Captain Nemo from Plains
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Writers & Writing CAPTAIN NEMO FROM PLAINS BY JOHN P. ROCHE From the moment he appeared on the national Democratic scene in 1975, Jimmy Carter spooked me. There was an autistic quality about the...
...Since we failed to take proper precautions, we should have reacted to the seizure of the Americans precisely as if they were military prisoners of war...
...Sadat agreed immediately...
...If the subject matter were not inherently serious (indeed, tragic for many), one would be inclined to script it as a comedy...
...or that if Sadat's game-plan worked out, he would get back Sinai and the oil fields in return for reversible cosmetic concessions...
...Try to imagine the reaction of someone like myself, who has been trained in the Kenny O'Donnell-Lyndon Johnson doctrine of original political sin, to the following discussion of the appointment of Zbigniew Brzezinski as Assistant for National Security Affairs: "I listened carefully to all the comments about him [Zbig] and decided I wanted him with me in the White House...
...He is a master at circumlocution...
...Selah...
...My 1976 verdict, borrowed from Gertrude Stein's characterization of Oakland, California, was "there's no there there...
...But Carter brimmed with Christian love, and in my judgment gave Brzezinski far too long a leash...
...Vance should have been disqualified as Secretary of State for putting up with the White House policy of a highly visible and talkative NSC Director...
...This may have been true of readers of the New York Times and Washington Pos-, or of autohypnotists who assumed that the fault-line in Iran lay between the wicked Shah, his Army and Savak on theonehand, and the forces of progressive, secular humanism on the other...
...if you have a choice between a virtuous Christian and a good citizen who loves his country, elect the latter...
...So we are plunged into the President's appointment of his top staff...
...The basic difficulty m reviewing Keeping Faith is that Carter slides by the messy questions and nuances that are the guts of international and domestic politics...
...Then we see "ole Russ" Long, probably one of the most subtle intelligences to grace the Senate this last quarter century, move in for the two-horse parley...
...After the first partial grab at the U.S...
...Carter did not like Menachem Begin...
...To Jimmy Carter this would have smacked of Presidential autocracy and lack of trust and fellowship...
...My other illustration of Carter's missing the essence of politics is drawn from domestic skirmishing and his hardships with the "Moral Equivalent of War"-that is, getting Congress to pass energy legislation...
...When in January 1979 General Robert "Dutch" Huyser was suddenly parachuted into Iran from his desk as Deputy nato Commander, his then boss General Alexander Haig was wholly baffled...
...You recall the litany, and I recall the Iranian students who considered me reactionary because I reminded them why the Jews in the old Pale of Settlement always prayed for the Tsar: The next one would be worse...
...For purposes of comparison, Johnson's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Walt Rostow-who was not formally awarded that title because LBJ felt it encouraged its holder to "play President," a shot at McGeorge Bundy?never held an official press conference...
...And so it goes for pages...
...Why, every visiting Iranian professor, student and exile guaranteed it...
...Embassy and its personnel...
...Sadat, with his private agenda, would cheerfully have agreed to a revival meeting-anything to keep that Bible-boy happy...
...Even Lyndon Johnson buttoned his wallet pocket when he negotiated with Long, but here we have one simple Christian gentleman appreciating another: "Russell and Carolyn Long came over for supper, and we enjoyed being with them...
...The President simply paints Israel's Prime Minister as a small-minded fanatic, offering the following evidence: "After [Begin] departed [for his Camp David quarters], Rosalynn and I discussed a proposal that she had been pursuing with some of the interfaith religious groups around Washington-that all three leaders issue a call for the world to join us in prayer for the success of our efforts at Camp David...
...And Haig later told me he got a call in Brussels from Huyser to inquire about his mission...
...He thinks that within three or four days he could put together a crude-oil tax [italics added-in fact, it might have taken Long 45 minutes, if he didn't already have a draft in the drawer] which he seems to favor provided all the money can go to energy production...
...Another WP ought to do the reviewing, but having made the long march through its pages I can try to assess it...
...God bless, we'll do what we can for you, see you when the dust settles...
...When Yasir Arafat was presented with the Israeli Embassy, no personnel remained to enliven his ego...
...Which brings us to the hostages...
...Beware not to elect the man who is the most virtuous when he is also naive...
...In the appropriate Surrealist genre let us conclude with an insight by the mad friar Girolamo Savonarola, who presided over a moral majority in Machiavelli's Florence until he was dispatched for the mortal political sin of boring the populace...
...If there are two men to choose from, one wise and one virtuous," hepro-claimed in a lucid moment, "elect the first, that is the wise man...
...He hasn't quite made up his mind on natural gas but he subtly mentions the sugar problem in Louisiana as being embarrassing to him...
...Pfui on Begin...
...If the Shah was bounced, so the logic went, those nice liberal Iranians who wrote the Op-Ed articles in the Times would come to power and the oppressed Iranian masses would have singing tomorrows...
...Interestingly, an unappreciative Carter wastes no time on the nominating process...
...At the same time, he is supporting my positions much more closely than Russell is...
...Now we discover from Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Bantam Books, 480pp., $22.50) that "CaptainNemo" never really emerged from the submarine during his four-year tenure in the White House...
...Believers are different: The Unitarian Michael Servetus was burned by John Calvin for praying to the "Son of the eternal God," rather than the "eternal Son of God...
...The President invites the Congressional leadership to breakfast, where he thought "Russell acted very moderately and like a gentleman, but Scoop was at his worst...
...Had the United States recognized the reality of the situation, we could have cut our losses...
...Neither did anyone else, notably the members of the brazen, investigative, independent press, who read his Why Not the Best?, nodded approvingly and slept off their hangovers on Sunday mornings while he attended a lily-white church in Plains...
...Russell and I did alot of talking and sparring around...
...Manners, in sum, make the man, a point repeated three months later: "In many cases, I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do with the others, although the others, the liberals, vote with me much more often...
...In short, there were a number of us in this country who thought the alternative to the Shah was a tidal wave of Islamic fundamentalism...
...The outcome of his any-number-can-play approach was the debacle in Iran that fills over 160 pages of this volume...
...Just keep in mind, for starters, that art reflects life: The average text in mechanical engineering has as much political substance as Keeping Faith...
...Masochists may want to read this saga in catatonic counterpoint with Hamilton Jordan's numbing work Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Administration...
...There is a rumor that William Sullivan, who was supposed to be the American Chief of Mission in Iran, has been forbidden by his doctors even to read this material...
...This is not 20-20 hindsight: read my 1978 syndicated columns on Iran...
...This thesis also was compellingly presented by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, leading to the early escape of about 80 per cent of Iran's Jewish population (which took Mossad more seriously than it did Op-Ed pieces in the Times...
...Before I stuck my name on a prayer concocted by Jimmy Carter, 1 would like to be sure that it did not sanctify, say, racial segregation in the ecclesia...
...Mainly the Shah's nouveaux bourgeois, they wore the latest fashions...
...Unlike Anwar Sadat, Begin was a nut for detail...
...The book reads, as several have noted, as though Jimmy's word processor did the writing...
...That coincidence would have prompted JFK or LBJ to stick Brzezinski on the next plane to Rwanda and give Vance the UN mission in Geneva-or some other harmless post...
...Was it an accident, comrades, that in 1961 John Kenneth Galbraith found himself overlord of the American Embassy in India...
...This characteristic response was a prelude to our relationship at Camp David...
...Embassy, the staff should have been evacuated...
...Begin liked the idea but first he wanted to see the text...
...Perhaps the height of Carter's ingratitude is the absence of a tribute to the press that invented him...
...At any given moment in Teheran in 1978-79 there must have been a dozen amateur ambassadors making back-channel calls to the White House...
...But enough...
...One can sympathize...
...And more humor...
...Both were good suggestions...
...the only women in Teheran in chadors were the servants who came in daily from the slums...
...I also recall a Johnson Cabinet meeting after le Grand Charles had in effect pulled France out of nato where Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared coldly that the President and the Secretary of State would handle any public commentary-and if anyone else took a hand in the game, his head would be mounted on a spike of the WhiteHouse fence...
...In looking at my old notes I find it interesting that Vance recommended Brzezinski for this job, and Zbig recommended Cy for Secretary of State...
...Carter (and Jordan) assume that there were no warnings or forebodings, that the world was as startled as the government of the United States when the Islamic fundamentalists seized the U.S...
...In the spring of 1977, however, when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced Carter's proposal for deep, symmetrical cuts in nuclear arsenals, it was Brzezinski who was assigned, or volunteered, to wade into the public slanging match...
...Knowing the principals, I find Carter's description of events hilarious...
...Instead, the President led the nation into a Pentecostal orgy that was to begin with counterproductive?for it encouraged the mullahs to hang on to the Americans as big poker chips-and, secondly, demeaning-because of its vulpine utility in Carter's struggle for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination...
...Viewed another way, though, one might argue that Begin's response was that of an individual who took prayer seriously...
...Without engaging in overbore let me cite a couple of cases...
...Two Senate barons, Louisiana Democrat Russell Long and Washington Democrat "Scoop" Jackson are having a turf fight on whose committee is going to bring out the key energy bills...
...or that a nation of 3 million with Israel's history is not paranoid to fuss over the fine print...
...But Carter neglects to mention that Egypt's President grabbed the Jerusalem express because the United States in September 1977 (the Vance-Gromyko communique) weirdly invited Moscow to join the Middle East game...
...Conducting American foreign policy, in other words, was not a rap session in an existential commune...
...It was well-known that the progressives were a basic force in Iran...
...The story of the "rescue" mission would be an essay in itself, and my blood pressure is not down to the task...
...Nor does he discuss the role in his victory played by President Gerald Ford's bizarre handling of Poland in the TV debates, or the GOP's crude number by "capo" Roberto Dole on "Bishop" Fritz Mondale...
...Of course it would be desirable if he also possessed Christian virtues...
...There was an autistic quality about the man: He always seemed to be in his submarine, and for the life of me I couldn't chart his navigational plans...
...We approached the other two leaders...
Vol. 66 • January 1983 • No. 2
