William Cohen
William Sebastian Cohen is an American lawyer, author, and politician from the U.S. state of Maine. A Republican, Cohen served as both a member of the United States House of Representatives and Senate, and as Secretary of Defense under Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Described as "a Republican moderate from Maine" and "something of a maverick centrist" by David Halberstam, Cohen had very good working relations with President Clinton and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and an "almost ideal" collaboration with the Joint Chiefs of Staff; however he often clashed with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whom he saw as "a grandstander, too outspoken on policy matters, and too eager to use military force."
Early life and education
Cohen was born in Bangor, Maine. His mother, Clara, was of Protestant Irish ancestry, and his father, Reuben Cohen, was born in New York and was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant; the two owned the Bangor Rye Bread Co.Pursuant to his father's wishes, Cohen was raised Jewish, attended a synagogue, and also attended Hebrew School in preparation for his bar mitzvah, but he decided not to follow through with his bar mitzvah when he was informed that he would have to convert formally to Judaism, and he began to practice Christianity.
After graduating from Bangor High School in 1958, Cohen attended Bowdoin College, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin in 1962. While a student at Bowdoin, Cohen was initiated as a brother of the Kappa chapter of the Psi Upsilon fraternity.
While in high school and college, Cohen was a basketball player and was named to the Maine all-state high school and college basketball team, and at Bowdoin was inducted into the New England All-Star Hall of Fame. Cohen attended law school at the Boston University School of Law, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree cum laude in 1965.
Legal, academic, and early political career
He became an assistant county attorney for Penobscot County. In 1968 he became an instructor at Husson College in Bangor, and later was an instructor in business administration at the University of Maine.Cohen served as the vice president of the Maine Trial Lawyers Association and as a member of the Bangor School Board. He became a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in 1972, and in 1975 was named as one of the U.S. Jaycee's "ten outstanding young men."
Cohen was elected to the Bangor City Council and served as Bangor Mayor in 1971–1972.
House of Representatives and Senate
In the 1972 election, Cohen won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Maine's 2nd congressional district, succeeding Democrat William Hathaway, who was elected to the US Senate. Cohen defeated Democratic State Senator Elmer H. Violette of Van Buren.During his first term in Congress, Cohen was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee, where he participated in the 1974 impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon. He was one of the first Republicans on the committee to support impeaching Nixon. During this time, Time magazine named him one of "America's 200 Future Leaders". In July 1974, he said,
File:President Ronald Reagan meeting with Senators Joe Biden and William Cohen.jpg|thumb|right|Cohen with President Ronald Reagan and then-Senator Joe Biden in 1984
After three terms in the House, Cohen was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978, defeating incumbent William Hathaway in his first bid for reelection. Cohen was reelected in 1984 and 1990, serving a total of 18 years in the Senate. In 1990, he defeated Democrat Neil Rolde. Cohen developed a reputation as a moderate Republican with liberal views on social issues and has been described as "a career-long maverick with a reputation for fashioning compromise out of discord."
In 1994 Cohen investigated the federal government's process for acquiring information technology, and his report, Computer Chaos: Billions Wasted Buying Federal Computer Systems, generated much discussion. He chose not to run for another Senate term in 1996; Susan Collins, who had worked for Cohen, was elected to succeed him.
While in the Senate, Cohen served on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Governmental Affairs Committee and was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee 1983–1991 and again 1995–1997, serving as Vice Chairman from 1987 to 1991. He also participated in the drafting of several notable laws related to defense matters, including the Competition in Contracting Act, the Montgomery G.I. Bill Act, the Goldwater–Nichols Act, the Intelligence Oversight Reform Act, the Federal Acquisition Reform Act, the Nunn–Cohen Act Amendment creating the United States Special Operations Command, and the Information Technology Management Reform Act, also known as the Clinger–Cohen Act. Cohen voted in favor of the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987. Cohen voted in favor of the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Secretary of Defense
On December 5, 1996, President Bill Clinton announced his selection of Cohen as Secretary of Defense, saying that he was the "right person" to build on the achievements of retiring secretary William Perry "to secure the bipartisan support America's armed forces must have and clearly deserve." As Secretary of Defense Cohen played a large role in directing the United States military actions in Iraq and Kosovo, including the dismissal of Wesley Clark from his post as the NATO Supreme Allied Commander. Both Operation Desert Fox in Iraq and Operation Allied Force in Kosovo were launched just months after al-Qaeda carried out the United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998.Confirmation
During his confirmation hearings, Cohen said he thought he might differ with Clinton on specific national security issues on occasion. He implicitly criticized the Clinton administration for lacking a clear strategy for leaving Bosnia and stated that he thought U.S. troops should definitely be out by mid-1998. He also asserted that he would resist further budget cuts, retain the two regional conflicts strategy, and support spending increases for advanced weapons, even if it necessitated further cuts in military personnel. Cohen questioned whether savings from base closings and acquisition reform could provide enough money for procurement of new weapons and equipment that the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought necessary in the next few years. He supported the expansion of NATO and looked on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the most serious problem the United States faced.After confirmation by a unanimous Senate vote, Cohen was sworn in as the 20th Secretary of Defense on January 24, 1997. He then settled into a schedule much fuller than he had followed in the Senate. Routinely he arrived at the Pentagon before 7 a.m., received an intelligence briefing, and then met with the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The rest of the day he devoted to policy and budget briefings, visits with foreign and other dignitaries, and to what he termed "ABC" meetings at the White House with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger as well as President Bill Clinton. He also traveled abroad several times during his first months in office.
Defense budget
One of Cohen's first major duties was to present to Congress the fiscal year 1998 defense budget, which had been prepared under Secretary Perry. Cohen requested a $250.7 billion budget, which represented 3 percent of the nation's estimated gross domestic product for FY 1998. Cohen stressed three top budget priorities: people, readiness, and modernization. This meant increasing the funds available for procurement of new systems, with the target set at $60 billion by FY2001.When he presented the FY1998 budget, Cohen noted that he would involve himself with the Quadrennial Defense Review, which would focus on the challenges to U.S. security and the nation's military needs over the next decade or more. When the QDR became public in May 1997, it did not fundamentally alter the military's budget, structure, and doctrine. Many defense experts thought it gave insufficient attention to new forms of warfare, such as terrorist attacks, electronic sabotage, and the use of chemical and biological agents. Cohen stated that the Pentagon would retain the "two regional wars" scenario adopted after the end of the Cold War. He decided to scale back purchases of jet fighters, including the Air Force's F-22 Raptor and the Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, as well as Navy surface ships. The review included cutting another 61,700 active duty service members—15,000 in the Army, 26,900 in the Air Force, 18,000 in the Navy, and 1,800 in the Marine Corps, as well as 54,000 reserve forces, mainly in the Army National Guard, and some 80,000 civilians department-wide. Cohen also recommended two more rounds of base closings in 1999 and 2001. The Pentagon hoped to save $15 billion annually over the next few years to make possible the purchase of new equipment and weapon systems without a substantial budget increase above the current level of $250 billion.
International relations and situations
Cohen faced the question of the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which he supported and its relationship to Russia. At a summit meeting between President Clinton and Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki, Finland, in March 1997, Yeltsin acknowledged the inevitability of broader NATO membership. Two months later he agreed, after negotiations with NATO officials, to sign an accord providing for a new permanent council. The council would include Russia, the NATO secretary general, and a representative of the other NATO nations, to function as a forum in which Russia could air a wide range of security issues which it was concerned about. Formal signing of this agreement would pave the way for a July 1997 invitation from NATO to several nations, probably including Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to join the organization.File:Defense.gov News Photo 990617-D-2987S-003.jpg|thumb|Cohen mediating the Kosovo crisis with President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari and Russian defense ministers at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, in 1999
The proposed U.S. missile defense system received attention at the Helsinki summit, where Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to an interpretation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty allowing the United States to proceed with a limited missile defense system currently under development. Specifically, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to distinguish between a national missile defense system, aimed against strategic weapons, not allowed by the ABMT, and a theater missile defense system to guard against shorter range missile attacks. Some critics thought that any agreement of this kind would place undesirable limits on the development of both theater and strategic missile defenses. The Helsinki meeting also saw progress in arms control negotiations between the United States and Russia, a matter high on Cohen's agenda. Yeltsin and Clinton agreed on the need for early Russian ratification of the Second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and negotiation of START III to make further significant cuts in the strategic nuclear arsenals of both nations.
File:Yoshiro Mori meets William Cohen 2.jpg|thumb|right|225px|Cohen and Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori pose for photographers prior to their meeting at the Kantei building in Tokyo, on September 22, 2000.
At least until mid-1998, the continuation of the existing peacekeeping mission involving U.S. forces in Bosnia and the possibility that other such missions would arise worried Cohen, who earlier had expressed reservations about such operations. Humanitarian efforts that did not involve peacekeeping, such as in Rwanda in the recent past, also seemed likely. Other persistent national security problems, including tension with Iraq in the Persian Gulf area, Libya in North Africa, and North Korea in East Asia, could flare up again, as could the Arab–Israeli conflict.
In preparing future budgets, the challenge would be to find the right mix between money for operation and maintenance accounts on the one hand and modernization procurement funds on the other, while facing the prospect of a flat DoD budget of about $250 billion annually for the next decade or so. A relatively new problem that could affect the DoD budget was vertical integration in the defense industry. It occurred on a large scale in the 1990s as mergers of major defense contractors created a few huge dominant companies, particularly in the aerospace industry. They were called vertical because they incorporated most of the elements of the production process, including parts and subcomponents. Cohen and other Pentagon leaders began to worry that vertical integration could reduce competition and in the long run increase the costs of what the Department of Defense had to buy.