SENATE REJECTS TOWER, 53-47; FIRST CABINET VETO SINCE '59; BUSH CONFERS ON NEW CHOICE
The Senate today rejected President Bush's nomination of John G. Tower to be Secretary of Defense, the first time in 30 years that a President was denied his choice of a Cabinet member.
After weeks of fierce debate, personal lobbying by the President and allegations of private misconduct by Mr. Tower that would never have been aired in an earlier age, the end came in a calm, ceremonial proceeding with all 100 senators gathered in the chamber.
Fifty-two Democrats and one Republican voted against the Mr. Tower; 44 Republicans and three Democrats voted for him.
The cordial end belied what senators said had been one of the fiercest and most unpleasant confrontations in recent history, in which the Senate rebuffed a new President, rejected one of its former members and dragged onto the floor its dirty laundry of drinking among members.
I will be recorded as the first Cabinet nominee in the history of the Republic to be rejected in the first 90 days of a Presidency and perhaps be harshly judged, Mr. Tower said after the vote. But I depart from this place at peace with myself, knowing that I have given a full measure of devotion to my country. No public figure in my memory has been subjected to such a far-reaching and thorough investigation, nor had his human foibles bared to such intensive and demeaning public scrutiny.
The last time the Senate rejected a Cabinet nominee was in 1959, toward the end of the Eisenhower Administration, when the nomination of Lewis L. Strauss as Secretary of Commerce was defeated, 49 to 46. The rejection was seen in large part as retaliation for the high-handed manner in which senators felt Mr. Strauss had dealt with them when he headed the Atomic Energy Commission.
In the closing hours of debate on the Tower nomination, Republicans, knowing that the die was cast, accused the Democrats of running roughshod over the former Senator's private life in a partisan attack aimed at weakening the new Republican President.
But Democrats, worried about a backlash against one of history's most forceful assertions of the Senate's constitutional role of advise and consent, insisted that the defeat of Mr. Tower was a unique case that need not mar long-term relations. They noted, too, that Mr. Bush himself had appeared to have doubts about Mr. Tower, delaying for weeks a nomination that had been expected ever since Election Day. 'Pitched Partisan Battle'
It was a pitched partisan battle and has been for weeks, Mr. Dole said in closing the debate for supporters of Mr. Tower, who in his last years in the Senate led the same panel, the Armed Services Committee, that voted along strictly partisan lines to recommend his rejection as Defense Secretary. After what we've done to this good man, maybe we ought to hang our heads. He knows this is politics. He knows he's being shot down because he's a Republican and there are more Democrats than Republicans.
But Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, asserted: This vote is not and should not be interpreted as a vote to harm the President. I cannot control what other people write and say. But I do know what's in my mind and heart.
Mr. Mitchell and Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, both argued that Mr. Tower's nomination was a special case, a nominee for a particularly sensitive job plagued by an unusually long list of allegations about purported drinking problems, misconduct toward women and lax attitudes toward conflicts created by his work as a consultant to military contractors.
Mr. Nunn said he did not expect in my lifetime to see another nominee with so many allegations against him.
I do not believe there is a basis for saying this has not been handled fairly, Mr. Nunn said.
In defending Mr. Tower, some senators warned their colleagues that the intense focus on alcohol and women, the subjects that dominated the six days of Senate debate, was raising new and dangerous standards of behavior.
The question is going to be asked of senators when they go out and start running for office, said Senator Steve Symms, Republican of Idaho. What's in your F.B.I. file? Can we really live up to the standards that have been set up here?
There was much talk in the Senate today, especially from Republicans, of the deep partisan scars the Tower fight may have inflicted.
Democrats mounted a strong campaign to dispel charges of partisanship. Mr. Mitchell said on the Senate floor that he had read through the Senate debates 12 years ago over Jimmy Carter's nominees and found the Republicans to be just as outspoken in their opposition to several of them as Democrats had been to Mr. Tower.