Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

again in the Republican primary for governor, a race that pitted Ronald Reagan against former San Francisco mayor George Christopher. Though Weinberger had known Reagan since 1958, and was, by his own accounting, “enormously impressed with his ability to communicate to audiences,”5 he supported Christopher, and as a result, found himself on the outside looking in when Reagan was elected.

The miscalculation pained Weinberger, who badly wanted to be the state’s finance director, a job second in importance only to the governorship itself. Instead, the post went to a Booz, Allen management consultant named Gordon Paul Smith. Fortunately for Weinberger, Smith lasted in the job only a year, and on his resignation, Reagan named him Smith’s replacement.

As finance director, Weinberger, the former liberal, experienced a political conversion. “He became a very skillful apologist for what Ronald Reagan wanted,” said Post, reporting that Weinberger tailored policies to fit Reagan’s views. “He acted like a good lawyer taking the side of his client. “6 “Cap the Knife,” as he came to be called, in tribute to his budget cutting, had a rather more difficult time straightening out his client’s finances. Despite his promises of fiscal restraint, Reagan in his first year in office had gotten the California legislature to enact the largest state tax increase in U.S. history. Confronted with a huge and embarrassing surplus, Weinberger was then given the task of getting rid of it through massive rebates. As a direct consequence, the state plunged once more into the red. Weinberger solved that problem in turn by recommending another tax increase, which produced another surplus, which eventually gave birth to the Proposition 13 taxpayer revolt.

By then, however, Weinberger had departed Sacramento for Washington and an appointment by Richard Nixon as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. In six months on the job, Weinberger streamlined the FTC and made it such a watchdog of consumer interests, particularly in the area of auto safety and reliability, that he was congratulated by no less than Ralph Nader. Weinberger also won plaudits from Nixon, who in 1970 appointed him deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. His boss was a University of Chicago academic named George Shultz. They did not get along well.

Consigned to an office in the Old Executive Office Building, Wein-177

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

berger fretted that Shultz, who enjoyed sumptuous quarters in the W hite House, was ignoring him and undercutting his authority. In that perception, he was at least partly correct. W hen seeking advice, Shultz routinely bypassed Weinberger in favor of his other deputy, associate OMB director Arnold K. Weber. It also irked Weinberger that Shultz did not give him authority to hire and frequently made jokes at his expense. At OMB department-head meetings, for instance, Shultz would grinningly annnounce that he was turning over budget-cutting “to Cap, whose mercies are tender.” The comment would draw chuckles from everyone but Weinberger. 7

Even after Shultz moved to Treasury, leaving Weinberger as OMB

director, the resentment continued. One sore point was Shultz’s habit of calling press conferences to announce the details of new budgets, a task that was ordinarily left to the OMB director. “Cap was devastated,”

one of his associates said, adding that Weinberger complained to Shultz about the snub. 8 To mollify him, Shultz began inviting him to the press conferences, which, to Weinberger’s annoyance, continued to be held at Treasury rather than OMB.

Weinberger’s appointment as HEW secretary, in February 1973, improved the situation somewhat, but though his cabinet rank put him on