Caspar Weinberger: Individual success in any bureaucracy often requires one overriding skill - the ability to find the boss's wavelength, and communicate on it. People who worked for Ronald Reagan learned that his mind was not cluttered with facts and figures; he grasped images and retained impressions, and decisions were based on them.
Caspar Weinberger, the anti-Soviet hawk who oversaw a huge peacetime defence buildup as the US secretary of defence during most of Reagan's two terms, knew how to communicate with his boss.
At a key meeting where Weinberger had to battle senior members of the administration who wanted spending restrictions, Weinberger ended his flipchart briefing by showing Reagan a large cartoon. It featured three soldiers. The first was a tiny unarmed figure, representing the defence budget of the previous Carter administration. "The second was a four-eyed wimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny rifle," a witness recalled. This represented the kind of armed forces the bean-counters would allow.
"Finally there was GI Joe himself, 190lb of fighting man, all decked out in helmet and flak jacket and pointing an M60 machine gun." Reagan was in no doubt which version he preferred. "It was so intellectually disreputable, so demeaning, that I could hardly believe that a Harvard-educated cabinet officer could have brought this to the president of the United States," wrote David Stockman, supreme budget-cutter of the administration.
But Weinberger knew exactly what he was doing. Any fears that Reagan might concede to spending restrictions, despite the president's own anxiety for stronger armed forces, were gone. Defence spending under Weinberger would go up by 50 per cent; he added 90 ships to the navy and two divisions to the army, brought in the B-1 bomber programme and other new weapons systems for the air force.
Weinberger, who also had prominent roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations, died last week aged 88 in a hospital in Bangor, Maine, with his wife Jane, son Caspar jnr and daughter Arlin by his side.
A native Californian, and son of a lawyer, Weinberger earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Harvard in 1938 and 1941. A few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7th, 1941, he entered the army as a private in the infantry and served in the South Pacific, becoming an officer on Gen Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff. He left the army in 1945 with the rank of captain. During the war, he met army nurse Jane Dalton aboard ship - the couple married in 1942.
When Reagan was elected governor in 1966, Weinberger was made California's director of finance in 1968. But he soon left for Washington as President Nixon's head of the Federal Trade Commission and then director of the Office of Management and Budget.
After the 1972 election gave Nixon a second term, Weinberger secured a cabinet post as secretary of health, education and welfare. When Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, President Ford retained Weinberger in that post. Following Gerald Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Weinberger went to work at Bechtel Corp, a defence company in San Francisco.
But by 1981, he was back in Washington when Reagan made him secretary of defence. Throughout his career at the Pentagon, Weinberger faced many opponents of his military build-up in the Reagan administration including Secretary of State George Shultz, who later wrote: "To Weinberger, as I heard him, our forces were to be constantly built up but not used."
Weinberger developed the "Weinberger doctrine" - a set of six tests for when American troops should be deployed. Among the tests were the support of the American people, the willingness to employ overwhelming force and the use of forces as "a last resort".
Weinberger said he produced the policy on the uses of military power because of his strong disapproval of US policy in Vietnam. "Some thought it was incongruous that I did so much to build up our defences but was reluctant to commit forces abroad," Weinberger later wrote. "I did not arm to attack . . . We armed so that we could negotiate from strength, defend freedom and make war less likely."During his time in the Pentagon, defence spending reached $300 billion a year.
Although initially a sceptic, Weinberger also strongly defended another of Reagan's proposals - the controversial Strategic Defence Initiative. SDI, commonly known as "Star Wars", soaked up an estimated $17 billion of the defence budget. It was abandoned by President Clinton in the 1990s, although more recently President Bush has made some efforts to revive it. He opposed reducing nuclear weapons, although he was eventually overruled when Reagan sought a partnership in arms control with Soviet President Gorbachev.
In 1987, as Weinberger was leaving defence, Reagan presented him with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour a president can give. A complex figure, Weinberger faced indictment years after leaving Washington over the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, the Reagan administration's sale of arms to Iran in the hope that such a deal would help win the release of American hostages. The complicated scandal also involved the diversion of profits from the sale to support rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Negotiating with terrorists was against American policy and aid to the rebels was banned by Congress. He was pardoned by President George HW Bush.
Weinberger, who ironically had strongly opposed the Iranian arms sale, maintained in his memoir that he "did not lie to investigators about the state of my recollection". After government, Weinberger concentrated on writing, mainly about defence matters.
Always interested in journalism, he also at various times moderated a public affairs programme on a San Francisco television station, wrote a newspaper column and did a radio commentary. He also joined the business periodical, Forbes, as publisher and then chairman, and wrote a column.
Caspar Willard Weinberger: born August 18th, 1917, died March 28th, 2006.