Correspondence
technology that allows the Chinese to identify the sex of a fetus months before birth. Animal rights activists went into high dudgeon after police laid the ambush and death of Mr. Hyram Kitchen,...
...gossip circuit, the piece repackages material that has appeared in other media outlets...
...That work, subsequently revised and published by Cornell University Press in 1974, contained a scholarly critique of the United States' association with the overthrow of the elected Lumumba government and the rise of the Mobutu regime...
...Nor did I publicly criticize the Mobutu government resulting in my getting thrown out of the country...
...Some businessmen are idiotic and venal...
...The new regime is "reformist Communism," just as Gorbachev intended from the beginning...
...I do not think it will last, indeed I wrote long before most others that Gorbachev's lack of understanding of democratic revolution and his cowardly refusal to enact an effective economic program had led him to adopt a doomed strategy...
...This article reminds me of those breathless exposés in the penny dreadfuls sold at every supermarket...
...The fall of Ceausescu was a purge, pure and simple...
...Needless to say, it is difficult to imagine such a column being written to-day...
...However, David Brock's article ("The Prince Metternichs of Congress") in your February issue contains a number of inaccurate statements about my personal experiences and motives that amount to character assassination...
...He makes much of this in the book, and his many admirers, in singing the book's praises, have made much of it as well...
...I'm grateful to Michael David Blume for his thoughtful comments...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...Robert J. Powers Shreveport, Louisiana More Fear and Loathing It frightens me as to how my name got on your mailing list...
...Contrary to Mr...
...As he makes a point of confessing, "high school for me, I am now embarrassed to say, wa's one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War...
...But what is most shocking to me is that you and your publisher, Ronald E. Burr, would publish material defaming me without even requiring that the author interview me to obtain my reaction to these allegations...
...Finally, I agree with Mr...
...Deans throughout the country have received death threats of uncommon grisliness even for American reformers...
...Wolpe and Mr...
...What scares me more than anything is that if I subscribed to your magazine, a little of that may go to the fund to put silly Reagan's face on Mount Rushmore...
...It is not that massive repression is impossible...
...Perhaps Mr...
...We were all Jews in the park yesterday . . . we wept, we embraced each other...
...In addition, it seems reasonable that there be actual investment in Eastern Europe, not by our government, of course, but by businessmen...
...helping to train legalscholars in, for example, the principles of commercial law...
...if constructive change proceeds, we have little to fear, for the Eastern Europeans can solve their own problems...
...Mobutu interact do not consider the hectoring remarks of Mr...
...Third, Franco and Salazar were despots and their societies were backward, but essentially they tried to protect traditional society against the dynamic side-effects of modernization...
...But Rumania is the purest example of the triumph of Communist Gorbachevites at the expense of real democracy...
...Well before this incident I had completed my doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on "American Foreign Policy Towards the Congo 1960-1964...
...not a single defense ministry...
...If events sour, we lose little...
...State: Zip: Date of change: 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...
...We have strong strategic, as well as humanitarian, interests in trying to influence the outcome, when social and economic prospects are uncertain due to the terrible ravages of Communism...
...IMPORTANT Allow six weeks for address change ^ Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$30) ^ Payment enclosed ^ Bill me later Name: (please want) Address: City...
...It Won't Be Easy My wife, native New Orleanian that she is, wishes to thank Victor Gold from the bottom of her heart for "We Never Called It 'The Big Easy" (TAS, February 1990...
...Weissman's colleagues on the Hill were under the mistaken impression that he had spent his time in Zaire with the Peace Corps...
...I am uncomfortable with the contemptuous allusion to capitalist rope-sellers...
...We know now...
...Don't forget TAS Address Changes Made Easy 1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...While I stand corrected on that, I fail to see why saying Mr...
...Not only do we have greater interest in the outcome, in Eastern Europe, but there is more healing needed...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...We also agree that Eastern Europe—and, though he doesn't say so, I assume he agrees, the Soviet Union as well—is extremely explosive...
...training statisticians...
...He also reminds us that in those days, among people like himself—that is to say, liberals—Israel enjoyed the blessings of a heroic image...
...RET CORRESPONDENCE Congo Din Congressional policy toward Zaire is a legitimate and important issue, worthy of informed public debate...
...Further, I don't see how this changes the aptness of my observation that Mr...
...I believe we hold a pat hand because we have what the Soviet Empire needs to survive, and we can deprive them of it unless they meet our democratic and strategic conditions...
...Pray we do not find out, but also admit that the beginning is rather hopeful...
...Let him say that to Secretary Mosbacher, who hasn't gotten the message...
...That's what a simcha is...
...We observed a moment of silence for all who had fallen, heard the melancholy summons of the shofar...
...We tend to forget that there has already been a lot of bloodshed, but when the Chinese do it in front of CNN the world denounces it...
...Beyond technology restrictions, I see little reason to hamper it...
...By and large, though, I think that Western participation in the development of Eastern bloc economies will be a "good infection," encouraging the process of economic liberalization...
...How many Communists with sufficient fanatic edge to risk vicious internecine war exist in the East...
...For them, as for Friedman, it serves as a special kind of moral license, entitling the bearer to add his own contribution to the campaign of defamation against Israel, and to do so without fear of rebuke...
...Additionally, we would all like to see market-oriented policies pursued by the emerging non-Communist political leadership, and are concerned about the strength of social democracy and agrarian populism among some of the anti-Communists...
...But Ed Gray foresaw a risk in the burgeoning direct-investment portfolios of Lincoln and similarly managed thrifts or he wouldn't have imposed the direct-investment limitation in the first place...
...and other such help through which they can expeditiously grapple with the problems of constructing modern liberal democratic societies...
...This is certainly the case with Friedman, who makes no claim to originality and, indeed, seems to prefer the company of the pack...
...so are some politicians...
...To show just how popular the country was back then, he quotes an old Washington Star column by Mary McGrory: Some of us never knew what a simcha was...
...I want to keep the controls on, until and unless the democrats come to power in those societies...
...Keating says the law firm informed him they needed an economist to make their case and suggested Greenspan...
...suggesting ways of defining the legal status of non-governmental public institutions—for example, non-profit corporations...
...First, especially after Rumania, it is difficult to believe that we are at "the beginning of the beginning...
...In between, he offers us analogies with Spain and Portugal, to suggest that we do little in Eastern Europe...
...Brock's reporting, I was not a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zaire during the 1960s...
...Charles Keating "put Alan Greenspan . . . on the payroll...
...On the other hand, Mr...
...That's all there is to it...
...Greenspan and Arthur Young and Co., was that federal examiners bore a substantial responsibility for creating the most destructive and irrational state of limbo for this institution . . . " Where to Begin...
...And as for the Soviet Union, we are presented with the hilarious spectacle of the monopoly"position of the Communist party being destroyed by . . . a unanimous (save Yeltsin) vote of the Communist party leaders...
...Attitudes toward Israel have undergone a radical shift from sympathy to hostility, and ideas that were once inconceivable to many people—that Israel has lost its soul, that Israel is the main obstacle to Middle East peace, that Israel is no better than its Arab neighbors—have been embraced with a vengeance...
...when the Russians do it in Azerbaijan, with no TV cameras, we cluck understandingly, and the President expresses sympathy for the invaders...
...There is much that is unobjectionable in Michael Ledeen's piece "The Beginning of the Beginning" (TAS, February 1990...
...They did not act so destructively as Hitler, or Stalin and his successors...
...During an episode of peaceful student protest against internal university policies, which resulted in the expulsion of the entire sophomore class and the temporary arrest of several hundred students, I and other faculty perceived to be privately sympathetic to the students were forced to leave the university and go to the capital city of Kinshasa...
...and he ends by telling us that we have a "pat hand," at least if correctly played...
...David Brock replies...
...There, both President Mobutu and his minister of the interior were helpful to me and my family...
...He is now forced to cope with his own failures—political and economic—in his own society, and I believe that in the end the forces of democracy will prevail there as well...
...Steve Weissman Staff Director, Subcommittee on Africa Committee on Foreign Affairs House of Representatives Washington, D.C...
...Blume says rightly that we need to withhold certain militarily useful technology from them...
...It is not apparent that much editing was done before the article went to print...
...training pollsters...
...Brock's article contains other inaccuracies on Zaire as well (e.g., his contention that Subcommittee on Africa Chairman Howard Wolpe refuses to talk to Mobutu...
...As Cranston puts it in a brief submitted to the Senate ethics committee, "The problem, as conveyed to me at the time not only by Mr...
...aiding in the development of capital markets and credit instruments...
...acquainting them with the ways various legislatures expedite business, especially as pertains to oversight responsibilities...
...It's what happens when the Arabs admit they've had it—again—and there are 30,000 Jews in Lafayette Park to celebrate...
...And therefore I haven't "harbored a grudge ever since" contributing to a "zeal" to oppose Mobutu...
...We agree on most things, such as the desirability of private investment in Eastern Europe, and the obvious need for support to democratic forces there (he calls it institution-building...
...We disagree over where things stand at the moment, not over where things are headed and where our interests lie...
...The Times paraphrased Greenspan as saying he did not remember "how much he was paid but that it was his usual rate...
...It is also a fact that Greenspan was serving as an economic advisor to President Reagan at the same time Keating was paying him to make a case against Reagan Administration thrift regulations...
...Albert Einstein's uxorious relationship with his first wife, Milvea, is being used as evidence in a nasty controversy among scholars, some of whom claim that the notoriously unkempt scientist actually stole ideas from her...
...It is still only the beginning of the beginning...
...and the FHLBB-SF foresaw the risk posed by Lincoln specifically, or they would have granted Keating the exemption Greenspan was requesting...
...Years of instability, economic stagnation, and somewhat authoritarian rule may sap these peoples of their drive to rejoin Europe, and give darker forces their chance to reassert themselves strongly...
...The author offers no support for this implication...
...These objections are minor compared to the corruption implied in the statement, "So Keating now put Alan Greenspan...
...Wolpe to be "speaking," thus the misleading statement that the two "do not speak...
...and, in any case, if economic crisis precipitated change in the first place, why not keep the pressure on...
...Something of the same process seems to have affected the Spectator since it traded Indiana for Washington, D.C...
...We want a situation which yields healthy, democratic, stable societies, as rapidly as possible...
...He is busily decontrolling all sorts of exotic technologies for sale to Eastern Europe (which promptly turns it over to the Soviets) and even to the Soviets directly...
...Hyram Kitchen, dean of the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine, to a plot by animal rights extremists who have vowed to murder the deans of veterinary colleges until all animal experiments end...
...In fact, Wolpe has done so several times, most recently at a Foreign Affairs Committee coffee he hosted for Mobutu last summer...
...With its octane rating hiked by a few "inside" disclosures fresh from the D.C...
...not a single interior ministry...
...My salary was paid by the Congo (now Zaire) government...
...Second, our hand is not pat...
...Ledeen that occasional humanitarian aid may be appropriate...
...Rather, it means encouraging currency reform...
...It is also a fact that in February 1985 Greenspan wrote a letter to the Federal Home Loan Bank-San Francisco claiming that Lincoln presented "no foreseeable risk" to the FSLIC and recommending that the thrift be exempted from the direct investment limitation...
...Weissman's unfortunate personal experiences in Zaire continue to shape his zealous views today...
...The evidence is he's totally uncorruptible...
...Ledeen begins by telling us that we are "at the beginning of the beginning," that change is real but tenuous...
...What, then, do I propose...
...He says that, after Rumania, no one should think that we're at "the beginning of the beginning...
...History has proved Gray right and Greenspan wrong...
...I've known Greenspan at least thirty years, and I have close mutual friends who know him well...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...What I neglected to mention in the TAS story is that Senators Cranston, DeConcini, Glenn, and McCain all publicly cite Greenspan's arguments advocating that Lincoln be exempted from the direct-investment rule as justification for their own actions, in helping Keating pursue such an exemption...
...We sang the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikva...
...LI CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) number of Reform Communists in the new regime, of course...
...But if his political ideas are thoroughly conventional, his acceptance of them does have a distinguishing aspect: he embraces the current anti-Israel perspective as a Jew...
...on the payroll...
...Box 10448 Arlington, VA 22210-1448 (Please attach address label here...
...Dr...
...These countries are ready to explode if their political aspirations are unsatisfied, and in the chaos of Rumania, the army threw in its lot with the rebellion, and the internal security apparatus was slaughtered...
...I read Tyrrell sometimes when my blood pressure is too low...
...I hope that he will be afforded an opportunity to respond, so that we can see...
...We subsequently left the country voluntarily but continued to be paid by the government...
...R. Richardson New York, New York Terence Jeffrey replies...
...That we interest ourselves in helping with institution-building, in proportion to the liberalization of any given country...
...Keating but also by Mr...
...Weissman was in the Peace Corps rather than at a university should constitute defamation...
...Ledeen and I are not so far apart...
...It is hard to tell, for he was being a bit cagey...
...For that I would turn in my passport...
...Recently, I discussed the question with Keating, who confirmed that Lincoln S&L hired Greenspan in 1984 through Weiss, Rif-kind, Wharton and Garrison, a New York law firm Keating had retained to lobby against Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Ed Gray's direct-investment limitations...
...This is madness, for it encourages the Kremlin to believe that it can weasel its way out of the jam...
...I am unhappy with the (continued on page 48) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 9 always the case...
...satisfactory, no...
...There is still not a single security service in Eastern Europe under democratic control...
...Southern people used to say that the fleshpots of the North seemed particularly damaging to ladies who departed with revered values and high morals...
...In a report published in November, Greenspan himself admitted the fact to the New York Times...
...Reasonable, yes...
...helping train CPA's...
...Now if some other kind soul could do the same for me, native Manhattanite that I am, and pen a "We Never Called It 'The Big Apple,' " I'd be eternally in your debt...
...Nor does Terence Jeffrey mention, anent Greenspan's February 1985 letter, the possibility that it was based on information Greenspan did not know to be false...
...Well, he certainly did not steal her ideas about personal hygiene and tidiness...
...I should have said the two men do not speak civilly...
...But there is a long way to go, and I cannot imagine it all happening without considerable violence...
...Michael David Blume Annapolis, Maryland Michael Ledeen replies...
...It is that anyone attempting a return to the bad old days must now ask himself if he wishes to risk Ceausescu's fate...
...Presumably all of us who fancy ourselves conservatives, of whatever variety, are unhappy with the degree to which Communists retain bureaucratic power, particularly in security areas, within the Eastern bloc...
...Milvea was always as neat as a pin, and she used soap...
...Mildred Haub Oakland Park, Florida 4 MOVING...
...Too bad today's libel laws give no protection to public figures...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...The truth of the matter is that I was engaged by the autonomous, Protestant-supported University Libre du Congo in Kisangani as an associate professor of political science during 1969-1971...
...People who have seen Mr...
...I believe the democrats will eventually gain control, but they are not there yet...
...Several of Mr...
...This does not mean merely aiding with elections...
...Greenspan and the Keating Five Re: "The Man Who Bought Washington" by Terence P. Jeffrey (TAS, February 1990...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
