Clinton's New Buzzword
SCHORR, DANIEL
Clinton's New Buzzword Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The overarching theme of Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign was "change." But, because he found that many Americans fear change,...
...At the recent White House correspondents' dinner, I was standing and chatting with General Colin L. Powell when Barbra Streisand approached, trailed by a covey of photographers...
...White House Counselor David Gergen told me) an echo of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 address to Congress propounding Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear...
...whether it is political or not remains to be seen...
...Punch in "Lebanon...Marines," and you bring back the murder of 241 peacekeepers in a car-bomb attack in Beirut in 1983...
...But, because he found that many Americans fear change, perceiving it as a source of insecurity, the agent of change is becoming an agent of "security...
...There will be plenty of people around to whisper, "Only you, Colin Powell...
...Abruptly, General Powell turned away from me and embraced Ms...
...In Somalia, there is a multilateral United Nations force and there is a unilateral United States force, which has been keeping its tactical plans and sophisticated reconnaissance photos to itself...
...President Bush called Governor Clinton "reckless...
...Or if, instead, the teleprompter had come up with President George Bush's UN speech of a year earlier, you would have heard Clinton maintaining that peacekeeping, proliferation and prosperity through free trade are the three great challenges of the day...
...Howe works for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose main concern is keeping peace in Somalia over the long term...
...But he is a remarkably stable person, not easily seduced by flattery...
...Except before the UN he does not realize the error and delivers a year-old campaign speech made in Milwaukee...
...There was also, as of mid-October, a UN negotiator, American retired Admiral Jonathan Howe, and an American negotiator...
...One could envision a scenario with UN Pakistani troops storming into a meeting between Oakley and Aidid to arrest the fugitive and collect the $25,000 bounty on his head...
...The closest that the Reagan Administration came to the notion of security was the "social safety net...
...Security," the new buzzword, has over the years been put to many uses as well...
...What President Clinton actually said was a lot closer to the Bush speech of 1992 than to his campaign speech...
...Reflecting on the loss of American lives in Somalia, one tends to start a search through the computer data bank of recent U.S...
...Ambassador Robert B. Oakley...
...Boutros-Ghali said, "I cannot afford a confrontation with so important a member as the United States...
...helicopter pilot Michael Durant—that would smooth the way for the departure of American troops...
...Freedom" was the buzzword for the liberation of oppressed peoples abroad and for the civil rights movement at home...
...Clinton had told a group of newspaper columnists that his single greatest disappointment in office was his inability to persuade Britain, France and Russia to let him bomb the Serbs...
...But no one ever accused a City College kid from the Bronx of not being willing to hustle...
...Oakley works for President Clinton, whose main concern is keeping peace with Congress and the American public...
...The Red-hunters of the 1950s turned that inward with "internal security...
...At alumni reunions and in the alumni magazine, he has made a point about having to do better than your immigrant parents, reaching as high as you can...
...That was before not only the poor but the middle class, in increasing numbers, began to feel insecure in the face of unemployment, family dislocation and crime on the streets...
...An internationalist version of same was "collective security...
...One could hear (not by accident...
...Once more the cost of underestimation was heavy...
...Watching the videotape of the battered Durant in hostile hands, one could not help noting that again the superpower had underestimated the firing power and staying power of Third World adversaries...
...He went on to propound four kinds of security as an umbrella over diverse Administration programs ranging from health care to crime control to the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...Imagine his teleprompter playing another trick on him like the one the previous week at a joint session of Congress, when it brought up his February economic speech instead of his health speech...
...In the end, therefore, Colin Powell will have to hustle some if he wants to be President...
...As White House watchers are wont to observe, it all looks different from the inside and circumstance has changed the bold candidate into the cautious Chief Executive...
...I can just hear someone in the Pentagon saying, "Who ever taught those bandits how to fire antiaircraft rocket grenades, anyway...
...Isn't that what you would have done...
...That means he will have to be really convinced the nation needs him...
...It's hard to remember that, during the campaign...
...Convention drafts don't work anymore in the age of primaries and media campaigns...
...Come on, Dan," he said, smiling...
...And General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while president of Columbia University, said, "If security is what Americans want, they can go to prison...
...Thus he identified with me, disarmed me and reminded me that going for the main chance is what City College kids from the Bronx do...
...So, from that health security card to job security to security in your home and community, you are likely to hear a lot more of the Clinton Administration's new buzzword...
...In service to the nation...
...Streisand for a picture that became widely circulated...
...President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that he would not "turn tail and run," but he did...
...traumas in the Third World...
...Indeed a time that might once have been called the Age of Anxiety now may be known as the Age of Insecurity...
...Consequently, Admiral Howe was still trying, under UN mandate, to capture Somali strongman Mohammed Farrah Aidid, held responsible for the killing of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers, while Oakley was giving higher priority to a political process—beginning with the release of captured U.S...
...He is also accustomed to receiving merit promotions rather than actively campaigning for the next star...
...Punch in "Tet Offensive," and out spill memories of the surprise display of Communist strength in Vietnam in 1968...
...But speaking before the National Press Club, General Powell sounded more like General Eisenhower than General Sherman when he said that, after collecting his thoughts, he hopes to "do something that is in service to the nation in some capacity...
...Colin Powell for President...
...We are a long way from 1952, however, when General Eisenhower could reject the Democratic nomination, offered by President Harry S. Truman, and receive the Republican nomination by acclamation...
...At Odds in Somalia As for national security, Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti have prompted some top-level reconsideration of the virtues of multilateralism...
...Efforts were made to bridge the gap between the UN and the US...
...But the net effect of the crossed wires and mixed signals, with Washington insistently pursuing its own exit strategy, was that Aidid was suddenly converted from a wanted fugitive to a leading player at the peace table...
...The word "security" was test-marketed by the White House as it prepared to sell its health reform program, and was found to resonate a lot better than "change...
...General Douglas MacArthur once said, "There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity...
...Although "security" appears in the dictionary as a warm, fuzzy noun, connoting shelter and protection, it has not been universally popular, particularly with those inclined toward rugged individualism...
...For the most admired soldier of his generation, who retired from the Army with a public approval rating of 70 per cent, this makes the aspiration to national office almost an imperative...
...Durant was freed and Aidid surfaced for a news conference that the UN forces treated with benign neglect...
...1 can believe that until his retirement he shunned thinking about politics...
...Next time 1 saw him, I chided the General for deserting me...
...Mixed Messages President Clinton's address to the UN General Assembly last September 27 provided an indication of how much his assertive and multilateral impulses have been tempered in a single year...
...In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on October 12, the President asserted that people would fear change less if they felt more secure...
...Now he was hedging his commitment to supply half the troops for a UN peacekeeping operation in Bosnia with conditions that may never be met...
...You would have heard him demanding forceful action to save Bosnia and declaring, "We can never forget this essential fact: Power is the basis for successful diplomacy and military power has always been fundamental in military relationships...
...FDR called his pension plan "Social Security...
...They are: health security, economic security, personal security, and community security—the last including shared responsibility for our children...
...You would also have heard him say that the United States, without offering combat troops, was willing to help UN peacekeeping with headquarters control and communications...
...Such was his soldier's self-discipline...
...Punch in "Lebanon...Hostages," and out come recollections from the mid-'80s of how helpless and vulnerable one felt seeing videotape of hostages held by terrorists who were able to make a nuclear superpower enter ransom negotiations with Iran...
...The President decided that the American contingent would be built up and then pulled out within six months, leaving Boutros-Ghali to worry about whether his other forces—starting with the Germans—would swiftly follow...
...Defense became "national security...
...You're a City College kid from the Bronx like me...
...That couldn't happen, of course...
...Admiral Howe said, "The United States has no intention of reaching a separate agreement...
...Henry Kissinger called this "the watershed of the American effort" to achieve its objectives at force levels "politically acceptable to the American people...
Vol. 76 • October 1993 • No. 12
