One week after being sworn in as secretary of defense, William S. Cohen held his first news conference. Cohen’s opening statement — his first substantial public remarks as manager of the most powerful military force in history — contained a total of 902 words. Cohen devoted 74 of those words to the Chemical Weapons Convention, 31 to the Pentagon’s quadrennial defense review, and 14 to “modernizing our arsenal.” He gave “the challenges of tomorrow” 21. He uttered not a word about Bosnia, China, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, or SDI. Instead, the bulk of Cohen’s statement concerned a primetime magazine show he had recently seen on television.
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