Cap Weinberger: Reagan left Marines exposed in Beirut

Reagan's former defense secretary says that he pleaded with Reagan to move Marines to a safer position but lost the argument to those who say that Marines "do not cut and run."

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former defense secretary for Ronald Reagan says he implored the president to put Marines serving in Beirut in a safer position before terrorists attacked them in 1983, killing 241 servicemen.

   

"I was not persuasive enough to persuade the president that the Marines were there on an impossible mission," Caspar Weinberger says in an oral history project capturing the views of former Reagan administration officials.

    Recollections of an initial 25 Reagan aides were released this week by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Altogether, scholars interviewed 45 Cabinet members, White House staffers and campaign advisers in a project begun in 2001, when Reagan was secluded with advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. Reagan died in June 2004 at the age of 93.

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    But he said one of his greatest regrets was in failing to overcome the arguments that "'Marines don't cut and run,' and 'We can't leave because we're there'" before the devastating suicide attack on the lightly armed force.

    "They had no mission but to sit at the airport, which is just like sitting in a bull's-eye," Weinberger said. "I begged the president at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position."