With that prairie accent you knew he was a Midwestern boy. Twenty-seven years old in 1966, Aspin was one of Robert McNamara’s whiz kids-the bright, bloodless ones who so unnerved the military with their lust for cost-effectiveness, fully loaded with classroom confidence, ignorant of the atmosphere of the battlefield. Academicians were everywhere in South Vietnam in those days: social scientists, psychologists, historians, professors of law, physics, psychology, all prodigies, all far from home. Les had punched the tickets so prized by the secretary of defense: Yale, Oxford, MIT In fact he was attached to McNamara’s staff as an economist.
But he didn’t look or behave like a whiz kid, overweight and disheveled even then, ever cheerful, habitually late, always with a mysterious manila envelope under his arm. Of course he was attractive to women, and when he showed up for dinner at last at Guillaume Tell or Ramuncho, we were happy to make a place at the table because he was so engaging, even though you weren’t certain ho he worked for or what he was doing, exactly, in the war zone.
Lookin’ around, he’d say.
Like so many others.
I remember he had a particular interest in the Ruff-Puffs, the South Vietnamese civilian militia, who, with their American advisers, would carry the battle to the Reds on General Giap’s terms: guerrilla warfare. What an MIT-trained economist was doing with the ragtag Ruff-Puffs is anybody’s guess. I think for Les it was yet another chapter in his ongoing investigation of internal contradiction. Whatever it was that he discovered, his name nowhere figures in the important war memoirs, conspicuously McNamara’s. But of course, he was only 27. What could he possibly know that could be of use to the Highest Levels? He was a whiz kid who got his hands dirty-and why do I think whatever he unearthed was unwelcome?
His opposition to the war was the centerpiece of his 1970 campaign for Congress. When I heard that he would challenge the Republican incumbent in Wisconsin’s First District–one I knew well, since it neighbored the Illinois district I grew up in-I thought he had lost his mind. They would devour him in Congress, and ff he had any affection for Wisconsin, he never confided it to me. He had fled his roots as decisively as I and so many others of our generation had for the allure of Washington, circa 1961. Aspin was a Washingtonian of no fixed address and no identifiable ante cedents, as busy as a badger on the higher slopes of the capital.
A failure of imagination on my part. He won in 1970, and won 11 subsequent campaigns, in 1985 engineering the coup that brought him the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee. By then he was an authority on the Pentagon, his office a kind of floating seminar on all aspects of military policy, Then he was offered the summit: secretary of defense,
He was more a man of government than of politics, and far from the modern Washington in-and-outer who glides from government to law or banking and back again, always one rung higher and one rung richer. Defense policy was a noble task, and no serious scholar could afford to divert himself to anything so inconsequential as the bond market or corporate law, any more than an astronomer would concern himself with the dust beneath his feet.
I last saw Les at a party in Washington in January, a few months after he had resigned as secretary. His tenure at the Pentagon was not a success, the cause, no doubt, his fascination with contradiction in a building that favored certainty. How Les loved to worry a problem. It is perhaps for this reason that no solution bears his name–no Aspin Doctrine, no Aspin Plan. How could he not be ruined by this most public failure in a job he had sought all his life? It was as if the pope were found to be impious, or ignorant of the catechism. But he was extremely jaunty and ff he harbored resentments, he did not give them voice. We had a drink and most unexpectedly began to talk of our youths in the Midwest, what it was like growing up in the ’40s and ’50s, how necessary it was to leave and what your family thought of you when you did.
“My mother didn’t like it when I left Ratine,” he said, his voice suddenly subdued.
Of course I knew what he meant. To our parents the East was a chaotic and unforgiving place and to adapt, you became someone of no fixed address and no identifiable antecedents. That night, listening hard, I noticed again how familiar Les’s Wisconsin rhythms were, and how 30 years in the federal city had not altered them.
