The incident is already a Pentagon legend. On one of his first days as Secretary of Defense, Caspar W. Weinberger, 63, arrived at his desk to find a report giving the reasons for a single budget item; it was 2,916 pages long. Weinberger hit the roof, to the extent that his easygoing temper can fly. He called for an all-out war on the stultifying proliferation of paper and procedures throughout the department. As a senior official put it, the bureaucratic problem of putting together a budget had become so imposing that "the numbers were...
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