The U-2 Goes Green

...The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who opted not to take the poison pill in his kit, was captured, tried and eventually exchanged for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel...

...Relations with Israel, envenomed by the Administration's refusal to proceed with loan guarantees to build housing for Soviet immigrants, had reached a new low...

...The Administration began spreading the word that it would offer a more meaningful program, and that after the election it would make good on its commitment to increase America's contribution to the International Monetary Fund...

...Back in the sense that he could have President Bush speak at his conference, then upstage hirn with a virtuoso extemporaneous speech that invited invidious comparison with the telepromptered incumbent...

...James Hoagland of the Washington Post says that from Paris America looks like a country having a temper tantrum instead of an election...

...In the wake of the Gulf success the United States stood astride the Middle East, unchallenged...

...The voters of Tatar-stan have turned their backs on Yeltsin's Russia...

...Arab-Israeli peace talks had been started, but had reached an impasse...

...Since then, the New York Times has revealed more details of Pentagon thinking, as contained in a draft guidance document...

...In a memorandum circulated in preparation for a Washington conference sponsored by the Nixon Library on "America's Role in the Emerging World," he warned that if reform fails to produce a better life for Russia and the other Commonwealth republics, then "anew and more dangerous despotism will take power, with the people trading freedom for security and entrusting their future to old hands with new faces...

...Before a joint session of Congress on March 6 of last year, Bush called for the creation of a new regional security structure for putting limits on the Middle East arms race, and for finally resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...The President's reply to Nixon was that he had "no blank check...

...In 1955, Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California, performed a miracle for the CIA...

...And back in the sense that he is still good at manipulating his own public relations, as I was fully aware when his office gave me permission to quote from a memorandum ostensibly intended for the eyes of his friends...

...He's "hysterical," wrote Washington Times columnist Ken Adelman, who served in the Reagan Arms Control Agency...

...For four years the U-2 flew over the Soviet Union from bases in Japan, Turkey and Norway, each flight personally authorized by President Eisenhower...

...It took me back to June 1956 and a Moscow reception that Nikita S. Khrushchev was giving for General Nathan F. Twining, commander of the U.S...

...The silence was not hard to understand...

...Nixon still has the power to inspire strong reactions...

...Now that the Soviet threat has receded, other threats to America's way of life have come into view—some of them the product of America's way of life...

...We know that Clinton wants to change the occupant of the White House...

...The fruits of victory, other than restoring Kuwait to its ruling family, had turned sour...

...Governor Clinton keeps saying that he is "the agent of change," and President Bush says things like," If we can change the world, we can change America.' But what do they really mean...

...A forceful answer to that narrow kind of thinking came from, of all people, former President Richard M. Nixon...

...I had no idea what he was talking about, and General Twining later told me that he didn't either...

...Back in the sense that, almost 20 years after Watergate, he has people arguing about his position rather than his past...

...He acted on information that the highest level of ozone-destroying gas ever measured anywhere had been found over New England and eastern Canada...

...But Nixon is also back in the sense of being able to spot a chasm of silence in an election-year debate and rush in to fill it...

...In eight months, working in unprecedented secrecy, it designed a reconnaissance aircraft that could fly at 70,000 feet, well above the range then of Soviet anti-aircraft artillery and missiles...

...Since then the world has come to know...

...Finally, on May 1, 1960, a triumphant Khrushchev declared before the Supreme Soviet (in the presence of an astounded U.S...

...But, whatever they call him, he's back...

...A personal aside: Those who remember that he had the FBI investigate me and that I ranked among the "top 20" on his "Enemies List" may wonder what I'm doing interviewing and analyzing Nixon...

...Belatedly, it had been discovered that his nuclear weapons program had been immense, something on the order of the Manhattan Project...

...I suspect we will be hearing more about NSD 26 as the campaign warms up...

...The white voters of South Africa have voted an end to apartheid...

...He is "phony," wrote New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb, who served in the Carter State Department...

...So the demand for change gets fun-neled into changing symbolic things— such as check-bouncing members of Congress, and gym and barber-shop perks...

...With American Jews divided over the obstinate refusal of Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir's government to suspend the building of settlements on the West Bank, the Bush Administration could perhaps afford to ignore political fallout in pursuing its tough course...

...Efforts to bring the Gulf states into a regional security arrangement had collapsed...

...A bipartisan group of Senators, led by Sam Nunn (D.-Ga...

...The plane had an enormous wing-spread, could operate as a glider to conserve fuel, and its special cameras carried 12,000 feet of film that could photograph a continuous path of 2,000 miles...

...It is something candidates say— almost every second sentence, it would seem—because their opinion researchers have told them that change is what Americans demand...

...The Administration has so far refused to release National Security Directive 26, an order signed by President Bush in October 1989 that is constantly cited in other documents as authority for granting credits to Iraq for reasons of high strategic policy...

...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y...

...The voters of Albania have voted to bury Socialism...

...In other parts of the world when people vote for change, they mean change...

...Time was when a Ronald Reagan could get away with "morning in America" and "standing tall...

...No longer...

...The voters of France have rebuffed the ruling Socialists and conferred respectability on a far-Right party that wants to expel immigrants...

...Week after week Representative Henry B. Gonzalez (D.-Tex...

...Or, how about that real wild-card change, H. Ross Perot for President...

...Even if all the installations could be found and demolished, there remained an army of 15,000 atomic scientists and technicians who could start up again...

...returning from Russia and other Commonwealth countries, similarly urged the President to do more on a priority basis to assist those countries...

...The data had been collected by a team of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) scientists using what had been a U-2 spy plane...

...But the hope of making some Camp David-like breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute this year had gone glimmering...

...Their official designation has been changed from U-2 to ER-2 (for Earth Resources...

...After Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended in November 1963 as the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, investigators noted that the one-time Marine had served as a radar operator at an air base in Japan from which U-2s had flown and might have been in a position to provide information to his Soviet hosts when he defected in 1959...

...Bush's Other Troubles Coming out of a Cabinet meeting on March 19, President Bush was asked by reporters what he planned to do about Iraq, which was dragging its feet on complying with cease-fire requirements to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction...

...Surely one must be the day the plane designed to spy on the Soviet threat was redeployed to spy on the ozone threat...

...Early in March President George Bush announced a four-year speedup in phasing out the production of chlorofluoro-carbons...

...The principal conclusion of the document is that the United States must be sure to remain the only military superpower in the world...

...Addressing General Twining, champagne glass in hand, Khrushchev toasted "peace and friendship" and said that he was willing to cooperate with President Dwight D. Eisenhower even though American planes were at that moment flying spy missions over his country...

...Khrushchev stormed out of the four-power Paris summit later in May, ostensibly because President Eisenhower refused to apologize for the U-2...

...told the Nixon conference, however, that Congress would vote a substantial aid program if the President took the initiative to propose it...

...Lost in the Wind As to the campaign, is it the wind of change we feel or just a change of wind...

...The U-2 was still around, in 1962, to keep an eye on Cuba (one of them was shot down) and to spot the missiles the Soviets were installing there...

...Last month I wrote about some of the scary scenarios that defense planners were planning for—like an invasion of Lithuania by a newly expansionist Russia...

...A year later the arms race was proceeding at full speed, with Iran and Syria arming to the teeth...

...A year earlier, when he was celebrating victory in the Gulf War, Bush would never have referred Iraq to anybody...

...And that Bush, on his part, wants to change Congress...

...The simple gesture with the thumb told volumes about how much had changed— how the triumph that was supposed to grease the way to a re-election landslide had turned into a puzzlement, and perhaps even a political liability...

...The black-painted U-2 flew with impunity while the humiliated Soviets worked feverishly on a missile that could reach it...

...All that belongs to the Cold War era when the Soviet Union was perceived as the main threat to America and its way of life...

...The Bush Administration, initially jittery about the "America First" appeal of Patrick J. Buchanan, was mainly worried about the cost of a comprehensive assistance program...

...It collected information that convinced him the "missile gap" was a myth and Soviet military strength had been greatly overestimated—an assessment that may have saved the United States billions of dollars in defense expenditures until later Administrations began fantasizing about Soviet power again...

...War could break out in the former Soviet Union as the new despots use force to restore the 'historical borders' of Russia...

...The Democratic candidates, with little experience in foreign affairs, did not see much advantage in talking to recession victims at home about bailing out victims abroad...

...Here's the Iraq man right here," Bush said, motioning to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney...

...Air Force, who was attending the Soviet Tushin air show...

...The planners profess little concern about civil and communal wars, or about the possibility of a political upheaval in the former USSR, as long as these are confined to "internal or localized hostilities, rather than a concerted strategic effort to project power beyond their borders...

...After that, the slogan of change evaporates into reform this and revolutionize that and make us competitive, educated and healthy...

...Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson) that a spy plane had been shot down...

...The Return of Richard Nixon But the Pentagon continues on its own course...

...If a new despotism prevails," he continued, "everything gained in the great peaceful revolution of 1991 will be lost...

...Obviously he can't say he needs changing...

...It must stand guard against a resurgent Russia, as well as Germany and Japan...

...That silence has to do with the issue of keeping the liberated region of Europe from going down the drain in some convulsion that would, no matter what the Pentagon may think, wash back over the world's only remaining superpower, not to mention Europe west of the Urals...

...chairman of the House Banking Committee, rose on the floor to read into the record documents suggesting that the Bush Administration had actually hindered the Justice Department's investigation of Iraq's role in a multibillion-dollar bank fraud in Atlanta...

...The answer is that I never maintained an Enemies List...

...Anyway, it's fascinating to watch him campaign for ex-President...

...It is not every day that one can strike an upbeat note from this capital of power, perks and posturing, and the Bush announcement had special meaning for me...

...More embarrassing politically, the "worse-than-Hitler" Saddam Hussein still held sway in Iraq and resisted efforts to clear out his weapons of mass destruction...

...In America's Presidential campaign, "change" has become a kind of buzzword...

...Actually, nasa uses three such planes, one of them converted from its CIA spy missions, the others newly built...

...But wasn't it from France that we learned, "The more things change, the more they remain the same...

...A continuing embarrassment also were the disclosures of how far the Reagan and Bush Administrations had gone in their pre-Kuwait courtship of Iraq...