Quayl's Sel-Portrait
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Quayle's Self-Portrair A word about the Quayle affair before it becomes an asterisk. There are not many standards in politics anymore, but it seems to...
...One of them was the massacre of 14,000 Polish Army officers...
...The Americans were ultimately freed on the day of Reagan's inauguration, and the Administration shortly thereafter authorized Israel to resume arms sales to Iran, banned by President Carter...
...East Europe's Passions More astonishing, though, is the current course of generational politics in Eastern Europe...
...In 1984, six American hostages, including CIA Station Chief William Buckley, were seized in Lebanon...
...Roller says, "I never got an answer...
...Perhaps America has finally learned not to mix terrorism and politics...
...One must remember the context of the time—May 1969...
...Quayle is remembered by fellow-students at DePauw University as having been an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War...
...It was not until 1957, so tense was the situation, that Western correspondents in Moscow were allowed to visit the Baltic states...
...This was a time when passions flared on the campuses of a polarized America...
...History does not rest...
...But there were clearly dangers, and a Polish dissident magazine asked, "Can Gorbachev cross such a gigantic threshold...
...On the 49th anniversary of the pact last month, there were largescale demonstrations in all three republics...
...In France this past May, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac secured the release of three French hostages in Lebanon on the eve of the presidential election...
...It was not surprising, therefore, that in June Robert Oakley, a National Security Council staffer (who is now ambassador to Pakistan), should write a memo foreseeing an attempt to use the nine American hostages in Lebanon as pawns during the Bush-Dukakis campaign...
...David Jacobsen, traded for 500 tow missies, was freed on election eve, November 2. Arms Dealer Albert Hakim testified in the Congressional hearings held last summer that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North had exerted pressure to get hostages out in time for the election for the purpose of "enhancing the President's position...
...There are not many standards in politics anymore, but it seems to me that candidates should be held to one rule: To thine own image be true...
...The United States never accepted Soviet annexation and continued to recognize the exiled Baltic legations in Washington...
...Not that the Khomeini regime didn't try...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...Nor has Quayle explained to this day why he did not put his life where his mouth was, as so many—on both sides—did back then...
...His self-portrait as staunch Right-winger, big on defense and standing up to the Communists, was marred by the revelation that he had sat out the Vietnam War writing National Guard press releases in Indianapolis...
...The Hitler-Stalin deal consigned the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the the Soviet "sphere of influence...
...Katyn remains a case of glasnost half full and half empty, a token of why General Wojciech Jaruzelski finds it so difficult to get Poles to make sacrifices for the regime's reform plans...
...Reagan aides say they walked out on this meeting, and that no such deal was ever made or contemplated...
...Max Frankel of the New York Times and I, among the first to travel to the Baltic, were followed closely around Riga by KGB officers...
...Nor did Quayle have an answer that fall when Americans divided for and against the great war moratorium march on Washington and President Nixon appealed for the support of "the great silent majority of Americans...
...The Soviet Union swallowed, but never digested these alien cultures...
...Vietnam continues to haunt generational politics in America...
...Mikhail S. Gorbachev, during his visit to Poland in July, referred to the "blank spots" about the painful events in the history of World War II, but contrary to expectations, he did not specify the events...
...In 1986, arms sales negotiations reached a climax as the Congressional elections approached...
...Lithuanian Counselor Stasys Lozoraitis told me, after the impressive August demonstrations, that he was not surprised at this explosion of popular passion...
...Ethnic passions long considered spent are flaring up against the order that Stalin and Hitler imposed almost half a century ago...
...Poland, carved up in a secret SovietGerman pact in 1939 as the prelude to invasion, struggles intermittently with strikes and demonstrations which, at bottom, represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the regime that Stalin imposed...
...Systematic murders were intended to wipe out any chance for alternate leadership...
...Bill Roller, who waited on diningroom tables with Quayle, recalls one hot discussion that ended with his asking Quayle, "If you're so much in support of the war, why don't you go over there and fight it...
...The Reverend Pat Robertson, the selfproclaimed scourge of Communism, was embarrassed when it became known during the primary season last year that he had gotten off his troopship in Japan on his way to meeting "the Evil Empire" in Korea...
...Similarly with Senator Dan Quayle...
...After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they announced that in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk they had discovered the bodies of some4,300 Polishofficers, hands tied behind their backs, each killed with a single bullet to the head...
...One would have thought that the ardor would flag with another generation...
...The Kremlin said the Germans had done it...
...Whether or not this was arranged with the help of his publisher father, that was not what his constituents had a right to expect of him...
...In 1922, as Lenin's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin consigned this predominantly Armenian enclave to the Republic of Azerbaijan...
...Still, not many would have predicted the tenacity of protest against the Soviet-German attempt to redraw the map of Eastern Europe...
...In the Soviet Union, Stalin's heritage has returned to plague Gorbachev with riots in Nagorno-Karabakh...
...An Iranian official reportedly tried to arrange a meeting with the Vice President, but his aides warned him it would be "crazy" toaccept...
...In September 1980, Ronald Reagan's campaign aides, including foreign policy adviser Richard V. Allen, were approached by intermediaries for Iran offering to hand over the 52 Americans held in the U. S. Embassy in Teheran to Reagan rather than President Jimmy Carter...
...Terrorism and Politics It is worth noting, even at this late date, that a cease-fire was achieved in the Gulf war without a hostage barter...
...When I was in Moscow last June for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, Moscow Radio reported "disturbing information" that the bullets used at Katyn wereof Soviet caliber: It was speculated that the stage was being set for Gorbachev to admit Soviet culpability on his pending visit to Poland...
...During the ensuing secret negotiations, seeking to trade the hostages for terrorists imprisoned in Kuwait, the Iranians at one point suggested that the hostages might be released in time for President Reagan's re-election...
...Even so, we had no trouble meeting Latvians who said they would never submit to Russification...
...What made Rafsanjani think he could pull off such a deal...
...The answer is that the dangling of hostages as bait has a long, if dishonorable, history linked to election years...
...The democratic Czechoslovakia of Eduard Benes and Jan Masaryk—the only truly democratic country in Eastern Europe—was taken over by Stalin in 1948 and invaded by Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1968 to crush an experiment in "Socialism with a human face...
...A week before the July cease-fire, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of Iran's Parliament and chief of its military forces, said that if the United States released frozen Iranian assets, "we will also use our influence in Lebanon to solve the problem of the hostages...
...Two generations later, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh want Stalin's deed undone...
...Whether arranged with or without the help of his senator father, that was not what his constituents expected of him...
...The despairing intellectuals I met in Prague then could hardly have imagined that 20 years later the deposed Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek would be speaking out, and that Czechs and Slovaks would be marching in memory of "the Prague Spring...
...He ransomed them with trade concessions to Iran...
...History does not rest...
...The bombing of North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia surfaced in the press, the first person was killed in antiwar rioting in Berkeley, and President Richard M. Nixon warned on television that the enemy was counting on a collapse of will in the United States...
Vol. 71 • September 1988 • No. 15
