Caspar Weinberger

b. August 18, 1917 - d.March 28, 2006

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Had to happen eventually - Caspar Weinberger was 88 - after all only Woody Allen is going to get out of this life alive (Woody said "Some want to achieve immortality through their works, I want to achieve immortality by not dying") - none of the rest of us will escape the inevitable.
Cappy was the real thing - a leader who was responsible, had integrity and intelligence. Those people may exist in leadership positions this day and age but they are rare indeed.
He was a member of that maybe over idealized generation that survived both the great depression and World War II. Being raised by my grandparents and having great respect for them my loyalties and admiration lies with this generation that is sadly passing into the history books. Somehow I don't think I will ever measure up to them. If you want to do yourself a favor pick up a copy of Hard Times by Studs Terkel an incredible book of interviews on the Great Depression. I know everyone can't feel as I do we sometimes forget they were also part of the same generation that brought us Vietnam and the inflation and general abyss that was the post-war 1970s. But I think they need to be measured on balance based upon the state of knowledge and the situations of their own time not ours. Only the post modernist deconstructionists don't have 20/20 vision in hindsight, the rest of see things clearly when looking at the past.
I saw first hand how Caspar Weinberger helped to transform the defense industry while just a pup working at the Allison Gas Turbine Division of GM while in my last four years of college at Indiana Central University in Indianapolis 1980 to 1984. (Hey lots of people go to college for 7 years - Yeah they call them doctors [from the movie Tommy Boy])
Well I think that puts a cap on a really crummy day that I would not want to change in anyway in the least.
Time to put on some Johnny Cash and some Towns Van Zandt and think about the blur that was the past 26 years of working. I started my white collar career just a few days before Ronald Reagan's first inauguration as President...
You could tell the Republicans from the Democrats in those days. Now you can't tell the Republicans and Democrats from the special interests they are paid to represent. Two sides of an unfair coin in probability theory parlance.
Back to Indianapolis
When I first got to Allison's we charged off whatever government military project was convenient. There were lax controls. It felt like the hay days of the 1960s. The place looked like the hay days of the 1960s. Same desks, same ties.
It was not long after the Reagan administration got control of things that if you were working on a military contract you better be working on a military project. There were huge fines levied against defense contractors for overpayment. Things really turned around in a very short amount of time. Much of this I attribute to the leadership of Caspar Weinberger. We went from having our advanced planning groups speak of how it would just be a matter of time before the Soviet Union took over the US because there was no way a free society could stand up to a totalitarian regime to actually productively creating the illusion, if nothing else, that we were a formidable power that the Soviets could not confront. If the Reagan administration spent the Soviet Union out of existence, then it was Caspar Weinberger that made sure Reagan got our money's worth.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished and we drug his name through the mud before he was pardoned by his friend George H. W. Bush (Bush I), but that story can remain for another day.
A postscript that shows we are all too human
After the Beirut barracks were bombed in Lebanon, the US identified Hezbollah as those responsible in 1983. An attack to wipe out the then fledgling Hezbollah terrorist group, consisting of 250 or so members, was approved by Reagan. Caspar Weinberger in his role as Defense Secretary overturned this order because of his fear of upsetting Arab interests in the Mideast. Reagan, ever the loyalist, forgave Weinberger this indiscretion and insubordination. An opportunity was lost, but more importantly, the US began a pattern of behavior that led the Arabs, from Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden, that if you attack the Americans they will in the best case flee (as we did from Lebanon) or in the worse case not respond to attacks.