SEN. DALE BUMPERS: I don't know anybody who ever tries to kill a weapons system or bring some sanity to defense spending that ever wins. I can only remember two or three weapons systems in my 23 years in the Senate that we have ever stopped. They take on a life of their own, and the minute Congress starts looking at them, the manufacturers start running full-page ads in every newspaper and magazine in the United States, giving the American people the impression that we will be so seriously threatened if we don't build that particular weapons system.

NARRATOR: Senator Dale Bumpers is a principled opponent of wasteful government spending and proliferation of the arms race. He once accused Ronald Reagan of not wanting "to spend money on anything that doesn't explode". Today, after more than 25 years of public service, Dale Bumpers remains a passionate defender of the taxpayer when it comes to military spending.

SEN. BUMPERS: Yesterday CNN poll, today CBS poll--show an increase in defense spending is just about the lowest priority of the American people.

NARRATOR: During his 24 years as a popular, Democrat Senator, the former two-term Arkansas governor has earned the esteem of his colleagues for his integrity, his honesty and his good humor. Arkansas voters demonstrated their approval by returning him to Washington three times with landslide re-election victories. Known as a compelling orator, Senator Bumpers has repeatedly and eloquently condemned what he views as irresponsible government spending at the taxpayer's expense.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Senator Bumpers was one of the first to call for an appropriate response by government: an end to the arms race and a reduction in military spending.

SEN. BUMPERS: Today the Soviet Union has been dissolved. It does not exist anymore. The military forces of Russia are in shambles. And we are appropriating $268 billion. What are we thinking about? Not an enemy in sight.

NARRATOR: Senator Bumpers has always advocated a modern military prepared to meet the dangers that America confronts. His service as a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II added to his understanding of the debate, yet he remains staunchly opposed to costly and unnecessary weapons programs such as the F22 fighter plane. He is still fighting to eliminate Star Wars, a costly endeavor that he calls "the biggest ongoing scam in America." Unlike many of his political colleagues who take a hands-off approach to the military budget for fear of being criticized at election time, Senator Bumpers has refused to soften his stance against wasteful military spending.

SEN. BUMPERS: I am not running again, so I am not worried about somebody accusing me of being soft on defense. That has always been the mortal fear of Members of the Senate when you are voting on weapons systems, that their opponent in the next election will accuse them of being soft on defense. Sometimes I think we should be accused of being soft in the head.

NARRATOR: After more than a quarter of a century of public service, Senator Bumpers has announced he will not seek re-election at the end of his 4th Senate term. Talking with America's Defense Monitor recently, he reflected on his political career and shared his hard-earned insights on government spending, arms control and the nature of American politics.

INTERVIEWER: I'd like to start by thanking you for taking the time to speak with us today. You were a Marine in World War II and you were headed to the Pacific towards the end of the war.

SEN. BUMPERS: We just sailed from North Island in San Diego on a sort of a miniature aircraft carrier. I didn't realize how luxurious that was until I came home on a troop transport. But in any event, the war ended about the time, just about halfway between San Diego and Hawaii. And so we pulled into Hawaii and that's where I spent the rest of the time. The war was over and I stayed there about ten or 11 months I guess, before I got to come home.

INTERVIEWER: So after the war, you returned home and you were a private citizen for a number of years. What was it that you got you interested in the idea of public service and public life?

SEN. BUMPERS: Oh, that was at a very tender age by my father. My father, in this little town of about 800 people at the time, my father expected me to be on the courthouse lawn when the politicians came through town. He served in the legislature and so we were a political family. We discussed state, national, international politics and affairs at the dinner table every evening. When candidates for governor, senator, congressman, whatever, came through town, my father expected me to be there from the time I was eight years old on. And he also expected me at the dinner table to be able his questions about who I liked, why I liked them, if I didn't like them, why didn't I like them.

But he really instilled a deep sense of responsibility in us about public service and our civic responsibilities and I've done that with my children. And unhappily, my father may be the last man who ever lived who encouraged his children to go into politics.

INTERVIEWER: Well, you, yourself, have had some comments in reflecting on your plan not to seek reelection about how politics has replaced statecraft in electoral government. To what do you attribute these changes?

SEN. BUMPERS: I think the biggest change has been that campaigns are prohibitively expensive now. When I ran for governor the first time, there were eight Democrats in the Democratic Primary and I got into the runoff. And at the time, I had spent $90,000.00 and really, the rest of it was pretty much a walk. I think we probably spent maybe $200,000.00 for the whole year in a gubernatorial race against Win Rockefeller who was, you know, a very wealthy man. And today, that would be laughable, for somebody to consider running for president -- for governor for $200,000.00 or running for the United States Senate. My Senate race in 1974 cost me $300,000.00 and if I had run again this year, it would have cost me a minimum of three and a half to four million.

And what I'm saying is with the cost of running for office, most of which is television -- about 80 percent of most people's campaigns go for television, which just keeps getting more and more expensive -- people are going to have to be very careful about how they vote. Because if you vote wrong and against the monied interests too many times, you're not going to raise three or $4 million dollars. If you're from New York, you're not going to raise 15 or 20 million or in California, you're not going to raise 20 or 25 million. So you have to be looking over your shoulder in every vote to see where the money's coming from. That's not intended to be a pejorative statement or a condemnation of my colleagues; it is a simple political fact.

INTERVIEWER: As senator during your 20 some odd years here, you've been a leader on a number of important issues. For example, you've been active, very active in efforts to cut the world's nuclear arsenal.

SEN. BUMPERS: I've always believed that the numbers game -- I can remember my wife, Betty, was a third grade teacher and she refused to teach her children duck and cover. Now she's not a chemist or a physicist or a scientist, but she had enough sense to know that duck and cover was the silliest thing anybody ever thought up. You know, if you were anyplace close to where an atomic bond drops, you can duck and cover all you want to, but you're still going to be fried. And it was designed to convince people that nuclear war was eminently survivable and particularly if you had more nuclear weapons than your opponent had. And so the Russians, the leadership in Russia were trying to convince their people of the same thing.

And so this game began and the escalation of the number of nuclear weapons had continued to escalate and it was absolute madness. And yet, the American people and the Russian people each believed that whoever had the most nuclear weapons was going to prevail in the next war. And the more I thought about this kind of madness the more I realized somebody ought to be speaking for sanity, somebody ought to be talking about getting rid of these things or at least reducing the number, you know, exponentially.

And it's just tragic that the military-industrial complex in this country, they have a public relations operation that's second to none, and they help, as well as -- you know, some politicians actually believe this, I guess, and others find it to their political advantage to keep people scared to death all the time. And so instead of trying to address that fright and the ominousness of an all out nuclear war, people found it to their political advantage and the military-industrial complex found it to their economic advantage to continue frightening people. And so when I came here, I came here with the express intention of doing everything I could to bring some sanity to the nuclear arms race.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned the role of the military-industrial complex both in shaping our policy in terms of planning and procurement. How do you feel we need to address the situation in order to balance out their influence?

SEN. BUMPERS: You know, that's a very difficult thing to do because they also contribute lots of money in campaigns and I've already said, you know, the role that plays and how important it is. So people who don't have money to contribute to campaigns are really at a decided disadvantage in trying to convince people that the military-industrial complex has a very -- it's an economic agenda that's quite different oftentimes from reasonableness and sanity.

You know, I have a speech I used to make sometimes, that Robert E. Lee was not very crazy about the idea of the Civil War. But when it was over and he was gone from Appomattox back to Richmond, he stopped one day and he said, "You know, this war could have been avoided," and he said the politicians caused it. And he goes through this sort of soliloquy about how the war should and could have been avoided. But my thought is why was Robert E. Lee not out on the cutting edge saying that at the beginning of the war, instead of at the end?

Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech was not made in his first inauguration; it was made in his exit from the presidency after two terms. How beautiful it would have been with all the power that he carried into that office, the respect and the esteem that he was held in, if he'd have made that speech in his first inauguration.

INTERVIEWER: Why is it you that feel that the bloated military-industrial complex is such a problem? What are the ramifications for us as a nation if the current trends in spending and planning continue?

SEN. BUMPERS: Well, this country has unbelievable problems and most of the problems cost a lot of money. And when we're spending as much as we are on defense, which in my opinion, you know, is billions and billions more than is necessary, what you're doing is you're slurping up money that could be spent in ways that would make the country actually greater. Your defense budget ought to be enough to make sure that you have enough military spending to implement your foreign policy and to protect this nation against all comers, foreign and domestic. That's fine. We have much more than that now.

So what do we have in education? We have a terrible shortfall in education. What do we have in medical research? The Institutes of Health can only fund about 27 percent of all the good applications they get for medical research. And when I think of the roughly million to two million homeless people on the streets of this country that we're not doing anything about because we don't have the money

And so I don't know, that's the reason I vote for everything on education I can find. Education is the key to everything, you must teach people to think. Otherwise, we're going to keep on -- Churchill said one time, it was a really funny statement, he said, "You can always depend on the American people to do the right thing after they've explored all the other possibilities." And if people are well educated and taught to think, you can bring a lot of this stuff under control. We're not doing a very good job of that.

And so when you ask me why is this such a momentous thing to me, about how bloated the military budget is, it is simply that there are other things that go to the heart of the greatness of this country other than how many tanks and planes and guns you have. And it's what kind of people we are, how well educated we are, how civilized we are, how we treat each other, all of those things, and health, the good health of the nation. And so we're sacrificing those things to a large degree in order to accommodate the number one thing on everybody's mind, that's defense. So that's one of the reasons I'm so violently concerned about it, is I see the strength of the nation can be sapped in more ways than not spending money on defense.

INTERVIEWER: One of the other aspects of the functioning of the military-industrial complex, as you've pointed out, is in promoting sales of U.S. weapons to foreign countries. And in fact, I believe you said that our weapons have a habit of outlasting our friendships around the world. What steps do you think we need to take to reduce the amount of emphasis that our corporations put on exports to foreign countries?

SEN. BUMPERS: Well, I've done everything I know to do in the past 23 years. Because in this room right here, the admirals and generals come and they sit before us and they say, "We can build this airplane for $50 million, but you know, if we can sell this airplane abroad and instead of making a thousand, make 2,000, sell the other thousand abroad, we can make them for 40 million." I may have said "thousand"; I meant millions. And so that's very appealing. Well, we can get these planes $10 million cheaper by selling them abroad. Now that's one of the traditional classic ways that the industrial complex uses to get a weapon built, that we're going to sell it abroad and therefore, it's going to cut our costs. See, my thought has always been if it's that good a weapon, why do we want to share it with the rest of the world?

One of the first taxpayer rip-off junkets I took after I came to the Senate was to Iran. And I went out to this airport, this air force base in Iran, and here are all these F-14s on the tarmac and we're selling them to them right and left. So what happened? The Shah falls and who inherits the F-14s? One of our mortal enemies. We left Vietnam the third most powerful nation on earth, that's how much equipment we left in Vietnam.

But what we do is essentially compete with ourselves. We sell these airplanes and then they come before Congress and say, "Look, these people have this airplane." Well, it's our airplane, we sold it. But that's the rationale they used then to build the F-22 plane, you know, we've got to have something much better than that. So that's the way these arms sales --

I just recently wrote President Clinton about the decision to sell these weapons in South America. There's no earthly reason, no justification whatever to be selling these sophisticated weapons in South America.

INTERVIEWER: This is a reversal of a standing policy, longstanding policy.

SEN. BUMPERS: A longstanding policy and we're breaking it. And we're doing it because of the military-industrial complex influence.

INTERVIEWER: I'd like to shift gears just a little bit and talk a bit about Pentagon planning and policy. As you know, last year, the Pentagon released the quadrennial defense review which is the new centerpiece of Pentagon planning to take us into the next century. And it focuses to a large extent on the requirement for us to be able to fight two wars simultaneously, virtually simultaneously, without assistance of allies. Is this a realistic requirement? Because it is the cornerstone of Pentagon planning for about the next ten years.

SEN. BUMPERS: The idea that we have to fight two wars simultaneously I think is a real stretch in today's world. There might come a time when things are so unstable in the future that that might make sense. Right now, it makes no sense whatever. And so what are we doing? We're spending, we're spending -- the United States alone spends twice as much, you think about this, the United States alone spends twice as much as Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, I forget who else, what we call the eight rogue -- they're not rogue nations, that we just call the eight most likely enemies that we're able to face. We're spending twice as much as all of them combined. We're certainly not likely to have to fight all of them at one time.

And when you add NATO to that -- we spend $268 billion this year, 1998, we'll spend $268 billion. If you add NATO to it, it's 503 billion. Now that's 14 times more than the so-called rogue nations. That does not include China and Russia. If you add China and Russia to the mix, NATO and the United States together are spending four times as much as virtually the rest of the world combined.

Now you know, who favors a weak defense? Nobody favors a weak defense. But the problem here is -- you asked, this sort of goes back to an earlier question. People in the Senate are very reluctant to oppose the B2 bomber or the F-22 or the Sea Wolf submarine or to vote against the defense budget for fear their opponent in the next election will accuse them of being weak on defense. Sometimes, it's a very legal argument and yet, it's never bothered me very much, you know. I've gotten almost 60 percent of the vote every time I ran. I shouldn't say that, that sounds a little bit arrogant, I don't intend it to be.

What I'm saying is when you talk sense to people, they respond sensibly. You talk nonsense to them, oftentimes they respond nonsensically. But when you think about how bloated that defense budget is and how much more we're spending than the rest of the world, it's just absolutely unfathomable and we continue doing it.

INTERVIEWER: And yet, when you look at polling data of the American, a cross section of the American public, you find that on the issue of military spending, if you ask them are we spending too much, are we spending too little, are we spending about right, they tend to come back with the answer, "We're spending about right."

SEN. BUMPERS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Is that a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding about the issue?

SEN. BUMPERS: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. And this is not to denigrate the public, you know. Most of them are busy making their car payments and trying to educate their children and making their house payments and paying their grocery bills. They don't have time to delve deeply into are we spending too much or too little on defense. In the first place, it's a very complex argument and it should be, that argument should be made in the Senate in a very sensible debate. But we never really get a chance to debate it in a sensible way because we're just too busy getting it all passed and getting it out of the way.

I'm on the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations and I can tell you, when you start fighting in there about some of these weapons systems, I mean you know, you just get run over like a Mack truck hit you. It's what you'd sort of call a freebie. You can vote for all the defense spending you want to and it will never cost you a vote. It certainly will never cost you a vote from somebody who otherwise would have voted for you. It's just one of those things that if you say, "I have voted for a strong defense, I want American to be second to nobody in defense, in our strength," who's going to vote against that? So the debate, the real debate is put off to one side and we just keep adding billions and billions.

INTERVIEWER: Well, since the end of the cold war and the sort of dissolution of the Soviet Union, what was once the focal point of our foreign policy, as you've pointed out, has really disappeared. Beyond the impact of the military-industrial complex in shaping policy, what do you think are really the forces driving the way we view the rest of the world and dictating our foreign policy today?

SEN. BUMPERS: Well, I'll tell you, we have a very difficult time in America not having somebody to hate. I don't know that we're unique, I think maybe other nations suffer that same kind of schizophrenia. But you know, the Soviet Union was so handy for us for so many years, 70 years, and we spent so much of our political capital convincing the world that communism was terrible and that the Soviet Union was intent on world domination. And it's very difficult for us to go back on that now.

We're looking desperately for a new enemy, somebody to hate. My guess is China's going to be elected. But you know, you have to have somebody for a number of reasons. Psychologically, it comes in handy; number two, the military-industrial complex can't operate very well, unless they've got somebody to say, "There's the threat."

INTERVIEWER: Is there a role in the future for a United Nations or another international organization in responding to --

SEN. BUMPERS: We don't need another international organization, the United Nations is just fine. I'll tell you, some of the mail I get, you know, I can always tell when some lunatic has been on talk show radio and my mail starts coming in, you know, about the United Nations.

Isn't it interesting, it was the United Nations who approved Desert Storm. It was the United Nations, virtually every nation in the United Nations who fought with us in Desert Storm, including the Russians. If you think about for 70 years, we had convinced the world how terrible the Russians were and then all of a sudden, two years after the Soviet Union falls, they're fighting beside us in Iraq. They voted to go to war in the United Nations. Everybody in the United Nations voted to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

I don't know what more people want. You know, it's like religion; if you didn't have religion, you'd have to invent it. It's the same way with the United Nations; if you didn't have a United Nations, a world organization of nations, you'd have to invent one.

INTERVIEWER: So if you can project yourself into the future for a couple of years and look back, what would you like to leave behind as your legacy, not necessarily as a senator, but as a person?

SEN. BUMPERS: As a person who spoke out on issues that I thought really went to the very heart of this nation's existence, our continued existence, and the quality of lives that my children and grandchildren can expect from this nation. More than anything else, I think I have cast a lot, I've probably cast as many unpopular votes as anybody in the Senate. And by the very definition, an unpopular vote is a courageous vote because if it were popular, it wouldn't be a courageous vote. I've been one of four or five a lot of times and that's never bothered me in the least.

If I were going to look back, it would be because I have stood up for what I believed. I was the only southern senator to vote against the prayer in school amendment, which would have been a disaster for this nation. I always ask these kids what nation that has a religious state, like Iran or Iraq or any of the rest of them, "Which one of those countries do you want to live in?" And yet, that's where this so-called sponsored prayer in schools takes you, down that road. And I could go through a whole list of constitutional amendments.

I have defended the Constitution at every chance. I voted against 37 constitutional amendments since I've been in the Senate and for one and that one was a mistake, I wish I hadn't cast it. But people around here trivialize the Constitution. It's the document that's made this country great, it's made us free, the longest living organic law in the world, and yet, people around here treat it as though it's just a rough draft.

So as I look back, as I say, I cast courageous votes, I stood up for what I believed, and I've tried very hard to mind my ethics and my integrity to make sure that nobody could ever question either one of them. If you lose those or if those are under question, then you lose all your effectiveness here. I never have all that much effect, but I certainly wouldn't have had the effect I did have if I hadn't openly stated my mind and told people the truth as I saw it. So if I were going to look back on my career, that's what I would want people to remember me for.

INTERVIEWER: Senator Bumpers, thank you.

SEN. BUMPERS: Thank you...Of all the spending cuts over the next seven years, poor little ole non-defense discretionary spending: education, health care, law enforcement, you name it, takes 33 percent, 33 percent of the total spending cuts over the next seven years. The Senator said this is not about B2 versus Head Start. That is precisely what its about.