Richard Armitage resembled a mildly simmering, bull-necked Ray Nitschke with a bad cold as he stoically tolerated the occasional inanities of the U.S. Congress.
The balding, muscle-bound No. 2 official in the State Department, whose likely ability to squash normal-size humans like a bug is not quite in keeping with the long genteel bastion of American diplomacy, was facing a surely historic moment in legislative oversight:
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A congressman was simultaneously raking Armitage, who bench-presses in excess of 400 pounds, over the coals and clipping his own fingernails.
Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), 63, is a conservative, white-haired stalwart on the House Appropriations Committee. In that role, he has become quite the expert on, and critic of, operations at the 25,000-person State Department, including waging a personal war on personnel.
Under the secretary of state, there is a single deputy secretary, in this case Armitage, a Naval Academy graduate, Vietnam combat veteran and former bigshot Defense Department official. But Rogers, who looks like a small-town banker with a hint of the country squire, has argued for years that there must be a second deputy, with similar clout and in charge of actually managing the department.
Now he’s succeeded in getting a bill into law that provides for such a slot. But Colin Powell and Armitage, confidants for two decades, have other priorities. And, besides, they’ve already brought on board as “undersecretary of state for management” a savvy ex-Powell military chum, Grant Green Jr., who’s been receiving good early grades from rank-and-file.
“Where is the deputy secretary for management?” Rogers asked Armitage during a subcommittee hearing last week on the department’s budget, a session of such portentousness, it drew only the baiduhai and a guy from Taiwan television.
“We don’t intend to break the law. You know, we don’t agree with you on this,” said Armitage, whose froggy voice sounded like Mercedes McCambridge as the Demon in “The Exorcist,” wiped out as he was after traveling to India and elsewhere to plug the administration’s anti-missile defense proposal.
Shoulders slightly hunched, hands clasped on the witness table in a tiny hearing room, Armitage said, with little fervor, “We either have to change the law or do it.”
“We expect you to abide by this directive!” Rogers blasted back, his voice rising. “You admit the department is not being run the way it should be run. . . . We can’t sit idly by.”
Rogers ticked off various State Department problems and mishaps: break-ins and buggings of offices at headquarters, the embassy bombings, poorly run construction projects and “squalid conditions” for staff in far-off lands.
“We expect this to be done,” he proclaimed. “We want you to know we expect this to be done.”
Clearly a man who believes in the impact of redundancy, he would not relent.
“The Department of State needs to be run like every other department. It needs a manager,” he said. “We expect you to do as directed. Give the deputy secretary of management the title so we can run this department.”
Reaching a theatrical climax, Rogers said, “I’m going to be down your neck,” an arguably unfortunate choice of words because Armitage’s neck could hold an Alpine ski jumping contest. “When will you execute the law that directs you to do this?!”
“I’ll go back to the secretary [Powell],” he responded.
“I didn’t ask you to consult!” Rogers said. “I ask when you’re going to do this?!”
“I can’t give you a date. I can’t satisfy you with a direct answer,” replied Armitage.
And, as this administrative melodrama neared exhaustion, Rogers took out nail clippers and started a self-manicure. He has his priorities too.
He never got the answer he truly wanted. As for Armitage, the three-hour hearing elicited an impressive, low-key performance in the early days of Powell’s celebrity-driven takeover of a hugely important, at times somnolent, department.
Armitage, 56, is the son of a cop and served as a deputy secretary of defense during Bush I. He had a reputation for being blunt, smart and conservative, but no knee-jerk. He rankled Ross Perot and crazies on the right by not buying into various Vietnam POW conspiracy theories, prompting Perot to help scuttle Armitage’s nomination by Bush I to be secretary of the Army by letting it be known that he had a compromising photo of Armitage and a woman from his Vietnam days.
He moved to a successful corporate consulting practice, with an emphasis on advising clients overseas. Still, with his daunting physical presence, including that shiny dome of a head, he is given to caricature.
But he’s a complicated fellow, who is moderate on social issues and sensitive on race, including having supported the notion of affirmative action. In addition to his own natural children, he has adopted, and been foster parent to, a small army of kids of various races, including several with disabilities and some who were crack babies. He has even purchased homes for the natural parents of his foster children so they could be near the kids and, it is hoped, clean up their acts.
Armitage hates talking about any of this and declined to do so with me. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime admirer, brought it up, while also praising him for being an excellent thinker, even if not “the classic diplomat.”
McCain introduced Armitage at his Senate confirmation hearing, a move that likely raised a few eyebrows at the White House, given its mild obsession with McCain. Somebody looking to apple-polish there does not have McCain introduce him.
He had actually wanted the No. 2 job at the Defense Department. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Armitage would not be a coosome twosome, so it was off with his friend Powell to the State Department, a world in which you may actually need 24 people to sign off before getting an airline ticket to travel overseas. Yes, two dozen.
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Process is paramount and the layers of decision-making can be truly depressing. Nothing changed much during the tenure of Madeleine Albright, leaving a distinct overcentralization and an institutional aversion to quick, decisive action and political hierarchies at times dismissive of career foreign service officers.
In the opening months, Powell and Armitage get high marks as they confront the dragons of inertia. It may not mean much to you or me but the fact that the secretary’s top staff meeting has been moved forward to 8:15 a.m. from 8:45 a.m. is a big deal there, a symbol.
Similarly, several participants in separate meetings with Powell and Armitage underscore that they cut to the chase quickly and demand answers to questions. One official told me about showing up in Armitage’s office and being treated like an attorney starting a Supreme Court oral argument, meaning he was cut off in midsentence right after he’d started a rigorously planned presentation.
“I actually liked that,” he said. “Plus, the guy actually thinks outside the box in a place where most are trained not to.”
Will there be true change? For now, people are pleased, including career officers being talked to a bit more often. But there was also an upbeat air during the heady early days of Albright, the first woman in the post who promised to be a budding “rock star” of diplomacy after the dour tenure of attorney Warren Christopher.
By the end of her tenure, she was seen as isolated, stuck in the executive suites on the seventh floor, surrounded by adoring yes men and women.
Will the action-oriented Power Rangers really shake things up, streamline the bureaucracy, not be beholden to security and media-obsessed legislative flunkies when it comes to policy, and resist natural temptations to centralize decision-making?
Perhaps. But I suspect that Rep. Rogers shouldn’t hold off on his nails until then.