Agents of Influence
Choate, Pat
AGENTS OF INFLUENCE Pat Choate/Alfred A. Knopf/295 pp. $22.95 David Brock It is difficult to recall a recent book that has so shaken the Washington hive—former officials of the Reagan and Carter...
...Independent" trade associations like the U.S.-Japan Trade Council are really "front groups for 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 Japanese companies...
...Choate names names and flogs sacred cows...
...officials, their foreign clients, and their fees, including everyone from Democratic National David Brock is a John M Olin fellow at the Heritage Foundation...
...What is more, Choate's overarching schema—where Suzuki is Japan, Chrysler is America, and every trade victory for Japan is a defeat for America—is an embarrassing economic anachronism...
...Choate writes, "The real issue is whether or not the manipulation of America's political and economic system . . . has reached the point where it threatens our national sovereignty and our future...
...They are tasked with hawking Japan's "propaganda"—for example, that the trade deficit is all America's fault, or that the culturally unique Japanese don't want foreign goods—to U.S...
...Ambassador," rather than as general counsel for the Association for International Investment...
...Ex-trade official Harald Malmgren was quoted in the Washington Post as criticizing Zenith during its fight against Japan's television cartel, without a mention of his having raked in $300,000 from Japanese television manufacturers...
...But we ought not abide Choate's nativist implication that Japanese money is somehow more tainted than, say, American money (recall the HUD and S&L influence-peddling...
...There are some glaring conceptual flaws in this work, but they can't account for such a hateful reception...
...Pity Japan: it pays through the nose to get the kind of sycophantic treatment from the American academy that the Soviets and the Sandinistas got for a song...
...Indeed, one-fifth of the book is comprised of elaborate appendixes listing former U.S...
...Worst is that so much of this flackery and wheel-greasing is undercover...
...business...
...bottom-line negotiating positions, and confidential information on the U.S...
...When the Beltway wisemen decide to join forces in this way, it's a good idea to check your wallet, or, in this case, the offending book...
...Choate is particularly appalled by the revolving door: "Many now see public service as nothing more than a booster rocket on a one-way journey to wealth and power as a D.C...
...trade officials, Congress, and the media, with the intent of keeping U.S...
...At the university level, according to Choate, 80 percent of research on Japan is funded by Japan, leading researchers to an odd focus on improving U.S.-Japan relations rather than on the intricacies of Japan's industrial policies or money-politics...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...One such workbook, Choate reports, dwells on "America's role in 'creating' war in the Pacific—U.S...
...markets wide open to Japanese exports and easing pressures on Japan to liberalize its economy...
...more than any other country, $400 million a year, to employ an army of Washington lobbyists, lawyers, and publicists...
...choate estimates that Japan spends k...
...At one point, describing his guerrilla tactics, the author bemoans the polite convention that "you cannot impugn the motive behind someone's argument, only the argument itself...
...Choate notes that when Elliot Richardson appears on a talk show opposing limits on foreign investment, he's addressed as "Mr...
...Committee Chairman Ron Brown to George Bush's former chief of staff Daniel J. Murphy...
...These hangers-on, many of whom have no known talents other than a taste for three-course lunches, are not breaking any laws, but they are pushing the bounds of ethical propriety and trampling on the concept of civic virtue, Choate charges...
...semiconductor, telecommunications, and supercomputer industries...
...Rolodex operators avoid registering with the Justice Department as foreign agents by masking their activities behind such appellations as "consultant" and "adviser...
...Perhaps this desperate bit of hyperbole means that managed-traders like Choate think they're losing the policy battle, though there is probably a large public appetite for such pap...
...The most scandalous revelations here, however, concern Japan's efforts to skew the information we use to analyze Japanese society, beginning with the apparently common dissemination of Japanese-funded teaching materials in U.S...
...insider...
...In the midst of the talks, Olive up and left State to work in the electronics firm Fujitsu's Washington office, taking with him knowledge of U.S...
...What irritates, I think, is that Choate has produced a rare Washington book, neither a dull political-science tome, nor a self-serving kissand-tell memoir, but one that yanks back the curtain and reveals something unlovely about how the place really works...
...Choate appears even to have lost his job at TRW, Inc., which does a lot of business with the Japanese, in the fracas...
...Ironically, this leads the author, like all Japan-bashers, to recommend the Japanization of America: a beefed-up trade bureaucracy, new rules to dissuade foreign investors, and more politicking by U.S...
...actions that are said to have influenced Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor, and Japan's perspective on America's dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...And too many D.C...
...elementary schools...
...Take David Olive, a Foggy Bottom type who laid the groundwork in the recent U.S.-Japan high-tech trade talks...
...It seems not to have occurred to Choate that the hucksterism he deplores was spawned in the first place by a grotesquely swollen federal government...
...22.95 David Brock It is difficult to recall a recent book that has so shaken the Washington hive—former officials of the Reagan and Carter administrations, think-tankers right and left, the redoubtable pundits Michael Kinsley and Hobart Rowen—as has Pat Choate's Agents of Influence...
...s a metaphor for the decadent swamp that is today's Washington, or as a general argument for full disclosure in public debate, Agents of Influence is good reading...
...Unfortunately, its breathless focus on Japan is meant to alarm us about an imaginary "Japanese threat" and discredit free-traders as useful idiots...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
