Warner's aides from that time, during the Vietnam War, remember little about the war issues he handled. What they do recall vividly is Warner the personality: his stylish European suits; his marriage to one of the country's wealthiest women, banking heir Catherine Mellon; and his commanding yet nurturing manner.

Tom Marfiak, a Navy lieutenant who served as Warner's special assistant, recalls attending a high-level meeting one day. Awestruck by all the four-star generals and admirals there, Marfiak said, he ended up sitting on his sleeves to hide his low-ranking two bars. Warner barked, "Marfiak! Are you sitting on your sleeves?" He replied that he was. "Well, put your arms up on the table where everyone can see them," Warner told him. "You may be a lieutenant, but you're my lieutenant."

Warner had great respect for rules and tradition, but he was also a pragmatist who would defy the playbook when his judgment told him better. In 1972, he extended the term of naval operations chief Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr., who was roiling the service with his aggressive racial integration programs. "He realized, as Zumwalt did, that the Navy needed to change," Marfiak said of Warner. "So he linked elbows with Adm. Zumwalt and said, 'We've got to go fix this.' And fix it they did."

Greenwood, who worked for Warner at the Department of Defense for five years, recalled that his boss had once been asked to sack a warrant officer who'd been caught in a three-way sexual encounter with a married couple. Navy rules required the warrant officer's dismissal, but Warner considered the man's consensual sexual relations with adults a private matter that had no bearing on his public duties. "He wasn't afraid to make an exception to the rule," Greenwood said. "The incident had no impact on the Navy, nor was it a public scandal. But if Warner had gone solely by the book, it would have been like sentencing some kid to 10 years in prison when the most he needed was a whipping."

Also toiling away for Secretary Warner in the early 1970s was a young Navy officer named John Poindexter. A computer expert, Poindexter had devised a new electronic tracking system for correspondence that was revolutionizing the secretary's office. He was quiet and hardworking, and Warner -- as with everybody -- appeared to get along splendidly with him, other former aides said. Poindexter and Warner parted ways in 1974, when Warner left the secretary's job amid the aftershocks of Watergate. But they would meet again.

By then, Warner's marriage to Mellon had ended, but the parting was amicable, no doubt smoothed by a $3 million divorce settlement for Warner. In 1976, Warner married actor Elizabeth Taylor. Two years later, he lost the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate to conservative activist Richard Obenshain. When Obenshain died in a plane crash, leaders of Virginia's Republican Party reluctantly turned to Warner in the general election, expecting that in return he would adhere to conservative orthodoxy. But Warner would frequently disappoint them on such core issues as abortion, taxes and gun control.

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