Mar. 28, 2006 (AP)

By Claudia Luther
Special to The Times

March 28, 2006, 1:38 PM EST

Caspar W. Weinberger, the anti-Soviet hawk who oversaw the nation's huge peacetime defense buildup as the secretary of Defense during most of President Ronald Reagan's two terms, died today. He was 88.

Weinberger had been hospitalized in Bangor, Maine for about a week with a high fever and pneumonia, his son Caspar Weinberger Jr. told the Associated Press. Jane Weinberger, his wife of 63 years, was with him at the time of his death.

"I was deeply disturbed to learn of the death of a great American and a dear friend," former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Associated Press. "Cap Weinberger was an indefatigable fighter for peace through strength. He served his nation in war and peace in so many ways."

As the nation's 15th defense secretary, Weinberger doggedly opposed reducing nuclear weapons, although he was eventually overruled when Reagan sought a partnership in arms control with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Still, the Defense Department under Weinberger increased defense spending by 50%, adding 90 ships to the Navy and two divisions to the Army, as well as the B-1 bomber and other new weapons systems to the Air Force.

A native Californian, Weinberger's long career in public service began with a stint in the state Assembly in the 1950s and included prominent roles in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations before Reagan named him secretary of Defense in 1981. Weinberger had the second-longest tenure in the post after Robert S. McNamara, who served as secretary of Defense during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.

A complex figure, Weinberger was a hawk who also opposed excessive use of military force, earning him such high-level opponents in the Reagan administration as Secretary of State George P. Shultz, with whom Weinberger often tangled on defense issues.

"To Weinberger, as I heard him, our forces were to be constantly built up but not used," Shultz wrote in his memoirs.

Weinberger and Shultz's biggest dispute came in the early 1980s when Reagan deployed U.S. forces in Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping team trying to quell the civil war there. Shultz was a strong advocate of this deployment while Weinberger initially objected, believing that U.S. participation was not vital to U.S. interests and that there was not a carefully defined objective.

In October 1983, 241 servicemen were killed in a suicide truck bombing at a Marine barracks in Beirut — the worst single casualty toll for the U.S. military since the Vietnam War.

However, Weinberger did endorse the invasion of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada that same month, where a buildup of Cuban military forces was feared. That operation, while criticized by some as a diversion from the Lebanon debacle, helped restore a sense of confidence in the U.S. military.

A few years later, in April 1986, Weinberger backed the U.S. strike against Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi for two incidents: firing missiles at U.S. airplanes flying over the disputed Gulf of Sidra and the terrorist bombing — blamed on Kadafi — of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen that left one American dead.

The next year, during the summer of 1987, Weinberger supported Reagan's decision to offer American help — including the protection of the U.S. flag — to Kuwaiti oil tankers that feared attacks by Iranians in the Persian Gulf.

During those years, Weinberger developed and put into use 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 had formulated the policy on the uses of military power because of his strong disapproval of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

"Some thought it was incongruous that I did so much to build up our defenses but was reluctant to commit forces abroad," Weinberger wrote in "In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century" (with Gretchen Roberts, 2001). But, he added: "I did not arm to attack We armed so that we could negotiate from strength, defend freedom and make war less likely."

While widely endorsed by political conservatives and many in the defense establishment, Shultz dismissed the doctrine as "a counsel of inaction bordering on paralysis."

"There had to be some way to deal with violent threats that lay between doing nothing or launching an all-out conventional war," Shultz said. "The idea that force should be used 'only as a last resort' means that, by the time of use, force is the only resort and likely a much more costly one than if used earlier."

Weinberger's doctrine evolved into the "Powell Doctrine" when it was reformulated by Powell — who had been a military advisor to Weinberger in the Pentagon and later was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush's and secretary of State during President Bush's first term.

During Weinberger's time in the Pentagon, defense spending reached $300 billion a year before leveling out. By some estimates, this peacetime defense buildup exceeded that for the Vietnam War.

Among the major items pushed by Weinberger were the MX missile and the B-1 bomber — costly initiatives that Reagan considered essential to the development and delivery of the Pentagon's nuclear force.

Although initially a skeptic, Weinberger strongly defended another of Reagan's proposals — the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposed space-based defense against ballistic missiles that has not proven to be workable.

SDI, commonly known as "Star Wars," soaked up what one defense expert estimated as $17 billion of the defense budget. It was abandoned by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, although President Bush has made efforts to revive it.

Weinberger was among the hard-liners in the Reagan administration to oppose most efforts at arms control agreements, but, urged on by Shultz and others, the president went ahead. Starting with a summit in Geneva in 1985, Reagan met with Gorbachev, and in 1987 the two leaders agreed to major weapons cutbacks that greatly altered the relationship between the two countries and hastened the end of the Cold War.

While at the time loyally praising the 1987 agreement as "very good," Weinberger told the New York Times shortly afterward that "the fact that Gorbachev came and didn't throw his shoes at anybody" may have been promising, but: "He's got claws, and every once in a while those claws come out. He remembers to retract them, but it's like a person who has learned to speak very carefully, very well, and then every once in a while resorts to a guttural brogue.''

That same year, as Weinberger was leaving Defense, Reagan presented him with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can give. But years after leaving the Pentagon, Weinberger was indicted in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal that had dogged the Reagan administration's second term.

The 1992 indictment charged Weinberger with lying during congressional and criminal investigations of Iran-Contra — 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.

Weinberger, who ironically had strongly opposed the Iranian arms sale, maintained that he "did not lie to investigators about the state of my recollection" in his book "In the Arena."

However, before the trial could convene in 1993, President George H.W. Bush granted pardons to Weinberger and several others in the Reagan administration who had been indicted by the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh.

In granting Weinberger's pardon, Bush declared him "a true American patriot who has rendered long and extraordinary service to our country."

The scandal left a mark on an otherwise stellar career that had culminated with Weinberger's years beside Reagan during the final years of the Cold War.

Caspar Willard Weinberger was born Aug. 18, 1917, in San Francisco, the son of a lawyer. Many people assumed that because of his name, the family was Jewish, but "Cap," as his father nicknamed him, was raised as an Episcopalian — his mother's faith.

A sickly child with persistent ear infections, Weinberger turned to books and playing mock battles with tin soldiers atop his bed. He had an early and strong interest in politics, following political conventions closely on the radio and attending campaign rallies with his father. He said the congressional record was his bedtime reading and, even as a child, he thought of himself as a Republican, like his father.

Weinberger earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Harvard University in 1938 and 1941. A few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Weinberger entered the Army as a private in the infantry and served in the South Pacific during World War II. According to an official Pentagon biography, he was an officer on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff. He left the Army in 1945 with the rank of captain.

His experiences in the military would inform his later years at the Pentagon.

"I was trained on a wooden rifle with a little block of wood labeled `hand grenade,'" he told the Indianapolis Journal & Courier in 2002. "I just determined that if I had anything to do with it, I wouldn't want to have that kind of lack of training that we had at that time."

During the war, he met Army nurse Jane Dalton aboard a ship on the way to the South Pacific. The couple married in 1942 and had a daughter, Arlin, and a son, Caspar Jr. All survive Weinberger, as do several grandchildren.

After the war, Weinberger returned to San Francisco as a law clerk to an appeals court judge before joining a law firm. He was more interested in politics and, in 1952, he won a seat in the state Assembly representing a San Francisco area district.

In 1958, Weinberger ran in the GOP primary for state attorney general, but lost and returned to law practice. He kept a hand in politics as chairman of the state Republican Party, gaining a reputation as a true believer in conservative principles.

Always interested in journalism — at Harvard, he was editor of the Crimson, the college's daily newspaper — he at various times moderated a public affairs program on a San Francisco television station, wrote a newspaper column and did a radio commentary.

When Reagan was elected governor in 1966, Weinberger joined his administration, first as a member of the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state panel that evaluates government for lawmakers, and, in 1968, as California's director of finance.

It was not long before Weinberger made the jump to Washington as Nixon's choice to head the Federal Trade Commission. He later served as deputy director and then director of the newly formed Office of Management and Budget.

At OMB, Weinberger's special targets were the Great Society programs put in place by Nixon's Democratic predecessor, Johnson. Weinberger carried out his mandate at OMB with such energy that William Safire, then a presidential speechwriter, dubbed him "Cap the Knife." The nickname stuck.

After the 1972 election gave Nixon a second term, the president moved Weinberger to a Cabinet post as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. When Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal, Ford retained Weinberger in that post.

After Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Weinberger went to work at Bechtel Corp., a defense contractor in the San Francisco Bay Area. By 1981, he was back in Washington when Reagan, who defeated Carter, tapped him for what would be the most important post of his career: secretary of Defense.

Alarmed about estimates of Soviet military strength, Reagan asked his old friend to oversee an immense expansion of military might. Weinberger enthusiastically complied, earning a new nickname — Cap the Ladle — as he spearheaded Reagan's "peace through strength" policy.

"The price of peace and freedom is high, but whatever it costs, it's worth it," he told the Washington Post in 1983. He later wrote in "In the Arena": "I felt that I was able to make a difference and perhaps help set our nation on a more stable, secure course than it had previously been following."

After nearly seven years in the E Ring of the Pentagon, Weinberger, citing his wife's health, left his post in 1987. Five years later, he was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal.

When the idea of trading arms for hostages was proposed, Weinberger said he had requested a meeting with Reagan during which he expressed his "very strong objection" to the Iran operation. He later told an aide that he believed "this baby had been strangled in its cradle."

The arms sale continued, pushed by national security advisors Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter, as well as Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, a staff assistant to the National Security Council.

In the indictment, independent counsel Walsh accused Weinberger of saying he did not know whether the sale of Hawk missiles to Iran was going to take place when, Walsh said, the secretary's personal notes indicated that he did know.

Weinberger spent the rest of his life fuming about having had his integrity questioned by Walsh, calling the charges against him "misguided" and "reckless."

After leaving the federal government, Weinberger became publisher and later chairman of Forbes, the business periodical, for which he also wrote a column. Besides "In the Arena," he wrote "Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon" (1990) and, with Peter Schweizer, "The Next War" (1996), which outlined five possible scenarios in which the U.S. would again go to war.

Also with Schweizer, he wrote the 2005 fiction thriller, "Chain of Command." The New York Times, in reviewing the book, called it "gripping."