Warner under fire - Virginia Sen John Warner

National Review, March 25, 1996 by Rich Lowry

This pliability made his tenure as ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a nightmare for more aggressive Republicans. Warner had a fatal attraction to Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, then chairman of the committee. "With the John Tower thing," recalls former Sen. Malcolm Wallop, referring to George Bush's nominee for Defense Secretary, "we had to have a committee revolt to get [Warner] to defend John Tower because he didn't want to offend Sam Nunn." On issue after issue, committee Republicans had to attempt to pry Warner away from Nunn, especially on SDI. "He always claimed to be the SDI Senator," says Wallop, who considers Warner a friend despite differing politics. "But he never would have been if it had not been for some of us who genuinely cared."

In 1991, the Bush Administration pushed for an SDI program combining space-based interceptors with ground-based missiles at six sites. The plan meant radically revising the ABM Treaty with the Soviets, a move for which Nunn and other Democrats have little stomach. So, Warner demurred. "He was sort of a chronically weak sister on almost all the hard issues," says a former Senate staffer. "Even when . . . he'd be all bucked up by leadership and so on, you'd turn around and all of a sudden he'd be taking a walk on you." In this case, Warner led a successful effort to put the space-based system on the back burner, limit ground-based deployment to one site -- and, consequently, defer tough choices on ABM. Last year, it was the same story. Warner led a bi-partisan effort to emasculate his own -- originally quite strong -- proposal to prevent the Clinton Administration from extending the reach of ABM.

None of this affected Warner's standing back home. That took more serious offenses, the first of which was his 1987 vote against the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Robert Bork. Afterwards Warner, according to press and eyewitness accounts, described to Virginia Republicans a decisive, last-minute, face-to-face meeting with Bork right before his vote. But Bork later characterized Warner's story as "not true in any relevant detail." Warner, according to Bork, briefly asked him about a frivolous criticism Sen. Howell Heflin (D., Ala.) had made of his youthful flirtation with socialism. Then Warner left -- without looking Bork in the eye or declaring his intention to vote nay, as he reportedly claimed. Bork concluded Warner had just been looking for cover.

The Senator still says of Bork that he wasn't "clearly certain of where this man's center of gravity was. Because he had switched around in life between being somewhat liberal and being somewhat conservative and back and forth." Is this what psychoanalysts call transference? "Since then," Warner says, "I must say Bork has, I think, handled himself very commendably in his private life. He has never once directed any bitterness towards me. Therefore you have to admire the guy for the manner in which he has conducted himself." Warner says he would now give "very serious consideration" to voting to confirm Bork. This is pure Warner: confused reasoning for a decision that just bent to the prevailing winds; no sense of his politics resting on anything more profound than personal taste; no compunction whatsoever about appearing absurd. Warner soon brought all this to bear on the Virginia GOP.