intheera

 IN THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS

LIES, ALL LIES

THIS WEEK I got my copy of Quotations From Chairman Ron, a handy, fresh compendium of Reagan howlers that was put together by Morton Mintz. Mintz is an excellent reporter for The Washington Post, and his effort goes right up on my shelf, taking an honored place next to Reagan for Beginners, by David Smith and Melinda Gebbie; There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error, by Mark Green and Gail MacColl; and Reagan Speaks, by Paul D. Erickson. In this corner of my library, I can readily put my hand on almost every damn-fool remark, cretinous simplification, historical falsehood, fatuous self-contradiction, “deniable” racist innuendo, pig-ignorant anecdote, sly misrepresentation, and senile discourtesy ever uttered by the village idiot now in occupation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This little retrieval system is, you might think, enough for my simple needs as a columnist. And yet, and yet … With the unappeasable dissatisfaction that is the mark of my kind, I crave just one more book. It could be fat or it could be slim, but it would have to say what the volumes above do not say. It would not dwell on Reagan the klutz or Reagan the ignoramus. It would make the point that hasn’t been made in six years of fixed press conferences and stage-managed interviews. Ronald Wilson Reagan is not (just) a hapless blooper merchant. He is a conscious, habitual liar.

Even the reporters who cover the President, and who get together to submit the regular “Reaganism of the Week” that adorns the bottom of Lou Cannon’ s column in The Washington Post every Monday, are a trifle shy about what stares them in the face. Cannon himself, who has seen more of the man than most, has gone no further than to say, “More disquieting than Reagan’s performance or prospects on specific issues is a growing suspicion that the President has only passing acquaintance with some of the most important decisions of his Administration.” That hardly counts even as a euphemism. In fact, the whole concept of a “Reaganism” is an affectionate collusion with the notion of a genial oldster who’s a bit out of his depth. The White House managers can live with that idea. Why, it even attracts sympathy. Many voters of all ages are sure they would fluff if they had to make speeches, meet foreign potentates, and face the allegedly adversary press.

But there is a difference between a lie and a slip, and you don’t have to be a Boy Scout to notice it. On November 29, 1983, Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he himself had assisted in the liberation of the Nazi death camps. On February 15, 1984, he repeated this claim to Simon Wiesenthal. On March 3, 1984, Cannon wrote a column confirming that both Shamir and Wiesenthal had heard the preposterous claim. Shamir had even retailed the story to the Israeli Cabinet, an incident corroborated by the Cabinet Secretary, Dan Meridor. In The Nation for March 4, 1985, Alexander Cockburn made some pithy comments on the claim in the light of Bitburg. Just after his column went to press, Reagan told a group of foreign journalists: “Yes, I know all about things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself.” Even the minor detail is a lie here: Reagan’s war service was notoriously confined to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps at the Hal Roach studios in Hollywood, where he never donned a uniform.

Now, it is one thing to say you took the cliffs in Normandy when you were throwing up in a landing craft a hundred yards from the beach. In the American Legion posts that display Reagan’s grinning photograph, feats like that (and amazing feats of valor in Indochina) are boozily exhaled every night of the week. And, ever since Henry V, it’s been allowed and expected of the veteran that “He’ll remember, with advantages, what deeds he did that day.” But Reagan’s boast to Shamir and Wiesenthal is not the pardonable “embellishment” (Cannon’s term) of an old fart long past his best. It is an insult to the victims whose moral credit he is trying to appropriate. It is an insult to those who did risk their lives. And it is a lie. In fact, given the certainty of detection, it almost counts as a pathological lie. According to some experts, pathological liars will pass a polygraph test because they don’t know the difference between truth and falsehood. If only Reagan would submit as willingly to the polygraph machine as to urinalysis. But there are clear limits to his willingness to share in the tribulations he imposes on others.

If you bear the Shamir distinction in mind, it becomes easier to read the numerous blooper anthologies. Reagan may not know the difference between Bolivia and Brazil, and may get a laugh for not knowing, while many in the audience secretly think, “Who’s counting?” That might be written off as a blunder. But to say that South Africa “has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought” is not to mistake South Africa for France, say; it is to make a false claim and hope that nobody notices. Which is to say, it is to lie. To say that “North and South Vietnam had been, previous to colonization, two different countries” is to show a fantastic, almost incredible, ignorance and stupidity. To claim that he has just had a message “from Pope John Paul, urging us to continue our efforts in Central America” is to lie.

I don’t want to seem pompous by insisting on this distinction, but it is an important one. And liberals and satirists have often overlooked it. Of course, some politicians are know-nothings and vaguely proud of the fact. But the Reagan presidency has been a sort of experiment in the limits of mendacity, made even more objectionable by its presentation as “wing-and-prayer” inspired amateurism.

Don’t be discouraged from getting Morton Mintz’s book. But don’t fall for the forgiving “Saturday Night Live” version of Reagan as a bumbling dotard. He’s a dotard all right, and a bumbler too. But liars don’t merit the indulgence that is reserved for dotards and bumblers. How can you tell when he’s lying and when he’s just making it up? No easy answer here. A rule of thumb is that when he’s lying, his lips move.

(The Nation, September 20, 1986)

THE MEESE FACTOR

IN OCTOBER 1975, the staff of the Watergate special prosecutor released its final report. Prominent among the recommendations was the following:

The President should not nominate, and the Senate should not confirm, as Attorney General or as any other appointee in high Department of justice posts, a person who has served as the President’s campaign manager or in a similar high-level campaign role… . A campaign manager seeks support for his candidate and necessarily incurs obligations to political leaders and other individuals through wide geographic areas.

If only the liabilities incurred by Edwin Meese were merely geographic in their scope. He has shown, in his contriving a tax exemption for the racialist degree-mill Bob Jones University, that his loyalty is to the Republican Party platform rather than to the body of law and precedent. He has proved, in his correspondence with Reagan crony Lyn Nofziger regarding the desegregation of schools in Washington State, that his right ear is cocked to the voices of his fellow time-servers. He has also shown, in his December 1983 comment about poor people’s preference for soup kitchens and in his description of the American Civil Liberties Union as a “criminals’ lobby,” that his other ear is as deaf as a stump.

Unfortunately, it is not these considerations that will obstruct his confirmation as Attorney General of the United States. When the Senate Judiciary Committee meets next month for what the White House and the Republican majority regard as a pushover hearing, they will have to confront three serious contradictions in the bluff testimony Meese gave before the committee last March. These were not recognized at the time. Nor were they emphasized sufficiently in the report of independent counsel Jacob A. Stein. They are:

1. The Barrack Factor. On March 5, 1984, Thomas Barrack, a realestate developer, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that although he had helped sell Meese’s house in La Mesa, California (putting $83,000 of his own money into the deal), and had later secured a government post, he “had never had a meeting in Mr. Meese’s office” between the two events. In a testimony richly larded with “I cannot recall” and “at that point in time,” this assertion was one of the few that Barrack made unambiguously. He added, “Did Mr. Meese ever talk to me about a job? Absolutely not.”

Buried in the turgid and evasive text of the Stein report is clear proof that Barrack met at least three times with Meese between the house sale and his appointment as Deputy Under Secretary of the Interior. He met Meese in Washington on September 8, 1982, one week after the sale. Stein records a letter concerning that meeting, in which Barrack thanks Meese for his “counsel and encouragement.” Barrack maintains that this refers to a discussion about the possibility of his moving to New York, a city about which Meese knows nothing. He justifies the remark by “reference to a discussion with Mr. Meese of the problems involved in moving a family from the West Coast to the East, and Mr. Meese’s assurances that the move was not a difficult one.” Barrack was never asked why he would discuss his moving plans with Meese or what he proposed to do on the East Coast. Meese, says the Stein report, “had no recollection of Mr. Barrack’s September 8 visit to his office until he found and reviewed the letter in his files.”

One month later, on November 9, Barrack dined with Meese and his wife at the 1789 Restaurant in Georgetown. That very afternoon, he had met with Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Samuel Pierce. Next day, he was due to see Interior Secretary James Watt and Energy Secretary Donald Hodel. This blissful round was to culminate on November 11 with an appointment with Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige. Two weeks previously, E. Pendleton James, former Director of Personnel at the White House and another principal in the La Mesa house sale, had written to each of the above, urging that Barrack’s talents be recognized, adding, “I should mention that Ed Meese knows Tom and I’m sure also would endorse my strong support.”

Barrack and the Meeses maintain that they endured a dinner between these two hectic rounds of meetings without ever alluding to the vulgar subject of a job for “Tom.” They supposedly preserved the same reticence over Thanksgiving, which the Meeses passed agreeably enough at the Barrack ranch in Santa Barbara. As the Stein report noncommittally puts it:

Mr. Barrack had by this time accepted the position of Deputy Under-secretary of Interior and was planning to begin his work in Washington on December 1, about one week later. He stated that he instructed his staff at the ranch not to mention this fact in the Meeses’ presence.

He told the help but not Meese? Why would the help bring the question up? On December 2, 1982, the day after he assumed his duties at Interior, Barrack went to Meese’s birthday party at Meese’s house. Again, it seems that he was too delicate to mention his own good fortune to the President’s chief counsel, a man keenly interested in appointments.

In light of all this, Meese’s earlier sworn testimony to the Judiciary Committee, and Barrack’s too, seems to hover just on the safe side of perjury. But, on one point, Meese can be said to have told the plain truth. The move from the West Coast to the East is, if you approach it in the right style, “not a difficult one.” This brings us to …

2. The Transition Trust. On March 1, 1983, Meese replied to Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond’s indulgent question about the sacrifices he had made to serve his President by mentioning “the unanticipated expense of moving to Washington, D.C., none of which was reimbursed by the government.” The next day, under equally soft questioning from Senator Orrin Hatch, Meese phrased the matter in a similar but not identical way:

  HATCH: And in addition to that, if I understand it, you had to pay all of your moving expenses as well?

  MEESE: That is right.

  HATCH: And all of the costs of bringing your family back here as well?

  MEESE: Yes, Senator.

  HATCH: And that all came out of your own pocket?

  MEESE: Yes, sir.

Facts can be dreary as hell, but, as the Stein report shows, Meese received $10,000 for “moving expenses” from the Presidential Transition Trust. On Trust check number 1069, made out to Edwin Meese, the words “moving expenses” are crossed out and the words “consulting fees” inked in. It’s not even clear whether Meese declared this income or had another of his nagging bouts of amnesia.

Again, this nifty little adjustment was unknown to the Judiciary Committee at the time of its hearings. So was the inelegant little shuffle that I’ll call …

3. The Promotion. Did Meese pull strings to gain promotion to full colonel in the Army Reserve in 1983? Like the staunch soldier that he is, Meese prefers to blame the brass for his rapid rise through the ranks. At his confirmation hearings he boldly claimed that he was “a victim of the Army’s bad judgment.” In fact, the promotion presents another example of his failure to distinguish between public and private interest. And it underlines, once more, his lack of veracity on the stand.

On November 1, 1982, the army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Lieutenant General Max Thurman, wrote a memorandum to the Chief of Staff, General Edward C. Meyer. The memo stated that “constructive credit” for a course in national-security management qualifying Meese for promotion to colonel could be granted only at the request of Meese or his commanding officer (General Thomas Turnage, director of the Selective Service System). Such a request had to be approved by General William Berkman, chief of the Army Reserve. General Thurman’s memo advised against such approval, since Meese was taking the requisite course by correspondence and had not yet completed it. Generals Turnage and Berkman overruled Thurman, effectively raising Meese to full colonel. Turnage is described in the Stein report as “an acquaintance and former associate of Mr. Meese from California, who had been designated (though not yet confirmed) as director of the Selective Service System.” Stein points out too that, very shortly after, General Berkman was nominated for a second four-year term as chief of the Army Reserve.

General Thurman’s memorandum recommending against Meese’s promotion was passed to Secretary of the Army John Marsh, who forwarded it to Meese. Meese says that he doesn’t recall seeing it, but Stein records statements by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and by Marsh in which they recall the memo and say that Meese urged them to reappoint General Berkman.

Meese told the Judiciary Committee that he had no knowledge of any army concern about his appointment receiving special treatment. Either he is lying or Secretaries Marsh and Weinberger are.

The contradictions in the three areas discussed above have not been put to Meese for explanation thus far. They should be. The matters are not trivial. But all one can find is complicity among the Republicans and resignation among the Democrats. The following Democrats sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee: Max Baucus, Joseph Biden, Robert Byrd, Dennis DeConcini, Howell Heflin, Edward Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, and Howard Metzenbaum.

I telephoned all their offices last week. Leahy’s staff told me that the senator was too busy wondering whether he could “rank” on Intelligence or Agriculture and feared that a new controversy over Meese would be “seen as counterproductive.” Biden’s people assured me that “most senators were off campaigning” when the Stein report came out. Heflin’s office said: “It’s too early—the members have not focused. It’s the same nomination.” Still others refused to comment or spoke of the psychological effect of the Reagan victory or said “in terms of” or “with regards to” all the time. Kennedy was on his way to Ethiopia when I called his office, but in his last statement on the matter he said, prematurely, that the Stein report had cleared Meese of any suspicion of impropriety and that such “questions” as remained were about civil and human rights. As we went to press, Common Cause issued an analysis of the Stein report which, though it did not correlate Stein’s evidence with the transcript of the committee hearings, found against Meese on ethical grounds. Media attention to this was slight.

Only from Howard Metzenbaum’s office has there been any sign of an understanding that this is the next Attorney General we’re talking about. Now the Reaganites are going around Washington telling all who will listen that Metzenbaum made the HUAC enemies list back in 1954. Meese will probably have “no recollection” of that little gambit either.

One of three things could now happen. The President may, as he should, blushingly withdraw Meese from nomination. The Judiciary Committee or the full Senate may vote him down. Or, in the lazy belief that they asked all the right questions the first time, the ten Republicans and eight Democrats on the committee may nod into office, as “the People’s Attorney” and the nation’s chief law officer, a man who has already shown that he cannot recognize a conflict of interest when it bites him in the leg.

(The Nation, December 29, 1984–January 5, 1985)

THE FIDDLER’S ELBOW

EVERYBODY REMEMBERS the case Sherlock Holmes cracked because of a dog that did not bark in the night. The case of Raymond Donovan, still Secretary of Labor, puts me in mind of that old tale. To read about him is to have the sensation of treading on the place in the dark where the top stair ought to be. There’s a strong feeling of something missing, of something that ought to be there and isn’t. There’s also a pungent sense of something that ought not to be there, and is.

The best way I can express this is to say that if Donovan were now nominated as Secretary of Labor, he wouldn’t make it. When he passed his Senate confirmation hearings, several crucial things had not happened.

1. Frederick Furino had not been murdered. Furino, a friend of the deceased mobster Salvatore Briguglio, was given a lie-detector test in April 1982. The test was designed to prove or disprove his claim that Donovan and Briguglio were complete strangers. Furino flunked. A few weeks later, he was found shot dead and crammed into the trunk of a car.

2. Nathan Masselli had not been murdered. He was the son of William Masselli, a former subcontractor of Donovan’s Schiavone Construction Company. Masselli Senior, a convicted Mafia criminal, had been moved to a Manhattan jail for the convenience of special prosecutor Leon Silverman, who was then pursuing his second inquiry. It seems, from Silverman’s second report, that William Masselli was eventually not questioned. His son, however, was shot dead in the Bronx on August 28, immediately after paying a visit to his incarcerated father. James Shalleck, head of the homicide bureau in the Bronx DA’s office, refused in court to deny a link between the murder, which he called an execution, and the Donovan investigation.

3. The serious suggestion that Donovan was involved with the Teamsters union election fund had not surfaced.

4. The FBI had not revealed all it knew about Donovan and his contacts. To quote the Supplemental Report of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, issued months after that committee had found him above reproach:

During Mr. Silverman’s investigation it was determined that certain information was contained in the files of the F.B.I.’s Newark field office which did not appear to have been furnished to the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources or the Special Prosecutor.

The paragraph’s smarmy euphemisms join “insufficient credible evidence” as part of the weasel talk that dominates the official handling of the case.

Donovan, who laughably claims to be the only victim of the inquiry, is in fact the beneficiary of a Catch-22. The witnesses are not “credible” because they are criminals, or because they need protection, or because they are informants in other cases. That is why 66 of 111 pages of Silverman’s second report are deleted. But if the witnesses were “credible,” they would not be caught up with the Sicilian business community. And it is precisely Donovan’s contacts with the SBC that are the issue.

Donovan is also the beneficiary of a further anomaly. The FBI gave as the reason for the deletions, and the reason for its general coyness about releasing evidence, the excuse that disclosure could jeopardize “the source of the conversation and the ongoing FBI investigation.” That is a catchall and coverall, rather like “national security.” It did not prevent the FBI from eventually revealing some of the material it had inexplicably held back. But it does prevent us from finding out quite how often Donovan’s name comes up in SBC circles. So, for the Secretary to rave about charges from “nameless accusers” is hubris. Would he really rather that the names were made public?

Finally, Donovan is the beneficiary of a most unusual special prosecutor. If I am ever on trial and have anything to fear, I shall hope to be prosecuted by Leon Silverman. In him, the milk of human kindness runs free and uncongealed. Donovan told the Senate that neither he nor his company had ever done business with Philip Moscato, a man apparently well known in SBC gatherings. Silverman’s subsequent investigation established that Schiavone Construction had done some thousands of dollars’ worth of business with Moscato. This discrepancy was attributed to a lapse of memory. Silverman did, however, astonish some onlookers by saying after the Masselli murder that if a third investigation is needed, he is “willing to accept such an appointment.” As the man said, it’s steady work.

Now comes the question: Why does the President endure this? If it is because of his famous loyalty to his friends, as his defenders in Washington suggest, then why did he fire Richard Allen for mislaying a few grand? Allen, though in every way a creep, was actually acquitted in an investigation, which is more than Donovan can claim. But he got the boot. Donovan is even less qualified for his job than Allen was for his. He is a laughingstock in his department. His only political achievement has been to raise money for the President’s election chest by holding Sinatra concerts at his unimprovably named Fiddler’s Elbow country club. As Senator Donald Riegle put it during the confirmation hearings, “If this nominee were a person of towering reputation and stature in this field over a number of years, I would give that considerable weight. That is not the case here.” Senator Riegle was worried about SBC penetration in high places. So should we all be. The Teamsters union, after all, got one of its men on the Reagan transition team even as he was actually being sued by the Department of Labor. It has in the past seated its nominees in government. Donovan might perhaps now survive a trial, but the FBI would be unlikely to tell the court, as it told the Senate in January 1981, that he is “a loyal American whose character, reputation and associates are beyond approach [sic].”

The misprint in the record is endearing. Indeed, some of Donovan’s associates are unapproachable in the worst way. But Silverman was mandated only to see if the evidence would warrant prosecution. He could not recommend whether Donovan should or should not remain in the Cabinet. On that, the verdict is already in.

(The Nation, October 2, 1982)

THE OLD BOY

AN OXFORD PROFESSOR meets a former Ph.D. student and courteously inquires what he’s working on these days. “I’m writing a book,” says the other, “on the survival of the class system in America.”

“Really, how fascinating. I didn’t think they had a class system in America.”

“Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”

As long as this joke (if it is a joke) has any point, it will be futile to dismiss Marx as “irrelevant.” The centenary of his death, celebrated with smugness or indifference in most quarters (The New York Times spent itself in a snigger about the old story of his bastard child), should remind people how much they owe the old man every time they discuss civilization and its surprisingly numerous discontents. Like Molière’s too-much-quoted Monsieur Jourdain, who discovered to his pleasant astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, many people who dismiss Marx as a “determinist” and an “economic materialist” or as the grandpapa of Stalinism are actually using his lines all the time.

The core of Marxist thought, and the reason for its stubborn survival, is the enduring conflict between the forces and the relations of production. The genius of the capitalist system lies in its inventive and creative nature—in its scorn for tradition, custom, and fetish. The menace of that same system occurs when it erects, by apparently voluntary labor, a thing beyond the control of its creators. To take a currently salient example, the “environment” is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity. Yet, as Marx put it:

At the same place that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. And our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

Who, living under the wings of the nuclear state and experiencing the pressure of conformity, can dismiss that as a nineteenth-century observation?

Again, it’s only a short while since characters like Daniel Bell and Sidney Hook were writing as if they had understood Marx better than he had himself. They pointed to the apparent abandonment of “alienation” in the canonical texts and with much gravity alleged that the poor had not got poorer. This half-formed critique was intended to challenge the labor theory of value. But it took no account of Marx’s seminal work (commonly known as the Grundrisse or Foundation), in which a clear distinction is made between “labor” and “labor power.” Thus, the term exploitation need not mean starvation and misery—though in much of the capitalist world it still does. It signifies the extent to which the skills and abilities of those without capital are appropriated by those with it.

Although every capitalist demands that workers should save, he means only his own workers, because they relate to him as workers. By no means does this apply to the remainder of workers, because they relate to him as consumers. In spite of all the pious talk of frugality he therefore searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs.

Remind you of anything? Don’t overlook the coda, the sting in the tail:

It is precisely this side of the relationship between capital and labor which is an essential civilizing force and on which the historic justification—but also the contemporary power—of capital is based.

Marx’s paradox, then, is the love–hate attitude he manifests toward the achievements of the bourgeoisie. That distinguished class has never produced or paid anyone who could sing its praises as he did. On its own, this elementary observation demolishes the pseudoscholastic view that Marx was a “determinist” or a banal proponent of the idea that economics decides everything. It is, in our day as in his, the apologists of the existing order who argue that economic logic justifies their own position. Marx wrote, and believed, that

history does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles… . It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends.

Yet, for all his insight into the innovative and ingenious character of capital, Marx also understood the destructive and destabilizing path it might take. He may never have imagined the horrors of World War I and fascism when he diagnosed the ills of class society, but he realized that capital was suspicious of its own claims about the market system and the “freedom” that it supposedly allowed. As he pointed out, the abolition of competition in favor of monopoly, when it occurred among businesses, would only intensify competition among workers. Does such an idea seem antiquated in the decade of the disposable employee?

When people talk of “the economy” as an organic unity, untrammeled by class, by interest, and by special holdings, they convict themselves of ignorance and of not having read Marx. When they say that Marx was the patron of the Warsaw Pact, they convict themselves of not having read his famous assault on Hegel. Bureaucracy is not the resolution of social conflict but the result of it, he wrote. Militarism is the forcible resolution of that contradiction. Let Prussia be Prussia.

Socialism was an idea before Marx. Democracy was an idea before Marx. Social revolution was an idea before Marx. What he argued was that you can’t have any of the above until you are ready for them, and that you can’t have one without the others:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are made by men and that the educator must himself be educated.

(The Nation, April 2, 1983)

AGAINST THE CONTRAS

JUST WHAT KIND of government is the Reagan Administration trying to bring to power in Managua? Alas, neither the Administration nor its critics seem to have the vaguest idea.

The Administration’s critics are at an increasing disadvantage. Opponents of what is still bizarrely called a “covert” war, they tend to argue in rather oblique, even evasive ways. You hear them say that Nicaragua does not really matter to the United States—a dubious argument for anyone who claims to be an internationalist. They plead that Nicaragua is not all that radical—another slightly shamefaced defense and one that finds little echo in Managua itself. Other critics suggest that the policy “won’t work”—an unprovable assumption given the many triumphs of counterrevolution in the hemisphere.

Finally, there is the analogy of the Bay of Pigs. It is used as if everybody agreed on its meaning. Actually, the meaning is often nebulous. In the Third World, the Bay of Pigs is a synonym for aggression. In the United States, it is a synonym for fiasco and embarrassment. When North American liberals warn against “another Bay of Pigs,” what do they mean? No more aggressions, or no more botched ones?

Shortly after the original Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was speaking with Clayton Fritchey, who was then with Adlai Stevenson’s staff at the United Nations. There had been many inquests and recriminations, and nobody had come out of them very well. Fritchey surprised his President by remarking, “It could have been worse.” Kennedy asked how. After all, the United States had been spared almost no humiliation. “It might,” replied Fritchey, “have succeeded.”

He was right, of course. Washington was very fortunate in the incompetence of its covert-action specialists and the brutal stupidity of its Cuban mercenaries. If they had won, captured Havana, and perhaps killed Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, they would have been faced with the awesome task of governing a resentful and defiant Cuba. The cost, in every sense, to the United States would have been extremely heavy. The cost to Cuba would have been heavier yet. And it might still be felt today—just as the calamitous consequences of the successful intervention in Guatemala in 1954 are still being felt.

If the Reagan Administration has a plan for Nicaragua after the Sandinistas have been overthrown, it has not made that plan public. Nobody seems to have the courage or the foresight to inquire. What, for instance, would the leaders of the Contras, or counterrevolutionaries, fighting in the north of the country consider a victory? Are they committed to holding free elections? (If so, as mostly onetime supporters of the former dictator, Anastasio Somoza, they have a funny way of showing it.) What is their opinion on land redistribution or on the Sandinistas’ literacy program? One suspects that they have not been asked these questions by their trainers and paymasters. As long as they undertake to break relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, they are deemed by Washington to have a fully rounded political program. How they propose to govern the Nicaraguan people, apart from by the gun, is not discussed.

The debate on the Boland–Zablocki bill, which would cut off United States aid to the Contras, ought to be widened to include these questions. It is absurd for the Administration to contend that it is not seeking the overthrow of the Managua government—for what else can be inferred from the fitting out of an army of invasion? Certainly, the Contras make it plain that they seek to seize state power. Unlike Edén Pastora, who is fighting the government in southern Nicaragua and was a Sandinista himself, they do not even pay lip service to the original objectives of the Nicaraguan revolution. How much money will they want before they are done? How many guns? What promises have been made to them and by them?

Ten years ago, a secret United States stratagem did succeed in removing a leftist government in Chile. Indeed, the murder of the reformist Salvador Allende did a great deal to sow distrust of pluralism among Latin American radicals. If the United States conservatives who so detested Allende had known what his successor, General Augusto Pinochet, would be like and how threadbare and disgraced his regime would be in ten years, would they have applauded so loudly in 1973?

The Reagan Administration will obviously carry on arming and paying the Nicaraguan Contras whatever Congress decides. We should dread the possibility of their “success.” It would be in the best interests of the United States and of Nicaragua if these mercenaries were soundly and finally defeated.

(The New York Times, July 27, 1983)

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

TOUCHING THIS “debategate” business, it is possible that the Reagan Administration, which has the luck of the devil himself, can live forever with the howling discrepancy between William Casey’s poor memory and James Baker’s clear evidence. But it’s also possible that there will have to be some kind of hearing. If so, I’d be inclined to put my money on Casey. He is no stranger to hearings and has emerged scatheless from more inquiries than Spiro Agnew. It’s hard to see how this lazy and indulgent Congress can hope to be a match for a man who has made conflict of interest into a way of life.

“Conflict of interest,” as understood by the Reaganites, is more a term of art than a term of abuse. Take, for instance, the brief autobiography that Casey submitted to his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 1981. Its final paragraph, headed “Publications,” reads as follows:

Tax Sheltered Investments; Lawyer’s Desk Book; Forms of Business Agreements; Accounting Desk Book; Tax Planning on Excess Profits; How To Raise Money To Make Money; How Federal Tax Angles Multiply Real Estate Profits.

Casey was scarcely questioned by the members of the committee, who mostly fell over themselves to laud his sapience. But by December 1981 they had to report on him again. This time, the problem was his taste in Deputy Directors for Operations. Max Hugel, who had been handpicked by Casey for this sensitive post, was accused of dubious stock dealings by his former colleagues. When interviewed by the committee’s special counsel, says the report dryly, “Mr. Hugel’s responses were circumscribed.” As for Casey, it found that he had forgotten to disclose at least nine investments valued at more than $250,000, personal debts and contingent liabilities of nearly $500,000, the fact that he had served on the boards of a number of corporations and foundations, four civil lawsuits in which he had been involved in the previous five years, and more than seventy clients he had represented in private practice in the same period. Among those “clients” were the governments of Indonesia and South Korea and an oil company named Pertamina, controlled by the Indonesian government. The committee, which went through the most abject contortions in order to give Casey the benefit of the doubt, ducked the question of whether his services to Indonesia should have required his registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—a formality with which he had not troubled himself. Actually, investigation shows that Casey “misled” the committee during his confirmation hearing: he was asked in writing whether he had been an attorney for a foreign government and gave a deceitful answer.

Casey remains because he is useful to his political seniors. He has always had the knack of being obliging, and it is surely this, rather than any aptitude for intelligence work, that has recommended him to President Reagan. In 1972, for instance, just before the election, he used his position as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission to frustrate the inquiry into International Telephone and Telegraph. There were thirty-four boxes of ITT papers under his care, and Congress wanted to have a peek at them. There was loose talk at the time about ITT buying favors from the Nixon Administration. The thirty-four boxes were whisked from the SEC to the Justice Department, and thus withheld from the vulgar gaze. Casey lied about that as well, testifying to Congress that he had transferred the records at the request of Justice Department officials.

Casey’s tenure at the SEC, in fact, showed us early on that he has two abiding qualities. One, a loyalty to the less fastidious element of the Republican Party. Two, a persistent inability to distinguish between the public and the private interest. He is, really, the only highly placed figure of the Watergate era to retain his prominence in politics. He remembers the heady days of testifying for John Mitchell and Maurice Stans about Robert Vesco. His confirmation hearings as SEC Chairman were full of the flavor of that epoch. Casey, it turned out, had been sued by an investor in his firm Advancement Devices Inc., which went broke a year after making a stock offering that the investor claimed was fraudulent and violated federal security laws. The offering circular was written by a man Casey introduced to the firm, who had once been disciplined by the SEC for price rigging; its fraudulent nature would have been discovered earlier had it been registered with the SEC, but Casey preferred not to inconvenience himself by doing that, claiming the offering was private. There are advantages in hiring a poacher as a gamekeeper, but it’s easy to overstate them.

In an earlier lawsuit, Casey displayed all the qualities that serve him so well as head of the CIA. He was found guilty of purloining and plagiarizing a manuscript on taxation. The real author, Harry Fields, sued for and was awarded punitive damages. The jury found that Casey had acted with “malice and vindictiveness.” His attorneys offered to pay a $20,500 out-of-court settlement if the verdict was expunged from the record. In the end, money changed hands and the court records of the case were sealed. Casey lied about this, too, during his confirmation hearings as SEC Chairman.

In April 1980, Casey told The New York Times, in his capacity as Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, “We expect Carter will try everything to get re-elected. So we’ll be ready for everything.” That may just have been tough talk. But it is perfectly clear that the Reagan-Bush campaign committee took very few chances and had very few scruples. It used stolen property as a crib. It has been cited by the Federal Election Commission, which “found a reason to believe that the law was violated” in point of contributions. Casey, again, says he knows nothing. He acts the part of the selfless Cincinnatus, abandoning his private life and his honest toil for the public weal. He has been attacked by liberals for confusing private and public transactions, though the truth is that he doesn’t know the difference. And he has been criticized for constantly pleading ignorance even though he is in charge of the nation’s intelligence network. One begins to suspect that, for Reagan, the problem of Casey is not that he remembers too little but that he knows too much.

(The Nation, August 6–13,1983)

DOING GOOD:The Neoliberals

IT’S ALL TOO EASY to sneer at neoliberals. But it is, I’m afraid, all too necessary. The movement that bears this smart little title has been in some danger of being taken too seriously. And, though its 1983 conference in Washington did something to deplete that seriousness, there is an evident need to say a few words before the memory fades.

First, what is neoliberalism? Its adherents beam with false modesty when they are asked. They will not be so dogmatic as to attempt a definition. But I think I know what it is. In the November 1983 issue of The Washington Monthly, which sponsored the conference and which serves as the calendar and notice board of the movement, there appears a review by Charles Peters, who is founder and mentor of both. The review concerns the new book Vietnam, by Stanley Karnow, which is a companion to the series now running on PBS. It’s a short notice, and it reads, in its entirety, thus:

Everyone, right and left, will find fault with this book, but there is nothing better available now. It is unique in its understanding of the cultural differences between South and North Vietnam and China that might have served our legitimate ends much more effectively and humanely than bombing by B-52s and invasion by 500,000 troops.

Here is the essence of the neoliberal style. First comes the smarmy evenhandedness (“right and left” are, of course, ideologies, and therefore untrustworthy). Then the vague but seductive idea that “cultural differences” can substitute for a definition of conflict. Then the invocation of “our legitimate ends,” which are assumed. Finally, there is the criticism of military and bureaucratic ineptitude—with all the moral and political courage that such a stand requires.

Neoliberals are like that. They have a sort of pious earnestness. They hold opinions rather than convictions. They wear their lightness learnedly. They are easily disappointed by the efforts and the antics of common people. They have a slightly feigned nostalgia for the times of FDR and JFK. They practice risk-free iconoclasm. Their idea of bravery is to speak the unsayable, shocking thing. For example: “I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but a lot of people really do cheat on welfare.” Some of them actually want Ernest Hollings to be President. To spend a weekend with them was like living through, rather than sitting through, The Big Chill.

Cynics have compared the neoliberal tendency to the neoconservative one. I think that comparison must be counted as unfair. For one thing, neoconservatives are much more rigorous. For another, they are much more interesting. Neoconservatives believe in original sin, while neoliberals believe in the enervating effect of public spending programs. Neoconservatives are keenly interested in foreign policy, with its emphasis on tough choices, while neoliberals are oddly diffident about it. Neoconservatives have a sense of class struggle and know which side they are on. Neoliberals wish the word “class” had never been discovered and agree not to use it at all, ever, except when attacking radicals for being out of touch with what “ordinary people” want. Neoconservatism could occur in any country. Neoliberalism could, really, only occur in a country like America, which combines abundance with angst and has a vast population of overqualified graduate students, some of whom wish they had, after all, served in Vietnam.

In what I suppose I must call his keynote address, Peters laid out a testing agenda for this bright-eyed group, mugged as they are by unreality. We must be flexible on welfare and crime, he said, and not automatically oppose the Right. We must be ready to denounce trade unions. We must invigilate and audit the big spenders. We must beware “the special interests” (I was touched to hear a panelist describe women as one such). Nor is equality forgotten—the neoliberals, in their only egalitarian proposal, would collectivize young Americans by means of the draft.

There is, true, a striking coincidence between these points and the “ideas” of the President. There’s also a coincidence in method (when Peters calls for educational reform, he does so because he believes it will make the United States able to “compete economically with other technologically advanced countries”). But neoliberals cannot help the time they live in, and I believe even they are a little embarrassed by these convergences. Still, it’s partly their own fault. If you go around mouthing Chamber of Commerce clichés like (Peters again) “In Japan, auto workers think about how they can improve their products; in America; they think about filing grievances,” you have earned your resemblance to the Great Purveyor of reactionary common sense.

The neoliberal style is a smartass one, and not without its effectiveness. The core of it is a species of gutless irony. You think public spending helps the poor? Check out Mike’s coruscating piece in ___ . You still think aid to the Third World has a point? Get a load of Nick in ____ . Disarmament would be less risky than the arms race? Where have you been? Read Jim in ____ . Neoliberals like to puncture illusions, and one wishes them luck in that enterprise. But they never take aim at the huge, gaseous balloon that supports their own basket.

A perpetual theme at the conference was the reinstatement of family values, or at least the rescue of those values from the crass, coercive stress placed upon them by the Christian Right. There was much talk of responsibility and parenthood as the common thing, even the model thing. In fact, neoliberals seem to see the United States as a sort of family. They employ the word we a lot, as in “our” industry, “our” military, and “our” political process. As I was moved to say at their conference, a family is collectivist as a society and socialist as an economy. It reveres the individual but it operates, approximately, on the principle “from each according to his or her ability and to each according to his or her need.” If these socialist values are good enough for the rearing of American children, why are they not good enough for American society? The fact that no panelist answered my tiny question suggests to me that neoliberals have, at best, only the cowardice of their convictions.

(The Nation, November 5, 1983)

THE PRESIDENT

ONE CLUE TO the causes of the invasion of Grenada can be found in the captured internal minutes of the New Jewel Movement, which show where leftist sectarianism can lead. Another can be found in the pages of the most recent issue of Conservative Digest. Published just before the Marines splashed heroically ashore, it is given over to a scathing right-wing critique of Ronald Reagan. He is convicted of all kinds of feebleness, especially in answering the Soviet threat. Patrick Buchanan scornfully refers to “The New York Times foreign policy decked out in the rhetorical finery of the National Review.” More significantly, Richard Viguerie writes about the fallacy of automatic conservative support for the President. It is not true, he warns, that conservatives have nowhere else to go. He calls for a new candidate or, failing that, a new party. A Conservative Digest poll of leading reactionaries shows similar sentiments predominating, and a decline in willingness to give time or money to Reagan’s reelection. There is also an ominous map of the world, depicting all the countries that are lost to, or threatened by, communism. Grenada is listed as lost on the accompanying inventory, one of the nations “taken during the ‘Era of Detente.’”

So the President has done some skillful repair work in that quarter. More depressing still, he has managed yet again to coerce and corrupt the wretched Democrats. The abject silence of Walter Mondale has been commented on enough. I wish Democratic Representative Michael Barnes had been as reticent. Returning from a fact-finding trip to Grenada in his capacity as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, he announced he had concluded that the invasion was justified. He cited the position of the American students as the crucial element in his conversion. There are two things to be said here. First, even if the students were in danger, which seems at best arguable, their safety could warrant only a rescue mission. Neither the Israeli commando raid at Entebbe nor the American Desert One mission sought to overthrow the regimes of Uganda or Iran, nasty though they both were. Second, the students said they were relieved to be rescued from the fighting caused by the landing. That is a circular justification—somewhat like invading the island to capture the weapons that were stockpiled to resist an invasion.

Why do the Democrats persist in giving Ronald Reagan more benefit than doubt? It is perfectly clear that in foreign policy he has surrendered completely to the fanatics. This is partly because they cut with his own grain and partly because the fanatics are at least easy to understand. I have no time, personally, for jokes about the President’s hearing aid or his other disabilities. But deafness can mask wider incomprehension, even an unwillingness to hear. As a tribute to Reagan’s foreign-policy grasp, let me reproduce a transcript of an exchange he had at a lunchtime meeting with some carefully selected “minority” editors on October 18.

  Q: Are you going to put any kind of pressure on the Turkish government about giving a just solution to the Cyprus problem?

  THE PRESIDENT: To the which problem?

  Q: To the Cyprus problem.

  THE PRESIDENT: Oh. I wish the Secretary of State were here. We’re aware of that but I don’t know that we have involved ourselves directly and deeply in that. We have offered, as we always do, to be of help if we can, but right now I think more of our help is directed a little further east than that, on the shores of____

  Q: I am speaking of 200,000 refugees in Cyprus.

  THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I know, and I hope that we can find—and help in the settlement of that.

  Q: Mr. President, my name is Dr. Michael Szaz from the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups. When are we going to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet-imposed government in Afghanistan and extend more effective material assistance to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan?

  THE PRESIDENT: I have to say that I don’t believe that breaking off diplomatic relations, even with the Soviet Union in our anger with them over this terrible deed with the Korean airliner_____

  Q: It’s Afghanistan.

  THE PRESIDENT: What?

  Q: It’s Afghanistan, with the Soviet-imposed government in Kabul.

  THE PRESIDENT: Oh.

  Q: Do you still have the plan to visit South Korea? If so, what is the main purpose to visit South Korea?

  THE PRESIDENT: What?

  Q: South Korea?

  THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

  Q: Mr. President, does India fit into your schedule?

  THE PRESIDENT: What?

  MS. SMALL [a Presidential aide]: One more question, Mr. President.

  Q: Mr. President, my name is Keshishian from California. I would like to know if the American government has a stand on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians?

  THE PRESIDENT: The genocide of____

  Q: The Armenians in 1915.

  MS. SMALL: The Turkish and Armenian genocide.

  THE PRESIDENT: Oh. I—the only official stand that I can tell you we have is one opposed to terrorism on both sides. And I can’t help but believe that there’s virtually no one alive today who was living in the era of that trouble. And it seems to me we ought to be able to sit down now, an entirely new group of people who know only of that from reading it, to set down and work out our differences and bring peace at last to that segment of humanity.

  MS. SMALL: Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you very much.

  MR. PRESIDENT: Karna tells me I have to go. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

I never have met Karna, but I think she’s absolutely right.

(The Nation, November 19, 1983)

KENNEDY LIES

LIKE EVERY ONE else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me. In October 1962 I was in my first term at an English boarding school and was at least as ignorant of Cuba as Kennedy was. But I have a very vivid recollection of masters standing in unaccustomed huddles, of bluff reassurances from prefects and from (I think) the chaplain. I know that Richard Dimbleby signed off that night with a stiff-upper-lip injunction to parents to send their children to school the following day, but this didn’t apply to my dormitory. Such was the relief at finding that the next day was not going to be the last that, like almost everybody else, I forgave Kennedy for gambling with my life. Such is the masochism of the human race.

But I have just finished reading an article in The Washington Post, entitled “How I Remember Jack.” It is written by Senator Edward Kennedy, or at least signed by him. Every important contention in the article is a lie. And, already, one can feel all the Kennedy hangers-on, in the media and academe, gearing up for a great thirtieth-anniversary feast of sentimentality, maudlin grief, and false accounting.

The two major lies in Senator Kennedy’s article are these, and I quote: “He [Jack] spent mornings working on Profiles in Courage, his Pulitzer Prize–winning book.” Then: “He showed us that a President could stand up to the Soviet Union, as he did in the Cuban crisis, without sacrificing the ideals for which this nation must always stand.”

In fact, Profiles in Courage was written by Theodore Sorensen, who also penned Kennedy’s flatulent but memorable inauguration speech. And the Pulitzer Prize committee (never less than impressionable, as recent bogus awards have shown) was lobbied almost out of existence by Arthur Krock, the Establishment journalist who used the whole weight of the Kennedy family to get the prize for his friend and patron JFK.

In his outstanding book The Kennedy Imprisonment, the historian Garry Wills meticulously documents this episode, as well as the other myths and fabrications which have been popularized by courtiers and toadies like Arthur Schlesinger. Professor Wills is no fellow traveler—he started his career as an earnest toiler on William F. Buckley’s National Review. But he is impatient with the flattery and stupidity which surround Kennedy’s presidency, and he has written a chapter on the Cuba crisis which is imperishable. To summarize it is to diminish it, but here goes.

Kennedy got into trouble with the Russians over Cuba because he was waging a secret war against the Castro regime and lying about it to the American Congress, public, and press. He thus had no alternative but to present Russian aid to Cuba as an inexplicable and sinister move. He could not admit that Khrushchev was right when he charged that thousands of American agents were, in Wills’s words,

plotting his [Castro’s] death, the destruction of his Government’s economy, the sabotaging of his mines and mills, the crippling of his copper and sugar industries. We had invaded Cuba once. Officials high in Congress and the executive department thought we should have followed up with overwhelming support for that invasion.

It is now commonplace in the United States to describe the Bay of Pigs invasion as a “fiasco.” This description rather euphemizes the real event. The attempt to take over and run Cuba, to enlist the support of the Mafia in the assassination of Castro, to poison and devastate Cuban crops, and to land a mercenary army on Cuban shores would have been much more disastrous if it had succeeded than if it had failed. Kennedy, we now know, was told this by quite close advisers. Yet he persisted in the policy, determined not to be outdone by a smaller country in his first term. And he repeatedly lied about the Soviet motives in supplying missiles to fortify the island, so that, as Professor Wills puts it, “the Kennedys looked like brave resisters of aggression, though they had actually been the causes of it.”

In a deft passage of reasoning, Wills confronts the argument that the Soviet missiles were a threat to America in any case:

Would he [Castro] launch his missiles in conjunction with a larger Russian attack—again, knowing that we could incinerate his island as a side-blow in our response to Russia? Even if Castro had wanted to immolate his nation that way, his missiles would not have helped the Russians—might, rather, have been a hindrance, because of the “ragged attack” problem. If missiles were launched simultaneously from Russia and Cuba, the Cuban ones, arriving first, would confirm the warning of Russian attack. Or, if Cuban missiles were to be launched later, radar warnings of the Russian ones firing would let us destroy the Cuban rockets in their silos.

Kennedy knew all this too. It was his swaggering desire publicly to outface the Russians, without publicly admitting his war on Cuba, that brought the world to the best view it has yet had of the gates of hell. And it was only the restraint of Khrushchev (another fact that Kennedy could not admit) that made the difference between a view and a death. It’s well understood now that Khrushchev lost his job as a result—hardly the best news from the Kremlin in the postwar period.

Reviewing such behavior, a sycophant like Arthur Schlesinger wrote of the Cuba crisis, “It was this combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world.”

It may be, and it probably is, a complete waste of time trying to undo the grandiose absurdity of the Kennedy myth. If Americans knew then what they know now about JFK—that he shared a mistress with a Mafia murderer, that he faked the authorship of “his” books, that he gave a fictitious account of the wartime PT-109 episode that made him a Hollywood hero, that he dissembled about Vietnam and lied in his sparkling teeth about Cuba—they might not have trusted him as they did. But, knowing all this now, they cannot quite relate it to the man they think they remember. Somehow, the drama of Dallas has sanctified and canceled everything. All the senior figures in the Democratic Party will be taking part in ostentatious mourning this week. They will also keep sneering at Ronald Reagan as a phony movie star more interested in media manipulation and cheap successes than in the serious business of politics and diplomacy. True enough, but the truth is that Reagan has not, in his entire presidency to date, acted with anything like the gun-slinging idiocy that the boy-hero did.

(The Spectator, November 19, 1983)

PERCEPTIONS AND SIGNALS

THERE ARE TWO voguish current terms which make American political discourse extremely irritating. They occur routinely in every press conference, every current-affairs broadcast, every congressional debate, and almost every editorial comment. The terms are “perception” and “signal.” The first is used as either a displacement or an evasion. The speaker need not say that he thinks the consequence of policy X will be harmful. That would be too definite and thus too risky. It is usual, then, for him to intone that policy X “will be perceived” as harmful. This has two political advantages: it takes longer to say and thus sounds more important; and it is ambiguous, having all the moral weight of the statement “It’s not me, it’s the neighbors.”

“Signal” is the other standby of the cornered politico. In this case, the speaker refrains from saying that policy X will amount to appeasement of the Russians, the Cubans, the Nicaraguans, or whomever. Instead, he bleats that policy X would “send them the wrong signal.” “They” in this sentence are usually the Russians, which makes one wonder what became of the hot line if we are reduced to international semaphore.

This has been a cheap and disgraceful week in foreign policy. The Reagan Administration, while attacking all the critics of its Lebanon policy as cowards and traitors, was all the while preparing its own withdrawal. The object, as we now learn from White House spokesmen, was to deal with the public “perception” that the Marines were being endangered for no purpose, without sending a “signal” to the Russians that American resolve had weakened. The use of massive offshore batteries was, literally as well as figuratively, to lay smoke over this policy in time for the evening news. There is, after all, no lobby in Washington to maintain that some of our best friends are Druze.

On February 3, 1984, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the President was asked about Speaker Tip O’Neill’s call for withdrawal of the Marines. “He may be ready to surrender,” sneered Reagan, “but I’m not.” Four days later, he announced the pullout and flew off to the seclusion of his ranch in Santa Barbara. I have never seen such rage and contempt among normally mild-mannered Democratic congressmen; Speaker O’Neill may be a dim old tub of guts, but he is an extremely loyal and reasonably honest tub. He fought bravely and stupidly in his own party for a “national” approach to Lebanon, arguing for the tradition that “politics ends at the water’s edge”—meaning you don’t snipe at the commander in chief. For Reagan to accuse him of cowardice and desertion, on a day when he must have known that he himself was about to order a withdrawal, is unpardonable—or is at least widely “perceived” to be so.

The President’s conduct has led many pundits to accuse him of inconsistency. This is tempting, but misleading. The withdrawal was all of a piece with the original commitment and with the whole unhappy experience of the eighteen-month presence. It was decided in a haphazard and jumpy fashion, as an improvised response to a situation that was eluding the control (and, it is fair to say, the comprehension) of the political leadership. A week after the Marines were landed, on September 28, 1982, Reagan said that they would remain in Lebanon until all foreign forces were withdrawn, “because I think that’s going to come rapidly. I think we’re going to see the withdrawal.” Later he said that “the American forces will not engage in combat.” Later still, “So it could be that they will be there for quite a period.” By October 1983, the Marines were there to show that America could not be pushed around—a new objective, which was replaced a few days later with: “What exactly is the operational mission of the Marines? The answer is to secure a piece of Beirut, to keep order in their sector and to prevent the area becoming a battlefield.”

But it all ended up with our old standby—a test of American will. This is normally, to borrow from the argot I have been criticizing, a “signal” that a scuttle is being prepared. In his weekly radio chat with the nation, the old maestro said bravely:

Yes, the situation in Lebanon is difficult, frustrating and dangerous. But that is no reason to turn our back on friends and to cut and run. If we do, we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere, they can gain by waging war against innocent people.

The friends, if they heard that, must have started packing for Switzerland on the instant. The “terrorists,” who already know that violence pays, were presumably unimpressed. Speaker O’Neill, who had taken a real political risk in helping to get Reagan the September War Powers Resolution, authorizing another eighteen months in Beirut for the Marines, is just plain disgusted.

Within the White House, it seems that there is still division between those who favor withdrawal (or “redeployment”) and those who feel that President Gemayel should be backed to the hilt. In the former camp are Caspar Weinberger and the Chief of Staff, James Baker. In the latter are George Shultz and Robert McFarlane, the National Security Adviser. Henry Kissinger, who is still maneuvering cannily for a place in the next Administration, has switched, in the space of one month, from saying that those who advocate withdrawal are preaching surrender to saying that the latest pullback is timely and statesmanlike.

The “signals” sent by all this to Moscow and Damascus are distinctly garbled. Neither government has ever doubted that the United States is capable of using force in the Middle East, but both may be marveling at the “seat-of-the-pants” way in which Reagan operates. Perhaps, by accident, the President has found his equivalent of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory of war,” where neither your enemies nor your friends have any idea what you may do next.

The “perceptions,” in domestic terms, are extremely confused also. I wrote recently that Reagan’s apparent honesty and amiability have enabled even his critics to give him the benefit of the doubt. Last week, I met more than a few people who thought they detected, for the first time, the rancid whiff of a Presidential doublecross. Are the Marines to be withdrawn, or are they not? Whose side are we on? If Lebanon is so vital, why isn’t there a really serious troop commitment? If it isn’t so vital, why are we shelling it in fits of pique? Above all, why say one thing and do another?

It is overlooked, in all this, that the Administration supported Begin and Sharon when they invaded Lebanon and radicalized the Shiite Muslims while driving them north, along with the Palestinians, to Beirut. It is also overlooked that the Marines were committed to Beirut in the first place because of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which were the last in a long line of General Sharon’s broken promises. The blasting of the Marine barracks, and many subsequent miseries, can be viewed from one perspective as the revenge for Reagan’s endorsement of “Operation Peace for Galilee.” Even the Israelis now regard that summer as one of their greatest mistakes. There has been no comparable accounting in Washington, but if ever there is, there may be some lasting changes in “perception.”

Our final perception, if I may: President Reagan’s first campaign speech was to the Association of Christian Broadcasters, a rather bovine and literal-minded group of evangelists who not only think that you can live twice, but believe that they themselves are already doing so. In his speech, the candidate referred to the need to bring God back into life and society. He never misses the opportunity of accusing America’s enemies of being atheists and materialists. Here is another “signal” that did not get through. His opponents in Lebanon may be many things, but “godless” they are not.

(The Spectator, February 18, 1984)

FINDING IT FUNNY

IN THE MEMOIRS of Ignazio Silone, which describe his mounting alienation from the communism of his youth, there is an anecdote of a visit he paid to Moscow. A British trade unionist who was in the city at the same time had objected to some proposed tactic of the Comintern. It would, he was alleged to have said, be “dishonest.” At this, there was a roaring, boiling gale of laughter. It spread from the committee room, through the successive echelons of the party, all across the Kremlin. Stalin himself was said to have heard and savored the story by suppertime. Silone wrote that, “in judging a regime, said Togliatti who was with me, it is very important to know what it finds amusing.”

In the last fortnight, the editorial and cartoon sections of the American press have been behaving as though they enjoyed Silone’s moral authority. You might think, from reading the pompous and righteous comments, that Ronald Reagan’s feeble microphone-testing gag about bombing Russia was a revelation of the real intentions of his regime. It was obviously, as any careful Reagan-watcher would admit, nothing of the kind. A man who can say to the surgeons, on the day that he cops a slug in the chest, “I hope you’re all Republicans,” and who can repeat the joke in his party’s election-campaign film, is quite capable of an innocuous crack about genocide and extinction. The sanctimony of the editorialists is misplaced. But Reagan’s sense of humor, and his free and easy way with facts and claims, may still be symptomatic and interesting.

He’s got away with gallows humor before now, as when he told his radio audience, concerning Vietnam, that “we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.” When the kidnappers of Patty Hearst demanded the distribution of free food surpluses to the poor of California, Reagan as Governor announced that he personally hoped for an outbreak of botulism. But he invests these utterances with such an “aw shucks, just kidding” flavor that it takes a heart of stone to condemn him. The same things, if said by, say, George Wallace, would sound ugly and nasty. Somehow, Reagan manages to escape this judgment.

Escape artistry is, in a sense, his political genius. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder recently dubbed him “the Teflon President” because he seemed to be made of nonstick material. Here is a man who can fall asleep during an audience with His Holiness the pope and get away with it. Here is a man who could say, in 1982, that he didn’t know there were still segregated schools in the United States. Here is a man who, in the same year, told a press conference that submarine-based missiles, such as Trident, were “conventional-type” weapons which, once launched, could be “recalled.” Any one of these would have been enough to ruin Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. This President just rises above them.

In fact, like the legendary Antaeus, he is somehow strengthened by each defeat. He opposed the attempt by Congress to add a cost-of-living index to the social security system. He lost. Republican television ads in the 1982 midterm elections then showed a folksy, white-haired postman delivering the new improved social security checks to America’s beloved senior citizens. “President Reagan kept his promise to the American people,” the ad intoned. This is wizardry of a high order, which leaves the Democrats with their mouths opening and shutting like so many winded carp.

It is probably Reagan’s gift for the anecdotal that gets him the benefit of the doubt. Like most people, he generalizes from personal experience, including the personal experience of rumor. Thus the story about Medicare paying for sex-change operations (“This one I’m sure will touch your heart”). Thus the tales about unemployed workers buying vodka with their food stamps. Thus his announced conviction, reminiscent of saloon-bar philosophers everywhere, that “if you are a slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and the rent begins at 113 and that includes utilities.” I choose just three of the many Reagan assertions which have been checked out in detail and found to be quite baseless. From the habit of half-humorous exaggeration comes the more reprehensible practice of falsification and slander. A fair example is his sly assertion, two years ago, that the nuclear freeze was first proposed by Leonid Brezhnev. The President had every reason to know that the nuclear freeze had first been proposed by Mark Hatfield, a Republican senator. In 1980, Reagan pointlessly accused Jimmy Carter of “opening his campaign down in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan,” an accusation that would have been meaningless even if it were true.

The President’s few lapses from bonhomie have occurred when he is challenged on points like this. Concerning the “bomb Russia” gaffe, he stupidly replied: “Isn’t it funny? If the press had kept their mouth shut no one would have known I said it.” This from the “great communicator,” who owes so much to the indulgence of the mass media, even if he doesn’t know a tautology when he sees one. In February 1982, asked by journalist Bruce Drake to account for some earlier statements, he became agitated.

You don’t really want to get into those mistakes you said that I made the last time, do you? I’d like you to know that the documentation proves that the score was five to one in my favor. I was right on five of them and I have the documentation with me.

Patient scribes later asked the White House for the “documentation” but were met with a refusal. Even his famous line “There you go again,” which is supposed to have lost Jimmy Carter the 1980 election, was made in response to Carter’s factually correct assertion that Reagan had opposed Medicare in 1965.

So it goes. “Governor, do you think homosexuals should be barred from public office in the United States?” “Certainly they should be barred from the department of beaches and parks.” Just kidding. “We were told four years ago that seventeen million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” Whatsamatter, cantcha take a joke?

As one watched the orgiastic jingoism of the Republican Convention one got the queasy feeling that many of Ronald Reagan’s audience don’t even think he is joking. They agree, quite literally, with every word he says. Tip O’Neill is mistaken when he says that Reagan finds nuclear war funny. The problem is not that he finds it humorous (after all, Stanley Kubric milked it for laughs and became a liberal hero), but that he doesn’t take it seriously.

(The Spectator, September 1, 1984)

REAGAN THE DEMOCRAT

IT IS RARE indeed for Walter Mondale to show anything resembling emotion. Even his closest associates have taken to nicknaming him “Norwegian wood.” But there is one thing which infallibly gets him going, causes his waxen cheeks to redden and flat voice to rise. He can’t stand it—in fact, he can’t believe it—when Ronald Reagan invokes the name of John F. Kennedy.

It’s an old trick, of course: a candidate who has switched his party allegiance can pretend to have lost his faith and found his reason. He can be pious about it (“I didn’t leave my party. It left me”). He can be humorous about it (“What would the party of FDR, of Harry Truman, of Hubert Humphrey and JFK, say if they could see the Democrats now?”). Reagan uses this device on every possible occasion, partly to goad Mondale and partly because the polls show that it works. In particular, his ceaseless evocation of Kennedy goes over very well with first-generation voters, who have been brought up to view the Kennedy they never knew as a sort of Siegfried. The use of his name has talismanic quality, giving the President more the aura of a grand old man than of a has-been. The other day in Danbury, Connecticut, where JFK made one of his most famous outdoor appearances in the 1960 campaign, Ronald Reagan turned up on the exact anniversary. He spoke from the same balcony, quoted from the same speech, and delivered the same message of optimism. The effect, in a town where registered Democrats have predominated since the dawn of time, was electrifying. Something about Kennedy makes lumps form in the most leathery throat and brings that fateful pricking to the eyelids. Reagan milked it for all it was worth, and more. I have said that the voters love him for his faults, which is a good thing since he has so many of them. It is for various reasons just as well that the 1960 election has become a vague memory. Those who remember it well can recall that Ronald Reagan took an active part. In fact, he was one of the founders of a group called Democrats for Nixon. On July 15, 1960, he sent Nixon a handwritten letter, which concluded:

One last thought. Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with it’s [sic] proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “state socialism” and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy.”

I apologize for taking so much of your time, but I have such a yearning to hear someone come before us and talk specifics instead of generalities. You will be very much in my prayers in the days ahead.

Sincerely, Ronnie Reagan

I like this letter; I think it has everything. The idea that somebody, in 1960, should feel it necessary to urge Richard Nixon to call his opponents communists and fascists is a touching one. So is the “yearning” for specifics over generalities. The sign-off sentence is Ronnie at his eager and pleasing best. Who could dislike such a man?

The Democrats waited a long time before they released this treasure, because they know that personal attacks on the President do not play very well with the public. A spokesman for the White House press office was almost insolent in his insouciance about it. By any calculation, he said, more people would have heard Reagan’s praise for Kennedy than would have read or noticed the letter. Therefore, it didn’t count. This is the prevailing standard, and I suppose we had better get used to it.

This same White House press office deserves to have a medal struck in its name. This has been the week when American newspapers publish their Presidential endorsements. Reagan probably didn’t expect the support of The New York Times or The Washington Post, both of which came out very strongly for Mondale. But he did pretty well. My favorite editorial was in the Chicago Tribune, which endorsed Reagan for a second term. It added that his “refusal to accept the linkage between the federal deficit and economic instability is threatening to bankrupt America and severely damage the free world economy.” It went on to say that “his ignorance about the Soviet Union and his air-headed rhetoric on the issues of foreign policy and arms control have reached the limits of tolerance and have become an embarrassment and a danger.” In other words, he is useless on the domestic front and a menace internationally. But he should be President for four more years because his philosophy “will result in less government growth and less government intrusion into the lives of citizens than would Walter Mondale’s.” So Mondale is Marx and Hitler all over again.

At the moment, there is only one historical figure who interests Walter Mondale in the least. That figure is Harry S Truman, who in 1948 made an idiot out of every pundit and pollster in the country by defeating Thomas Dewey. On his recent gallop through the Midwest, Mondale drew such large and happy crowds that there were those who thought a late surge was possible. And when Mondale mentioned Truman, at least he could honestly claim that he had supported him at the time. But it was during this very stage of the campaign, when things seemed to be picking up, that Mondale was told the bad news. His campaign chairman, Jim Johnson, took him aside in a Milwaukee hotel and informed him that no possible interpretation of the data could make him the next President of the United States. Truman, after all, did enjoy the advantage of being President already.

So that seems, to most people, to be that. When Mondale talks about the past of the Democratic Party, he is accused of living off memories and forgotten glories. When Ronald Reagan talks about Kennedy, he is credited with the capacity for vision. When Mondale insists that we should talk about “specifics” and not “generalities,” he is accused of being a bore. When Reagan speaks, as he did in Oregon the other day, he is praised for raising America’s sights. To the Oregonians, he said: “America will never stop. It will never give up its mission, its special mission. Never. There are new worlds on the horizon, and we’re not going to stop until we get them all together.” (This in a scripted and rehearsed appearance.) When Mondale talks about a very restricted nuclear freeze, he is accused of being credulous and gullible about the Russians. When Reagan says that he will share America’s most advanced space technology with the Soviet Union, he is lauded for statesmanship and generosity.

I predict that, if Reagan does win, disillusionment will be swift. There are too many unredeemed pledges flying around and too many hangover-inducing binges behind us. Euphoria will stale. Future Republicans will be less inclined to quote the Reagan record. Nor will they want to mention their other past heroes, like Hoover, Nixon, and Ford. Instead, as they search for a peroration, they will tell lisping children and restless teenagers of the man who embodied all the American virtues. Generations yet unborn will be told, by leering phonies incandescent with insincerity, of how the Democratic Party has gone downhill since the plucky, thrifty, honest leadership of Walter F. Mondale.

(The Spectator, November 3, 1984)

DESTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT

IT’S BRASS-MONKEY weather on Massachusetts Avenue, especially on that posh but exposed section which features the embassies of Britain and Brazil, and the fine vacant property that once housed the envoy of the Shah. Here stands the South African embassy and here, outside it, stands a permanent daily picket. District of Columbia law contains a simple protocol which states that anybody holding a placard within five hundred yards of a diplomatic legation will be arrested. A police tape is stretched to demarcate this limit for the convenience of demonstrators. Anyone taking the appropriate pace forward is guaranteed, after one warning, a ride in a car and a night in the cells.

With this guarantee comes the promise of an appearance on the nightly nationwide news. In the past fortnight, viewers have seen the black Mayor of Detroit, the black head of D.C. Council, and several Democratic congressmen escorted away by grave black policemen. On the night before I turned up, it was Douglas and Rory Elisabeth, the son and daughter of Bobby Kennedy, who volunteered themselves. Today, it’s to be a trade-union official and a progressive nun. The picket line is swollen by three busloads of teachers’ union members, most of them white and at least half of them female. And today, there’s a new development. On the opposite corner stands a shivering man in a business suit, holding a homemade placard which reads: South Africa: Do Not Give In to Ignorant Mobs. You Do Have Support. This fellow is protected by his own personal posse of impassive black cops. In conversation, he says straightaway that he knows very little about South Africa but that he feels protest should be directed at the evils of black African governments. He accuses the demonstrators of being publicity seekers and looks genuinely blank when I ask what he is seeking. “I’m completely unpolitical,” he says, adding that he is a registered Republican and “a very strong Reagan supporter.” These two statements are perhaps not as ill matched as they sound at first. “Anyway,” he concludes, “those people should be concentrating on the problems we got right here at home.”

It’s difficult to think of any domestic issue that would unite this white Babbitt and the picketers yonder, but as a matter of record his words were an exact repeat of those offered me by the black cabbie who dropped me here. He too felt that his representatives might be better employed on the less glamorous business of the home-front political grind. And it’s certainly true that the personalities arrested so far are a perfect cross-section of the forces—trade unions, urban blacks, and liberal Democrats—who were decisively repudiated by the electorate last month. It will take many renditions of “We Shall Overcome” and many evocations of the memory of Dr. King to obscure this simple truth. The nightly picket may be good for morale, and the Honk for Support placard draws hoots from about one car in three, which isn’t bad. But this is a coalition of the defeated.

All the same, it has touched the Reagan Administration on an exposed spot. The ostensible reason for the picket is to draw attention to the seventeen black labor leaders recently detained in Johannesburg. But the real target is the increasingly warm relationship between Washington and Pretoria. Under the name of “constructive engagement,” the Reagan Administration has relaxed the prohibition on the sale of arms, taken a “low profile” at the United Nations, and virtually dropped all criticism of the illegal occupation of Namibia. This has of course enraged black America, but it has embarrassed many other sectors too. The quid pro quo for “quiet diplomacy” was supposed to be a reform program in South Africa itself. Nothing worthy of that name has resulted, which makes the Administration here look foolish. In an astonishing development this week, thirty-five Republican congressmen, all of them declared Reaganites, delivered a letter to the South African ambassador. It said that “South Africa has been able to depend on conservatives in the United States to treat them [sic] with benign neglect. We serve notice that, with the emerging generation of conservative leadership, that is not going to be the case.” This must have been something of a facer for the ambassador, more even than the message of sympathy which the picket line received from Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and certainly more than the news that Yale was selling its South African stocks.

Ronald Reagan has been unusually slow to sense this alteration in mood. After his meeting with Bishop Desmond Tutu, he was able to say no more than the usual platitudes. He told the waiting hacks that he had heard, from tribal chieftains in South Africa, how grateful they were for the boon of American investment. The tiny Tutu bears an uncanny resemblance to Bishop Abel Muzorewa, but if anybody had told the President that he sounded exactly like Ian Smith he would probably not have understood the reference. The concept of the loyal chieftain is too close to his generous heart.

For the clever right-wingers, though, the chieftain factor won’t quite cover it. There’s a concept here known variously as MoHo or MoHiG, which stands for “Moral High Ground.” It is important to be seen to be in possession of this precious turf, and the Left has more or less monopolized it, in the case of South Africa, these many years. Ideologically speaking, apartheid makes nonsense of the celebrated distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian upon which conservatives base their human-rights policy. An authoritarian regime may repress dissent, but it is supposed to respect private life and private property, to allow its subjects to worship God in their own way, and to permit such free movement and intercourse as does not pose a threat to its rule. In practice, this is supposed to translate conveniently but not explicitly into “any dictatorship that is not Marxist-Leninist.” But South Africa does make laws which rape the privacy of the individual, even as far as the bedroom. It confiscates the property of citizens, and it limits their right to travel and work even in the country of their birth. That all this is done on the basis of color and race doesn’t make it any sweeter. By taking a sterner view of apartheid, then, the smarter Republicans are protecting a flank that has long been highly vulnerable.

In May 1981, Ronald Reagan defended South Africa by asking, absurdly: “Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought?” Leaving aside the numerous American wars in which South Africa took no part, and assuming that the President was chiefly referring to that greatest of all wars, we’re forced to recall that the Afrikaaner Nationalist Party was on the wrong side in that one, and that imprisonment for pro-Nazi and anti-British activity was and is considered a badge of honor among its ruling circle. Reagan may not know this, but many people do. Here is a case which defies the normal Cold War and patriotic categories. The pickets on Embassy Row may be made up of today’s political “out groups,” and they may be whistling somewhat when they try to revive the spirit of Selma and Montgomery. But they have in common with their predecessors the firm tenancy of MoHo, and in America that will always count for something.

(The Spectator, December 15, 1984)

KENNEDY’S BEDROOM

WE CAN’T PAY you much, I’m afraid. But I can probably get you put up in the John F. Kennedy suite. You can fantasize there to your heart’s content.” I was to be the visiting speaker at the Institute of Politics at Harvard, which is attached to the Kennedy School of Government. On arrival, my friend and host handed me the keys with what I thought was a puckish look on his face. He repeated his injunction about fantasy and heart’s content. I wondered how I could live up to this on my own. About whom was I supposed to fantasize? About Angie Dickinson, who once bashfully described an amour with JFK as “the most memorable fifteen seconds of my life”? Or about Kennedy himself, who told his friend Lem Billings that the advantage of Harvard was that “I can now get tail as often and as free as I want, which is a step in the right direction.” With the help of an incredibly beautiful and utterly incurious girl, I managed to find the door to F14 of Winthrop House and, alone once more, to turn the key.

Erotic shades, if there were any, were taking the day off. I found myself in a comfy twin-bed setting, with an adjoining living room and small kitchen. A largish bookshelf held few books, all of them by or about a member of the Kennedy family. A plaque on the wall announced that JFK had shared this room with Torbert Macdonald, a fellow member of the Harvard intake of 1939–40. This was the year in which JFK, with the unacknowledged help of various court historians, produced his sonorous book Why England Slept, which is said by some to have had an oedipal bearing on his terrible father’s pro-Nazi sympathies. A copy was laid beside my chaste cot. Not until I had lurched back from the seminar and the dinner did I notice the Visitors’ Book.

It seemed to promise more bedside diversion than the lachrymose works of Arthur Schlesinger or the ghost-written juvenilia of the Great Man himself. I began at page one, and found that I could not put it down.

There is a space for remarks in this book, and at first my eye was taken by all those who had been unable to think of anything to say. The extant volume began in the winter of 1971. On November 22 of that year, the eighth anniversary of Dallas, Congressman John Brademas had signed without comment. A former Democratic whip, he is now president of New York University. Just before his entry, I found that of R. W. Apple, now London correspondent of The New York Times and one of the large cadre of American reporters who keep transmitting uplifting news about the SDP. He hadn’t put anything either. Nor had Roy Hattersley or Gloria Emerson. There was the name of Allard Lowenstein, founder of the Dump Johnson movement in 1968 and the man credited with getting Bobby Kennedy to run against LBJ. Not long after I met him, Lowenstein was murdered in New York by an unhinged homosexual friend of his. A book published this month claims that he was working for the CIA all the time he was urging Bobby to take up the torch. No comment even from him.

Perhaps overcome by a sense of history, and perhaps not wishing to seem tongue-tied, Congressman Pete McCloskey of California makes the first stab. “The first day of peace,” it says. I look at the date: April 30, 1975—the day Saigon fell. Is McCloskey one of those who think that Kennedy would never have continued the war he began? Something tells me that he is.

Emboldened by his example, the guests begin to commit themselves more. Frank Capra, a few months later, rather superfluously gives his address as “Hollywood.” He writes, making a point of the capital letter, “I felt the Charisma.” This is the first appearance made by the indispensable Kennedy-word. And on we go, with a certain John Vesey writing “Wow! The K-vibes are intense! ‘Inspirational’ sounds so put on, but it certainly is that. All right here.” Exclamation marks are often a sign that the user is straining for effect. Can it be that Mr. Vesey wrote what he thought he should feel?

The years roll by, and Seymour Hersh, Congressman Charles Goodell, Ted Koppel, and others all come to stay without saying anything. In March 1977, I am stunned to notice, John B. Connally of Houston, Texas, passed a night here with his wife and left no inscription. I think, speaking purely for myself, that if I had featured in the most famous few frames of the century alongside the Dead Man, and if I had been his host at the time he was shot, I might have attempted a few words. But, then again, if anybody can be speechless, he can. More surprising is the modesty of Eugene McCarthy, one of America’s most conceited men and the politician who eclipsed Robert Kennedy in 1968. Last I heard, McCarthy had become a Reaganite. But he prefers to stress the private poetry and aphorism which he produces in moments of solitude. The muse stood him up on this occasion.

But a burst of musing awaits. In quick succession we find Evangelos Averoff, leader of the Greek Right, who is moved to say, “Cozy and refined. Perfect.” (I never did trust him.) Anne Armstrong, the Valkyrie-like exambassadress to the Court of St. James’s, gushes, “Thanks for kindness, stimulation and inspiration.” Carl Oglesby, former SDS megaphone, gives his address as % the Assassination Information Bureau in Washington, D C., and contributes, “One feels and imbibes the spirit of his life.” Sean MacBride, Dan Rather, and Helen Suzman can’t think how to follow that and pass on the whole thing. But with what pleasure does one find little Shirley Williams putting, “A la recherche des [sic] Temps Perdus.”

Tough guys, on the whole, don’t bother. William Webster, now head of the FBI, remains gruffly silent. So does James Buckley (brother of the famous Bill and now running Radio Liberty). Irving Kristol keeps his thoughts to himself, as, more surprisingly, does the loquacious Jack Valenti. Only with John V. Lindsay does the genius loci return. On November 20, 1980, just two days shy of the anniversary, this man, who was once said to be “Jack’s inheritor,” wrote the single word “Onward.” Here, no exclamation mark is needed to emphasize the emptiness.

The Reagan years seem to have robbed some people of speech altogether. After 1980 there are mere hasty signatures from Judith Martin, who was presumably uncertain of the etiquette, from Hodding Carter, from Edwin Meese, from John Anderson, Barbara Tuchman, and C. L. R. Clifford. Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, was silent. Even I. F. Stone could do no better than “Very pleasant.” The British and Irish take up the slack. On March 17, 1983, Harold McCusker boldly inscribes, “An Orangeman in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day.” He has the self-possession to omit the exclamation mark, which is more than can be said for the Irish Ambassador the day after, who writes, “The Irish Ambassador the day after.” David Steel manages to say, in a schoolboy hand, “A marvellous experience!” Swell.

Lately, the Moral Majority have been staying here. Their press spokesman, Cal Thomas, has put “Jesus First.” His deputy, an indecipherable Ed Someone from Lynchburg, has added (did they share the room?—the date is the same), “Ephesians 3:21.” Look it up: I had to, because this is one of the few American guest rooms without a Bible. Inscriptions from the non-famous tend to be less self-conscious and more embarrassing. “Sic Transit Gloria,” “A Whiff of History,” “We will pay any price, bear any burden,” and “Don’t let it be forgotten that for one brief shining moment there was a spot known as Camelot.” These are more like the humble slips lodged in some Wailing Wall.

So what became of Torbert Macdonald? He was adopted by his roommate and elected to Congress in 1954. The roommate’s father had arranged for “Torby” to get a special job during the war. But the roommate’s father later prevented Torby from inheriting Jack’s Senate seat, which Jack had rashly promised him. The seat was pledged, after all, to Teddy. It was to Torby, who once asked him how he would prefer to die, that the young President said, after a pause, “Oh, a gun. You never know what’s hit you. A gunshot is the perfect way.”

After a couple of days, with the brilliant spring sunshine on the quad and the Charles River gleaming nearby, I began to develop a proprietary attitude toward the rooms where once Jack and Torby so grandly hung out. It’s a wrench to pack the old bags. And there is the Visitors’ Book, looking at me reproachfully. I want to be invited back. But one must be honest in the face of posterity. I pull the book toward me and begin, steadily, to write… .

(The Spectator, March 23, 1985)

USELESS IDIOTS

IN ISABEL ALLENDE’S impressive novel The House of the Spirits, which is set in a barely fictional Chile, one of the best-drawn characters is a certain Esteban Trueba. Trueba is a grandee—a brawling, egotistical landowner and an almost likable prisoner of his own appetites. He devotes prodigious energy to rallying his class against the mob and to the struggle against Marxism. He is a senator when the workers’ parties come legally to power, and he insists from the start that only violence will remove the danger to order and property. He smuggles guns into the country, solicits covert aid from the gringos, and addresses subversive meetings of young officers. On the glorious day of the military coup, he gets into his car and drives out to congratulate the soldiery.

The officer received me with his boots up on the desk, chewing a greasy sandwich, badly shaven, with his jacket unbuttoned. He didn’t give me a chance to ask about my son Jaime or to congratulate him for the valiant actions of the soldiers who had saved the nation; instead he asked for the keys to my car, on the ground that Congress had been shut down and that all Congressional perquisites had therefore been suspended. I was amazed. It was clear then that they didn’t have the slightest intention of reopening the doors of Congress, as we all expected. He asked me—no, he ordered me—to show up at the Cathedral at eleven the next morning to attend the Te Deum with which the nation would express its gratitude to God for the victory over Communism.

Trueba’s veins contain real blood, not an insipid mixture of milk and holy water stiffened with liquid dollars. But as I read of his awakening to reality, I found I could clearly see the puffy, shifty, unctuous features of Arturo Cruz.

Cruz is, at one and the same time, the darling of the Reaganites and the icon of the liberals (one wishes he was the only such coincidence). It is he, and not the loutish Enrique Bermúdez or the sadistic Ricardo Lau, who is brought before the cameras like a performing seal. The face of the Contras as seen by the villagers of Nicaragua is that of the snarling, crop-burning fascist. The same face as seen by the U.S. news media and public is that of a sheep with a secret sorrow. Here comes Arturo again, with his nagging worries about the revolution betrayed. Naturally, we are drawn to sympathize with this troubled Everyman. But why are we not introduced to Bermudez, the man at the cutting edge of our military aid? Next question.

Cruz doesn’t have the pretext of innocence. He was on hand when Edgar Chamorro, spokesman of the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Force, gave his testimony about widespread Contra atrocities and admitted that the aim of the mercenaries was the overthrow of the government. He knows that, for speaking those unwelcome truths, Chamorro was banished from the FDN ranks. Does he honestly think he would be treated differently? Does he dream of the day when “the boys” install him in the presidency of a liberal, democratic Nicaragua? Or would just plain “president” be enough?

Not long ago I attended a breakfast meeting in Washington that featured both Cruz and Edén Pastora. Cruz was reason itself, talking of the need to separate party from state and stressing the values of pluralism. He was skeptical about the Sandinista commitment to democracy and scornful of their election. Pastora was his usual “colorful” self, still battered from the bomb that had gone off at his jungle press conference. Both men could at least claim that they had once been Sandinistas, though the returns on this claim are diminishing with time and Bermúdez.

I admit to an animus against the heroic Pastora, for when that bomb exploded, he seized the only available rapid transport and fled, leaving a woman friend of mine (who had absorbed much of the blast meant for him) horribly wounded on a river bank. Still, I listened politely while he denounced Jesse Jackson for going to Cuba, describing him as one of Lenin’s “useful idiots.” The next question concerned Roberto d’Aubuisson, who had just paid a visit to Washington. What did Commander Zero think of him? Pastora preferred not to give an opinion because that would be “interfering in the internal affairs of El Salvador.” At that point I interjected to ask why, in that case, did he feel so free to be personal about Jesse Jackson? He asked to have the question translated, and did not reply. Unimpressive. So, when you reflect on it, is the evolution of Arturo Cruz. He would not take part in an election that he felt to be insufficiently democratic, but he will take part in a war of sabotage and attrition that has no democratic pretenses at all.

This is the old “salami tactic,” operating from the right. The Christian Democrats of Chile joined gleefully and mindlessly in the destruction of Salvador Allende because they believed that they would be the beneficiaries. And certain labor types helped in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, hoping thereby to preserve “free trade unions.” The alliance with fascists, murderers, and oligarchs was, of course, only temporary. Twelve years later in Chile and thirty years later in Guatemala, we can see who was using whom.

With Nicaragua, however, we don’t have the excuse of hindsight. William Casey and his crew have picked Enrique Bermúdez and his crew, and have discarded the waverers. The installations and the infrastructure of a small underdeveloped country are being ruined and destroyed. The population is being subjected, after earthquake, war, and revolution, to a calculated campaign of demoralization, a modern attempt to create a Vendée. One can feel sympathy for the youths who leave the country to avoid the draft and the rationing, but it’s asking a lot to expect us to regard the mercenaries, or their two-faced spokesmen, as brave democrats. The proper historical analogy for these people is not the Founding Fathers but Benedict Arnold.

It is, finally, Cruz and Pastora who are the dupes and the “useful idiots.” Their time could come only under conditions that would consign them to the well-known dustbin of history. Counterrevolutions can also be betrayed. This one will devour its parents as well as its children.

(The Nation, April 27, 1985)

BITTER FRUIT

THE WHOLE misery and disgrace of current U.S. involvement with the “wrong side” in Central America began with the invasion of Guatemala (sometimes described as the coup in Guatemala) in 1954. This invasion/coup was brought off by the usual suspects—Vice President Richard Nixon, the CIA, the United Fruit Company, and other practitioners of destabilization. Even today, the more polished conservatives have to repress a shudder at the recollections of 1954 and its aftermath.

But in Bitter Fruit, their exemplary account of the Guatemalan intervention, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer also describe how solicitous the destabilizers were to the small but significant forces of liberalism and social democracy in the United States. They relate that Edward Bernays, chief lobbyist of the forces seeking to overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz,

had an especially close relationship with The New Leader, a vigorously anti-Communist liberal weekly… . Bernays persuaded the United Fruit Company to sponsor public service advertisements on behalf of the Red Cross and U.S. Savings Bonds in the magazine at $1,000 a page, far above the going rate. The New Leader … carried numerous articles, both before and after the coup, justifying intervention against Arbenz’s regime on the grounds that a Soviet takeover was imminent.

A managing editor of The New Leader in the 1950s, Daniel James, wrote a book entitled Red Design for the Americas, which provided a rationale for the destruction of Guatemalan democracy. United Fruit and the CIA cooperated to insure that this luminous work had a wide distribution.

I thought continually of this episode as I attended the national convention of Social Democrats, U.S.A., held in Washington from June 16. This organization, which might better be known as Social Democrats, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! and which has the crust to claim descent from the party of Debs and Thomas, is little understood or studied but highly influential. Combining the worst of Old Left sectarian venom with the cheapest line in neoconservative platitudes, SDUSA has provided the intellectual context for Jeane Kirkpatrick and some useful cover for other Humphrey-Jackson Democrats in transition. In transition to what? Well, their guru, Carl Gershman, held Kirkpatrick’s fragrant coat at the United Nations for many years, served the Kissinger Commission on Central America, and now heads Reagan’s National Endowment for Democracy. In other words, don’t be fooled by the fact that the mode of address at SDUSA meetings is still “comrade.”

There’s a lot not to be fooled by at these affairs. Alfonso Robelo had been invited as the star guest, to do for the Contras what his 1954 predecessors did for Castillo Armas. He gave a bland speech, sounding for all the world as if the campaign against Nicaragua was being waged by members of the Young Social Democrats and the more highly evolved forces of the Socialist International. He lauded the Lew Lehrman coalition of anti-Soviet guerrillas (incidentally, I do not see how any of that bunch could have got into Angola without being taken through occupied Namibia by the South Africans).

When I asked him about the “social democratic” leadership of Colonel Enrique Bermúdez, he became ever so slightly less silky. To keep harping on about the Somoza National Guard, he said, was like saying that all the Wehrmacht were responsible for war crimes. This Bitburg reference, probably intended for a later speech at the convention of Young Americans for Fascism, may have just slipped out, but I didn’t notice any of the Social Democrats objecting. They didn’t even raise a murmur when Robelo claimed to have investigated all the former guardsmen in the FDN and found them blameless of atrocities under Somoza.

Your typical Social Democrat has a wised-up, pitying manner. You are looking at someone, he seems to say, who has left illusions behind him. No flies can settle on this smirking countenance. Don’t you know, the face seems to ask, that the world is a dangerous place? Haven’t you read The Gulag Archipelago? Ever heard of the boat people? Don’t you want America to be strong? Aren’t you aware that you can’t demonstrate for nuclear disarmament in the Soviet Union? At about this point, and to distract myself from the overmastering desire to slap the face, I imagine myself demonstrating for nuclear disarmament in the Soviet Union and being locked up by someone with precisely those features and that tone of voice.

But, in fact, for all their worldly wisdom, the SDs are extremely naïve. They are the useful idiots of the Reagan revolution. They were the last political formation in America to realize that the Vietnam War was not being fought by democratic forces or for democratic ends. Many of them still feel that, with a bit more “political will” (favorite SD and neocon term), the trick might have been pulled off. They have a utopian and protective attitude toward Israel which in its myopia rivals that of any old party hack toward the Soviet Union. They think that Jean-François Revel is a new philosopher. They think that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a social democrat, though some of them have suppressed worries about his attitude toward the Vlasovites. They think they “saw through” Carter and McGovern before anyone else did, but they modestly understate their role in Democrats for Nixon.

Intellectually contemptible though they may be, the Social Democrats shine like pearls among the Reaganite swine. Left to itself, the old conservative movement could not have come up with fluent twisters like Kirkpatrick, Elliott Abrams, and Max Kampelman, nor mastered a standard of apologetics anywhere near that of Commentary or the Committee for the Free World. A certain vital patina has thus been provided to this government of Christian bigots and thwarted militarists by an ostensibly secular, internationalist political tendency. As with Guatemala or Vietnam, the SDs will be somewhere else while the actual slaughtering is done—probably accusing the journalists who report it of “blaming America first.” But, as with Guatemala and Vietnam, they show that every little bit helps.

(The Nation, July 6–13, 1985)

CHICKEN HAWKS

When you’ve shouted “Rule Britannia,”

when you’ve sung “God save the Queen,”

When you’ve finished killing Kruger

with your mouth …

IN WASHINGTON, it is the season of the white feather. A few months ago, Republican Congressman Bob Doman attacked one of his Democratic opponents as a “draft-dodging wimp.” On June 27, there was nearly a punch-up on the floor of the House when another young Reaganite, Dan Lungren, who bellows for everything from aid to the Contras to chemical warfare and Star Wars, shouted as he was restrained: “I do not have to fear for my physical being in this House. My avocations are weightlifting and tae kwon do, and I certainly do not have to worry about someone who is two decades older than I am.” On television and in their syndicated columns, leading conservatives like George “Triumph of the” Will excoriate liberals for their reluctance to use force and for their generally bleeding-heart attitude. Meanwhile, the glistening pectorals of Sylvester Stallone have become inescapable as Rambo stalks the land, growling out of the side of his mouth about the stab in the back that “our boys” received from unnamed pointy-heads.

But, as Kipling showed long ago, patriotism and jingoism are not by any means the same thing. Jane Mayer in The Wall Street Journal, and the less surprising Jack Newfield in The Village Voice, decided to take a look at the leading white-feather distributors. What they found was what social scientists might call an inverse correlation. The louder a man shouts for bombing and strafing, the less likely he is to have felt the weight of a pack. There are pitiful examples of this, like the former Reaganite Congressman Bruce Caputo, who actually fabricated a Vietnam War record, deceived even his own staff, and was finally given the breeze by the electorate he had hoodwinked. And there are grandiose examples, like the President himself, who convinced Yitzhak Shamir that he had personally taken part in the liberation of the concentration camps, and who repeated the story to other auditors until his handlers and speechwriters admitted that he never left Hollywood between Pearl Harbor and Potsdam. Mostly, though, the proponents of militarism are simply inglorious.

Congressman Dornan, for example, turned out to have been rather a cautious reservist throughout the Vietnam War. Congressman Lungren, he of the Contras and the tae kwon do, was eligible for the draft between 1964 and 1970, but now says: “I had a knee injury from football.” Newt Gingrich who last year told Congress, “I am the very tough-minded son of a career soldier,” was eligible from 1961 to 1969 but took the prudent course of a student deferment and told The Wall Street Journal “What difference would I have made? There was a bigger battle in Congress than in Vietnam.” Arguably true, but since he took part in neither … Best of all, from the esthetic point of view, is Sylvester Stallone himself. He dodged the draft in the most agreeable possible way, hiding in Switzerland as coach to a private school for girls. As he told an interviewer before Rambo was released:

I got there because my mother was a great con-artist and she got me in as a physical instructor. This was a school for extremely wealthy and professionally spoiled children. The Shah of Iran’s kid. The kid from the Hershey fortune, the kid whose father owned the Kimberley mines… . I didn’t want to ski. I just wanted to get loaded and play pinball machines. Essentially I was the imported American sheepdog for these little lambs, these girls. I mean it.

I bet he does. And there’s nothing wrong in wishing that you had had a good war, but something, well, rum about pretending that you did. Something rummer still about defaming those who opposed the last war or who are unenthusiastic about the next.

The green-eyed monster must be at work somewhere. As it happens, the leading “doves” (ludicrous term) have rather more to show on their chests and sleeves. The new senator from Massachusetts, for example, John Kerry, was a renowned officer in Vietnam but also helped found Vietnam Veterans Against the War. George McGovern was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II. Congressman Andrew Jacobs, who originated the idea of calling the rightist bluffers “war wimps,” was a marine in Korea.

And the coincidences are extraordinary. Look into the past of any rabid patriot of the moment—and you will find that they wangled a job at the base. There never was such a collection of bad knees, weak lungs, urgent academic priorities, or, as in the case of Stallone, sheer bloody gall. Contrast this “hawkish” crew with Senator Albert Gore, the rather decent and skeptical Democratic senator from Tennessee. Of those who graduated from Harvard in 1969, Gore was practically the only one to enlist under his country’s colors. As he put it in a recent interview—because this is the conversation topic of the moment—“I came from a small town of three thousand people. I concluded that if I didn’t go, somebody else would have to go.”

Which is the closest to a money-mouth relationship that anybody has got in this exchange. The open secret about the American Armed Forces is that, by rank and file, they are composed of poor blacks, Hispanics, and rural whites. The figure of Lieutenant Calley was shocking to enlightened Americans, not because they discovered him in Vietnam, but because he was the sort of person they never met at home. Both sides wage class war on the point: the Right by suggesting that the limousine liberals are out of touch with “grass-roots America” and the liberals by alleging that the Right only fancies the plebeians as cannon fodder.

The conservatives certainly asked for this riposte about their own war records, and they are definitely squirming as a result. But the Democrats should beware of their temporary field day. Congressman Lane Evans, for example, has proposed nicknaming the draft-dodging warmongers “chicken hawks,” which is superficially amusing but is also, as I bet he knows perfectly well, a particularly nasty slang word for elderly pederasts. People like Jack Newfield, who don’t think anybody should have gone to Vietnam, should beware of borrowing the philistine, vulgar speech with which antiwar spokesmen were slandered in those days. The white feather can be a more honorable thing to receive than to give.

The serious pacifist objects not to dying but to killing. The serious radical long ago got bored with endless jokes about socialists who went to private school, had a private income, were embarrassed by having servants, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. Tom Wolfe built a whole reputation on this one tenuous gag, and Lord Stansgate nearly lost one. But everybody agrees, somewhere in his heart, that there ought to be some connection between what you believe and how you behave, what you advocate for others and how you live yourself. At the moment, the gap is more conspicuous in the case of the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. So:

Pass the hat for your credit’s sake and pay—

pay—pay!

(The Spectator, August 10, 1985)

STANDING TALL

THE STANDARD image of President Ronald Reagan as a game but fuddled movie actor is an image so stale as to be rebarbative. It is the standby of the weary cartoonist, the flagging gag-writer, and the composer of hackneyed captions. It’s been a boast of mine, during some years of writing from Washington, that I have never lampooned the old boy as a Wild West ham, an All-American lad, a granite-jawed GI, or any other of the stock repertoire. To fall for such instant “takes” is to be a hack oneself—like those who go to Republican conventions in Texas and dwell endlessly on the rhinestones and ten-gallon hats.

Now, as we lurch uncertainly into the second term, comes Professor Michael Rogin of the University of California with a serious thesis on Reagan and celluloid. And now I wish that I had paid more attention to the obvious. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans, Rogin gave a paper entitled “Ronald Reagan: The Movie.” This paper makes the most blasé, acclimatized Washingtonian sit up and peer around. For example, I still remember the irritation I felt at my own emotion when Reagan last summer made his D-Day anniversary speech in Normandy. I knew that I was being got at, but I swallowed and blinked all the same when he asked the assembled leathery veterans: “Where do we find such men?” I might have been better armored had I recognized the line from The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Likewise, in the New Hampshire primary debates in 1980, when Reagan upstaged his rivals by chirruping, “I’m paying for this microphone,” few of those present recognized the plagiarism of Spencer Tracy’s State of the Union.

All the President’s lines—but not all of them so subliminal. Launching his latest nuclear fantasy, he told the press corps, “The Force is with us.” Then, rather oddly, he complained at having his “Strategic Defense Initiative” nicknamed Star Wars. Defending his inventive tax-reform bill, and challenging the Democrats to make something of it, he gurgled: “Make my day!” But comparisons between his style and that of Dirty Harry are daily discouraged by a pained, overworked White House press office.

The apotheosis of all this (“Where’s the rest of me?” “Let’s win this one for the Gipper!”) came, Rogin believes, in 1981. “To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.” It so fell out that Reagan had already recorded a breezy, upbeat salute to the audience at the Oscar ceremony: “The television audience watching a screen saw a Hollywood audience watch another screen. One audience saw the other applaud a taped image of a healthy Reagan, while the real President lay in a hospital bed.”

The point must come when one asks whether the President himself knows the difference. Perhaps it came recently when the Leader of the Free World took a gander at the impasse in Beirut and told the microphone (which he’d paid for): “I saw Rambo last night, and next time I’ll know what to do.” The whoop that echoed across the nation was one that had been building for some time. But, though I have been writing about Rambo for months, I am still uncertain about what has made it so much more successful than other chauvinist, paranoid spectaculars. The theme of captive “missing” Americans in Indochina might be thought to have been exhausted, in the last year alone, by at least three rival films. The idea that “we” could have won if it weren’t for the press and the pointy-heads (“Weimar chic,” as a friend put it to me sourly) is drearily familiar from a host of Monday-morning quarterbacks. The idea that “we” actually did win, in Vietnam and everywhere else, is even now being popularized by that great studio revisionist Menachem Golan, whose latest offering is a replay of the TWA Beirut hijack—where the U.S. Cavalry really does arrive at the last minute.

A possible explanation was offered to me unintentionally by a Vietnamese friend with whom I went to see Rambo. He took it with fair good humor, though he was generally rather appalled. He objected in particular to the portrayal of Vietnamese soldiers as Japanese—as, moreover, the cruel, kepi-wearing, buck-toothed Japanese of John Wayne vintage. Easy to see why any Vietnamese above the age of forty would resent such a vulgar confusion. But musing through a second screening, and seeing Mr. Minh’s point afresh, I was struck by the final scene in which Sylvester Stallone howlingly machine-guns a whole roomful of his boss’s high-tech computers, radios, and retrieval systems. To him, of course, they represent the power of the potbellied bureaucrat over the man in the field. But, to the blue-collar, semiemployed youths who yell for Rambo, may this moment not suggest the revenge on Sony, Nissan, Toyota, and Mitsubishi? Today’s cold war with Asian capitalism excites scarcely less passion than did the hot one with Indochinese communism. Rambo as protectionist paradigm?

The screen, a smaller one this time, has also dominated the year’s most emotional and enduring public debate. It is a very rare night that does not feature some strong footage from the Cape of Good Hope, usually succeeded by some strenuous punditry. American networks easily make up in technological sweetness what they have abandoned by way of political depth, and some real feats have been accomplished. By satellite, and by the deft use of separate studios (Apart-Aid?), Botha and Tutu have been presented as if they were actually arguing in the same room. An issue which was, until very recently, almost occluded in America has become the foreign-policy question. Its hard edge of moral choice and its pitiless focus on racialism have insured that there is scant hiding place for the undecided. This means that a lot of American clergymen are getting prime time without, for once, having to pay for it by the electronic collection plate.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx said, rather aptly, that men learning a new language always begin by translating it back into the language they already know. Thus, the newly potent symbols of apartheid become instantly assimilated to the memory of Selma, Montgomery, and Memphis. Experienced South Africa hands like Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post (himself a white Southerner) have been arguing for years that the comparison is not even a comparison. But the temptation of analogy has proved too strong. For an entire hour the other night, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Jesse Jackson went at it as if the Freedom Riders were even now being bayed by Bull Connor. The two men still detest each other from that period, and neither of them seems to have read anything except the Bible (or “the babble,” as they both call it) since. Falwell, though still able to please a racialist crowd while later saying, “Who, me?” now claims to have been delivered by the Lord from his earlier segregationist prison. Jackson, who set out as a rainbow warrior, has also kept company with bigots and claims to have been cleansed by the experience. Both know as much about South Africa as I do about molecular biology. It’s a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay “The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.” This rather shallow piece appeared in The New York Times Magazine and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight Macdonald, etcetera, etcetera. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once-iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, okay! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naïveté or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-Semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged “neoconservative” movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary, and The New Criterion can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist, and, above all, anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon as it is raised. I wait for the agonized, self-justifying neoconservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?

The smart new metropolitan Right has more in common with the unpolished legions of Falwell and Rambo than it might care to acknowledge. Their shared psychology is one of superpower self-pity. Rambo sees the United States as David to the Vietnamese Goliath. By slight contrast, the Committee for the Free World views America, in Nixon’s famous, grizzling phrase, as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Never in history can any group of well-connected, well-heeled, well-advertised propagandists have complained so much, and through so many outlets, about being an oppressed minority. Seldom in history has such a wealthy, powerful, overbearing government represented itself so consistently as a victim—bullied now by the Lebanese and now by the Nicaraguans. Individual self-pity (“We want our country to love us—gulp—as much as we love our country”) merges nicely with this lachrymose conception of country itself. I don’t mind the fact that former liberals rush to repeat these old conservative commonplaces. It is, after all, one of the great themes of our time. But I do find it hard to be told, in the age of Reagan and Rambo, that it took courage for them to do so. “Where do we find such men?” Only too easily.

(London Review of Books, October 3, 1985)

SKIN OF THEIR TEETH

DURING A PARTICULARLY dismal phase of the Cyprus crisis, Aneurin Bevan was taunting the Tory front bench and happened to observe that they were, without knowing it, of two minds. Did they want, he inquired sarcastically, a base in Cyprus or Cyprus as a base? I have been told by those who witnessed the debate that you could actually see the ministerial visages change. As Bevan’s point went home, they realized that the need for a strategic foothold did not commit them to an indefinite responsibility for an unpopular and repressive government. You could have one without the other. A brisk climbdown, some hasty constitutional arrangements, a bit of aid and goodwill and—generalized feelings of relief. Failure to see this opportunity would infallibly have resulted in the loss of both the island and the bases.

It is difficult to pinpoint with any certainty the moment at which the Reagan team was hit by the same blinding and obvious revelation about the Philippines. In the mind of Michael Armacost, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the moment seems to have come when, as U.S. Ambassador in Manila, he had to read and write reports on the murder of Benigno Aquino. The experience convinced him that Ferdinand Marcos was terminally dishonest and nasty and a great deal more trouble than he was worth. Returned to Foggy Bottom, he set about winning over his colleagues and superiors to this view. But, while the anti-Marcos faction in the State Department was growing steadily, the White House was still committed to its client in his capacity as the landlord for Clark Field and Subic Bay. It’s only a short while since George Bush, toasting Marcos at a banquet, said: “We stand with the Philippines. We stand with you, sir. We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic processes. We will not leave you in isolation. It would be turning our backs on history if we did.”

Attacking Mondale’s foreign-policy proposals during the second Presidential debate, Ronald Reagan chose the Philippines as a classic illustration of the rightness of his own world view. Better to “retain their friendship,” he burbled, “rather than throwing them to the wolves and then facing a communist power in the Pacific.” As late as February 10, 1986, the President said that he was unconvinced by reports of election fraud: “I’m sure even elections in our own country—there are some evidences of fraud in places and areas.” It’s so unusual for Reagan to say anything that even slightly denigrates America that one must judge his attachment to Marcos to have been pretty strong even at the eleventh hour.

Several things combined to make a lightning change possible. First, Marcos practically committed suicide on network television. Apparently he had no adviser brave enough to tell him how revolting, conceited, and deranged he looked. I say apparently, because he did keep coming on, arousing choruses of disgust across the nation. Second, there was, unlike in Nicaragua or Iran, an alternative “third force” available, led by presentable people. Third, and oddly unremarked, the Soviet Union decided for reasons of its own to defend Marcos, to attack American “interference” in the elections, and even to send its ambassador to congratulate the despot on his “victory.” This made it harder to present Marcos as the only alternative to the expansionist Bear.

So the thing was done, and done with dispatch. The State Department won its first foreign-policy victory in a long time. All that now remains is for Ronald Reagan to succeed in giving the impression that the whole thing was his own idea.

This may prove more difficult than his other masterly credit takings have done. The least noticed but certainly the major casualty of the Marcos demission is that very theory which has, until now, been the Administration’s guide. For six years, the ideas of Jeane Kirkpatrick have been the reigning wisdom. In the famous article that got her a place in Reagan’s heart and, later, in his Cabinet, Kirkpatrick wrote that American liberalism had a suicidal tendency to respect “deep historical forces.” It was not such forces, she argued, that brought down the Shah and Somoza. It was “lack of realism” in American decision-making coupled with “the pervasive and mistaken assumption that one can easily locate and impose democratic alternatives and the equally pervasive and equally flawed belief that change per se in autocracies is inevitable, desirable and in the American interest.” The answer was to abandon the precepts of Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young, and to give ungrudging support to “positively friendly” authoritarians.

In the last few months, Kirkpatrick and her supporters have fought a long rearguard action in defense of Marcos. Norman Podhoretz, Robert Evans and Rowland Novak, Owen Harries, and the other syndicated neoconservatives echoed the same themes. They attacked “liberal meddling” in Filipino affairs. And they were taken up by Blas Ople, Marcos’s official spokesman, who told American viewers that he “would like to paraphrase Jeane Kirkpatrick, who warned against a foreign policy of the United States dedicated literally to the subjugation of a friendly nation.”

At the climax of the Filipino elections, Kirkpatrick’s column urged that American interference cease lest the United States end up like Magellan, “hacked to death by the Philippine tribes.” Just as her article was going to syndicated subscribers, Kirkpatrick tried to change it, hastily inserting some lines about “charges of fraud” that “destroyed the perception [that bloody word again] of a creditable election.” Which column you might have read depended on which newspaper you bought. Put the two versions together, and you see the collapse of the neoconservative ascendancy in foreign policy.

By failing to take its own advice, the Reagan Administration has not only secured its enormous military bases in the Philippines, but it has won itself an immense grant of moral and political credit. That credit may be temporary, and there will be those who resent the last-minute nature of the metamorphosis. But it has all gone off incomparably better than anyone would have foreseen, and incomparably better than any of Jimmy Carter’s brushes with authoritarianism. The Reagan people hate being mentioned in the same breath with Jimmy Carter, but in this case they’ll just have to live with the fact that they did what he would have done. As Aneurin Bevan said on another occasion, conservatives are quite good at wearing the medals of their defeats.

(The Spectator, March 8, 1986)

LOONY TUNES

IF THERE IS ONE thing that unites the Reaganites and their sickly circle of liberal admirers in Washington, it is the allegation that Nicaragua is a “revolution betrayed.” The phrase has an honorable pedigree, deriving from Trotsky’s mordant dissection of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

But, as employed by the White House propaganda team, it is an important element in the manufacture of a false consensus. If the term means anything in President Reagan’s mouth, it means that everybody welcomed the anti-Somoza revolution but that some of the more sensitive comrades have become sickened and distressed since 1979—sickened and distressed enough to start burning the crops, murdering the peasants, and bombing the refineries of a wretchedly underdeveloped society (something the original Trotskyists were only accused of doing).

The record, like history, is pitiless. It shows what the Right would have you forget: that Reagan and his advisers were always pro-Somoza and anti-Sandinista, and that they started levying war on Nicaragua long before any of the incoming revolutionary tendencies had had a chance to establish or to differentiate themselves.

As a candidate in 1979, Ronald Reagan recorded numerous broadcasts for his political action committee, Citizens for the Republic. Tapes and cassettes of these gems were distributed to radio stations across the luckless nation. Here is what the man emitted between March and April 1979:

Senator Steve Symms of Idaho … made a nine-day trip, touching shore in Jamaica (our newest Marxist neighbor), the Dominican Republic and Cuba. His summation is blunt and to the point. He says the Caribbean is rapidly becoming a Communist lake in what should be an American pond… .

I’m sure he would agree that the troubles in Nicaragua bear a Cuban label also. While there are people in that troubled land who probably have justifiable grievances against the Somoza regime, there is no question but that most of the rebels are Cuban-trained, Cuban-armed and dedicated to creating another Communist country in this hemisphere.

A little later in the same period, as Somoza’s government was approaching its death agony and inflicting death agony on thousands of its own people, Reagan took to the airwaves again. His target was the softhearted State Department:

Our State Department [has decided on] a cutback in economic aid to Nicaragua and the withdrawal of American personnel. This we are doing because, according to the State Department, President Somoza is in violation of our standards of human rights. He may be—I don’t know.

So, right up until July 19, 1979, the date of the Sandinista revolution, there is no evidence that Reagan was anything but sympathetic to the deluded sadist Somoza, who bombed his own capital city before giving up. Nor was it long after the revolution that the American Right began to rattle the saber. The 1980 Republican platform, which was written less than a year after the fall of Somoza, read:

We deplore the Marxist Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua and the Marxist attempts to destabilize El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. We do not support United States assistance to any Marxist government in this hemisphere, and we oppose the Carter Administration aid program for the government of Nicaragua. However, we will support the efforts of the Nicaraguan people to establish a free and independent government.

Credit for the insertion of this plank in the platform is taken by John Carbaugh, a former senior foreign-policy aide to Senator Jesse Helms and a man of such disordered reactionary temper that the Thatcher government had to ask him to leave the Zimbabwe independence talks in London, where, uninvited, he was urging Ian Smith to hang tough.

Even Carbaugh would have looked a little farouche at the May 1980 meeting of the Council for Inter-American Security in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The CIAS declaimed:

Certainly, in war there is no substitute for victory; and the United States is engaged in World War III. The first two phases, containment and detente, have been overtaken by the Soviet scenario of double envelopment: surround the People’s Republic of China and strangle the Western industrialized nations by interdicting their oil and ore. Southern Asia and Ibero-America are the actual areas of aggression.

Latin America is vital to the United States: America’s global power projection has always rested upon a cooperative Caribbean and a supportive South America. For the United States of America, isolationism is impossible. Containment of the Soviet Union is not enough. Detente is dead.

Only the United States can, as a partner, protect the independent nations of Latin America from Communist conquest and help preserve Hispanic-American culture from sterilization by international Marxist materialism.

It was from among the authors of this swirling bullshit that candidate Reagan picked his advisers on the Panama Canal and Nicaragua. Roger Fontaine briefed him on the canal, became a special Central America adviser to the National Security Council, and now works for the Moonies at The Washington Times. Lewis Tambs is U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica. L. Francis Bouchey, one of Roberto d’Aubuisson’s hosts when he visited the United States in 1984, also has continual “input,” as they say.

The rest is history. In March 1981, the Reaganites suspended Nicaraguan credits for the purchase of wheat. In April of the same year, they canceled the fifteen million dollars in aid that remained of President Carter’s original seventy-five-million-dollar program. In September, the seven-million-dollar AID loan was suspended, and, in November, the National Security Council met to approve an eight-point plan that included the initial nineteen million dollars for the Contras, and their training by officers of the Argentine junta.

And yet we are asked to believe that the Right has been driven by Sandinista excesses to support the Somacistas. If it had been up to the Reaganites, Somoza would never have been overthrown. Not since the days of the China lobby has an important foreign policy been so firmly in the hands of a fanatical clique—an ancien régime cabal of misfits and loony tunes.

(The Nation, April 19, 1986)

CASTING BREAD ON THE SENATORS

IF THERE WAS ever a topic which the Reagan Administration spent a great deal of time not caring about, that topic was acid rain. It had everything that a hot Republican issue should not have: environmental and ecological overtones; the possibility of complex and restrictive legislation; the opening of an avenue of attack on the American Chamber of Commerce. There were no blue-collar votes in it either, or even middle class residential ones. Wasn’t the whole point of acid rain the fact that it drifted over into Canada? Everybody knows that there’s lots of spare room in Canada, combined with a disagreeable tendency to whinge. Two or three years ago, I went to the Key Theater in Georgetown and sat through three unbearably dull Canadian films about the problem solely because the Administration had refused the films an import license. That was how much the White House, and most of the rest of Washington, cared about Canadian susceptibilities.

All of a sudden, however, there was action, Michael Deaver, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, became all acid rain-conscious. The subject was moved to the top of the agenda when Reagan met Brian Mulroney in Quebec. Generous allocations were made to those old favorites, research and prevention. And, when Michael Deaver left the White House to put up his brass plate as a consultant, one of his first blue-chip clients was the government of Canada. “Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.” Investigation shows that it was Deaver who had been pushing for a more “activist” policy while in office. He picked up his million-dollar retainer almost, as it were, on the way out. As a result, in spite of the fact that he was probably doing the right thing in a praiseworthy cause, Mr. Deaver is hauled before the cameras and the Congress for a “conflict of interest.”

There isn’t a single member of that great legislative body who does not know the meaning of the term. For as long as I live here, I shall never quite adjust to the loud, uncompromising way in which money talks. Deaver has argued publicly that he was not using the “revolving door” between public and private interest, and that he only did what many other insiders do. How right he is. American politics is choking and drowning in boodle.

The agreed villain is the political action committee, or PAC. These organizations evolved to circumvent the laws on campaign finance that followed the Watergate scandal. They allow individual interests and corporations to make enormous donations to candidates and incumbents, and to buy themselves audience in the Capitol. As I write, the Congress is debating tax reform and members are daily forced to run what’s been called “the Gucci gauntlet,” as sharply dressed lobbyists and loophole artists crowd the corridors. A congressman who doesn’t want his eye to be caught will be in a weak position when he espies the face of a man who just wrote him a check for $75,000.

I am not exaggerating. There are twenty-seven senators seeking reelection this year, and in 1985 alone they accepted a total of $9.8 million in donations from political action committees. This is an elevenfold increase over 1979. Some senators are more candid about the situation than others. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, told the Los Angeles Times that he’s getting so much interest-group money these days that he has to keep a computer printout on his desk to remind him to whom he is indebted. Asked why he was suddenly in the money, Grassley deployed what Stanley Baldwin used to call “appalling frankness.” He’s on the Senate Finance Committee, he said, “and we didn’t have a tax bill in 1983. Now, people are anticipating a major tax bill.”

The situation is bad enough and blatant enough for (the retiring) Senator Barry Goldwater to introduce legislation limiting PAC payments. This would mean that a senator could accept “only” $750,000 from PACs. But it would make some other provisions as well. For example, the practice of “bundling” would be sharply restricted. Bundling? Bundling is a means for PACs to evade contribution limits by collecting serial amounts from their members in individual checks and handing the whole fistful or armful to the target candidate. A wonderful group named Align PAC—a group of insurance agents set up to lobby on the tax-reform bill—last year gave $215,000 in this fashion to Senator Robert Packwood of Oregon. He was Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

In the last election campaign, PACs kicked in $102 million to congressional candidates. (It took six million ordinary Americans and thousands of assorted celebrities several months to raise half that amount in the recent Hands Across America ballyhoo.) And there were only four thousand PACs involved, which lends point to Goldwater’s observation that “it is no longer ‘we the people,’ but PACs and the special interests they represent, who set the country’s political agenda and control nearly every candidate’s position on the important issues of the day.”

If this money and these inducements were being made available to parties, it might be unfair but it would not be so suspicious. It is the singling out of individual candidates and incumbents, and the clear attempts made to suborn their votes and allegiances, that has become more than a “problem.” There is no boring old balance rule in the American mass media. If you want air time at election time, you pay for it—and very steeply, too. If you don’t want, then you don’t want to get elected. Parties these days will simply not nominate men and women without funds of their own or access to the funds of others.

As if all this were not enough, we have the annual farce, just completed, of the “Honorarium Declaration.” The law allows a senator to accept as much as one-third again of his or her salary in presents and fees, provided that the residue is given “to charity.” The salary of a senator is $75,100 per annum, plus generous expenses for staff and research. Last week we learned that senators accepted $2.3 million in honoraria in 1985, passing on $723,000 of it to charities such as libraries in their own districts bearing their own names. Incredible groups like the American Pork Congress, which one never hears about most of the time, spend a good deal of money buying free holidays for senators and free facelifts for their overworked wives. If this is not bread on the waters, what is? Members of the House of Representatives copped $4.6 million in honoraria and lavished $847,000 of that on their favorite charities. The leading recipient (of honoraria, that is) was Dan Rostenkowski, Democratic Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who netted $137,500. The Ways and Means Committee is a tax-writing committee, and it was no surprise to find that its members attracted two and a half times the average in extramural receipts.

You don’t have to be very precise about how you spend money given to you for campaign purposes, and, under one extra-generous clause in the law, you can keep any of it left over for your personal use if you were in office on January 8, 1980.

Goldwater is right. The voters are sickened by the way in which their Congress has been alienated from them by money. I think one could go further and say that the decadence of political language, the growing domination of discourse by ad men and media consultants, all the grooming and blow-drying and emasculation of candidates are largely attributable to the operations of pelf. It’s no surprise that so few Americans think their vote counts, or even bother to register it.

Poor Michael Deaver. Like many former chefs de cabinet, he developed the illusion that his job was above politics. When next he comes for a solemn hearing on Capitol Hill, it will be interesting to see which senator casts the first bundle.

(The Spectator, May 31, 1986)