Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR What Bush Would Rather The start of this (more or less) monthly column tends to be influenced by matters in the public eye at the moment of writing....
...Ask your most threatening rival why he doesn't release all his records on White House meetings, tax returns, medical history...
...It is no accident that Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, who can count noses in primary states as well as in the Senate, insisted on being the lead-off witness on the missile treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but recommended a delay in the vote on contra aid...
...This time I have a choice among President Reagan's State of the Union address, his request for renewed aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and the television donnybrook between Vice President George Bush and CBS anchorman Dan Rather...
...He wrote to Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, "I do not recall any strenuous objections...
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y...
...The President portrayed himself as an eagle, not a lame duck, and was rewarded with warm applause from a Congress that can oppose him but cannot bring itself to hate him...
...Ploy 1: Why Don't You Let it All Hang Out...
...Reagan, not renowned for his keen memory, supported Bush the next day...
...Secretaries George P. Shultz and Caspar W. Weinberger voiced loud and fervent objections to the proposed sale of 3,000 tow antitank missiles to Iran...
...President Reagan might well complain to Bush about upstaging the State of the Union address, and Senator Robert Dole (R.-Kans...
...Those are the voters out there, and they're looking for sincerity...
...Whatever his response, he will look defensive...
...Something is wrong there, and with Bush's whole story about the January 7 meeting that launched the government on its perilous course of selling arms directly to the Khomeini regime in the face of a professed antiterrorist policy and laws restricting arms exports...
...He sure told Dan Rather...
...Admit error with forthright and appealing candor, and not necessarily the whole error or even the same error you are accused of...
...When hard pressed, remind a rival he is feeding ammunition to the opposing party in the election campaign...
...Had there been any strenuous objections, I am sure I would have remembered it...
...He did not, however, recall the Shultz-Weinberger stand...
...There is an inherent contradiction between the Vice President's assertions that he didn't know until December 1986 that the deal was arms for hostages, and his statements that he was motivated in his support of the program by compassion for the hostages...
...He pushed hard for ratification of the medium-range missile treaty, the token of his pursuit of accommodation with the GHQ of Communism, and simultaneously asked Congress for an interim $36 million to support the Nicaraguan contras, token of his resistance to accommodation with the Communists incentrai America...
...The treaty is popular with the public, the contras are not...
...Confrontation with Dan Rather has done more for Bush's image than weeks of confrontation with rival candidates...
...What follows is an interim observation...
...Reagan and History One can skip lightly over the seventh Reagan State of the Union address, which was a triumph of style over substance...
...In terms of volume, that should be as good a deal as the asymmetrical dismantlement of Soviet and American missiles in Europe provided for in the treaty...
...Insist that anything you'd rather not talk about is a preoccupation of the media, and that people couldn' t care less...
...might well demand of CBS equal time to be abused by Dan Rather, for there is no doubt that Monday Night Live invested the Vice President with a new importance...
...Or Bush, in effect, "Yes, we made some mistakes—anyway Reagan did...
...Therefore, obtaining Buckley's release could not have been a reason for the Israeli shipment of weapons in November, and certainly not for the direct deliveries by the United States that President Reagan authorized in January 1986...
...Ploy 2: Watch Your Step, Buster...
...There is an implied time warp in his claim that, as former CIA director, he was especially concerned about William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, who was kidnapped and reportedly tortured to death...
...Ignore anyone who may be on the platform with you and look straight into the camera (the one with the little red light glowing...
...Historian Daniel Boorstin calls a phenomenon like the Rather-Bush duel a "pseudo-event," something that happens only because of television...
...Furthermore, this was all to be done under the authority of an intelligence "finding" that Bush had in fact seen President Reagan sign the day before...
...It was Reagan who reported that, at last December's summit, Gorbachev dropped word that he would be willing to suspend Soviet military aid to the Sandinistas within the framework of the peace process—presumably meaning in return for suspension of American aid to the contras...
...The Vice President, after initially saying he didn't remember being present, later said "records indicate I probably attended an ad hoc meeting...
...As the address revealed, Reagan is embarked in his final White House year on a curious dichotomy of foreign policy initiatives...
...Bush said to Rather, "Maybe I wasn't there at that point...
...Warn a rival who is giving you problems that you could give him problems...
...The Bush-Rather encounter on the evening of January 25 was one of those seismic media events that will be studied in years to come by politicians, sociologists and students of crisis management and conflict resolution...
...Ploy 4: A id and Comfort to the Enemy...
...For example, Gary Hart, "I made a damn fool mistake...
...More to the point, it created a media reality that, right now at least, has overwhelmed the factual reality of Bush having still not explained satisfactorily his role in the Iran-contra affair...
...The January 7 meeting was a watershed session that arrayed White HouseCIA risk-takers against Cabinet members who, until then, had considered the Vice President an ally...
...Finger pointing, voice rising, say you're sick and tired of being accused of whatever you're being accused of and make no apologies for your patriotism, loyalty or love of God (whichever comes to mind...
...He is widely perceived as having held his own against the toughest anchor in the business and has therefore become a combined media victim and media hero—certainly no wimp...
...If you can fake that, you've got it made...
...Yet Bush, responding to a Rather question concerning an Oval Office meeting on January 7,1986, said, "I've already explained that, and I wanted those hostages, I wanted Mr...
...Previously the Administration had covered its tracks by replacing Israeli arms shipments...
...So it goes in broadcast news...
...On arms control, according to Michael Deaver's book, the President has harkened to the advice of Nancy Reagan, who is concerned about his image and place in history...
...Clearly media bashing, a tactic several candidates have tried, does not work as well as being bashed by the media...
...These contradictions, which become more troublesome the harder Bush tries to finesse them, will undoubtedly come back to haunt him, but for the moment they have been exorcised...
...Shultz, though, said he recollected the Vice President as having been on hand throughout the 80-minute session...
...The day after the interview, a local television producer told me she was having difficulty finding someone in the media field who would defend Rather...
...Ploy 7: Sincerity...
...If the goal in Nicaragua is not military victory, but heading off the creation of a Soviet military base, then Reagan should be less concerned about Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra than General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...When Al Haig presses Bush about the Irancontra affair, Bush asks if he would like to talk about Watergate...
...Ploy 6: Bash the Media...
...Campaign Manual Having OD'd on candidate debates, I offer the Presidential contenders this manual of time-tested tactics...
...believes that the Soviets, in dire economic straits, looking for a way out of Afghanistan, have bigger fish to fry than Nicaragua...
...Monday Night Live with Dan Rather is hard to arrange and must be considered a windfall...
...The two Reagans—the one soft on Moscow, the other hard on Managua —do not seem to be much in touch with each other...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...The first has enraged his Right-wing supporters, the second has delighted them...
...Ploy 3: Nobody's Perfect...
...But the two Reagan initiatives have proceeded on separate tracks as the President writes separate pages in history as global peacemaker and supporter of freedom fighters against Communism...
...Ploy 5: I'm Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take it Anymore...
...That seemed to challenge the testimony not only of Shultz and Weinberger, but of Attorney General Edwin Meese and Admiral John M. Poindexter, who recounted the forceful opposition offered by the Cabinet secretaries...
...On the contras he has ignored advice, saying at one point, "No, no, I have to do it...
...Her assignment was to produce a segment for that night's program matching a Rather defender against one of his many conservative critics...
...Moynihan says Reagan should simply tell Gorbachev that if he wants admission to international trade and banking institutions, he should let go in Central America...
...The Secretary of State had testified before the Tower commission a year ago, "It was clear to me that by the time we went out, the President, the Vice President, the Director of Central Intelligence [William Casey], the National Security Adviser [Poindexter] all had one opinion, and I had a different one and Cap [Weinberger] shared it...
...Refer to your combat record in war (if any...
...Who cares now what Bush confidentially told Reagan...
...Documents in the files of the Tower Commission and the Congressional investigating committees make clear that, after the release of the Reverend Benjamin Weir in October 1985, the Reagan Administration knew Buckley had been killed the previous June...
...Buckley out of there before he was killed, which he has been killed...
...You see, Haig knows that Bush knows that Haig is rumored to have been Bob Woodward's principal Deep Throat...
...Unlike some Presidents I have known, I'll do the popular thing...
...But there is nothing pseudo about the impact of such an event...
Vol. 71 • February 1998 • No. 2
