There were also constant clashes with his opposite numbers at the State Department - first Alexander Haig, then George Shultz - that prefigured more recent battles between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, during the first term of George W. Under Weinberger, even more than under McNamara and his successors, the Pentagon became today's bureaucratic behemoth. A host of new weapons programmes - long-range nuclear arms, ships, planes and tanks - strengthened the US arsenal at a rate Moscow could match only at the risk of economic ruin. During his six and a half years at the Pentagon - a stint exceeded only by Robert McNamara - he persuaded Congress to spend more than $2trn (£1.15trn) on defence. As for "Cap the Knife", all that belonged to the past. But even casual acquaintances could not miss the intensity and steel.
Small and slightly stooped of stature, he had an unassuming and courteous manner. In January 1981 he returned to one of the most powerful posts in the land, Secretary of Defense, for his old friend, now President, Ronald Reagan.Īs he admitted at the outset, Weinberger was no military expert. But his absence from Washington lasted only four years. When Jimmy Carter regained the presidency for the Democrats, Weinberger retreated to his home state and a senior job at the giant Californian engineering group Bechtel. The self-described "fiscal Puritan" became Richard Nixon's first White House budget director - and thus was born the legend of "Cap the Knife", the hard-nosed bureaucrat who had no qualms in taking the axe to some of Lyndon Johnson's "great society" programmes to bring some order to a national treasury strained to breaking point by the Vietnam War.Īnother Cabinet post followed at Health, Education and Welfare, where Weinberger's budget-cutting instincts were less in evidence.