Landing the Eagle

As Bill Clinton sweated over who would replace the charismatic chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, the nation's highest-ranking admirals and generals were plunged into a battle of succession. DAVID MARTIN reveals the tense behind-the-scenes maneuvers— and the damage control in the Pentagon when it was discovered that the chosen man's father had a Nazi past

DAVID MARTIN

'Jesus Christ, don't do this," Les Aspin, the rumpled and slumped secretary of defense, beseeched White House counselor David Gergen.

It was two o'clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 11, and Aspin was working out of the national-security adviser's office in the White House, stagemanaging the selection of a successor to Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now Gergen was on the phone telling him that, with the crush of other business, the decision might have to be postponed until after the president returned from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard at the end of August.

Aspin had hoped to avoid a replay of the recent Supreme Court nomination, in which candidates had been paraded through town, then left waiting, waiting in the wings while the president cast his roving eye elsewhere. It had made the president look indecisive and had demeaned the candidates.

So far, Aspin's plan was working. He had timed the selection of a new chairman to coincide with an annual conference of top four-star generals and admirals that brought all 15 contenders from around the world to the Pentagon and provided a business-as-usual cover under which to slip the finalists in and out of the White House. The president had met privately with the two leading candidates, army general John Shalikashvili and Marine general Joseph Hoar, and no one outside his tight circle of advisers had found out about it. But now, with Gergen warning of a possible delay, the most important military appointment Bill Clinton would ever make was in imminent danger of becoming a media circus.

"The only way on God's green earth we get out of this thing is do it now,'' Aspin warned Gergen.

The hang-up was that General Shalikashvili, 57, everybody's first choice, wasn't sure he wanted the job. He had dropped that little bombshell on the president Tuesday morning, at the end of a one-hour interview. Clinton had asked if there was anything else Shalikashvili wanted to tell him. General Shali—an abbreviation he invited everyone to use— at first said no, no there wasn't. Then he said yes, yes there was. He felt he could serve his country best by continuing in his present job as supreme allied commander, Europe.

True, chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the top of the heap, the highest-ranking job in the military, the capstone of a career in uniform. It comes with a house, complete with staff, that overlooks all of Washington and, now that the military is back in favor, guaranteed invitations to the town's toniest dinner tables. But it is a bitch of a job. Ask Colin Powell, who wanted to retire early but couldn't. Ask his predecessor, Admiral William Crowe Jr., who turned down a request from George Bush to serve another two-year term. Ask his predecessor, General John Vessey Jr., who left almost a year before his term was up.

The chairman is the man everybody in the room turns to when it comes time to decide where and when to send America's youth into harm's way, but he is only an adviser; he doesn't command any troops, which is what the military is all about. The chairman's day is filled with budget reviews, congressional hearings, and official ceremonies. Being chairman means trying not to nod off during the dinner you're hosting for the visiting Chinese chief of staff. Being chairman means getting a phone call in the middle of the night every time somebody in Mogadishu thinks he's spotted Mohammed Farah Aidid. The job doesn't even mean a raise. The chairman is entitled to a salary of $121,410, but because of a government-wide pay cap he actually earns $108,200—the same as any other four-star general. If it weren't for the honor of the damn thing. . .

Shali's reluctance worried the president. Clinton told Aspin that his experience had been that a person did a better job if he really wanted it. Aspin replied that his experience was exactly the opposite, that the person who had to be recruited usually performed best. But Aspin was worried, too. What if the president offered the job to Shali and he turned it down?

Aspin got Powell on the line and said they'd better have a talk with Shali and find out whether this ambivalence was real or just false modesty. Powell gently suggested that Shall was likely to be more candid if Aspin weren't in the room.

And so, in a ground-floor office of the Pentagon, a black man bom in Harlem sat down with a white man bom in Poland for a conversation that would decide who would lead the American military. ' 'This job's too important for you to be keelhauled into it, pissing and moaning,'' Powell told Shali, one soldier to another. ' 'Go talk to yourself, go talk to Joannie [Shali's wife], because it's coming your way and the only way you can stop it is if you really, really don't want it.''

There was only one right answer, and it did not take Shali long to decide. "I would still rather remain in Europe," he told Powell, "but if this is what everybody wants me to do, I'll do it, and I'll do it enthusiastically."

Powell called Aspin. "If this is the guy we want," Powell said, "he's ours."

This was certainly the guy Powell wanted. He had been impressed by the way Shali had ran Operation Provide Comfort, rescuing the Kurds of northern Iraq from the wrath of Saddam Hussein. Forcing the defeated Iraqi army to back off had been a simple enough military operation, but Provide Comfort also required a deft diplomatic touch, since it had to be ran out of Turkey and the Turks hated the Kurds only slightly less than Saddam did. When Powell visited Shali in northern Iraq, he offered him the job of assistant to the chairman. Back in Washington, Shali had proved he could move easily through the corridors of power, dealing with the likes of James Baker. Shali had genuine people skills. In an institution where ass chewing is considered an art form, Shali had a gentle way of telling subordinates they had screwed up that left them feeling miserable that they had failed their leader.

As a three-star general working for Powell, Shali had been a certified member of the inner circle but was still a long way from being a contender for the top job. He first had to win his fourth star, and he lucked into that in 1992 when General George Joulwan, Powell's first choice to become the next supreme allied commander, Europe, ran into unexpected opposition from the Bush White House. National-Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft had taken a dislike to Joulwan back when they both worked in the Nixon White House. That was long ago, but it cost Joulwan a shot at the most prestigious combat command in the United States military. When Powell looked around for another candidate, his eye fell on Shali. He was awfully junior for the job, but the Europeans would love him; bom in Warsaw, fluent in Polish and German, Shali was one of them. Besides, Powell was coming down to his final year as chairman and starting to think of Shali as a potential successor.

For Christ's sake~ these are two good candidates.

Shali was Powell's guy all right, but this was the president's choice to make. So Powell offered Aspin this piece of advice: "If you want Shali by more than 10 percentage points, you take him in spite of his doubts."

But there really weren't 10 points separating Shali and the only other serious contender, General Joseph Hoar, 58, the man who had succeeded Norman Schwarzkopf as commander in chief, Central Command. Hoar had none of Schwarzkopf's volatile charisma, but he made up for it by looking as if he'd stepped straight off a Marine recmiting poster. A bio Aspin's office had prepared for the president described Hoar as "an Irish Gary Cooper" who, by the way, had read all the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Appearances were important, so important that Aspin had sent the president videotapes of both Hoar and Shali testifying before Congress. The military calls it "command presence," but by whatever name, you have to look the part.

"By far the most important quality is that the new Chairman be a warrior," Aspin had advised the president in a memo entitled "The Next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs." That, of course, meant more than just having a strong jawline. "He should have your unquestioned confidence in his ability to organize, lead and win any military action you direct him to take." As the commander of operations in both Iraq and Somalia, the only two places where American forces were firing shots in anger, Hoar was perhaps the military's premier warrior.

He had also shown he was willing to stand up and accept responsibility, a trait which had brought instant stardom to Janet Reno in the wake of the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When forces under Hoar's command were unable to find the Dae Hung Ho, a rust bucket of a North Korean freighter believed to be carrying missiles to Iran, Hoar had told a House committee, "If you're looking for the guy that's responsible for letting the Ho go through, you're looking at him."

There was, however, one nasty little problem with Hoar. He was opposed by gay activists, once one of the president's most fervent constituencies, now alienated by what they felt was his betrayal of his campaign pledge to lift the ban on homosexuals in uniform. Hoar commanded the Marine-recruit training base at Pams Island in 1987-88 when the Naval Investigative Service had come in to get to the bottom of a particularly steamy scandal involving allegations that female drill instructors had had sex with women recruits. Twelve female Marines were kicked out of the corps and three courtmartialed, and now gay-rights activists were revisiting the case, claiming that Hoar had presided over a witch-hunt.

Aspin had only just found out about this episode from Tony Lake, the president's national-security adviser, who called in from vacation to relay a garbled version of the story, which he had heard from a friend. Aspin's aides had frantically tracked it down and satisfied themselves that while there indeed had been a controversial investigation at Parris Island, Hoar had simply been following Marine Corps policy. Aspin had assured the White House that Hoar had done nothing wrong, and besides, the gay campaign was behind the power curve, having so far managed only a sparsely attended press conference announcing opposition to Hoar. But if the president left town without choosing a new chairman, the activists would have the rest of August to fill the news vacuum. By the time he came back to Washington, the president would be in a no-win position: if he chose Shalikashvili, he would seem to be caving in to gay pressure; if he chose Hoar, he would be betraying the gay lobby again.

"For Christ's sake," Aspin told Gergen, "these are two good candidates. Flip a coin, and let's go with one of them."

That Les Aspin was the one making the train run on time—or at least stay on the track—said a lot about the Clinton White House. At a university, Aspin would have been the star lecturer, the professor whose seminar filled up first. At the Pentagon, he was still a student. His sloppy work habits drove the military to distraction. Meetings had to be scheduled and rescheduled, and still the secretary did not show.

"This meeting's two hours late," Powell had barked at the start of one tardy session.

"Not by congressional standards," someone piped up. And that was exactly the problem, as far as Powell was concerned. Aspin and the coterie of aides he had brought with him from the House Armed Services Committee ran the Pentagon as though it were just another congressional committee.

Much more was at stake than just satisfying the military's penchant for following the Plan of the Day. Aspin and his aides had spent the past 12 years in opposition to Republican indulgence of the military. Now they were in power and telling everybody who would listen that they would re-establish civilian control of the Pentagon; the Republicans had given the Pentagon away to the military, and the Democrats were here to take it back.

But in the first eight months of the Clinton administration there was little evidence that these civilians were taking back the Department of Defense, despite a work schedule that left Aspin so drained that rumors routinely circulated through the Pentagon predicting that he was about to resign for health reasons. It was not entirely Aspin's fault—the White House had been maddeningly slow in signing off on appointments to his staff—but the military's perception of a floundering defense secretary was starting to take hold.

Flip a coin, and let's go with one of them."

Aspin understood the Pentagon, even if he hadn't yet figured out how to run it. From his seat at the head of the House Armed Services Committee, he had watched closely as Colin Powell revolutionized the job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Smart, energetic, and charismatic, Powell had a resume like no other. He had spent most of the 1980s in Washington, first as military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and ultimately as President Reagan's national-security adviser. He knew the town cold. A secretary of defense or a president could do one-stop shopping with Powell, getting not just military advice but policy and political counsel as well. And that was before the Gulf War made him a national hero. By the time Bill Clinton entered office, Powell had turned the job of chairman into one of the most glamorous and powerful in the world.

It wasn't always this way. For decades, the chairman was a figurehead, little more than a mouthpiece for the chiefs of the army, navy, air force, and Marines. The only advice he could offer was what had been agreed upon by all four chiefs. The result, wrote former chairman Bill Crowe, was "watered-down positions that took too long to formulate." But in 1986, Barry Goldwater co-sponsored a bill that would hand the chairman powers no American military man had ever enjoyed. It would give him the best staff in the armed forces and allow him to tell the secretary of defense and the president exactly what he thought. The chiefs were apoplectic. The chief of naval operations called the bill "un-American." Despite these heresies, the bill became law. The first beneficiary was Bill Crowe, who used his new powers gingerly. It was Colin Powell who seized the job by the throat and engineered a once-in-a-generation sea change in the balance of power between the military and civilians.

Aspin had recruited a civilian staff in his own image, men and women of high I.Q. but little management experience, and they were no match for the drill-trained Joint Staff at Powell's command. The Joint Staff is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. To the extent the general public even knows it exists, it is only because of the televised Gulf War briefings given by Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, then the Joint Staff's director of operations. But the Joint Staff does much more than give colorful briefings. Made up of 1,400 men and women, most in uniform, the Joint Staff analyzes the military consequences of the various options proposed by the administration. The answers they come up with can stop a fledgling policy dead in its tracks. You want to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia? Sure, we can do it. But it will take 500,000 troops, and the second you pull them out the fighting will resume.

The Joint Staff is divided into eight directorates—including manpower, intelligence, operations, strategic planning, and communications. Each is run by a general or an admiral who reports directly to the chairman and who has, at this point in his career, management experience comparable to that of a C.E.O. of a midsize corporation. Several of them have been division commanders, for instance, responsible not only for 12,000 soldiers but also for the base where they and their families lived. Backed up by legions of majors and lieutenant colonels, each an expert in some military subspecialty, these generals can shred the bright ideas pumped out by Aspin's staff as rapidly as they rolled up the Iraqi army.

Besides being better-staffed, Powell was more popular than anyone in the new administration. Whenever he went into the field, he was surrounded by soldiers trying to shake his hand, get his autograph, have their picture taken with him—a striking contrast to the stiff salutes and awkward silences that usually attend the arrival of a high-ranking officer. And it wasn't just the troops. Powell couldn't go to Best's on a Saturday morning without being so mobbed by other customers that he had to leave without making a purchase. No one, least of all a president whose own military credentials were notoriously nonexistent, was going to take him on.

Powell was too powerful, if you asked some of the men who advised Bill Clinton and Les Aspin. One of the president's principal advisers on military affairs says bluntly that Powell did not serve the new administration well, that he created problems and then got credit for solving them. That was a pointed reference to the manner in which Powell handled the controversy over gays in uniform—first leading the revolt of the chiefs against lifting the ban, then getting on board at the last minute for the "Don't ask, don't tell" compromise crafted by Aspin's staff. Another of the president's advisers agrees that the chairman was not helpful on the issue, and finds it galling that Powell got any credit at all.

By July 22, when Aspin sent his memo to the president gently suggesting that the time had come to "turn your attention to the task of choosing [Powell's] successor," there were those in the administration who would be glad to see Powell go—though the president wasn't one of them. Had Powell given the slightest hint that he was willing to stay on, Clinton would have asked him to serve a third two-year term, but Powell was eager to get on with the rest of his life and would even have retired early if he could have done it without creating the impression that he was disenchanted with the new commander in chief. In fact, Powell was not so much disenchanted—he had never been enchanted—as tired of beating back the new administration's attempts to reinvent the wheel.

Those who would breathe a sigh of relief when Powell retired would never dare criticize him directly, but you could read it between the lines of some of the documents being circulated at the Pentagon and the White House, documents intended for the president's eyes. "Gen. Shali would most likely lead the Joint Staff to operate more collegially . . . than we have consistently seen in recent years," one memo said, an unmistakable reference to the zeal with which Powell's Joint Staff shot down ideas put forth by the civilians who work for Aspin. "Gen. Hoar is of the 'Vietnamplus' generation,'' another memo said, meaning "he has moved beyond the all-or-nothing school'' of military force. Again, the implication was obvious: Powell was still a captive of Vietnam, a commander who believed you went in with overwhelming force to win a quick and decisive victory or you didn't go at all. That school of thought was fine for Desert Storm, but it brought little to the table when the subject was the Balkans.

One of the president's advisers says bluntly that

Shali and Hoar were not, of course, the only candidates to replace Powell. Fifteen generals and admirals were eligible, and the president had the authority to select someone outside that pool if he chose. Aspin suggested eight names as possible candidates, but the president wasn't relying on Aspin alone. One of the few members of the military establishment he feels comfortable with is retired admiral William Crowe, Powell's predecessor as chairman, who was the first military man of stature to endorse Clinton's candidacy. From his sinecure at a Washington think tank, the shrewd old beagle of an admiral now serves as the president's off-line adviser on defense. Old enough to be Clinton's father, Crowe talks frankly with the president on matters great and small. When an air-force general was quoted as describing the president as "draftdodging," "pot-smoking," "gay-loving," and "womanizing," Clinton's inclination was to let the general off with a public apology, but Crowe set him straight: such disrespect is cause for immediate dismissal. Clinton's failure to understand just how inexcusable it is to insult the commander in chief that way speaks volumes about how much he still has to learn about the military.

When it came to choosing Powell's successor, Admiral Crowe urged the president to get to know all the contenders on a first-name basis. He warned against selecting a chairman for a superficial reason. Ronald Reagan had chosen General John Vessey Jr. as his first chairman because he had been a sergeant at Anzio and later risked his career by criticizing Jimmy Carter's plans to withdraw American troops from South Korea. (As chairman, Vessey apparently did not make much of an impression on Reagan. While giving testimony in the Iran-contra case after he left office, Reagan was asked who Vessey was. "Oh, dear," Reagan had responded. "I could ask for help here. The name I know is very familiar." Vessey, who had served as chairman from 1982 to 1985, graciously responded to the slight by quipping that it was a lot better for a president to forget a general's name than the other way around.)

Crowe told Clinton that the new chairman should obviously be a man of broad military experience who was also articulate and seasoned in the infighting of Washington. The hard part would be finding a man who was open-minded. After a lifetime of manuals and check-off lists, most senior officers did not come easily to new ideas—the world after the demise of the Soviet Union, for instance.

There was one certified innovator on the list of eight possible contenders Aspin had sent over to the president: air-force general George Lee Butler, 54, commander of the Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear missiles and bombers. While serving on the Joint Staff during the Bush administration, Butler had been the informing mind behind the cutbacks in nuclear forces ordered in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, the cuts looked like the least the Bush administration could do, but in the glacial world of nuclear strategy it was considered revolutionary at the time.

But Butler had enemies. Somebody in the air force leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post an inspector general's report of an investigation into an allegation that his wife had used a government van to go shopping while she was accompanying the general on a business trip to Europe. It was small beer to begin with, and it turned out that Butler's wife had had nothing to do with the choice of transportation.

There was, however, a more fundamental problem with Butler. He did not pass the warrior test. As a captain during the Vietnam War, he had flown F-4s out of Cam Ranh Bay, but as his career progressed he had spent most of his time planning and training for the unthinkable—nuclear war. Thankfully, he had never had the occasion to demonstrate his ability to lead in combat.

Powell did not serve the new administration well.

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Another air-force officer, chief of staff Merrill McPeak, 57, came closer to meeting the warrior test. In the 60s he had been a member of the Thunderbirds precision-flight team—an honor reserved for only the hottest top guns. During the buildup to the Gulf War, he had flown wing on training missions over Saudi Arabia and personally reported back to President Bush that his men were ready to go. Viewed as something of a fluke (he had become chief of staff only because his predecessor had been sacked for talking too openly about what the air force planned to do to Saddam Hussein) and a flake (he was a health-food and fitness fanatic), McPeak was widely suspected of leaking the inspector-general report in an effort to discredit Butler, an act that certainly would have violated Aspin's criterion that the new chairman be "a man of the highest personal character." But McPeak denied it, and Aspin aides eventually traced the leak to someone else.

McPeak fell by the wayside for an entirely different reason. One of his first initiatives as chief of staff had been a redesign of the air-force uniform. The look and feel of a uniform mean a lot to somebody who has to wear it every day, but to Aspin and his aides it seemed like a curious undertaking and made them skeptical about McPeak's sense of priorities.

The uniform business was never mentioned in any of the "inside dope" stories that appeared in the press, charting who was up and who was down in the chairman sweepstakes. The stories were avidly read inside the Pentagon and were considered deliciously entertaining. Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The undeclared campaign for the military's most powerful post has all the intrigue of a papal ascension, the backstabbing of a Texas cheerleading tournament and the Byzantine twists of the Kremlin's darkest succession battles." These stories instantly became the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom was wrong. In the end, none of the factors that were said to matter made any difference.

The chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, was widely assumed to be out of the running because of the Tailhook scandal. Kelso had not taken part in any of the debauchery and outright sexual assault that had occurred at the infamous Las Vegas convention, but it had happened on his watch. Kelso was so straitlaced that he could say he had no idea something like that went on in the U.S. Navy and people would believe him, but what administration in its right mind would nominate a man whose confirmation hearings would guarantee a rehashing of Tailhook? Actually, Kelso was never a contender, but it had nothing to do with Tailhook. He was simply judged not to have the energy level needed for the job, a judgment that was probably based more on his laid-back Tennessee drawl than on his physical and mental capabilities.

Admiral Paul Miller, the commander in chief, Atlantic, was considered an early front-runner, in part because he charged so hard and looked so young—more like 41 than his actual 51. When Miller was still a three-star admiral working in the Pentagon, Caspar Weinberger had told him he looked awfully young to hold such a senior rank. "I'm growing old as fast as I can, Mr. Secretary," Miller had replied.

Miller had a golden opportunity for quality face time with the president when Clinton made a day trip to Norfolk, Virginia, to observe flight operations aboard the carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, the most impressive sight the military has to offer. But the most lasting memory of that day had not been the roar of a jet in afterburner but the thud of The Washington Post landing on doorsteps with a front-page story that quoted members of the ship's crew making derogatory remarks about the president. The conventional wisdom was that this bummer of a story had hurt Miller's chances for chairman. In fact, no one in the Pentagon or the White House held Miller responsible for what had been said three decks down on the Roosevelt.

Miller's problems were more basic. "When you listen to what he says," one official involved in the selection says, "three-fourths of it is blather." Hearing that harsh judgment, one of Miller's fellow admirals shakes his head in disagreement and says, "He's too smart, too fast, too aggressive for them." That apparently was the president's feeling as well. He liked Miller, liked him a lot, but felt he might come on too strong with Congress, which prefers its admirals humble and deferential.

The president also liked another navy admiral, Charles Larson, the commander in chief, Pacific. Larson, 56, had spent his seagoing career aboard nuclear submarines, the brainiest branch of the navy but also the most aloof, a collective personality trait linked to the practice of spending half of every year underwater. Inside the Pentagon, Larson was considered too "standoffish" from the troops, and that was important, since in his memo to the president Aspin had specified that "the new Chairman should have earned the highest regard among his senior military colleagues as well as the troops in the field." Whatever his shortcomings, Larson had managed to establish a rapport with the one person who mattered most, the president. He had briefed Clinton when he stopped off in Hawaii on the way home from the Group of Seven summit in Japan, and the two had played a round of golf. Larson felt they had hit it off, and they had. Of all the candidates, the president felt Larson would be the most loyal. But Clinton had also decided Larson might not be tough enough—not for combat but for the political warfare in Washington.

There was a thin line between being tough and being narrow-minded, and that was a particular concern when it came to the Marine Corps candidates, Joe Hoar and General Carl Mundy Jr., the commandant of the Marine Corps. The Marines pride themselves on being tough, but as the smallest and most insular of the services, they are sometimes out of touch— so out of touch that Mundy did not realize that his recent decision to stop recruiting married men and women would strike such a social nerve that it would have to be rescinded immediately.

The conventional wisdom was that Mundy had killed his chances of becoming chairman by being the most recalcitrant of all the chiefs toward any change in the policy banning gays. Friends told him he was eating his gun, but Mundy said he cared more about the policy than he did about becoming chairman.

Again, the conventional wisdom was wrong. The president wasn't necessarily looking for someone who agreed with him. He wanted someone who would give him unvarnished professional advice, and Mundy had certainly done that. Mundy's problem was Joe Hoar. If the president were to select a Marine, the first ever to become chairman, the one to pick was Hoar. Lord knows he was tough enough, having survived two years as chief of staff to the volcanic Schwarzkopf, whom one memo called the "most difficult of military bosses."

Hoar had somehow risen above the insularity of the Marines. Powell thought he was one of the few Marines he'd ever known who was up to the job of chairman. As commander of operations in both Iraq and Somalia, he had impressed the Aspin crowd by the way he had made do with the forces he was given, shuttling an aircraft carrier and an amphibious task force back and forth between the Persian Gulf and the coast of Somalia rather than doing what most commanders do when all hell breaks loose—scream for more forces.

'No, no, I can't be on the list," General Hoar said when Colin Powell told him he was a contender. "It doesn't make any sense."

Like Shali, Hoar was a reluctant candidate who hadn't even thought about becoming chairman until he read a story in the Baltimore Sun that put him on the shortlist, CINCS like Shali and Hoar—it's pronounced "sink" and stands for commander in chief—had more important things to do. Hoar commanded every American soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine from East Africa to Pakistan. He was the man responsible for safeguarding the oil lifeline from the Persian Gulf. He had the best job in the military—a major combat command. He wasn't about to lose any sleep over the chairman's job.

"No, no, I can't be on the list," Hoar said when Powell told him he was a contender. "It doesn't make any sense."

"Trustme," Powell replied. "It's true."

Hoar couldn't believe that a Marine was in the running. The Marines had been the most vigorous opponents of the 1986 Goldwater bill that elevated the chairman's position. Why trust a Marine to assume powers his service had fought against tooth and nail? But the evidence kept mounting. Mundy, the Marine Corps commandant, called to say he'd been asked to send over the biographical data that went with a nomination. Then Powell told Hoar it was down to him and Shali.

"I can't believe it's only two of us," Hoar replied. But when he was informed he was going to have a late-night interview with the president, Hoar became a believer.

With all 15 contenders due at the White House for dinner at seven on Tuesday evening, August 10, the president was still undecided. He called Admiral Crowe, but Crowe didn't know either Shali or Hoar and said he couldn't help, although he cautioned the president to beware of Marines, no matter how impressive they might seem. Crowe had decided early on that he would not push any particular candidate, but he could not resist asking the president if he was giving Miller a good look.

At the dinner that evening, there were no clues to the president's thinking. Neither Shali nor Hoar was seated at the president's table. But the dinner was not about choosing a chairman. It was a chance for the president to bond with his senior military commanders—men, and they all are men, who had reason to view their new commander in chief with suspicion. It wasn't a question of loyalty. Whatever they might think about Clinton's efforts to evade the draft, they had worn the uniform too long to think that they could serve one president more faithfully than another. What bothered them about Clinton was that he just didn't seem to get what life in the military was all about. He had shown it by the way he offhandedly tried to lift the ban on gays. In the armed services, where young, sexually active men and women live and work in cramped quarters night and day, homosexuality is a gut issue. It was as if he had come into their homes and told them how to live without bothering to ask what they thought.

Then there had been the snub visited on one of the army's most famous generals, Barry McCaffrey. Attending a White House meeting early in the administration, McCaffrey had said hello to a young woman, who huffed, "I don't talk to soldiers." The story of the gratuitous slight had gotten around and had come to epitomize the notion that the Clinton White House just plain didn't like the military. No one knew who the woman was or even, for that matter, if she was a member of the White House staff, but at his Vancouver summit meeting with Boris Yeltsin, the president had gone up to McCaffrey, put his arm around him, and said, "Barry, I feel bad about that incident.''

Clinton was doing his best to make amends and, in fact, had come a long way toward winning the confidence of his commanders. He had listened to them on the gay ban and, in the end, done it thenway. Some commanders were even willing to admit that their initial reaction to the idea had been knee-jerk and that they had not really understood the issue until the president forced them to confront it. He had listened to them on Bosnia, refusing to commit American ground troops unless and until a real peace treaty is signed. "This guy gets it," Powell told the secretary of the navy a few days after Clinton had ordered a cruise-missile strike on Baghdad in retaliation for the plot on George Bush's life.

Now, on an August evening, the president had invited his commanders over to his house for dinner. They ascended the grand staircase and were personally greeted by the First Couple, then drifted out to the Truman Balcony with its incomparable view of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial at sunset. The talk had been light and inconsequential— Clinton's jogging, Powell's new house— and the president was at his charming best, showing them his second-floor office and the Lincoln Bedroom, with its handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address. Walking down the stairs to dinner in the Blue Room, General Shali whispered to Admiral David Jeremiah, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I hope I never get to the point where I become so jaded that I consider a personal tour of the White House living quarters to be a routine event."

The president had all the right moves. After the filet mignon, he rose to toast Powell for all he had done and then turned to Admiral William Smith, who was on nobody's short or long list for chairman, and congratulated him on his retirement after 38 years' service. He even settled a dinner-table debate over why on the Roosevelt china the eagle in the great seal was facing toward the arrows while on the Eisenhower china that same eagle was turned toward the olive branch. (The redesign was a faint gesture toward detente in the middle of the Cold War.)

It was only after the Marine Band had finished playing and the guests had begun to depart that the business of selecting a chairman resumed. After sending his wife home, Joe Hoar slipped upstairs to speak with the president. The two had met after the cruise-missile attack on Baghdad, but this time the subject was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. After they had talked for an hour about everything from Somalia to Congress, the president asked, "What would you say if I offered you the job?"

"For a good part of my career I thought battalion commander was a suitable goal,' ' Hoar replied. "I continue to marvel at how far I've come." It was a nonanswer meant to say that it wasn't for Joe Hoar to decide. If the president wanted him, he would be glad to serve.

It was after midnight by the time Hoar left, but the president stayed up talking with his secretary of defense. Clinton was leaning toward Shali. He had more Washington experience, having spent 11 months as Powell's assistant. He had more NATO experience, and despite the fall of the Soviet Union NATO was still America's most important alliance. He had run a firstclass operation in northern Iraq. He had given candid, straightforward advice on Bosnia. And he had an only-in-America story which Powell liked to joke was even better than his own.

Although Crowe had counseled the president against choosing a chairman for superficial reasons, Clinton was taken with Shali's life story—bom in Warsaw, fled west in a cattle car, learned his English from John Wayne movies. A background like that was more than superficial. The president thought it gave Shali a feel and a smell for the ethnic rivalries that were rapidly emerging as the principal source of instability in the post-Cold War world. There was, however, still the problem of Shali's reluctance. The president wanted to sleep on it and meet once more with Shali.

The one who really needed to sleep on it was Shali. His week had begun on Sunday at a nine A.M. meeting with Aspin in the Pentagon to go over plans for air strikes to lift the siege of Sarajevo. He had flown back to Brussels for the Monday meeting at which NATO approved the airstrike plan, then returned to Washington, arriving at 5:30 Tuesday morning—just in time to shower and change before going to the White House for his eight A.M. interview with the president. After that, he had sat through a full day of meetings at the Pentagon, then returned to the White House for dinner, finally leaving at 11 o'clock. Now, on Wednesday afternoon, he was back for a final meeting with the president, this time just the two of them.

"I can tell you what the president's going to ask you," Aspin had counseled Shali. "Do you really want the job?"

By now, Shali had thoroughly warmed to the idea, and both Aspin and Powell had cast their votes in his favor. It seemed like a done deal, so done that with the president and Shali still behind closed doors the Pentagon press office put out the word that the president would announce his choice for chairman at 4:30.

That seemed impetuous. This president was perfectly capable of coming out of this final meeting with Shali and announcing that he wanted to think about it some more. If that happened, Aspin would be guaranteed exactly what he had worked so hard to avoid—another high-profile appointment turned into presidential psychodrama.

Finally, at 5:30, the president emerged in the Rose Garden with Powell, Shali, and a very relieved Les Aspin at his side. The secretary of defense had gotten his way, but it had cost him at the White House, where they were more than a little annoyed with him for having pushed the selection process so hard.

"Only in America," the president beamed as he recounted Shali's life story. Only in the Clinton administration, he should have said. Sixteen days later, a small newsletter called Defense Daily revealed that during World War II Shalikashvili's father, Dimitri, "joined the Nazi army, and later rose to the rank of major in the Waffen SS," Hitler's notorious military unit. After weeks of intensive research and high-level consultation, the Clinton administration had come up with the son of a Nazi as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff!

The story the president told of Shali's boyhood was a press agent's dream, but it didn't add up—at least not to Dave Eisenstadt, a 31-year-old reporter for Defense Daily. Eisenstadt, who is Jewish and lost grandparents in concentration camps, wondered how the Shalikashvili family had managed to survive for so long in Germanoccupied territory without somehow collaborating with the Nazis. He called the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where they had never heard of Shalikashvili but promised to check their archives. Two weeks later Eisenstadt got a late-night phone call from Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, telling him he had stumbled onto something. Confident he was alone on the story, Eisenstadt took his time, waiting for Hier to fax him some of the documents and checking other sources to make sure he had his historical facts straight. He would have taken more time had not an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, raising the same questions that had puzzled Eisenstadt.

In danger of losing his scoop, Eisenstadt called Kathleen deLaski, the Pentagon's spokeswoman. She was not in, so Eisenstadt left the outlines of his story with one of her assistants. While Eisenstadt waited for a callback, deLaski tracked down Shalikashvili at the Pentagon. Shali was stunned. He knew his father had served in the German army but had never until that moment heard of the Nazi connection.

Vhalikashvili shook his head in disbelief, listening as an archivist read the Nazi passage from his father's autobiography.

DeLaski needed more time to figure out just how bad this was, but Eisenstadt was on deadline, and she had to return his call. According to Eisenstadt, "her approach was to say I was trying to ruin a man's career." DeLaski denies saying anything like that, but both agree that when Eisenstadt told her, "Kathleen, I do this with a heavy heart," she laughed, "Bullshit." Until recently she had been a White House correspondent for ABC News, and she knew that a reporter's heart is not made heavy by a good story. She pressed Eisenstadt about his sources and the authenticity of his documents, trying to figure out exactly where this story from hell was coming from. Finally, she read him a statement. "Allegations about his father's history are not relevant to General Shalikashvili's nomination to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." It was the best she could do until she found out what secrets lurked in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where the elder Shalikashvili's papers had been deposited. (DeLaski was not having a good day. At the same time, she was trying to deal with the news that the acting secretary of the army had just been picked up for shoplifting.)

The next day deLaski sat with Shali as he shook his head in disbelief, listening over a speakerphone as an archivist at the Hoover Institution read from the unpublished manuscript of his father's autobiography. "Now, the command of the Weapons [Waffen] SS sent a request to the Georgian Liaison Office, in Berlin, to dispatch them, on temporary basis, a cavalry officer, who could give expert advice on matters pertaining to cavalry. It was me who was chosen." There it was, in Dimitri's own words.

The Soviet propaganda machine, had it still been functioning, would have had a field day. As it was, almost no one, not even the Wiesenthal Center, suggested the father's past made the son unfit to serve as chairman, although Rabbi Hier did point out that the president's portrayal of the Shalikashvili family as victims of World War II was a distortion of history. In fact, an accurate rendition of General Shali's past makes him a prototype of the new American, the perfect man to lead the U.S. military at the end of the 20th century. Had his father revealed his SS connection when he came to the U.S. in 1952, he would have been denied entry. His son John Malchase David Shalikashvili, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was an illegal immigrant.