Politics by the Book
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Politics by the Book FOR MONTHS, the subject that inevitably came up in dinner conversations was O.J. Simpson. Then, for a few days, it was the Baltimore...
...Tantalizingly, he suggested it could be Republican, maybe independent, perhaps even Democratic...
...There has to be a minimum of confidence that the senior officials of the American government are not playing with the lives of the American people," he said...
...As to the difficulty of trying to manage an international crisis in the face of press skepticism about motives, Kissinger said...
...Bob Woodward of the Washington Post appeared first with details of the Nixon cover-up from H.R...
...The turn of events has given rise as well to some spirited media infighting...
...Public interest organizations like Common Cause have inveighed against it for years...
...His positions on abortion rights, affirmative action and gun control make him anathema to the Right-wing that today controls the GOP...
...The story presented a pretty fair summary of the biography's contents, complete with juicy tidbits like the way the General turned down President Bush's offer to head the CIA and President Bill Clinton's offer to consider him for Secretary of State...
...New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, retiring from the Senate and another noncandidate—or not yet candidate?told me he has finished his book, and its last word is "possibilities...
...It is hard to know what possessed Packwood to document day by day the correlation between money received and legislative favors extended...
...They were wrong...
...Newsweek's article did not contain a single direct quotation...
...But Dobrynin hasjust published his own memoirs, titled Confidence, and has not returned the compliment...
...So he has trooped in and out of TV studios, but he hasn't inhaled the adulation...
...Waco and Ruby Ridge have exposed cancerous growths in two Federal agencies, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms...
...Seldom, however, are we afforded the kind of first-person evidence Packwood presents in his politically suicidal diaries...
...Randy Weaver believed it and, ironically, must have found confirmation in the actions of the FBI...
...The Powell phenomenon underlines the disconnect between what it takes to win a nomination and what it takes to win an election...
...Too many militias and survivalists already believe that the Federal government is a conspiracy against their rights...
...He has remained the risk-averse military planner who wants to know where the battle will end before he commits his forces...
...When Crawford needed a special tax loophole forthe Shell Oil Company, Pack-wood, who was Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, recalls that he told him, "Ron, I still hate the oil companies, but I'll do you a favor...
...Nothing is more disturbing to public confidence than a sense that our law enforcers are not playing straight, that they may be twisting and breaking the laws we rely on them to execute...
...If he did, on what ticket...
...He seemed fully aware that the nation was hanging on every teasing word that might betray his intentions...
...I'm tanned, rested and ready—ha, ha," he said to one group of admirers at a Time magazine reception...
...But more important is where that kind of money comes from, and what it purchases from legislators hungry for campaign funds...
...Senator Bob Packwood (R.-Ore...
...This may be one of the greatest services he performed...
...The order was described as a warning to the Soviets, then threatening to send troops to Egypt...
...When Crawford needed a favor for the cable television industry, Packwood came through with support for deregulation...
...My impression of the book and the first spate of interviews was that Powell had effectively eliminated himself from the traditional party system...
...In post-Watergate days...
...Whether it was a felony, as Packwood speculated, for Senator Phil Gramm (R.Tex...
...They did three summit conferences together...
...On the other hand, U.S...
...And if you don't, you'll be rich...
...At a news conference, Kissinger expressed great indignation that anyone should suspect an international crisis was being orchestrated to divert attention from Watergate...
...And no wonder...
...There are Republicans alive today who still think the 1952 nomination should have gone to Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio rather than General Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...But Powellmania sells books, and he has worked the superstores skillfully...
...If the rest of us are to be convinced that the Feds and the local cops, on the whole, serve us, a lot will have to happen...
...Dobrynin writes, Kissinger expressed regrets for the alert, calling it, "a rash move dictated by the White House...
...Then, for a few days, it was the Baltimore Orioles' Cal Ripken Jr...
...He took unambiguous positions on several key issues: pro-choice, pro-registration of guns, pro-affirmative action, pro-death penalty...
...that is why we occasionally get doomed candidates like William Jennings Bryan, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern...
...Kissinger spoke glowingly of Dobrynin in his memoirs...
...Take the case of superlobbyist Ronald Crawford, a good friend and ardent money-raiser for the disgraced Republican...
...Ruby Ridge is one token of an issue large and grave...
...What lies behind, though, is only the initial phase of the Packwood scandal, mainly involving personal misconduct with women...
...He denounced the "hostile and skeptical atmosphere" created by the media...
...In his interviews, he has run the gamut from aw, shucks, I'm just an ordinary kid from the South Bronx, to a self-confident leader who believes he has what it takes to inspire America...
...Now comes Dobrynin, declaring that, in fact, the alert was a Watergate-inspired charade...
...They were realpolitik diplomats of the old school who, both in and out of crises, understood each other...
...Lamar Alexander, the GOP hopeful who was Governor of Tennessee and Secretary of Education under President George Bush, has a book on his American travels last year, not to be confused with My American Journey...
...At present, we are in a period of sinking confidence in our enforcement agencies...
...it was all done by paraphrase...
...In dictatorships such as Nazi Germany, consistency in law enforcement was the first thing to go...
...Can Colin Powell Save America...
...That is something the average powerful chairman of a powerful committee prefers to gloss over...
...Or whether he was too quick to call off the war against Iraq...
...The late Philip Stern described it in his book, The Best Congress Money Can Buy...
...Let's go back to that moment in history...
...Suddenly the political life in America is the literary life, and every publishing tycoon can dream of having a leg up in the White House...
...Of a $3,000 contribution from a timber and paper company he wrote, "I'm glad to have anything I can get...
...Ross Perot has a new book about saving Medicare...
...On October 25,1973, we awoke to the news that President Nixon had put worldwide American forces, including nuclear forces, on alert...
...If Powell has not proved himself a political leader, he has certainly proved himself a political performer...
...Our nation of laws rests on the assumption of regularity in their enforcement...
...In this high-stakes media competition the idea is to scoop your rival and upset the publisher's carefully-crafted promotion campaign, without opening yourself to the accusation of stealing intellectual property...
...Would he run or wouldn't he...
...Packwood boasted in his diary that "much of Crawford's income is dependent on his relationship with me...
...They had special telephone hot lines to each other...
...He turned his back on the Democratic Party ("They're not alive and well like the Republican Party is"), and he virtually insured that the Republicans would turn their backs on him...
...But Packwood has broken the code of silence about the hard uses of soft money...
...Movie lobbyist Jack Valenti, the one-time POWELL with Joseph E. Persico aide of President Lyndon B. Johnson, told him admiringly, "If you run for President, you'll be formidable...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose To Renew America topped the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for seven weeks, has been replaced in that spot by Powell...
...Formidable is the way the media threw skepticism to the winds to worship at the Powell shrine...
...A Federal Appeals Court, overruling a lower court decision in the publisher's favor, held that a present or former public official cannot "take private possession of the most important details of a nation's historical and political life...
...That was presumably to avoid any issue of copyright infringement...
...The publication of his memoirs, My American Journey, was greeted with a wave of publicity such as I have never witnessed—a wave in which he zestfully bathed...
...Party activists control the nomination...
...In Russia and in Mexico today, police corruption is so pervasive as to leave people feeling helpless and cynical...
...Now the book comes first, and publication day ranks with primary day...
...Our country has experienced periodic derailments of law enforcement, usually at the local level, but sometimes at the Federal level—from the Palmer anti-Communist raids of 1919, to J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance, break-ins and blackmail, to Nixon's effort to thwart the FBI investigation of Watergate...
...Kissinger called me to say, "1 want to put on record that the Dobrynin quote is totally untrue...
...The issue of journalistic enterprise versus property rights is not new...
...A few days later, Nixon invited the Ambassador to Camp David and is quoted as telling him he might have lost his cool a bit, because his enemies were using Watergate to undermine his authority...
...That was true then and it is true now...
...No longer...
...Clearly, one way to sell books is to make people think you are or may be running for President...
...But when two principals have conflicting versions of the same crisis, how is one to avoid skepticism...
...was forced to resign...
...News scooped Newsweek on Woodward's own book...
...And former Vice President Dan Quayle, who has forsworn the 1996 race, has a new book about—what else?—values...
...In 1983, the Nation was sued by Harper and Row for borrowing from Gerald Ford's memoirs for an article on the Nixon pardon...
...asked a Newsweek cover suggestively...
...Time, purchaser of Powell excerpts, with a cover story headlined, "How the General's New Book and Publicity Blitz May Launch His '96 Bid...
...It was Richard M. Nixon, speaking not of himself but of Alger Hiss, who said that the cover-up is most dangerous—not only to the malefactor but to the country...
...Remember the dim, dead days almost beyond recall when Presidents like Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter served the country and then settled down in tranquillity to write their memoirs...
...Starting with a thorough exposure of the rogues...
...Ahead of us, as the diaries and massive documentation are studied, is a deeper and more pervasive second phase involving legislative misconduct at the public's expense...
...Crawford brought in the big bucks, but Packwood didn't sneeze at small bucks either...
...and for none of it do you have to account to the Federal Election Commission...
...In his memoirs he wrote, "I tremble at the thought of what fate would have been in store for us in such an environment if we had to sustain a crisis for very many days...
...For the rest, the media acted the way much of the American public has acted—so hungry for someone fresh in politics as to suspend disbelief and join a sort of national revival meeting...
...Congressional investigations, messy as they sometimes are, have served as a useful instrument...
...The pundits predicted that he would avoid taking positions...
...Yet this nation, unlike Russia and Mexico, has shown an ability to expose and rein in its rogue cops...
...On the contrary, one of his disclosures concerning Kissinger is quite devastating...
...Early in November...
...to siphon $ 100,000 of so-called "soft money" into the Oregonian's 1992 campaign was discounted by the Senate Ethics Committee...
...The quid pro quo is not new...
...The party faithful want an ideologically correct candidate more than they want a winning candidate...
...He quotes Kissinger as telling him it was largely determined by domestic considerations and would be canceled the next day...
...Dobrynin THERE NEVER WAS a Cold War relationship such as existed between Henry Kissinger, foreign policy mastermind for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and veteran Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin...
...Powell Mania," the Washington Post called it...
...A Problem of Confidence THEN THERE WAS a week of Senate hearings on the fatal confrontation at Ruby Ridge, Idaho...
...Only now and then did you get questions about how Powell handled?or did not handle—the My Lai massacre in Vietnam...
...Kissinger vs...
...He wouldmake a good President and it would be good for the country," said ABC's usually abrasive Sam Donaldson...
...Haldeman's book, to the irritation of Newsweek, which is under the same ownership as the Post and had paid dearly for an exclusive excerpt...
...All those radio and TV appearances, all those magazine covers...
...I think that left General Powell, if he were so minded, to undertake the almost impossible task of running as an independent...
...Because this happened five days after the "Saturday night massacre" of the Watergate special prosecutor, with talk of impeachment already in the air, some of us, including myself, were skeptical about the real motive for the alert...
...No one knows better than Colin Powell how fast a balloon can be deflated...
...Lately it has been overwhelmingly Colin Powell...
...A media-age book tour is a great way, too, of campaigning for the Oval office without saying so...
...There is enough on the record to show that senior FBI officials tried to cover up mistakes in judgment about the rules of engagement...
...They had secret lunches every week...
...Newsweek stole a march on its rival...
...Veil, about the CIA and William J. Casey...
...Hard Uses of Soft Money IN OTHER Washington news, as the saying goes...
...Local police forces, from New York to Los Angeles, are being rocked by scandals involving corruption, racism and arbitrary action...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
