative committee vote. (A committee can kill or indefinitely delay a nomination, by refusing to report it to the full Senate. A less dramatic and less confrontational step is to report the nomination to the Senate, but with a recommendation that it not be confirmed.)

In most of the cases where nominees have gotten in trouble, the underlying political issues have been polarized, emotional, unforgiving of halfway views. The underlying issue in the Adelman nomination was the control of nuclear weapons, which meant that Kenneth Adelman was walking into the middle of a holy war.

IN 1963, THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION signed the Limited Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibited tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under water, and in space. In 1972, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT I, which had two parts. One set limits on strategic nuclear forces, those designed for attack; the other restricted further development of anti-ballistic-missile systems, or ABMs, which are intended to shoot down incoming warheads. In 1979, Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev signed the successor agreement, SALT II, which extended the limitations, in greater detail, to different categories of weapons, although it did not require overall reductions in either side’s nuclear force. In 1980, after the invasion of Afghanistan, Carter gave up on ratification of the SALT II agreement, bowing to the general view that it could not get the two-thirds vote necessary in the Senate.

The modern history of arms control is contained by these dates. On that, but little else, the two major camps in today’s arms-control disputes agree. From their different interpretations of these past negotiations have grown doctrinal conflicts of religious ferocity and abstraction. Ferocity because partisans of each view believe that their opponents endanger the survival of the United States, indeed of human society. And abstraction because no one has seen a nuclear war, and neither side can prove its contentions about how such a war might start until it is too late.

One of the arms-control camps is made up of liberals. Its members would resist that label and instead describe themselves simply as being “committed to arms control.” They are convinced that the unbroken chain of arms negotiations, stretching back more than twenty years, has helped pull great-power relations back from the precipice toward which they constantly veer. They often talk about “the process,” as in “We must keep the process going.” They mean that through all the frustrations of U.S.-Soviet relations, despite the shortcomings of specific treaties, both the Soviet Union and the United States are better off because they have kept on talking with each other. From the constant, patient search for small areas of agreement come the underpinnings of larger agreements, and the bulwark against war.

The historical metaphor most popular among the liberals is the summer of 1914, when the great powers drifted witlessly into war. War came, in this view, not because of irreconcilable conflicts but because no one was able to stop the warward momentum of rhetoric, weaponry, and national bureaucracies.

Their other cherished metaphor is “letting the genie out of the bottle.” Arms negotiations are seen as a race against disaster, the vision and courage of statesmen ever challenged by the ingenuity of the technicians, who might produce the “destabilizing” breakthrough that would upset the deterrent balance.

The liberals have a classic cautionary example of what can happen when the statesmen lose the race. The first SALT negotiations failed in one significant way: they did not prohibit placing multiple nuclear warheads on a single missile, through MIRV technology (for “multiple independently targeted re-entry vechicles”). Without MIRVs, there would not have been even the hypothetical danger of a disabling “first strike” which has proven so vexatious for the past five years.

It could happen again, the arms-controllers say: with weapons in outer space, opening a new frontier to the arms race; with cruise missiles, which are so hard for the other side to count, and therefore to regulate in arms agreements; with other, now-unknown genies. That is why they place such emphasis on keeping “the process” going, and why they are so cautious about doing or saying things that might lead to rupture.

They find it dangerous to assume that the U.S. is the only occupant of the moral high ground—or, more precisely, that it will automatically look that way to all other countries. They argue that it is bad for deterrent stability, and therefore for world peace, if either side builds a weapon capable of launching a first strike against the other. And they are concerned that America will prove inept in the “perceptions,” or propaganda, battle for European opinion. They say that European cooperation and good will cannot be taken for granted. The greatest long-term threat to Western security would be the crumbling of NATO, and the greatest threat to NATO would be an American administration that sounded hot-tempered, cowbovlike, unawed by the threat of nuclear weapons.

The liberal arms-control camp is mainly, but not exclusively, Democratic. One of the Democratic senators running for President , Alan Cranston, of California, has made arms control the central tenet of his campaign, and two others—Gary Hart, of Colorado, and John Glenn, of Ohio—use it as a cudgel against the Reagan Administration. The most prominent Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, has chosen SALT II as one of the few legacies of the Carter Administration that he can boast about.

But the line-up on arms control is not strictly partisan. The first SALT agreement, after all, was the child of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Several Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, such as Charles Percy, of Illinois, the chairman; Charles Mathias, of Maryland; and Larry Pressler, of South Dakota, are outspokenly “committed to arms control.” And few politicians were as fearsome in their opposition to the SALT II treaty as a Democrat, Henry Jackson, of Washington.

If there is a general difference between the arms-controllers and their adversaries, it has more to do with culture than with party politics. In their hearts, most people who believe in arms control trust the foreign-policy establishment of the last generation. They may not agree on every detail of its outlook; many emphatically disagreed about America’s involvement in Vietnam. But while Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy could never have made common cause in the sixties with Joseph Biden or Paul Tsongas or other young Democrats who have now become senators and leading advocates of arms control, they all stand together in insisting that America’s security lies in negotiated limits on nuclear weapons.

To a surprising degree, the distinction is a matter of education and class. Members of the liberal arms-control camp pride themselves on the sophistication, the long study and the international contacts, the appreciation of diplomatic complexities, that underlie their policies. What they most fear from, say, a Jesse Helms of the other side is his ability to inflame less sophisticated popular passion. When they watch President Reagan’s speeches about the big Soviet lead in land-based missiles, the liberals instantly think of the offsetting American advantages in submarine-based missiles, and bombers, and total warheads. They are not sure the people in Midland and Asheville do.

ACDA is singularly important to this camp. The liberals think of it as, by rights, their agency. Claiborne Pell, the patrician Democratic senator from Rhode Island, reminded his colleagues during the Adelman debate that he had participated in the creation of ACDA, in 1961. “What we intended twenty-two years ago was for ACDA to play the role of an advocate for arms control ... as a way to enhance our national security,” he said. “We wanted, in other words, an agency that would more often than not counterbalance what was coming out of the Pentagon. The last thing that we wanted was for ACDA to be an echo chamber for policies developed in the Pentagon.”

The liberals’ proprietary attitude toward ACDA constricts a President’s range of choices when he nominates a director. Certain agencies in Washington are ceded to certain interest groups. In filling major positions at the Defense Department or the Central Intelligence Agency, for example, a wise President will avoid nominees who symbolically irritate “strong-defense” groups. The same thing holds with ACDA, the arms-controllers feel. This is one of those jobs for which a President should come up with someone who shares the faith on which the agency was founded. To do otherwise would be to appoint an atheist chaplain.

ARRAYED FOR RIGHTEOUS COMBAT AGAINST THE liberals are the forces of the other main arms-control camp. It is a coalition whose members feel that unless “the process” is challenged, America will eventually succumb to its more resolute adversary. To the liberals, the members of this second camp are “right-wingers,’ or, in extreme cases, “warmongers.” To themselves, they are “realists” or “conservative skeptics.”

The conservatives hold that if the world has a hope for true arms control, it rests with them. For they, unlike the arms-controllers, have purged the opiate of “the process’ from their systems.

The conservatives challenge “the process” on practical grounds: all that the SALT treaties have done, they say, is ratify an appalling one-sided buildup in nuclear force. They say that the arms-control establishment is obsessed with reaching agreements, any agreements, whether or not they truly bolster American security. They also mount a challenge on moral grounds. They say that something in the liberal soul is satisfied by the “inevitability” of nuclear deterrence, the impossibility of ever regaining the upper hand. The conservatives claim, as William Safire put it in The New York Times, “that the time is ripe for a breakthrough that will reduce the nuclear arsenals; they are willing to risk the delays of a Soviet propaganda offensive to accomplish genuine arms reduction.”

The “genuine arms reduction” would come through the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, or START, President Reagan’s alternative to the pussyfooting of SALT. “You and others who are very favorable on arms control are saying, take tiny steps,” Kenneth Adelman told Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, at his hearing. “The President is saying, take big steps, let us have real reductions. ... if you ask for baby steps, then you are going to get baby steps.”

To this the liberals reply, If you insist on too much, you will end up with nothing. They suspect that the conservatives are ultimately more determined to win the arms race than to curtail it, and that to the conservatives, “nothing” in arms control would not be so bad. Watching the months pass with no apparent progress in START, the arms-controllers see their fears borne out.

Behind these differences of policy, the fundamental intellectual difference between the sides is the historical prism through which their perceptions are bent. When the liberals look at the 1980s, some of them see 1914. When the conservatives look at the 1980s, nearly all of them see 1938.

Most arms-control discussions with an anti-SALT conservative lead quickly to reminders of Munich, of the cost of appeasement, of Europe’s willful refusal to face the truth about Hitler until it was nearly too late. “I guess Ronald Reagan is a warmonger just like Winston Churchill,” Senator Jake Garn, of Utah, said during the Adelman debate. “And we can find lots of other examples of . . . the Neville Chamberlains, the appeasers of this world who never . . . seem to learn the lessons of history no matter how many decades or centuries pass by.” Also during the Adelman debate, Senator John Tower, of Texas, nattily tailored and bristling with indignation, reminded his colleagues that within six years of Chamberlain’s declaration, in 1938, of “peace in our time,” millions of people had died on the battlefields and in the extermination camps. Having made his point, Tower slammed his papers down on his desk and said with passionate contempt, “Do not tell me there is no lesson to be learned there.”

“We are not the village idiots,” an assistant to a Republican senator remarked in an interview during the Adelman controversy. “We recognize that Andropov is not Hitler. But if he ivere, we don’t trust that the Establishment, with a capital E, would tell us in time.”

The abstract concern about appeasement comes to a focus on the question of “verification”—determining whether the Soviet Union has honored the treaties it has signed. To the conservatives, this is a natural corollary of the Munich analogy, since it concerns the willingness of a free society to face uncomfortable truths.

Although it has received less attention than abortion or school prayer, verification is Issue Number One to some of President Reagan’s original supporters, especially those who fear that the President is going soft on his campaign promises. The 1980 Republican platform contained a promise to end the Democrats’ “cover-up” of Soviet treaty violations. Four months after Reagan took office, he received a letter signed by twenty-one conservative senators, asking whether new radar projects under way in the Soviet Union constituted blatant violations of SALT I. A tug-of-war has been going on ever since between Reagan and the Republican New Right, over the President’s refusal to declare officially that the Soviets have violated the treaties.

For those who feel that Ronald Reagan has been too lenient about Soviet violations, David Sullivan is a pivotal figure. Sullivan is a stocky, short-haired man in his late thirties who works jointly for Senator James McClure and Senator Steven Symms, both of Idaho. He volunteered for the Marines after graduating from Harvard, in 1965; got his master’s at Columbia; and joined the CIA after combat in Vietnam.

Sullivan says that he began his intelligence career as a supporter of detente and SALT I, but what he learned about Soviet plans made him a skeptic. He resigned from the CIA in 1978, in the middle of a controversy over allegations that he had leaked documents to Richard Perle, then an assistant to Senator Jackson. Many conservatives considered him a martyr, their equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg. He was rescued and employed by conservative senators. In 1982, he published a book, The Bitter Fruit of SALT: A Record of Soviet Duplicity. It was the unclassified version of his dossier on Soviet misbehavior. Its case is this:

By using Cuba as a base for the controversial “combat brigade” discovered in 1979 and for planes capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the Soviets violated the agreement between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev that ended the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

By venting radioactive material to the atmosphere some thirty times, and by testing weapons larger than the 150kiloton limit, they violated the Limited Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Threshold Test-Ban Treaty of 1974, respectively.

By dragging their feet and cutting corners in a number of areas, such as dismantling old missiles, they circumvented or violated the SALT I agreement.

By developing several new models of intercontinental ballistic missiles—not just the one new type permitted by SALT ii—and by encoding the test data their missiles send back from test flights, thereby thwarting American attempts to monitor the tests, they violated SALT II.

The SALT II agreement, of course, was never ratified by the United States, largely because Sullivan’s allies in the conservative camp succeeded in stalling it until the invasion of Afghanistan made its ratification impractical. It may therefore seem graceless of them to complain that the Soviet Union is not living by a treaty that the conservatives helped torpedo. They see no inconsistency in their stance, for they say they are really discussing a pattern of behavior, not the specifics of any one treaty. From the long, sorry record of Soviet duplicity, we can learn how to reach a new agreement, a realistic and enforceable one.

“We have got to show the Soviet Union just how serious we are,” David Sullivan says. “We must convince them that they have to change their behavior. If they are confronted with resolute American interest in arms control, accompanied by a strict insistence on verification, we may get agreements worth having. But we are no longer going to accept unequal agreements, unequally applied and unequally enforced.”

Even within the Reagan Administration, there is resistance to this view. Nearly all of the evidence about treaty compliance lies beneath shrouds of classifications. The results usually point toward a range of probabilities, a 60 percent likelihood that the new missile has certain characteristics, 40 percent that it has others.

In general, conservatives pay more attention to alleged treaty violations than liberals do, because of their different conception of the nuclear balance. To them, nuclear deterrence is not an all-or-nothing question. Weapon must be matched against weapon; there must be a balance of forces in every strategic theater, at every level of potential conflict. Many arms-controllers are less upset by the prospect of a new kind of Soviet missile. Yes, the Russians may well be cheating; and yes, they should be called on it if they are. But what does this new missile really matter, when both sides already have enough to do the job? Why should we panic about Soviet air-defense systems and “battle-management radars” if we have concluded that anti-ballisticmissile systems simply cannot work?

To the conservatives, America’s response to verification and to the larger failure of “the process” will reveal nothing less than whether we have the mental and moral will to survive. To the liberals, secrecy, defensiveness, and sharp practice are all part of the Soviet Union’s standard operating procedure, which we should recognize but not be panicked by when we negotiate with the Russians. A public hullaballoo cannot possibly improve things; the very reason the U.S. and Russia established the Standing Consultative Commission, in the first SALT agreement, was to resolve these complaints.

THIS, THEN, WAS THE LINEUP AS OF EARLY 1983: arms-controllers, who felt that the Administration was on the verge of irreversible error—indeed, was courting a breakdown of “the process” in order to justify its military budget; and anti-SALT conservatives, who despaired that even Ronald Reagan would speak the truth about Soviet behavior. Each group came to the Adelman nomination bearing the marks of its recent experience.

To the liberals, the significant development of 1982 was the anti-nuclear movement, and in particular the resistance in Europe to the Pershing II nuclear missiles America planned to deploy there. When NATO decided, in December of 1979, to go ahead with the Pershings, it also decided to negotiate with the Soviet Union about reductions in these “intermediate-range nuclear forces,” or INFs. This was called the “two-track” decision, but one of the tracks—the INF negotiations in Geneva—seemed by 1983 to be going nowhere.

Many in the arms-control movement saw Ronald Reagan as the culprit. In 1981, he proposed his “zero option” for INF negotiations: the United States would not go ahead with the Pershings if the Soviet Union would dismantle its counterpart missiles, the SS-20s. He stuck with the zero option, despite flat Soviet rejection, throughout 1982. To the left, this seemed unrealistic: more important, it would look that way in Europe.

This fear reached panic level on the day Eugene Rostow was dismissed. As time went on, the private word inside the Administration was that Rostow’s problems were mainly personal: his prickliness in team play, his eagerness to volunteer advice on subjects where his views were not solicited, such as the Middle East. But for several weeks after his departure, the public story was different. Rostow was portrayed in the newspapers as a victim of the right. He had approved a compromise deviation from the zero option; he was too soft-line.

Here was a man who many of the arms-controllers thought was fairly intransigent; yet even he seemed not to be hard-line enough for the Administration. What could be meant by the selection of Adelman, whom most of the liberals had never heard of? The only rationale they could see was a desire to place a nullity at the head of the agency that rightly should be advocating arms control. As Paul Tsongas, of Massachusetts, put it to Adelman during his confirmation hearings: “Dr. Rostow had credibility, he had a constituency. . . and when he either jumps or is pushed off the ship, it makes international headlines. You are not well known, you are not perceived as an expert in these affairs, you don’t have your constituency. And if I were the President and wanted to have someone who I could control . . . why is it not logical that you are the kind of person I would go to?”

The conservatives came to the Adelman hearings at a high point in their power. Over the past two decades, Congress has been transformed by the decline of party discipline and of the seniority system, and by the rise of the staff establishment. Initially, the increase in staff members seemed to help the left. During the Vietnam War, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hired a number of investigators who had worked in the executive branch, who had an insider’s sense of where to find facts and how to exert influence.

For the past five years, the action has been on the right. Staunchly conservative senators came to dominate the delegations from the South and West. They collaborated more closely than their liberal counterparts. For example, more than a dozen senators coordinated their efforts through the Senate Steering Committee, an unofficial but highly important caucus that holds weekly meetings and deploys its own staff.

A perhaps more important network developed among the members of the senators’ staff. Staff’ assistants to such conservative Republican senators as Jesse Helms, Jake Garn, John Tower, James McClure, and (on military matters) the Democrat Henry Jackson knew each other, met regularly, and combined their efforts far more successfully than any counterparts on the left. They stepped into the limelight in 1980, when newspapers in Washington were full of articles about the “Madison Group,” a collection of staff members with a shared commitment to a conservative foreign policy.

With Reagan’s election, many alumni of the group went into the executive branch. The best known is Richard Perle, for ten years an assistant to Henry Jackson, who became an assistant secretary of defense. In his years in the Senate, Perle was legendary for managing the flow of information in from the bureaucracy and out to sympathetic journalists, especially the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Now, in his deceptively modest position in the Pentagon, he is credited by conservatives, and blamed by liberals, as the main intellectual force behind the Administration’s arms-control policy.

Despite the crossovers to the Administration, the congressional staff network was still in place, and in the years before the Adelman showdown it had helped conservative senators execute a new tactic. Obstructive techniques, of which filibusters are the most dramatic, had traditionally been employed on large legislative issues. Southern conservatives protested civil-rights bills in the sixties, northern liberals opposed the decontrol of gas prices in the seventies. Led by Jesse Helms, the conservatives began obstructing people rather than bills.

Through much of 1982, the Republican right stood square in the road against Richard R. Burt, a former reporter for The New York Times, whom Reagan had nominated assistant secretary of state for European affairs. By the time they finally relented, the conservatives claimed to have been given “reassurances” from George Shultz about arms-control policy. And, indeed, a hardliner on Soviet SALT violations, Manfred Eimer, was at the same time placed in charge of verification activities at ACDA.

The conservatives scored again last January, when President Reagan withdrew Robert Grey’s nomination as deputy director of ACDA. Grey was Eugene Rostow’s choice for the job (after his early entreaties to Kenneth Adelman), and he had been acting deputy for many months. But to the right, he was the Antichrist, especially on the all-important question of verification. The conservatives claimed that he did not cooperate with some of their favorite verification experts, and that he did not answer their letters about Soviet SALT violations. Incredibly, he had for a brief time been an assistant to Alan Cranston. When Congress reconvened this year, President Reagan withdrew the nomination. With that, the right had a big win and Rostow’s departure became a matter of time.

Some conservatives saw these victories as just the beginning of tomorrow’s politics. They felt that the professional officer corps and the Foreign Service had been “politicized,” by which they meant they had been pressed into service to advocate SALT II. If a senator could reach down to block a potential assistant secretary of state, why could he not do the same within the military? This spring, a conservative staff assistant mentioned one military officer who had been particularly vigorous in advocating SALT. “When his next promotion comes up, are we supposed to just let him by?”

At the same time, the conservatives sensed that they might be due for a fall. “All this time, the arms-controllers had been watching and taking their licks,” one of them said. “They’d seen us reach down into the bureaucracy. Now it was their turn.”

ADELMAN WAS BORN IN CHICAGO IN JUNE OF 1946. He grew up there, in a Jewish household, number four in a family of six children. His father is an attorney. His early passion was swimming, and it was for its swimming coach that he chose Grinnell College, in Iowa. There he set a conference record in the butterfly and became captain of the swim team before graduating, in 1967.

Adelman then moved to Washington, where he began work on a master’s degree in foreign service at Georgetown University. He completed the degree in 1968 and then volunteered for the Marine Corps, in hopes of being an underwater-demolition man, but his chronic eczema disqualified him from service. Instead, he began work at the Commerce Department, and in 1970 he switched to the Office of Economic Opportunity, which ran anti-poverty programs.

The OEO was then directed by Donald Rumsfeld, a Republican rising star who had given up his congressional seat from Illinois to take the job. With him were a number of other young Republicans who came to prominence during the Ford and Reagan administrations, including Richard Cheney, who became chief of the White House staff under Ford, and Frank Carlucci, who has been Caspar Weinberger’s deputy director at several government agencies, most recently at the Department of Defense. In his spell at OEO, Adelman met this future Republican cadre, and also Carol Craigle, then an assistant to Carlucci, whom he married in 1971.

In the fall of 1972, Adelman began research for a doctorate in international affairs and moved with his wife to Zaire, where she was on assignment for the Agency for International Development. There they lived for two and a half years. Adelman studied French, collected African art, and served as a translator for Muhammad Ali during his fight there. He also wrote a series of articles on Zaire for The Washington Post and traveled to Angola to report for Foreign Affairs.

In the spring of 1975, the Adelmans returned to America for the birth of their first child, a daughter named Jessica. Their intended next stop was Bangkok, where Adelman planned to teach philosophy and religion at a university and his wife would continue her AID work. But the spring of 1975 was when Saigon fell; it did not seem the time to take a family to Southeast Asia. Adelman worked briefly in the Congressional Liaison Office of AID and then went to the Defense Department, where his friend Donald Rumsfeld had become secretary. He served as Rumsfeld’s special assistant until the end of the Foixl Administration, when he joined the Washington office of the think tank known as SRI International.

Writing became Adelman’s new passion. While in Africa, he had turned out more than a dozen articles for newspapers and foreign-policy journals. In the late seventies, as he passed his thirtieth birthday, he began writing even more prolifically, and with a more distinctly conservative bent. He widened his range to include general discussions of weapons policy, dealing with the Soviet Union, keeping the Western alliance intact. He wrote for journals such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Harper’s, and for a variety of newspaper op-ed pages. He came to be featured by conservative publications, neoand otherwise, such as Policy Review, The American Spectator, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

Adelman’s book and articles about Africa, the most interesting of his works, stressed the local realities that the bright, progressive viewpoint toward emerging nations so often overlooks. They also emphasized Soviet influence on the continent.

As Adelman’s focus turned to national security, his writings were more squarely in the conservative mainstream. He wrote that American intelligence systems, while good at detecting current Soviet behavior, had been truly inadequate in predicting the Soviet military buildup. He said that America should be more assertive in presenting its case to the world. He said that the U.S. needed an acrossthe-board defense buildup, and that events of the late seventies had discredited the liberal foreign-policy elite.

On the specific subject of nuclear-arms control, to which he devoted about a dozen newspaper and magazine articles, Adelman made the conservative case against “the SALT process.” “It has not saved money for either side,” he wrote, “and is unlikely ever to do so; it has not reduced the destructive power of either side, and is unlikely ever to do so; and it has not enhanced strategic stability (quite the contrary), and is unlikely ever to do so.” He argued that the arms-controllers’ ceaseless search for an agreement with the Russians led to vague, unverifiable treaties— which in turn only deepened suspicions and mutual distrust. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal that if there were to be a SALT III, it would have to improve on previous efforts in three ways. It should develop more sophisticated ways of counting weapons; it should encompass the intermediate-range forces, those based in and aimed at Europe; and it should embrace other nations, especially the European allies, along with the two superpowers.

Many of the articles shared a distinctive tone. In his personal bearing, Adelman does not have the hater’s edge that so often typifies ideologues of left and right. In his writing, he sometimes does. The mocking, wise-guy tenor of several articles was later to cause him regret.

While establishing his name as a writer, Adelman also developed wide contacts within the conservative foreignpolicy establishment. In 1977, while on a trip to Japan, Richard Allen, who later became President Reagan’s first national security adviser, read one of Adelman’s articles in Foreign Policy, called “The Black Man’s Burden.” When Allen returned, he called Adelman and invited him to lunch; from such contacts grew Adelman’s inclusion on the executive board of the Committee on the Present Danger, which propounded the anti-SALT point of view during the Carter years. Adelman came to know the principal figures in the neo-conservative foreign-policy firmament. By the late seventies, he counted as friends Eugene Rostow, Paul Nitze, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Bartley, Irving Kristol, Fred Ikle, Richard Perle, Richard Burt, Robert Tucker, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and many others. Unlike many of his associates, Adelman was not doing anything so crude as looking for a job in the new Administration. But for a person who aspired to a place at the main table of the intellectuals, this was a remarkably helpful corps of friends and patrons.

In 1978, at Richard Allen’s request, Adelman began informally sending position papers and memos to the Reagan campaign. In the summer of 1980, he agreed to have his name published as part of a list of Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers. On the night of the 1980 election, Adelman watched the returns come in, pronounced the results good for America, but said he would never take an Administration job.

During the period before Reagan’s inauguration, Adelman worked on the transition team. There he launched a battle against Reagan’s right flank. His contacts and patrons had been either liberal Republicans, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Frank Carlucci, or neo-conservatives. Neither group was a natural ally of the Jesse Helms-style New Right. The right wing regarded Carlucci’s nomination for deputy secretary of defense as the first scrimmage in the battle for the Administration’s soul. Adelman did his best to build support for his friend Carlucci; he was fighting not Democrats but Jesse Helms,

At the end of the transition, when Reagan took office and the American hostages were finally freed in Iran, Adelman flew to West Germany with Jimmy Carter, representing the new President. One photo in Hamilton Jordan’s book, Crisis, shows a weary-looking Jimmy Carter smiling grimly at his lieutenants on the flight back from Wiesbaden. The caption reads, “Jordan, Carter, and staff. . . .” Looming over Jordan’s shoulder is Adelman’s grinning face.

Most young men so positioned would have moved straight into the Administration. Adelman had his chances, but he was true to his early word. Alexander Haig asked him to become assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs—that is, to sit on the hot seat when the Administration “went to the source” of subversion in Central America. Adelman said no. Eugene Rostow felt him out about joining ACDA as deputy director until Adelman politely demurred. Frank Carlucci and Richard Allen extended open invitations. Jeane Kirkpatrick asked him to join her at the UN.

Adelman returned to SRI and to the family life that meant so much to him, until he heard from Jeane Kirkpatrick a second time, in April. In her brief tenure as American ambassador to the United Nations, she had been through an awkward churning of the staff and was now looking for a deputy. She remembered his earlier list of objections: he didn’t want to uproot the kids, his wife didn’t want to quit her job, he didn’t want to re-enter bureaucratic life. She wanted to tell him that life at the UN was even worse than he imagined. But would he and Carol still come up and talk with her?

They would, and shortly afterward they had signed on. Adelman liked and admired Kirkpatrick, his former teacher at Georgetown, beneath whose crusty public demeanor he thought he had discovered a sweet soul. The challenge she had undertaken at the UN—exposing the hypocrisy of Third World diplomacy, telling America’s story without embarrassment—was what he had been writing about all along. Apart from the wear and tear on his children, he and his wife were eager to leave Washington, the company town. As when he had moved to Zaire or volunteered for the frogmen, he was in the mood for a shake-up of routines.

At the UN, he was a yeoman in asserting the Administration’s case. He made pungent, “undiplomatic” speeches alleging that the Soviets had used poison gas and “yellow rain.” When a Swedish representative piously denounced the United States for playing “a crucial role when it comes to keeping tottering dictatorships on their feet,” Adelman snapped back that the statement was “obnoxious [and] false.” Who were the Swedes to complain, when they had given $50 million in aid “to none other than Vietnam, a country that so palpably violates its own people’s human rights”? Some Third World diplomats predictably thought him monstrous. The very day before his ACDA appointment was announced, The Wall Street Journal published, on its op-ed page, Adelman’s article “How Much Can One Say in 27,000 Tons of Words?” It lampooned the endless flow of reports and studies that the Lilliputians of the UN disgorged.

He was floor manager for the temporary American delegations that rotated in and out for special sessions. One of the delegates, Gordon Luce, a banker from San Diego, wrote that he found Adelman “smart, scholarly, energetic, reasonable and strong but flexible.” In 1982, when the Administration asked Donald Rumsfeld to travel through Western Europe explaining why the U.S. hated the Law of the Sea Treaty, George Shultz asked Adelman to accompany Rumsfeld. “Scuttle Diplomacy,” Carol Adelman christened the mission.

In short, by January of 1983, Kenneth Adelman was on top of the world. He and his family loved New York. They loved the regular dinner parties at which diplomats and thinkers gathered to talk policy. He loved his job, as an able polemicist for the neo-conservative view of American interests. He loved the brave simplicity of Ronald Reagan’s mind and character.

Then came the call from William Clark.

WHEN ADELMAN HEARD CLARK PROPOSE THAT he become ACDA director, his initial answer was no. Clark asked him what the problem was. Adelman said he knew the subject of arms control was poisonous, and that Rostow’s departure would make it more so. He suspected that his age and his unsuitable personality would get him in trouble.

Later, at the time of the confirmation hearings, Adelman was at pains to make his reluctance clear. He told various senators that Clark had sympathized with his hesitation. When the President had asked Clark, an old and trusted friend, to become deputy secretary of state, he had had absolutely no experience in foreign affairs. He had endured several weeks of international humiliation when he failed basic who-what-where questions at his confirmation hearings. He had persevered because he knew he had the President’s trust. Now he had become national security adviser, and he told Adelman that if the President had been looking for the “best-qualified” candidate for that job, it would not have been Clark. But the President wanted him.

To Adelman, then, Clark said the question was not whether he was the ideal man for the ACDA job, and not really whether he wanted it. The President thought he was the right man, and the only question was whether Adelman was willing to serve. When the question was put in those terms, Adelman had little choice but to say yes.

As news of his selection broke in Washington that afternoon, the response was not warm. Many liberal arms-control authorities said their first reaction was “Who is he?’ Adelman had never worked within the ACDA bureaucracy; he did not have many contacts among congressional staffers or liberal specialists. The congressional leadership, which prizes the appearance of being ahead of the news, had not been forewarned.

Among the conservatives, Adelman was better known, but as a Rumsfeld man, a supporter of Carlucci and Burt, not one of their own. After quick consultation, several conservative staff members and senators decided they should be grateful that it was not anyone worse. Jesse Helms put out a mildly congratulatory statement. Michael Pillsbury, who had served briefly as ACDA’s acting director before Rostow was brought in, and had since returned to the Senate staff, telephoned Adelman. As Pillsbury recalls it, he told Adelman the conservatives would be happy to help in whatever way they could—they could do so by being his champions, or by keeping their mouths shut. Both of them laughed, thinking it was a joke. The next day, Dan Rather reported on CBS News that Adelman’s nomination was sure to prove controversial because opposition was likely to come from the right.

The staff members of the Foreign Relations Committee, scholars and specialists mainly in their thirties, most of them liberals “committed to arms control,” began looking into Adelman’s record. They did not like what they found.

The problem was the tone. When he was outside the government, Adelman thought of himself as a writer, not as a potential appointee. He chose his words for their effect at the moment, not for the way they might look to congressional investigators several years hence. He thought that the SALT II treaty was, on balance, a bad idea. Its provisions were so vague that they would only encourage further friction between the U.S. and Russia. He did not wage a holy war against it, as Richard Perle did in the Senate, but he did feel free to ridicule it. When the Senate staffers saw the articles in which he did so, they thought that his attitude reeked of contempt for the whole armscontrol process.

One article in particular did Adelman in. Its title was “Rafshooning the Armageddon: The Selling of SALT.” Adelman had originally prepared it for Lewis Lapham, then the editor of Harper’s. Lapham turned it down, writing that “the difficulty had to do with a matter of tone.” It was eventually published in the Summer, 1979, issue of Policy Review, an organ of the Heritage Foundation.

If pressed, most of the arms-controllers would concede the article’s basic argument: that the Carter Administration, in its attempts to sell the SALT II treaty, exaggerated how much difference the treaty would make. Rut what they found wildly inappropriate was the sarcastic, sophomoric tone. For example, there was Adelman’s treatment of John Culver, a Democratic senator from Iowa, who was one of the genuine heroes of the arms-control movement, a former fullback and Marine who said that the only route to strength was arms control. Culver had been knocked out of the Senate in 1981, in part because of his defense of SALTand how did Adelman portray him? He described Culver reading a letter from a girl whose family had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell:

“Speaking with a Janis Joplin-like whooping sound, the Senator pinpointed the main problem of the SALT debate: ‘We have [lost] . . . the elementary sense of horror and anguish that is needed to make us see the truth.’ As indefatigable truth-seeker, the Senator furnishes a major dollop of the needed ‘horror and anguish’—details of pain akin to burns from boiling oil, of children screaming for their mothers, of scalded babies, and so on, in what has to be the most sickening description this side of Guyana.”

Adelman later conceded to his friends that the article sounded too smart-alecky. For him, that closed the question, as it would for any other writer remembering an old essay that had not been as good as it should.

But his opponents were seeing him as a public servant, not as a writer. If he still believed the things he had written, then he was clearly the wrong man to carry ACDA’S unique burdens. And if he said he no longer believed them, was he anything more than a political chameleon, willing to express whatever view proved convenient at the moment?

“The bottom line of his criticism may have been well taken,” one of the committee’s staff members said after reading the articles. “SALT II was not going to save the world. But you just didn’t get the gut feeling that he believes our security rests on lower levels of arms. A lot of it comes down to gut feelings.”

Without knowing Adelman personally, but seeing his views unfold on the printed page, several members of the congressional staff were developing a distinct gut feeling about him. They could not stand him. It did not help that he was the same age as many of the staff members and— as they saw it—had so much less professional experience in arms control. “The fact that he was a smartass rubbed a lot of us the wrong way,” one staff assistant said after the hearings. “That he was coming as a poseur into an area where many people had spent so much more time than he had. That added a little pinch of emotion to it.”

These feelings mattered, because there are so many choices a senator must make, and so few about which he or his assistants have intense feelings. The influence of staff assistants naturally increases when their passions run high. Several staff members would willingly work late, if that is what it took to preserve “the process,” save Ronald Reagan from himself—and beat Kenneth Adelman.

Even from Republicans in the Senate, the initial reaction was cool. The only words of support to be heard had come from Jesse Helms. In response to this sullen reception, the Administration began a whispering campaign. Its message was that no one should get too upset about Kenneth Adelman, because George Shultz would really be in charge. This won few converts. Shultz was already overtaxed as the Administration’s Mr. Fixit for every new problem that arose, and he was as inexperienced in arms control as the other main figures—Weinberger, Clark, Reagan himself.

At the same time, the Administration was attempting to explain why Kenneth Adelman, of all the possible candidates, had been chosen for ACDA. The Administration’s allies were told that Adelman was a logical, even an outstanding, choice. He had written widely about the subject, had won Jeane Kirkpatrick’s admiration at the United Nations, was a fine specimen of the assertive young leaders on whom the future of conservatism would be built.

It was also said, more quietly, that he would fix the things that Rostow broke. “I think they were looking for someone who wouldn’t commit Rostow’s sins,” Michael Pillsbury said later. “Who would not lack modesty. He was young, not old. He was not a know-it-all, not about to move onto everybody else’s turf.” He was a team player. He could get along with the three negotiators whose efforts he would coordinate: the venerable Paul Nitze, in charge of the INF negotiations; retired general Edward Rowny, the START negotiator; and Morton Abramowitz, a newly appointed negotiator for the long-running, slowmoving Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks in Vienna.

It looked different to the Administration’s critics. By their lights, there could hardly have been a more provocative selection. At a moment of utmost delicacy in international relations, with the arms-control bureaucracy already disrupted by the Rostow firing, the Administration was putting forward, for this extraordinary position, an underaged wise guy.

Always in their minds was the thought of “purge.” As ACDA had grown more and more politicized since the midseventies, each sect of the arms-control faith suspected that the other would stamp out disbelievers if given half a chance. Conservatives had their grievance list of allies slighted in the past. Liberals now saw a counterpurge under way. Its ultimate effect, they feared, would be the bureaucratic subordination of ACDA to the Pentagon, specifically to Richard Perle.

Those who had battled against Perle for ten years in the Senate, who saw him as the most tenacious and unsparingenemy of SALT, were filled with dread by the thought of Perle unimpeded. They looked to ACDA as the internal counterweight, and when they considered Kenneth Adelman, he did not fill the bill. “In the most ambitious construction of his talents, you could not possibly see him as a senior player in the formulation of policy,” one of Adelman’s opponents said after his nomination. “Even if you’re his mother, you can’t expect him to have blossomed that quickly. The politics of it meant that it was a consolidation of [Perle’s] ability to control the subcabinet game.”

ADELMAN KNEW HE MIGHT HAVE TROUBLES, BUT IN the first few days he had no sense of how deep they could become. At that stage, he still had his jaunty, buoyant air. He still said hello with a swooping glissando from high to low, in the style of the fifties singer the Big Bopper. Life’s experiences had taught him that most people, once they met him, liked him. So he prepared carefully but without anxiety for his appearance before the Foreign Relations Committee.

According to conventional wisdom, the only way to get in trouble at a confirmation hearing is to say too much. After all, George Shultz had been overwhelmingly confirmed as secretary of state after testimony that amounted to “I’ll look into that” and “An interesting idea!” For the previous several months, the Administration had been bedeviled by loose remarks about “prevailing” in nuclear war, and Adelman knew that here was a minefield to be crossed with care.

Meanwhile, the committee staffers were preparing for his arrival. They circulated excerpts from his most flamboyant writings to senators on the committee; they prepared sample questions designed to unveil his sardonic view of SALT. (“How would you reconcile [your] negative evaluation of the strategic-arras-control process with your desire to be ACDA director?”)

Then, on the very day before the hearings, something far more promising fell into the hands of Senator Alan Cranston.

When he heard that Eugene Rostow had been fired, Cranston said that he would make the confirmation hearings on Rostow’s successor into a general debate on armscontrol policy. When he read samples from “Rafshooning” and other works, Cranston concluded that Adelman represented everything he didn’t like about the Administration’s policy. Cranston had been the only member of the Foreign Relations Committee to vote against Rostow’s confirmation two years earlier. Now he reasoned that no matter how well Adelman might perform in the hearings, he could not redeem the attitude his writings revealed.

As Cranston prepared his questions about SALT and limited wars, Gerald Warburg struck gold. Warburg, twenty-eight, was Cranston’s assistant for foreign policy and defense, a tall, thin man with wavy black hair. The day before Adelman’s hearing, the Foreign Relations Committee received an unexpected piece of evidence. It was the “executive summary” of a study Adelman had prepared while working at SRI. Since Cranston had been in the news for his criticisms of Adelman, the committee staff passed the study to Cranston’s office, where it wound up in Warburg’s hands.

It was not the whole document, only a summary, but its few paragraphs stunned Warburg. They discussed what would happen if South Africa got the nuclear bomb.

“It was clear to me that it was an options paper,” Warburg said later. “But it was also clear that it contained no conclusive statement that nuclear weapons there would be bad. The last two paragraphs suggested that if South Africa had the bomb, it would be of use to the West.

“I got literal about it. From the context of the study, it was clear that he did not have any view of the importance of non-proliferation at all. It was another example of Adelman saying one thing—that he opposed proliferation—and having written something else.”

Armed with this evidence, Cranston and his assistants drafted a question to use the next day.

The hearings opened with an air of moderate drama. Network television was there, and eleven of the committee’s seventeen senators: better than average, but not a packed house. Before Adelman was even called to the microphone, Cranston announced that he would vote against him, no matter what. A few minutes later, Cranston revealed his South Africa surprise.

The crucial passage in the executive summary had said that a “clear South African nuclear capability might be helpful to Western security interests in one respect,” namely, for warfare against the Soviet submarines that might patrol the Cape route. Since an anti-submarine weapon “could easily be converted into a nuclear gravity bomb, South Africa could simultaneously gain a deterrent capability with respect to threats it perceives looming from ground assaults in the region.”

Cranston read this paragraph to Adelman and said he found it “astounding.” What could it mean but that Adelman welcomed South Africa’s using “nuclear weapons against their own blacks or against neighboring black nations”?

Adelman, taken aback, replied that he had spent enough time in black Africa to find such suggestions “abhorrent.” And why had Cranston ignored the rest of the study? Adelman said that he and his co-author had been asked first whether South Africa’s possession of the bomb would be helpful or harmful to American security interests. “I spent seven chapters talking about how it would be harmful.” Then he was asked, as a separate stage of the study, what would happen if things went wrong and South Africa did build a bomb. Only then did the anti-submarine issue come up.

From Cranston’s and Warburg’s point of view, the South Africa questions were perfectly fair. If this nomination really affected humanity’s ability to control nuclear weapons, then a few impolite questions might be excused. To Adelman, the incident demonstrated only that Alan Cranston was running for President and looking for headlines, and that he was not punctilious about how he got them. Neither he nor anyone else seemed worried (so Adelman thought) about the pain their wild accusations might inflict.

Adelman may have thought that the day could hold no worse than this, but he had much to learn. In the space of two and a half hours, he saw his nomination begin to change from “controversial” to “imperiled.” One of the most devastating moments came near the outset, when Claiborne Pell catechized Adelman. if a nuclear war started, could it be contained? To the arms-control camp it is axiomatic that the first nuclear detonation would lead to the second, and the second to the third, and on to catastrophe.

The first ten words of Adelman’s answer, beamed across the country that evening on the network news, were:

“Senator Pell, I just have no thoughts in that area. . . .”

The rest of the answer, not carried on TV, was “and I will tell you why. I think it would be such a time of extreme human stress and extreme conditions that I think any predictions on what leaders around the world would do in that kind of situation would just not be accurate or not be based on anything that I know.”

If the confirmation hearing had been a philosophy class, Adelman’s answer might have been judged adequate, even profound. No one knows for certain what would happen during a nuclear exchange, except that the damage would be vast. The unfathomability of nuclear weapons is in fact the most important point about them; only by ignoring it can strategists concoct cool, confident scenarios for what “would” or “would not” happen.

But this was not a philosophy class, and Adelman’s answer was not artfully begun, it was the same with several other questions he was asked before the lunch break that first day—his opponents said the number was sixteen or twenty, but a reading of the transcript shows six. In each case, he was asked one of the “nature of God” questions from the nuclear faith; each time, he made a defensible point in a clumsy way.

When Claiborne Pell pursued his first question, asking where Adelman stood on the theological battles about “prevailing” in nuclear war, Adelman said, “This is not an area that I have ever gone into in any depth, and it is not an area [about which] I have any strong feeling.” Pell went on to ask whether a nation could survive in a “governable form” after a nuclear exchange. Adelman concluded his answer, “So, again, I am sorry to tell you, I just have no strong opinion on that.”

When Jesse Helms, hardly meaning to embarrass Adelman, asked how he would respond if the Russians suddenly proposed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, Adelman replied, “Senator, I would not be honest if I did not tell you that is a thought that I just have never thought about in my life.”

When Alan Cranston invited Adelman into the swamp of verification, asking whether he thought the Soviet Union had violated SALT u, Adelman’s answer was “Senator, that is not an area that I have looked into. It is not an area I am knowledgeable about at all.”

To himself, Adelman’s justification was that the questions couldn’t be answered. He knew enough about verification to understand that it turned on minute analysis of ambiguous details, and on ultra-classified information he had not been immersed in while at the UN. He found Jesse Helms’s question puzzling, because it ignored one complicating fact: the U.S. and the Soviet Union aren’t the only countries with nuclear weapons, and how would their agreement control China or Israel?

He also knew that what the senators wanted was answers from the catechism: limited wars would lead to general wars, total elimination of nuclear weapons is mankind’s ultimate goal, Soviet compliance with SALT is a subject of constant attention at meetings of the StandingConsultative Commission, etc. But in his stubbornness, or his nervousness, or his determination not to make waves, he neglected to say those things. The resulting “don’t know” answers are a minor refrain when the hearing transcript is read as a whole. But they were to constitute the first grave breach of Adelman’s defenses, the first sign that he might be not merely harassable but defeatable.

During the rest of the hearing, there was a divided verdict on how the session had gone. Adelman recalls beingtold by Ed Sanders, the staff director for the committee, that his only problem was that his answers were too long. At the end of the day, Adelman says, Sanders told him that things had gone fine and he should sail through to confirmation. (Sanders says that his encouragement was meant only to be polite.) An assistant to a Democratic senator who later voted against Adelman said it seemed like any other confirmation hearing. The New York Times account of the hearing, written by Philip Taubman late that afternoon, contained no mention of the “don’t know” answers.

On the other hand, Rudy Boschwitz, of Minnesota, a Republican senator whose views accorded with Adelman’s writings, repeatedly broke into the questioning to express incredulity at the things Adelman said he didn’t know. As soon as the hearings adjourned that afternoon, Claiborne Pell talked with Paul Tsongas, said the nominee was in trouble, and arranged a strategy meeting.

“You know how it is in Washington,” an assistant to a Democratic senator said a few days later. “You don’t know how you feel till you see it on TV that night. If the TV news had said, ‘Kenneth Adelman faced tough questioning from committee members, but Administration officials are still confident he will be confirmed,’ the hearing would have been a one-day story.”

That is not what the TV news said. Each of the three networks showed the “don’t know” parts of Adelman’s answers, run back to back, with little other evidence of his qualifications. Inside Washington, it confirmed Adelman as a now-vulnerable figure. Outside Washington, it was the public’s introduction to a man most people knew nothing else about.

“The impact of the hearing, confirmed by TV, was significant and negative,” said an assistant to a Republican senator several weeks after the first hearing. “It was that you had an Administration that was not interested in arms control, and was making it all the worse by sending up some second-rate fellow who was not briefed and capable in the field.”

WHEN KEN AND CAROL ADELMAN SAT ON A BED IN a friend’s apartment that evening, eating snacks and watching the network news, they felt as if they were in the middle of a terrible dream. Carol had thought, like her husband, that it had all gone reasonably well. Yet here he was, being presented to countless millions of viewers as the classic know-nothing hack. Like her husband, she is affable and warmhearted; yet, like him, she was aware of the station they had attained in life, and was not going to let it all, the friendships and the reputation, be destroyed without a fight. Three or four days after the hearing, when it was apparent that the nomination was in serious trouble, she grew fiercely combative, sending out truth-squad mailings to friendly columnists, venting her anger at the latest outrage, even though her husband was still relatively optimistic about his prospects.

The second hearing, one week later, hardened the impressions left by the first. This time Adelman was his customary assertive self. He answered crisply and concisely the questions on which he had stumbled the week before. He defended Ronald Reagan’s policies without setting off alarm bells about winnable nuclear wars. Had he spoken in this manner at the first hearing, his enemies agreed privately, they could not have hoped to block his way.

But, they wondered, how could a man have gone from “no thoughts” about limited war to elegant, paragraphlong answers in the space of a week? After listening to his newly polished answers, Tsongas asked whether Adelman had received any coaching. Adelman said no (“I cannot think of one briefing that I have had. . . Eventually he conceded that in the previous two days he’d been through two “murder boards,” two hours long each, in which advisers had peppered him with practice questions. In Adelman’s mind, the difference was clear, from his days at the Pentagon. A briefing was when you sat down and listened to someone give you information. A murder board was when you worked on your stage presence, your general quickness on your feet. As so often happened during his congressional ordeal, Adelman failed to explain what he was thinking. To his inquisitors, it looked like simple deceit.

Slowly, through the first and second hearings, the liberal staff members and several of the senators had been modifying their estimate of Adelman. Before they heard him testify, they considered him merely a wise guy. But as they tried to follow the twists of his answers, they concluded that he was deliberately evading them. “It was a slow thing,” one of the assistants said. “If he was not actually lying, then he was sliding around so facilely that it gave everyone a start. People started to wonder, What kind of a sleazeball are we dealing with here?”

Tsongas put that question in a form that made the TV news: “Who is the real Ken Adelman—this week or last week?”

After the second hearing, the initiative left Adelman’s hands and went to the senators’. The Foreign Relations Committee, with its preponderance of arms-control sentiment among the members and the staff, was naturally hostile territory. The specific personalities on the committee complicated the process further.

One of these was Tsongas, a man with a quick, debaterstyle mind. Adelman visibly stiffened in his chair when Tsongas began to question him. This senator, unlike some others, would be listening to the answers. Tsongas’s questions and comments were usually about tactics. He wanted to know Adelman’s “game plan” for the testimony, he asked about “scenarios” in which he’d resign in protest, he said the nomination was not “playing well” in Europe. Tsongas began edging into command of the anti-Adelman effort after the second hearing, because Alan Cranston was always on the road, running for President. After the second hearing, Tsongas was declaring that he would do what he generally deplored: he would stop the Senate’s business with a filibuster if that is what it took to beat Kenneth Adelman.

Another crucial figure was Charles Percy, the committee chairman, impeccably groomed, a melodious orator, another of those liberal Republicans who, like Elliot Richardson and George Bush, look as if they are born for the leadership class. Percy is widely regarded as a decent, nice man; but as a chairman he is, in the words of a staff assistant, “comically weak.” Committee chairmen may be de facto monarchs or mere figureheads, depending largely on their personalities. Percy was reluctant to ram his decisions through, to violate the spirit of statesmanlike, bipartisan consensus. After the first Adelman hearing, the Administration did not want a second, and after the second it did not want a third. At every point, it thought that delay was its greatest enemy, but Charles Percy was the wrong kind of chairman to speed things up.

A third player in the drama was Rudy Boschwitz, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a staunch defender of Israel, and a skeptic about Soviet intentions. During the first hearing, he had been more nakedly hostile to Adelman than any other senator. He yielded some of his questioning time to Alan Cranston, his polar opposite in ideology, so that Cranston could twist the knife about South Africa. He had objected to Adelman’s professed ignorance, and he had been driven wild by one offhand remark. In response to a question from Cranston, Adelman was looking for something good to say about the United Nations. Why, there was the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, helpfully adding that among UN agencies it was “one of the best.”

Boschwitz nearly burst. Thanks to the inexcusable laxness of the IAEA, Iraq had almost become the next nuclear power. Only a squadron of Israeli bombers had forestalled that catastrophe. Boschwitz was also uncomfortable about Jesse Helms’s quick endorsement of Adelman. Boschwitz was up for re-election in 1984, in a state traditionally more liberal than he. On the basis of what he’d heard from Adelman, he had everything to gain from opposing him, including a cheap “peace” vote.

Adelman got word of Boschwitz’s concerns and set in motion one of the Administration’s rare successful countermaneuvers. He met with Boschwitz at the Metropolitan Club shortly after the first hearing. There he explained the narrow context within which he meant to praise the IAEA. He had previously given Boschwitz a compilation of his writings, which Boschwitz, remarkably, had sat down and read. He interrogated Adelman about the implications and contradictions of his articles. In the end, Boschwitz was satisfied. By the time of the second hearing, he was the closest thing Adelman would have to a champion in the Senate. He was also the only one who gave signs of having read the full texts of Adelman’s articles.

The arithmetic of the committee was nine Republicans, eight Democrats. If the Democrats could hold firm, they would need only one Republican vote to beat Adelman. But they could not hold: Edward Zorinsky, of Nebraska, wasted no time in announcing that he supported Adelman. Two other, more liberal, Democrats, Joseph Biden, and Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, were regarded as on the fence.

After Boschwitz became an Adelman fan, there was only one obvious Democratic hope on the Republican side— Larry Pressler. Pressler was chairman of a subcommittee that considered arms control in space. A treaty to limit anti-satellite warfare was his special project, and he had been lambasting the Administration for months because of its apparent lack of interest. Soon after Adelman’s nomination, he was making gloomy sounds about Adelman’s qualifications, and at the hearings he seemed displeased with Adelman’s answers about satellite warfare and his position on two treaties that, though signed in the mid-seventies, had never been ratified: the Threshold Test-Ban Treaty and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty.

But as Pressler came closer to declaring outright opposition, a bizarre story began to spread. It said that the real reason Pressler was opposing Adelman was that Ronald Reagan had refused to come to Larry Pressler’s birthday party. According to several of Adelman’s supporters, who would not then and will not now let their names be used, Pressler was pouting about the party and saw Adelman’s nomination as an opportunity for revenge.

Pressler himself called the story a flat lie—well, almost flat. He later said there might be a “grain of truth” to “a small part” of the story. He recalled having told his fellow legislators, the previous fall, that if the President were to come to South Dakota, a birthday party/fund-raiser might be the right occasion. But he claimed that the party had nothing to do with Kenneth Adelman.

The truth about Larry Pressler’s birthday party was never conclusively determined, but the story kept bubbling up. Each side thought it epitomized a central truth about this nomination fight. To Adelman, the story summed up what was wrong with the U.S. Senate, where questions of war and peace were resolved on the basis of childish spats. To his opponents, it confirmed their suspicions of how quickly the Administration would resort to a smear campaign.

These same opponents, of course, were undertaking a smear campaign of their own, but they felt there was an important difference in their standards. “We pursued every scum angle we could think of,” one staff assistant said when the fight was over. “But we have certain principles. We looked into the rumors and found they wouldn’t pan out.” That is how the very search for scandal that nauseated Adelman became, to his opponents, a source of pride.

For example: Zaire had a law prohibiting export of native art, and Adelman’s house was full of masks and artifacts from the Congo basin. Could he be discredited as an art plunderer, with the suggestion of insensitivity to the Third World?

Answer: No, because the law did not apply when Adelman was in Zaire. The man officially responsible for enforcing the law was the director of the museum in Kinshasa. He had admired Adelman’s collection in Zaire, and again when he visited the Adelmans’ home in Arlington, Virginia. But Adelman and his attorneys had to spend most of a week cajoling the exculpatory statement out of Zaire’s ambassador to the U.S. The ambassador had

not heard of the law, and no one back in Zaire seemed to be able to locate a copy. The task of looking it up and explaining its provisions fell to the U.S. Department of State.

There was another possible smoking gun, this one from Adelman’s tenure at the UN. In 1981, during the campaign to replace Kurt Waldheim as the UN’s secretary general, one of the candidates was Salim Salim, foreign minister of Tanzania, whom the U.S. delegation opposed. An urgent cable reached the State Department from the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It claimed that Adelman was being quoted in local radio reports as saying that Salim Salim was the kind of man “who swings from trees.”

Minutes after the original cable, a second arrived. It said that the first cable was a hoax, the work of a junior press officer. He meant to rib the chief of mission, who was preparing for a meeting with Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, and was already uneasy about an unflattering profile of Nyerere that Adelman had published in Harper’s. All meant in fun, the message implied; appropriate steps will be taken.

Adelman passed through the confirmation dreading the appearance of the first telegram. In fact, it had already fallen into the Democrats’ hands from a source at the United Nations. The staff had even looked into it eagerly. Paul Tsongas had called the ambassador from Tanzania to ask if it was true. But it didn’t pan out.

ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, FIVE WEEKS AFTER Adelman’s nomination, the first clear test of strength was at hand. Going into the Foreign Relations Committee’s business meeting, Tsongas and Cranston thought they lacked the votes. Their strategy was to look for a further delay, to keep Adelman in the spotlight a little longer. Cranston had material to introduce into the record which would almost guarantee delay, and he began the meeting by explaining his plan.

Before its impact could be measured, the committee’s political landscape was drastically changed. Charles Mathias, the veteran Republican from Maryland, gave a setpiece oration in the committee room. He said that Adelman must be turned down.

“It is an unhappy coincidence that... we should have a President, a secretary of state, a secretary of defense, and a national security adviser who are all innocent of experience in the complex and bewildering world of arms control. . . . It would be neither coincidence nor chance if a fifth man, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, should also be without experience, knowledge, or competence in the field. ... So I would hope that Mr. Adelman could be excused from taking a crash course in a subject upon which, until now, he has not concentrated. The President can then enjoy that privilege which is so rare in human experience—a second choice.”

As soon as Mathias was through, Percy looked at Alan Cranston and asked if he’d like to renew his motion that the vote be postponed. Laughter broke out around the room. With his dramatic switch of sides, Mathias had changed not only the emotion in the committee but also its basic arithmetic. Now the vote would be 9 to 8 against Adelman, if Biden and Dodd stuck with their party. Tsongas determined that they would, and he sent a note to Cranston. It said, “We have the votes. Let’s go.”

For all of the casual histrionics in which they had so far indulged, the senators, as they reached the point of decision, considered it no light thing to reject a nominee. They seemed, at least for the moment, sobered by the appearance this would give. Part of their argument against Adelman was that the nation needed to present a serious, steady face to the world. So the suggestion was heard: let us put it off again and give the President a chance to do the right thing. “If the vote is cast now, Mr. Adelman loses,” Joseph Biden said. “I do not think we should put the President in that position.”

By 14 to 2, the committee voted to postpone its decision on Adelman for another week. Its intended message to President Reagan, Paul Tsongas said in formulating the resolution, was that “this is not working and it is time to go back and perhaps submit a nominee that we can all enthusiastically endorse. ...”

Ronald Reagan was having none of it. He said publicly to reporters, and privately, through intermediaries, to Adelman, that he stood behind his man. The private message included the thought that if Reagan could not stand up to Alan Cranston and Claiborne Pell, how could he stand up to the Russians?

Kenneth Adelman, hearing of the President’s steadfastness, felt a new wave of dedication to Ronald Reagan. If someone had to suffer publicly so that the President’s visions might be realized, Adelman was proud to have been chosen to make the sacrifice.

The Senate committee, learning of the President’s response, looked more carefully at the evidence Alan Cranston had introduced.

ABOUT THE TIME OF THE SECOND HEARING, CRANston’s press secretary, Murray Flander, had received a telephone call from the columnist Richard Reeves. Reeves told him that he had written a column Cranston would want to see. Since Reeves had no outlet in Washington, he arranged for his syndicate, in Kansas City, to send it to Cranston.

Reeves’s column concerned another column, written by Ken Auletta in the New York Daily News two years earlier. Auletta had met Adelman at seminars at the Lehrman Institute and had heard him espouse his foreign-policy views.

In May of 1981, before Adelman joined the Reagan Administration, Auletta wrote a piece on the “radical” changes the President was making in U.S. foreign policy. About a quarter of the column was devoted to Adelman, including the following passages:

“ ‘I can’t think of any negotiations on security or weaponry that have done any good,’ says Kenneth L. Adelman. . . .

‘“One reason not to rush into negotiations,’ Adelman continues, ‘is that in a democracy these negotiations tend to discourage money for defense programs. The public says, ‘Why increase the military when we’re negotiating with the Russians?’. . . .

“Representing a common feeling within the Reagan administration, Adelman says the major reason to enter into arms negotiations is to placate our allies and American public opinion. ‘My policy would be to do it for political reasons,’ he says. But: ‘I think it’s a sham.’”

Auletta heard no reaction from Adelman. Twenty months passed. Then, shortly after Adelman’s appointment was announced, Auletta was dining with Reeves. Auletta mentioned that he had done a column in which Adelman had said things hostile to the traditional conception of arms control. Auletta showed Reeves the column and the six pages of notes he had taken during a telephone interview. Reeves got Adelman’s home telephone number from Auletta and called for his comments.

Adelman did not talk to Reeves directly—he was keeping away from the press—but he was perplexed when his wife relayed Reeves’s questions to him. He knew Auletta, but he did not know that Auletta had ever written a column about him. He had not seen it when it was published and could not remember Auletta’s mentioning it to him. In fact, he could not remember Auletta’s ever interviewing him; and that was the message passed through his spokesman back to Reeves.

The “sham” quote next turned up on February 3, the day of Adelman’s second hearing. In his commentary on the NBC nightly news, John Chancellor said that the man now proclaiming his fidelity to arms control was “on the record as having said arms talks are only a sham to placate the European allies.” In replacing Rostow with Adelman, Chancellor concluded, “the President fired the man with credibility and hired a man with no credibility. Some days we just hand it to the Russians.”

The dispute soon became a showdown between two men who felt that their reputations for honesty were on the line. On February 17, two weeks after the Chancellor broadcast, and one day after Alan Cranston read parts of Auletta’s column to the Foreign Relations Committee, Adelman issued a press statement. It began by praising Auletta as “a fine journalist with whom I have a good personal relationship. His integrity and professionalism are not under question.” It then insisted that Adelman did not remember ever being interviewed by Auletta and that he had never seen the column until Reeves’s call. “Had I been shown the article, I would have denied that the alleged quotes reflected my opinions then or reflect my opinions now.” Of the “sham” quotation, Adelman’s statement said. “I do not recall making any such statement at any time.”

“I was not deceived by the sugar coating,” Auletta said of Adelman’s statement. “He was trying to have it both ways. Trying to be nice to me and, in effect, calling me a liar. The bottom line of that release was that I am not telling the truth. It seemed to me that I had a credibility problem.”

To cope with that problem, Auletta turned over the notes from his interview with Adelman to Marilyn Berger, of ABC News, who questioned him the night that Adelman’s statement was released. On February 18, the next day, Auletta circulated copies of his notes to the many other reporters who were besieging him for information. He also began negotiating an arrangement with the Foreign Relations Committee staff under which he would agree to testify. Auletta said he would come, but only if subpoenaed. The committee’s representatives said that they would issue a subpoena, but only if they were sure that Auletta would not fight it and turn it into a freedom-of-thepress confrontation. An agreement on a friendly subpoena was eventually struck.

On February 20, a Sunday, the front page of the New York Daily News said, “AULETTA: ADELMAN IS A LIAR.” In a column, Auletta said that Adelman’s hunger for the appointment was making him slither away from his previous views. If Adelman denied the remarks to a congressional committee, he would be perjuring himself. “I happen to like Adelman, and hope he does not allow ambition, and stubborn vanity, to get him hauled off to jail.”

Four days after that column, February 24, Adelman and Auletta were facing each other as sworn witnesses before the Foreign Relations Committee. Adelman had resisted a joint appearance, and especially the idea of oaths, which he thought implied that somebody was lying. His spirits rose the evening before the hearing, when the committee’s staff’ examined copies of Auletta’s interview notes. They found that the notes, unlike the column, quoted Adelman as endorsing “real reductions” in nuclear weapons. The offending word “sham” appeared to have been written first as “shame.”

For all its apparent potential as a grand showdown, the third hearing accomplished very little. Alan Cranston said the committee had an obligation to explore this issue, so the whole Senate would have a record to work from. At least within the committee, no votes were changed. Auletta, cool and professional, provided confirming evidence for those who already opposed the nomination. To those who already supported it, the testimony was beside the point.

For his part. Adelman stuck doggedly to his “can’t remember” story, which his opponents found unbelievable and his supporters quietly overlooked. In the face of Auletta’s phone records, which listed a call to Adelman’s office, he might have conceded that the conversation probably took place. He might have aborted the whole controversy by conceding that even though Auletta, a well-respected reporter, understood him to say “sham,” Adelman was really trying to convey the idea that he had expressed so often to the committee, that “the SALT process” had failed. Out of stubbornness or obtuseness, or his own sense of principle, he had refused to play the nuclearcatechism game with Claiborne Pell. In the same way, he was refusing to play along now.

The committee voted the same way it would have if the confrontation had never occurred: nine against Adelman, eight for. Then, by a vote of 14 to 3, it passed the nomination on to the full Senate, instead of attempting to keep it bottled up in committee.

BY THIS TIME, KENNETH ADELMAN WAS STARTING to feel low. Once or twice in each President’s term, there is an official who gets caught in the cross fire, who becomes notorious for reasons that have only a little to do with mistakes he may or may not have made. Hamilton Jordan (accused of snorting cocaine, and later cleared) was such a person. It was dawning on Adelman that he might be another.

He was showing up in editorial-page cartoons, a shorthand symbol for an administration that appointed a treehater secretary of the interior and an anti-arms-controller ACDA director. One Saturday in March, the whole family was at La Guardia airport for a trip to Florida to visit the grandparents. His younger daughter, aged five, ran up beaming. She had spotted a picture of her father in The New York Times. “Look! It’s Daddy!” she said happily. Adelman’s face fell as he read the story, which described the latest charges that he was deceiving the Senate.

Adelman professes a zeal for gospel music. More and more often, the windows of his apartment shook late at night as the songs of James Cleveland came booming at full volume from his stereo set. Adelman played one of Cleveland’s songs over and over again:

While he recognized that he had made the occasional misstep, he saw himself as the victim of a political system run amok. The Senate had the obligation to determine his views about arms control. Fine: he’d be happy to argue SS20s with Paul Tsongas all night long. But why the circus atmosphere, the search for hidden motives? Why would seventeen United States senators show up for a hearing about a two-year-old Daily News column, when only one senator—Boschwitz—asked intelligent questions about the articles he had written? If these liberals really cared about arms control, why were they letting ACDA drift without a director?

With so many people criticizing him, he was denied the luxury of modesty. Donald Rumsfeld lobbied unselfishly on his behalf; so did Senator Bennett Johnston, of Louisiana, who had worked with him for four months at a UN special session. But with these and a few other exceptions, Adelman was left to blow his own horn. He ended up blowing too hard. He referred to the “116 articles" that laid out his views, even though only a dozen touched on arms control.

What he had learned about the U.S. Senate made him a more skeptical citizen. But what he had endured so far made him more determined to persevere and win. He would win for Ronald Reagan, win to save his reputation, and win to do something more than talk about arms control.

While full of this brave resolve, Adelman suddenly hit dead bottom. It happened in mid-March, because of the Rowny memorandum.

THE EPISODE WAS THE MORE PAINFUL BECAUSE Adelman could see it coming. Two days after he was nominated, Adelman had gone to Washington for meetings. There he talked briefly with Edward Rowny, who was bustling away because he was already late for a lunch with Henry Jackson. Rowny gave Adelman a paper and asked him to read it. Adelman looked at it long enough to know it should go straight to Robin West.

West, another friend from Adelman’s days in the Defense Department, had since become an assistant secretary of the interior. He had no interest in getting into the arms-control business, which is what made him indispensable to Adelman. Adelman had seen enough goings and comings in government to know that personnel questions could be the nastiest and most entwining. He told George Shultz, one day after his nomination, that he would not do anything about appointments until he was confirmed. He refused to tell his personal secretary at the UN whether she should prepare to move to Washington. He refused to tell Jon Gundersen, the Foreign Service officer who handled his schedule during the hearings, whether there would be a place for him at ACDA. When people volunteered names and suggestions, as they inevitably did, he promised to consider them after his confirmation, and he passed the names to his repository, Robin West. In a note written a few days after his nomination to Kenneth Dam, the deputy secretary of state, Adelman said that West’s “mandate is to investigate and evaluate the ACDA scene, but decide nothing, say nothing one way or the other, and make no bureaucratic waves whatsoever.”

The piece of paper from Rowny was clearly material for West. It consisted of petty bureaucratic wheedling (“Wives’ travel to negotiations—necessary”) and wildly indiscreet remarks about ACDA staffers and members of Rowny’s own delegation at the START talks. One of the five members was “OTL [out to lunch], abrasive; doesn’t want to learn”; three others stood for “progress at any cost.”Adelman wrote on the cover, “Robin—Eyes Only! Ed Rowney’s [sic] very confidential real views on people. Thanks! Ken.”

Later that day, Rowny called Adelman’s secretary in New York and gave her four other names of possible appointees. Adelman wrote three of them on the last page of the Rowny memo, omitted the fourth, whom he knew well enough to judge that he would not be interested in a job, and added another name that had occurred to him. Then he shipped the package to Robin West.

The whole tone of Rowny’s memo confirmed what the conservatives generally thought about the man. For his guts and principle in resigning from Jimmy Carter’s SALT II delegation, he was respected. For his political judgment and organizational savoir faire, he was not. Adelman knew that if it ever came time for him to select appointees, Rowny’s brain would not be the first he would pick for advice. Consistent with his reputation, Rowny carelessly lost track of the memo within ACDA, from which it promptly leaked to the Foreign Relations Committee.

The committee learned about the memo early in March, after it had already voted against the nomination. That the memo made Rowny look bad there was no doubt; but did it say anything about Adelman? In his testimony, Adelman had been asked time and again whether he was planning a purge of ACDA. No indeed, he replied; “I have not addressed the personnel situation at all.” [Emphasis added]

Did this make him a liar? Adelman thought not. Each time he had spoken so categorically, he had been responding to a particular question—for example, whether he had prepared to fill the many vacancies among ACDA’S assistant directors. But to senators already skeptical of his “don’t remember” answers, this seemed another too-convenient lapse. Why the sweeping overstatement? Why not a plain description of Robin West’s role? The smoking gun had at last been found.

In the middle of March, the committee requested an official copy of the Rowny memorandum and associated documents. Adelman volunteered more than they originally asked for. On March 28, in defiance of an Administration request, the committee voted to release the memo, with the names whited out. As when he had basked in a feeling of contentment after his first hearing, before he saw the TV news, Adelman felt secure that the memos would prove his case. Then he saw the first stories come over the wire: they were thick with “credibility problem” and “mislead.”

ADELMAN BEGAN TO FEEL THAT EVENING THAT THE tide was running away from him, that the cumulative toll was becoming too great. Inside the Administration, people tried to buck him up. It was so unfair, they told him at White House meetings, because the deeper you went into the personnel question, the better his decisions looked. It was unfair, they said, that he was takingpunches really aimed at the President. But with the exception of Reagan himself, no one in the government was saying these things in public.

Adelman developed a nervous tic. He pulled constantly at his hair. As his wife became more energetic and combative, he became more quietly resigned. When they were in different cities, he sometimes could not bear to keep his promise and tell her all the news, good or bad. He said he could feel things slipping away.

He carried two items with him for inspiration. One was a cartoon from the Richmond Tirnes-Dispatch. showing members of the committee in a hear-no-evil pose as Adelman innocently says, “We feel that in the face of massive Soviet arms buildups, the way to maintain peace is to remain strong.” The other was an index card with several quotations from Shakespeare. One was an exchange from Othello, between Cassio and Iago, which Adelman had transcribed, underlining the concluding portion:

Cassio: Reputation, reputation, reputation. Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation.

Iago:. . . Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.

Twice in March he sent messages to the White House. He had taken this assignment to serve the President, he reminded his superiors. If his persistence stopped being a service, someone should be sure to tell him so.

All along, he considered the clock his enemy. Day after day, there was a new story about purges and deceptions; when would the Senate’s majority leader, Howard Baker, cut it off by bringing his nomination to the floor? On March 25, the Senate would begin its Easter recess. Adelman dreaded having the case drag on past the recess, but it did.

Yet this last delay seemed to work in his favor. Since the middle of February, Tsongas and Cranston had been saying that the case would finally be decided by the “grass roots.” The letters and telegrams would start pouring in, the people’s voice would be heard. Those who opposed Adelman would exert more leverage. Those who were undecided would topple into their camp. If the public seemed not to notice the vote, most senators would probably give the President and his man the benefit of the doubt. But if it became a big, well-publicized contest on war and peace, Adelman’s opponents thought, they stood a better chance.

What most of the senators discovered when they went home was resounding indifference to the case of Kenneth Adelman. Paul Tsongas received several hundred letters, but a general flow of mail had never started. Newspaper editorials had overstated the degree of local interest in the case. One northeastern Democrat climbed onto a plane back to Washington and saw a friend. They started talking about Adelman, which was the first time the senator had heaixl the subject mentioned for ten days. Tsongas and Cranston said the problem was timing: the nuclear-freeze movement, a logical source of support , was concentrating on the House of Representatives, where the freeze resolution was coming to a vote. The Rowny memorandum, which looked for a time as if it would keep generating news stories for weeks, had faded faster than expected. Tsongas could no longer plausibly argue to reluctant colleagues that they would wear Adelman like an albatross if they voted for him. As far as the other senators could tell, not many people would notice.

AFTER THE EASTER RECESS, PAUL TSONGAS disclosed a tactical retreat. He agreed to drop his threat of a filibuster, in return for a guarantee of three full days’ debate on the questions of war and peace. This was a concession to the reality his head counts revealed. The list of likely anti-Adelman votes never contained more than forty-six names. That was five short of what it would take to beat the nomination outright, but six more than were necessary to keep a filibuster alive. But several senators who were ready to vote against Adelman were also against a filibuster. Tsongas thought that his chances would be best if he tried to fight it out on the floor.

Most Democrats had lined up as No votes, most Republicans as Aye. The swing votes seemed to lie with the liberal Republicans, who would be torn between their loyalty to the party and their “commitment to arms control.” The more partisan the debate sounded, the harder it would be for them to vote against the Administration. Therefore, Adelman’s opponents agreed not to do what some had originally intended: to cast the debate as a frontal assault on the Administration’s arms-control policy.

It became, instead, a muted argument about the standards of competence against which Adelman should be judged. Most Democrats argued that at this delicate time, for this sensitive job, concerning this transcendent issue, something more was needed than Kenneth Adelman could bring to the task. They would be helping the President, the nation, and the Western alliance by forcing Ronald Reagan to make another choice.

Most Republicans, in response, made a narrow, legalistic case in favor of granting the President his prerogative. For example, the members of the Foreign Relations Committee who voted for Adelman said in their dissenting report, “Only in those instances in which a nominee is found to be clearly unqualified or unsuited for a position of special trust and responsibility should the Senate refuse to consent to the President’s choice.”

So for three days the “great debate” followed its predictable course. Senators Percy and Pell, the floor managers for the debate, sat wearily at their tables, coordinating the flow of speakers pro and con. Another senator sat as presiding officer, and one other was giving his speech. That was it: average attendance until the final afternoon was four. A dozen staff members sat on couches along the back wall, taking notes for their employers.

There was little progression during the three days, virtually no interchange of views—that is, no “debate” in the normal sense. Paul Tsongas gave a long discourse on how poorly the whole affair was playing in Europe; Charles Percy said again and again that the Administration had promised to push ahead with the two stalled treaties if Adelman was confirmed.

The closest approximation to a debate was a sharp exchange between Tsongas and John Tower. Tower had derided the idea that the Senate should second-guess the President on his national-security decisions. Tsongas replied that he had seen someone greatly resembling the Senator from Texas on television second-guessing the President’s plan for the MX missile.

The one senator who seemed to have his heart in it was Dale Bumpers, of Arkansas, recently resigned from the presidential race. Using a popular metaphor, he said that with Adelman the Administration had offered up the “James Watt of arms negotiations.” His speech contained more personal barbs than most others—was more in the tone of “Rafshooning the Armageddon”—and was delivered in the style of rousing stump demagoguery. Most of his colleagues wearily trod through their texts.

The debate had started on a Tuesday; even by then, Adelman’s opponents knew they were going to lose. Paul Tsongas visited the press gallery that evening, saying that the whole point of the exercise had been to raise the visibility of the arms-control issue. If a surer sign of impending defeat was needed, it came soon afterward. The antiAdelman strategists had assumed that if the vote was very close, they would lose Sam Nunn, of Georgia, who was reluctant to hand the President this direct defeat. But if his vote didn’t matter, they expected him to stay with the party. Conversely, if the vote was close, they expected Daniel Patrick Movnihan, of New York, to vote with most of the other Democrats. If it was a throwaway, he seemed certain to vote Aye. He had roots in the same neo-conservative New York City crowd that so enthusiastically backed Adelman, and he fought the same battles at the UN. Why needlessly antagonize these, his friends?

Late in the debate, Nunn rose to speak against Adelman, and Moynihan rose—to say nothing. He inserted his whole speech into the re coni, where it proved to be a defense of the nomination. It was a signal that everyone expected Adelman to win.

When the vote came, it was 57 in favor, 42 opposed, Robert Packwood, of Oregon, not voting. It was a more comfortable margin than most people had predicted; nearly all of the swing votes had gone Adelman’s way. Alan Cranston said it was a sad day for arms control. Paul Tsongas congratulated the President on his Pyrrhic victory. “A few more like this, and I don’t think there will be much left of NATO,” he said. “If I were Andropov, I wouldn’t do anything but mumble ‘Adelman!’ ‘Adelman!’ through Europe.”

Viewed one way, the whole affair was a triumph of the American constitutional system. The Senate, fulfilling its Solemn obligation to offer advice and consent on nominations, peered closely into Adelman’s character and his beliefs before pronouncing him fit to serve. More than twenty senators took the floor to join the “great debate” on Adelman, ACDA, and the largest questions of human survival in the nuclear age. The fourth branch of government, the press, devoted remarkable time and space to coverage of the contending views of arms control.

Yet when it was over, it was hard to think of an interested party who had benefited from the proceedings. Adelman was plucked from comparative obscurity only to be tarred with a reputation for incompetence and deceit. The Reagan Administration found the votes to force him through the Senate, but it could hardly contend that its policies had been endorsed or its standards of excellence acclaimed. The arms-control bureaucracy, in turmoil to begin with, was further buffeted by the three-month uproar. The liberals sniped at Adelman without managing to stop him; only the conservatives seemed no worse off at the end of the fight. Each side was upholding its vision of the national interest, but the result was a squalid argument that further emphasized the depth of the ideological divide.

Within minutes of the Senate vote, Kenneth Adelman was on the phone. From New York he called each senator on the Foreign Relations Committee. He was eager to talk about arms control, he said. Could he come by for a visit next week?

The following morning, he went to Washington to give a pep talk to ACDA staff, and then went back on the shuttle to New York. His apartment was jammed with flowers sent by friends and fellow diplomats. He began hangingsigned originals of editorial cartoons, while his wife phoned in an offer on a house in Virginia. Late into the night, the windows shook from an upbeat gospel album that Adelman had just discovered in a Harlem record store. His daughters, now accustomed to confusion, slept oblivious through the din.

Adelman’s life was back on keel. In the next few weeks, he would be talking pleasantly with the senators who had denounced him. and inviting the embattled congressional staff members to meet him over sherry. Bygones would be bygones.

For three months, the two sides had fought as if humanity’s survival turned on the outcome. As soon as it was over, they acted as though none of it had really mattered at all. □