The other defense secretary nominee who promised to stop drinking
John Tower's unsuccessful bid to run the Pentagon has some echoes in the Pete Hegseth story
On March 9, 1989, former Sen. John Tower told reporters, “it is time for the bitterness, anger and rancor to fade.” His words sounded surprisingly conciliatory coming six days after the U.S. Senate made Tower, as he put it, “the first Cabinet nominee in the history of the republic to be rejected in the first 90 days of a presidency.”
President George H. W. Bush had nominated Tower, his fellow Republican, to be secretary of defense, a job he had sought for years. At first, the odds for his confirmation appeared favorable: He had served for 24 years in the Senate and had chaired the Armed Services Committee. But allegations about Tower’s personal conduct and possible conflicts of interest were cited by senators in the chamber’s Democratic majority who voted to sink the nomination.
In his brief statement on March 9, Tower also said he was at “peace with myself” after the ordeal, would return to private life in Texas and would speak out at times on matters of public interest.
But Tower never forgot nor forgave the humiliation.
And the whole experience would ultimately cost him his life.
The Hegseth debate
No presidential nominee for the Cabinet has been rejected in the 35 years since Tower’s appointment was turned down by the Senate. But President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of former Fox News host Peter Hegseth for secretary of defense is on the ropes, with a small number of Republican senators possibly standing between him and confirmation.
The words of Hegseth’s own mother complicated his path to the Pentagon. The New York Times reported the contents of a 2018 email she sent her son. “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” wrote Penelope Hegseth.
She added: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
She told the Times she had immediately apologized to him for the email and defended her son as “a good father, husband.”
Last week, Hegseth went on offense against the allegations of mistreating women, along with claims he had abused alcohol and mismanaged nonprofit organizations he ran. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he tried to turn the tables by blaming the media. “The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown. They provide no evidence, no names, and they ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf.” Hegseth also promised not to drink “a drop of alcohol” if confirmed.
In an interview that aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump said, "It looks like Pete is doing well now. I mean, people were a little bit concerned. He’s a young guy, with a tremendous track record actually. He went to Princeton and went to Harvard. He was a good student at both. But he loves the military and I think people are starting to see it, so we’ll be working on his nomination along with a lot of others."
There are two big unknowns: will Hegseth’s aggressive pushback win over enough votes in the Senate for confirmation, and if the result remains in doubt, will Trump go to bat for his nominee by pressuring the doubting senators?
Or is the floating of a potential fallback choice — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — an indication that Trump isn’t planning to spend much political capital on trying to get Hegseth confirmed?
Tower’s rise
John Tower was born in Houston, the son of a Methodist minister. He served in the Navy on an amphibious gunboat in the Pacific and was an active member of the naval reserve until 1989. After graduating from Southwestern University, he worked as a radio announcer and insurance agent. Tower soon enrolled at Southern Methodist University for graduate work, doing research at the London School of Economics for a thesis on Britain’s Conservative Party.
While working as an assistant professor of political science at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, he married the organist at his father’s church, Lou Bullington. They had three daughters and would divorce in 1976. (Tower remarried the following year, but obtained another divorce in 1987.)
Tower’s work in the Texas Republican party got him a nomination for state representative in 1954 and for US senator, in a race against Lyndon Johnson, in 1956. Tower lost both elections. But when Johnson became vice president in 1960, Tower won a special election to succeed him, becoming the first Republican senator from Texas since 1870.
Tower’s problems
Tower and George H. W. Bush were both rising stars in Texas politics in the 1960s and 1970s. And the month after Bush was elected president in 1988, he nominated Tower to be secretary of defense.
“He's established great credibility and earned great respect, both in Congress and among the American people for his knowledge, for his many contributions to this nation and for his understanding of the fundamental truth that strength and clarity in our defense and national security policy lead to peace,” Bush said of Tower.
But the respect for Tower wasn’t shared by many of his former colleagues in the Senate.
“He was a veteran senator who was arrogant, off-putting to his colleagues and despite all the deference that senators normally give to former colleagues, he got none of it,” journalist Walter Shapiro recalled in a 2018 podcast.
Tower’s heavy use of alcohol and his behavior toward women made him vulnerable to critics.
“John Tower had a reputation around Capitol Hill as someone a woman — unless maybe she’s in a wheelchair over the age of 90 — would never dare to share an elevator with,” according to Shapiro. “He was a bottom-pincher, a skirt-chaser, in the parlance of those days.”
Yet Tower had passed an FBI background check, and the beginning of his confirmation hearing before the Armed Services Committee went well. Then Paul Weyrich came before the committee. A conservative activist who disapproved of Tower both personally and on policy terms, Weyrich declared, “Over the course of many years, I have encountered the nominee in a condition—a lack of sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married.”
According to Suzanne Garment, writing in 1989 for the American Enterprise Institute, the Weyrich comment prompted a flood of allegations about Tower.
“An unidentified woman, the press reported, had told authorities that she had seen Tower chase a secretary around a desk. An Air Force colonel claimed that Tower had had fourteen separate liaisons with women while he was heading the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva. Someone charged that back in Houston, Texas, Tower had kept a Soviet ballerina.”
“Tower himself let it be known via the White House that these days he drank only two glasses of wine a day, on the advice of his doctor. He also released a report from a physician who had attended him during his recent cancer surgery, confirming that he showed none of the physical signs of alcoholism.” And Bush said further checks by the FBI had “gunned down” the new claims about Tower’s behavior, Garment noted.
“Tower himself let it be known via the White House that these days he drank only two glasses of wine a day, on the advice of his doctor.” — Suzanne Garment
Still, the Democrats on the committee voted unanimously against Tower’s nomination, with chairman Sam Nunn of Georgia citing Tower’s “history of excessive drinking.”
Tower responded with a notarized document, pledging that “I hereby swear and undertake that if confirmed, during the course of my tenure as secretary of defense, I will not consume beverage alcohol of any type or form, including wine, beer or spirits of any kind.” Bush, on a trip to Asia, called senators from Air Force One to rally support for his nominee.
Tower’s work as a consultant for military contractors also spurred objections to his nomination. “But the specific effect of the conflict-of-interest issue on the outcome was limited,” Suzanne Garment wrote. “By the end of the debate some commentators were noting how ironic it was that the large structural issue of Tower’s conflicts of interest was getting so much less attention than the more colorful but probably less important issue of drink.”
The Senate rejected Tower’s nomination by a 53 to 47 vote.
In a 1990 interview with The New York Times, Tower defended his conduct. "Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes. Am I alcohol-dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not. But I've never done anything disqualifying. That's the point."
Tower’s memoir
Two years after his nomination was rejected, Tower struck back in a memoir called “Consequences.” As the New York Times reported, Tower named names, calling one Senate Democrat “not the brightest guy in Washington,” saying another “drinks, and drinks heavily.” A third was “the Senate bully, quick to attack with harsh and personal invective.”
“Mr. Tower reserved his most acid comments for Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who succeeded him as chairman of the Armed Services Committee and whose announcement against Mr. Tower's nomination was widely credited with sealing its defeat. Mr. Tower said the Senator suffered from blind ambition, timidity, inexperience and priggishness.”
On April 5, 1991, Tower, who was then 65, and his 35-year-old daughter Marian, boarded a twin-engine plane in Atlanta, heading for Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia. They were to attend a party Tower’s literary agent was holding to honor him after the book’s publication.
The flight crashed while trying to land at the Brunswick, Ga. airport. There were no survivors. Investigators would later blame a flaw in the control unit of a propeller for the crash.
What ifs
Bush had moved quickly to fill the Pentagon role after Tower’s rejection by the Senate. On March 11, 1989, he nominated Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming as secretary of defense. “After enduring months of the most intimate scrutiny of John G. Tower's private life,” Andrew Rosenthal wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Bush turned to a safer choice, a man with a reputation as a straight-arrow Westerner who married his high school sweetheart and is more inclined to river-rafting excursions than the Washington night life.”
The Senate confirmed Cheney by a 92-0 vote one week after he was nominated. And so it was the Wyoming conservative rather than the man from Texas who presided over the Pentagon as it fought the Persian Gulf war, which turned out to be a resounding U.S. victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
That win didn’t secure Bush a second term in office. But after eight years of Democratic rule in the White House, Bush’s son George W. Bush ran successfully for the White House with Dick Cheney as his running mate.
Following the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. in 2001, the Bush administration would not only go to war against Afghanistan, which harbored the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, but would launch a disastrous war against Iraq. As vice president, Cheney played a major role in steering the administration into that war, on groundless intelligence that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction.

The war ousted Hussein and unleashed chaos in Iraq, where more than 100,000 civilians died, along with more than 4,500 American service members.
Hegseth served in the US Army in Iraq, in a regiment that was criticized for inflicting civilian casualties. Four members of the regiment’s Charlie Company “were court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Shortly after returning home, Hegseth argued that he and his comrades were often hamstrung by generals and politicians far from the front lines. Over time, he defended increasingly aggressive wartime actions by troops, successfully lobbied for pardons for some of them and spoke with increasing disdain for the policymakers who sent them to fight.”
The increasingly unpopular war helped bring to prominence such critics as Sen. Barack Obama, who was elected president in 2008.
Would it have made any difference if Tower hadn’t had behavioral issues and had been confirmed as secretary of defense instead of Cheney, who made the case so aggressively for war?
We will never know.
I consider John Tower a tragic figure (even if the tragedy was of his own making). I covered him as a reporter and producer in Texas back in the day.
He was short - albeit bereft of a "Napoleon Complex."
"My name's Tower - but I don't" was his favorite introductory line when addressing constituents on the rubber chicken circuit. As a reporter in some of Texas' smallest TV markets - and later as a producer in the state's largest market I found his response to my requests for a statement or interview to be the same - regardless of my station in the journalistic pecking order - even when I was very much a small fish in an even smaller pond - (which was not my experience with others in power who ignored me until I took a job in Dallas).
I can vouch for his well-deserved reputation as a drinker - although I never saw him incapacitated. I'll leave others to confirm (or deny) his reputation as a "womanizer" (which is quaint by today's political "standards.")
I don't know what sort of Secretary of Defense he might have become had he survived confirmation - but based upon his military service record - and his reputation as a "defense hawk" in the Senate I have no doubt he would have taken the job seriously had he been confirmed (and would have celebrated that achievement with a drink or two -- or three).