Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  I heard Tip out. “Look,” I told him, “I come from a district that has been voting Republican since World War II. I just was able to get in, and I ran on economic issues. My constituents are still recovering from a recession. I cannot imagine coming back here and voting myself a pay raise as my first vote. I just can’t.”

  He didn’t like that answer and still thought I might come around, but as I thought the matter through, I was bothered not just by the politics of it but also by a matter of substance: It struck me as improper for members to approve a pay raise that would affect themselves, rather than making it prospective to the next Congress. I voted against it. And then, when it passed anyway, I refused to accept the increase. Instead, every time I received a paycheck, I’d return the raise by writing a check back to the U.S. Treasury. And I made the most of that. John had me photographed in the act of writing those checks and made the return of a pay raise a staple of my next campaign. To reinforce the point that my Central Coast constituents were more important to me than the politics of Washington, John made the theme of that campaign “Working for Us.” It became the tagline for every one of my reelection efforts after that.

  Most of my colleagues understood my predicament on the pay raise and eventually forgave me for it. Another early battle, however, earned me a lifelong enemy. I arrived in Washington with a big class of Watergate-era congressmen, as many of us were swept into office as part of the country’s revulsion over the Nixon administration’s malfeasance. Two ideas that strongly bound those new members, which included Dick Gephardt and Al Gore, among others, were a refusal to accept casual misconduct and an unwillingness to sanction leadership traditions that protected members from being held to account for those actions.

  With that in mind, it seemed to me that we shouldn’t tolerate the continued service of any committee chairman who’d been found to have committed misconduct. That led me to join a challenge to Representative Bob Sikes of Florida. Sikes was a tough customer. He was nicknamed, believe it or not, “He-Coon,” after a particularly wily raccoon native to north Florida, and he wielded considerable power in his position as chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on Military Construction—a post that allowed him to decide where bases were built and where they should be closed. Since that translated directly into local jobs, he could make or break a member of Congress. It was no coincidence that Sikes had fourteen military bases in his district.1

  Just before I arrived in Washington, Sikes had been reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for money that he’d made—and not disclosed—from his holdings in a Pensacola bank that he had helped establish, and in Fairchild Industries, which profited by defense work. He was also a bigot and a segregationist, though plenty of his southern colleagues, even in 1976, fit that description at the time. It was the financial dealings that the House viewed as intolerable, and in July 1976 the members voted 381 to 3 to reprimand him.

  It’s hard to get 381 members of the House to agree on anything, so that represented a fairly resounding attack on his integrity. Still, it did not cost Sikes his chairmanship, which he clung to when I and my fellow freshmen arrived. We considered that a blemish on the House, and raised a challenge. We circulated a letter demanding that he be removed. Signed by fourteen freshmen members, including me, Gore, Gephardt, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio, and Anthony Beilenson of California, it urged other members to oppose Sikes’s reconfirmation. “In our home districts,” we wrote, “Congress as an institution stands in alarmingly low repute, largely as a result of recent disclosures of questionable conduct by individual Members.” Under the circumstances, we added, “to return [Sikes] to that position now would be the clearest kind of signal that we simply don’t mean what we say when it comes to policing ourselves.”

  Our argument prevailed. Sikes was defeated.

  Sikes, who was once accurately remembered for “his tenacity at directing taxpayer dollars back home, concern for his constituents and vengeful attacks on his enemies,” did not take it well.2 He blamed “flaming liberals,” and set out to get even. In my case, he took aim at the Naval Postgraduate School and sought to shut it down. The school is right in the center of Monterey, so closing it would have hurt my district badly. A colleague and member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, Bob Giaimo, warned me that Sikes was maneuvering for vengeance, and I confronted Sikes directly, urging that he not get even with me in a way that would harm the military. That seemed to defuse the matter, but I was relieved when he decided to retire in 1978. The postgraduate school survived.

  Among the important events in the life of a freshman congressman is his committee assignments, and mine proved both helpful and illuminating. I was eager to serve on the Education Committee, but my instincts told me I’d be of greater service to my district if I angled for Agriculture. In general, members of that committee use their positions to look out for agricultural subsidies for the farmers in their districts, but in my case, few of my farmers qualified for subsidies, which tend to support grains, cotton, and other large crops. The farmers in my area grew mostly fruits and vegetables, which don’t often qualify for such government help. Still, the committee regulated what are known as “marketing orders,” which set parameters for the sale of those crops, and it also occasionally ventured into oversight of pesticides, another important issue for my district. Tip O’Neill must have at least partially forgiven my refusal to support the pay raise, because he agreed to let me join Agriculture and also understood when I asked him to reconsider his decision to put me on the D.C. Committee, which supervises the District of Columbia, because it could not help me out in any way back home.

  Once on Agriculture, I moved up quickly because one of my subcommittees was Nutrition, which manages the Food Stamp Program. The chairman of that subcommittee was Fred Richmond of New York, and it wasn’t long before he was swept up in a series of scandals that included financial misdeeds, possession of marijuana, and soliciting sex from a sixteen-year-old boy. That’s enough to damage even the safest congressman, so he moved out, and I became chairman.

  I also landed a spot on House Administration, a committee responsible for everything from election laws to parking spaces. It has never ceased to amaze me how much some members value their parking spot, so I acquired some early leverage.

  Finally, at the urging of some of my colleagues, I pushed for a spot on the newly created Budget Committee. Like so much of what was going on in Congress in those years, the Budget Committee was an outgrowth of the deterioration of trust between Congress and the White House during Nixon’s self-destruction. Before that, the House of Representatives, as required by the Constitution, originated all spending bills, but it had no real body to monitor the overall budget for spending and revenues. But when Nixon refused to spend money that Congress had appropriated, the House responded by creating the Budget Committee. It came into existence in 1974, so it was still brand-new when I arrived. I sensed that it could become an important entity in Congress and lobbied for a spot on it. Soon after I was reelected in 1978, I got it, and that was the beginning of what became the most important work I would do in Congress—developing and overseeing the federal budget.

  First, however, there was the matter of settling in and representing my district. Sylvia got our offices running. After a few years of living alone in Washington, I joined a group of members in a house just a few blocks from the Cannon House Office Building, where my Washington office was located. George Miller of California was the landlord, and Chuck Schumer of New York, Marty Russo of Illinois, and I all shared the place. We’d often walk home after work, play a little basketball, have a drink, talk politics over dinner. I’d often return to the office in late evening and make calls to California, checking in first with Sylvia and then with constituents, trying to stay connected.

  There was a genuine camaraderie to it, a welcome check on the arrogance that infects so much of Washington. We were conscious of being youn
g and new—eager to change these institutions but also still a bit in awe of them. There were nights when I would get a glimpse of the Capitol, lit up against the dark sky, and catch my breath. I still can’t approach the building without a sense of awe.

  It was also fairly grueling. I’d work until Thursday or Friday afternoon when we were in session, and then head for Carmel Valley. I flew direct from Dulles to San Francisco, rented a car at the airport—Hertz didn’t have many better customers in those days—and drove down the coast to Carmel Valley, usually not making it home until very late at night. Sylvia would greet me with any pending constituent issues that demanded my attention, and I’d usually have constituent hours on Fridays or Saturday mornings. Saturday afternoons were devoted to this event or that—there was always something to attend—and Sunday morning, after church, I’d try to drop by gatherings as well. We did try to hold Sunday afternoons open for the family, and I’d cook over the grill in our backyard under the grape arbor—the same grill and the same arbor that my father had built in 1948. Some Sundays he would join us.

  There was a great sense of accomplishment and meaning as I circulated through the district, and those weekly trips guaranteed that I wouldn’t fall out of touch—few things are more humbling for a member of Congress than to hear from constituents pleading for help. But there were hard moments. Many evenings I would put the boys to bed, straighten up after dinner, and then get in the car to head to the airport to return to Washington. As I drove away, I’d look in the rearview mirror and think, What the hell am I doing?

  My district was a varied place. We didn’t have any real urban areas or inner-city problems, but there were poor communities in Monterey and San Luis Obispo, and communities of staggering wealth in Pebble Beach and Carmel. The inland areas were mostly agricultural, while the coastal towns thrived mostly on fishing and tourism. Santa Cruz was changing rapidly as the University of California there opened and grew. But all those communities had one thing in common, and it was among the first issues that captured my attention as their new representative: They all enjoyed the remarkable beauty of our coastline.

  The Monterey coast is dramatic, and its waters are clean and productive. There are broad beaches in Santa Cruz, Seaside, and San Luis Obispo; crashing waves on cliffs and rocks in Monterey, Big Sur, and Carmel. Pebble Beach’s eighteenth hole is familiar to every golfer on the planet. That coastline supports fishing and tourism, mainstays of the California economy. Beneath the ocean floor, however, the shelf includes at least one other resource of value: oil. And that’s where my concerns lay.

  South of my district, Santa Barbara had experienced the effects of offshore oil exploration, and it had left an indelible impression. On the morning of January 28, 1969, a week after Richard Nixon was sworn in as president, a surge in pressure in an oil extraction pipe on a Union Oil platform a few miles off the coast caused a rupture. Workers on the platform tried to cap the problem, but the pipe casing failed, and a burst of natural gas cracked the seafloor surrounding the well. By noon that day, oil was gushing into the water off the Santa Barbara coast.3 It would continue for eleven days, and during that time roughly three million gallons of oil poured from the cracks in the ocean floor into the water and onto thirty-five miles of some of the nation’s most beautiful coastline, beaches, and harbors. Nixon himself was staggered by the damage, promising to send federal troops if needed to help the cleanup. Earth Day began the following year, and many still regard the Santa Barbara spill as the germinating moment of the modern environmental movement.

  The Big Sur coastline—and my district—escaped damage in the Santa Barbara spill, but the disaster sent a shock through my constituents, as many considered the repercussions of oil fouling our fishing grounds or washing up at Pebble Beach. Soon after I took my seat, I began to look for ways to protect our coastline from the type of damage that Santa Barbara had endured. In my first term, I proposed creating a working group made up of federal and local representatives to study the coast. That effort didn’t go far, as some of my more militant constituents worried about bringing the federal government into that study; I dropped the working group idea and instead backed an entirely local planning effort. In September 1978, I joined with Pete McCloskey and a group of county supervisors from counties along the coast in order to make our case to Cecil Andrus, the secretary of the interior, that the Big Sur coast should be off-limits to any oil exploration.

  We came away from that meeting optimistic, but were soon disappointed. On October 10, Andrus announced that Interior was launching a study of 243 tracts off the California coast for possible oil and gas leases. Included in those were about 75 tracts that I had specifically asked Andrus to permanently exclude because of their extreme environmental sensitivity. I expressed my outrage and laid down my marker: “I intend to fight this decision down the line and to make sure that other congressmen join with me in preventing offshore drilling off this coastline.”

  That was just a month before my first reelection campaign came to a head, so before I could defend the coastline, I had to defend myself. Fortunately, the challenge came in the form of one Eric Seastrand, a stockbroker who lived in Salinas and worked in Monterey. It’s generally true that members of Congress are most vulnerable to a challenge after their first term, and I was no exception. And if the Republicans had picked a moderate with a strong environmental streak, I might have had a hard run—I’d carried only 53 percent of the vote in my race against Talcott, and there still were wide swaths of the district that tilted Republican. Instead, however, they gave me Seastrand, an attractive and energetic campaigner but also a former member of the John Birch Society—he’d been a member until 1977, quitting just in time to run for Congress—who made the strange decision to attack me as fiscally irresponsible.

  By this time, I’d already made hay out of my vote against the pay raise and my refusal to accept it once my colleagues approved it. In my first year, I returned $35,000 of my office budget to the Treasury, including $4,257 of unused raises, $5,000 in unused travel and office supplies, and about $25,000 in unused staff salary allowances. My refusal to accept the money I was allowed to spend hardly stamped me as irresponsible with money, so Seastrand’s campaign came at my strengths, not my weaknesses. We had a debate or two, and I made sure that pictures of me signing checks to the Treasury were a mainstay of my campaign advertising. I got the endorsement of the newspapers in the district, including a much-appreciated one from the Monterey Peninsula Herald. The editors there described me as having “managed to represent faithfully the moderate and sensible judgment of the vast majority of voters in this district.” The paper’s recommendation for Seastrand: that he “be restored to the bosom of his medieval, right-wing fellowship in the John Birch Society, where he belongs.”

  On election day, I carried all four counties in my district, including the most conservative of the four, San Benito. It was the first time since 1936 that San Benito had voted for a Democrat for Congress. Overall, I got 61.4 percent of the vote. That really was the last time I felt much of a threat in a reelection campaign. In the coming years, I would never again take less than 70 percent.

  Reelection plunged me back into the fight for the coast, and I sparred with the Carter administration through 1979 and 1980, eliminating some tracts but continuing to fight over others. The battle really escalated in 1981, however, when Ronald Reagan became president and appointed James Watt as his secretary of the interior. Andrus had been bad enough; this was a whole new level of problem.

  Soon after Watt took over, a couple of us in Congress decided that we’d try to educate him on the special qualities of our coast. My partner in that effort was Don Clausen, a Republican who represented the Mendocino coast, his district covering the gorgeous country north of San Francisco and running up to the Oregon border. Don was a moderate, affable centrist holding office in an increasingly Democratic district, and one, like mine, where coastal protection was a unifying issue. So we
invited Watt to come talk with us, figuring that a bipartisan appeal might reach him.

  Watt arrived at Clausen’s office right on time, and we ushered him inside. I spoke first. “Areas like Big Sur and the Mendocino coast are really national treasures,” I began. “It’s like Yosemite or Yellowstone.” I conceded that there might be some areas that should be explored, but some were too valuable or too pristine to risk contamination.

  In the conference room where we were meeting, Clausen had an arresting photo of the Mendocino coast, one of the nation’s most picturesque. So behind me was this panoramic view of waves crashing at the base of cliffs, spray shining in the sun. I gave my pitch and turned to the photo. “This is the kind of coast we’re talking about,” I said.

  Watt sat for a moment, then stood up and walked over to the picture. He pointed at it and said, “Not a bad place for an oil rig.” I still remember the thought that shot through my head: Holy shit.

  If nothing else, our meeting with Watt was clarifying. We obviously weren’t going to be getting any help from the White House or Interior. That meant our only recourse was Congress. Happily, that’s where we knew the ropes.

  Clausen and I agreed that there wasn’t any point in taking the issue head-on. Outside of California, there was no reason to believe that members would feel strongly about protecting the coasts in our districts. Moreover, some colleagues might resent the effort to curtail drilling in our areas while the country explored oil reserves in theirs. So rather than approaching the authorizing committees, we instead attacked the issue through Appropriations.