Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR On the Bork Front It was a most un-Washington thing that Judge Robert H. Bork did when he refused to leave the stage after he could see the curtain was...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR On the Bork Front It was a most un-Washington thing that Judge Robert H. Bork did when he refused to leave the stage after he could see the curtain was coming down...
...In this case, after the decisive 9-5 negative vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and especially after a majority of Senators had committed themselves to rejecting the Supreme Court nomination, President Reagan and his staff made meaningful noises about leaving it to Judge Bork to decide if he wished to withdraw...
...On the Battle Fronts Committed to the last-ditch battle for Bork, the President held back from a confrontation with Congress early this month over Central America...
...Still, it is breathtaking when one recalls that in his very first White House news conference, in January 1981, Reagan asserted the Soviets reserve the right "to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat in the pursuit of world revolution...
...Western Union reported having handled about 75,000 telegrams from Bork supporters and opponents, compared with 150,000 for Colonel North...
...with his Fu Manchuish facial hair...
...Through Pakistan, these shoulder-mounted missiles have for the past year been furnished in large quantities to the Mojaheddin guerrillas in Afghanistan, and they have been knocking Soviet aircraft out of the sky...
...It can be speculated that the President has come under the softening influence of Shultz, White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker or Nancy Reagan (check one or more of the above...
...The editorial said mournfully, "It is as inexplicable as it is shameful that...
...A week earlier, Garment had bet me lunch that Bork would not quit before the Senate floor vote...
...Perhaps we should no...
...When the Stingers were first provided to the Afghan rebels, fears were expressed that some might fall into the hands of their Iranian allies and coreligionists...
...But the Democratic leadership in Congress didn't seem to have its heart in pressing the issue...
...It also happened in a most un-Washington way...
...Bork did better by Western Union in October 1973, when his firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox generated nearly half a million messages...
...It was a Dwight D. Eisenhower who extricated the United States from an anti-Communist war in Korea, and a Gerald R. Ford who pulled out of Vietnam...
...But in the speech, despite some antiCommunist rhetoric and expressions of skepticism about the "facades of freedom" being presented by the Sandinistas, the President basically stood still...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior ncws analyst for Salumai Public Radio...
...The Pentagon claimed they had fired without provocation at a helicopter on routine patrol over international waters, and it called for assistance...
...In that other perennial area of trouble, the Persian Gulf, U.S...
...It was a Richard M. Nixon, belying decades of anti-Communist rhetoric, who established relations with Red China and embraced coexistence with the USSR...
...Aboard one that stayed afloat were found parts of the launching gear for Stinger antiaircraft missiles...
...What does account for the relatively rare rejection of a Presidential Supreme Court nominee...
...The attack on the Iranian gunboats raised another problem for the Reagan Administration, however...
...The more things change...
...Because hopeless quixotic battles are so uncharacteristic of this capital, many veteran observers were surprised at the Judge's decision...
...this rush to détente should occur under Ronald Reagan...
...In announcing his decision to fight on, Judge Bork showed more than usual emotion and less than usual clarity of thought...
...It is certainly true that Congressional trial by television operates under different rules than a judicial trial...
...Army assault helicopters on October 8 attacked four Iranian vessels, destroying three of them...
...Secretary of State George ? Shultz thereupon stated that the request would not be submitted to Congress before November 7—the deadline for compliance with the Guatemala plan...
...It can be explained that all this comes at a time when Gorbachev needs agreement for his economy and Reagan for his resum...
...As long as there are no substantial American casualties, theU.S...
...They appeared astonished when, after three days of White House parleys, the embattled jurist declared that he would go on fighting until the final bell had tolled in the Senate...
...Reagan did say he would ask Congress for $270 million in military and humanitarian assistance to the contras, and that he would continue such assistance until a cease-fire was in effect and " full democracy" was restored to Nicaragua...
...So much— even before the Iran-contra affair—for Presidential prestige and remaking the Supreme Court...
...presence in the Gulf does not seem to be a burning issue for Americans...
...have been...
...It was said that the White House was drawing up a list of 21 demands, or conditions, including early general elections in Nicaragua, going far beyond the provisions of the Guatemala City accord of the Central American states and the President's own agreement with Speaker of the House James Wright (D.-Tex...
...That may put the matter too baldly...
...Had he not, after all, said in an interview last summer that he believes you have to "wreak yourself upon the world...
...So, now, the dawn of Reagan détente...
...Reagan's October 7 speech to the Organization of American States came off somewhat anticlimactically after a week of reports that he was getting ready to step away from the peace process initiated by Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias Sanchez (who on October 13 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize...
...Bork asked that voices be lowered, yet the effect of his suggestion that Senators had been lashed or hoodwinked into opposing him would be to raise the decibel level...
...Demands again went up in Congress for the Administration to be held to account under the War Powers Resolution, or a watered-down version thereof...
...A televised hearing tends to work to the advantage of an Oliver North, who responds to complicated questions with appealing simplicities, and to the disadvantage of a Robert Bork, who found himself having to respond to simple-sounding questions about liberty and privacy with unappealing complexities...
...He said that no nominee for Supreme Court justice has ever campaigned for the job, yet this is what he was now doing—and, indeed, has been doing from the start by intensive lobbying with Senators and by newspaper and magazine interviews before his confirmation hearing...
...Lebanon in 1983, after 241 Marines were killed in a truck-bomb attack, showed how quickly that could change...
...Normally, a Presidential nominee in trouble only hangs in if the Chief Executive, for some reason of principle or politics, insists that he do so...
...Once more the indiscriminate arms-supply policy of the Reagan Administration threatens to come home to roost...
...Perhaps one donnybrook at a time was all he could handle...
...If true, that would mark the first time the Iranians directly engaged the American forces in the Gulf—something Teheran had been believed trying to avoid...
...That announcement was criticized not only by Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega but by other Central American leaders as not very helpful at this point...
...When Garment subsequently emerged as ardently urging this course, I chided him for going to any length to get a free lunch...
...And, beyond arms control, there are signs that the two powers are approaching, in a more serious fashion, long-standing disputes over human rights and Afghanistan...
...It was precisely in character with his known damn-the-torpedocs tendency for him lo insist on going out not as Judge Whimper, but as Judge Bang...
...History is a disorderly process, and hard on stereotypes...
...in fact, there was some suspicion that the last thing Congress really wanted was to be part of deciding what happens next in the Gulf...
...Reagan was conspicuously absent as Bork entered the White House press room the afternoon of October9...
...At a Mattingly rally in Columbus, Georgia, on October 28, the President said, "Without him and the Republican majority in the Senate we'll find liberals like Joe Biden and a certain fellow from Massachusetts deciding who our judges are...
...To Tom Shales, the talented television critic of the Washington.Posr, the answer was there for all to see: "Bork came across on television as coldhearted and condescending...
...He reiterated his support of the Guatemala plan for a cease-fire, which he had earlier called "fatally flawed,' and he reaffirmed his partnership with Wright...
...The charge sounds like the complaint of liberal legislators unseated by narrowly targeted campaigns of the New Right, which has made its mark in single-issue politics...
...Bork's supporters have insisted he was defeated by a well-financed personal assault that distorted his record and obscured the issues...
...A lead editorial in the Washington Times, the voice of Reaganite true believers, accurately sums up their reaction to the turn of events...
...There are no new demands," he said...
...On election day, the Republicans lost eight seats in the Senate, and new Southern Senators like Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Terry Sanford of North Carolina came in with the help of large black constituencies...
...Whatever the effects of television, the activities of the anti-Bork coalition (brilliantly led by Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) and the miscalculations of the Reagan Administration, it could be argued that Bork was really defeated in the November 1986 election...
...On the Way to the Summit In the autumn of Ronald Reagan's discontent, his steadiest source of contentment remains the approach of a summit with the Soviet Union's Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...An approaching agreement banning medium-range missiles has also given new vigor to negotiations on intercontinental weapons, chemical weapons and nuclear testing...
...The only people who accurately predicted Bork's stand were zealots like his friend Leonard Garment, onetime Nixon counsel...
...Reagan had campaigned for Senator Mack Mattingly in Georgia, and for Representative James T. Broyhill in North Carolina, saying he needed them to help reshape the Supreme Court— and they lost...
...He said that the judicial selection process should not be political, yet prolonging his struggle threatened to sharpen political divisions...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 15
