The author of that offbeat insight, Admiral William J. (Bill) Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1985 to 1989, has died at the National Naval Medical Center in the Washington suburbs. He was 82. His passing will likely mark the end of an era. Bill Crowe was a soldier-statesman of a kind America’s military seems increasingly unable, or unwilling, to produce.
I first came to know Crowe as a Brit reporter, new in Washington in 1985. Crowe liked Brits. He’d done his Ph.D. thesis on the modern British Navy—which he held “showed all the problems the U.S. Navy is going to face, with a 30-year time-lag”—and he claimed fond memories of his year’s research in London, despite the labors of maneuvering three small children up to the freezing fourth-floor walk-up which was all he and his wife Shirley could afford. (His stint as ambassador in London in the early Clinton years was his last government posting—and, he said, “the most purely enjoyable. They laughed at all my jokes”). So Crowe decided to educate me. On long flights in the chairman’s private jet—which he felt it necessary to insist had been bought for a knock-down price from some failing corporate magnate—he dispensed tutorials in the realities of Washington. He was a superb teacher: long recitals of dauntingly indiscreet anecdotes and shrewd observations. He was never dismissive, though: he understood the pressures at the top.
Crowe was arguably the most significant chairman of the past 60 years, and certainly the most influential peacetime one. He grasped, earlier than anyone except President Reagan, the opportunity for seismic change that the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offered. In Washington, his backroom diplomacy was critical to the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization of 1986, the most ambitious restructuring of the military chain of command since the creation of the modern Pentagon in 1947. Crowe persuaded Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that giving the chairman power to speak for the services as a whole wouldn’t diminish civilian control, while simultaneously soothing his service colleagues’ fears that the move would diminish their independence. The compromise that Crowe and Goldwater reached to seal the deal was that the chairman would not be in the military chain of command on operational matters. Crowe actually thought the chairman should be in the chain of command; but he acknowledged: “It’s a step too far right now. That’s a job for a future chairman.”
Crowe was a most unusual sailor. The only warship he ever skippered was a diesel-engined submarine. After that, his career took him from an intellectual awakening as a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton to one diplomatic or politico-military assignment after another. Even his obligatory tour in Vietnam was as an adviser to the Riverine Force, a brown-water assignment shunned by true blue-water salts. Adrift from any of the baronies—surface, aviation, submarine—who divvy-up promotions in the Navy, Crowe’s career was saved more than once by a lone admirer on a promotion-board willing to give up a prized slot in favor of the maverick Crowe. So Crowe zigzagged an eccentric path through negotiations in the Pacific; policy jobs in the Pentagon; finally to NATO and from there to Hawaii as CINCPAC, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific. In the process he acquired a range of knowledge about America’s foreign policy challenges, and an understanding of what roles the U.S. military could—and just as important, could not—play in the international arena that none of his successors has come close to matching.
The Navy tried more than once to force him into retirement. But Crowe was lucky: he had civilian masters perceptive enough to value his brains and judgement—and willing to override the Navy’s institutional hostility to someone who had failed so blatantly to jump through the usual career hoops. (Not that Crowe was naïve. Realizing at one critical point in his career that he needed a naval command, he lobbied to get the Fifth Fleet job in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf—a job which, once again, demanded more diplomatic than war-fighting skills.) Crowe’s relationship with Cap Weinberger wasn’t always easy. “I have never known a man whose mind is so made up about so many things,” Crowe remarked. But Weinberger esteemed Crowe and ensured he got the CINCPAC job. Conservative admirers—George F. Will and Richard Perle—then played a role in ensuring that Crowe came to President Reagan’s notice as a future chairman.
Crowe was firmly of the “great men make history” school. General MacArthur and Kemal Ataturk were, he would say, the 20th-century military men he most admired: MacArthur because for his Pacific campaign in World War II he had to organize a new kind of warfare; Ataturk as the Ottoman army captain who rose to become founder of the modern state of Turkey. “How did he get to be so smart?” Crowe would muse. It was a question he also debated about Reagan, as he observed “the Irish romantic”, as he called him, respond to Gorbachev and begin to unfreeze the Cold War. Crowe came to the conclusion that the single most crucial requirement in a president was the capacity to grow in office. (“Nobody goes into that job prepared for it.”) That was why Crowe, or so he said, declined to serve a second term as chairman under President George H.W. Bush. He didn’t think Bush comprehended the opportunity Crowe and Reagan had believed Gorbachev offered. That also was why, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Crowe publicly defended Bill Clinton against the charge of being a Vietnam draft-dodger. He believed the charge was unfair. As important, he thought Clinton had the brains and vision that Bush Sr. lacked. The decision took moral courage, but Crowe never lacked that. As Bush senior prepared for the Gulf War in 1991, Crowe—only recently retired—went before Congress to argue that diplomacy be given longer. (In retaliation, Crowe’s visiting privileges at the Pentagon were revoked.)
