An American Way of Strife

...There it was, spoken by Hal Holbrook playing Deep Throat in the murky shadows of that garage...

...Hardline President Kliment Voroshilov called the new Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy a "liquidator" and said, "We must act decisively...

...His last words were "Governor, look over your shoulder, justice is coming...

...It is easier to sign a NATO pact with Russia than to make Russia part of an economic community, even though President Boris N. Yeltsin attended the Denver "Summit of Eight...

...He spoke to four Senators, most of them on the Armed Services Committee...

...Even the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt has had to yield to today's revisionist ideas...

...At their meeting on November 3, Khrushchev accused hardliner Molotov of coming up with "the most pernicious ideas...

...That made him more amenable to a plea bargain with the FBI...

...In The Hague, the mission of the Economic Cooperation Administration— the American Marshall Plan organization running independently of the embassy—considered the application...

...The search was the harder because Kansi's father had been a rich tribal chief, well connected with the Pakistani government...

...Over a period of weeks I talked two more times to Woodward, who continued to express his bafflement, and said the line must have been invented by Goldman...

...Landing Sayegh, who reportedly drove the getaway car in the bombing of the Khobar Towers complex, which killed 19 Americans, involved the State Department in a tricky situation...

...Then he added, "If absolutely necessary, we will have the meeting without you...

...Khrushchev stated, "We must not withdraw our troops...

...The question arose recently when I was writing about President Clinton's campaign funding problems...

...To the war-crippled countries of Western Europe, Marshall conveyed an offer from President Harry Truman...

...When General George C. Marshall delivered that Harvard commencement speech promising to help Europe to its feet if it would unite, his proposal made bigger headlines in Europe than in the United States...

...But by the next day sentiment started shifting back to crushing what one of them called "a fascist counter-revolution...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr An American Way of Strife In barring emotional testimony of the sort that might have turned the Timothy McVeighpenalty hearings into "some kind of lynching," Judge Richard Matsch showed great sensitivity to the danger of helping to create a martyr for Right-wing extremists...

...The 16 countries of Western Europe were drawn together in a community of shared need...

...General Ralston, returning from a trip to Asia, was advised to make some calls on Capitol Hill and judge the mood for himself...

...Roosevelt's trademark silver fox fur piece is never shown, no doubt a concession to the anti-fur movement...

...If Europe would organize itself to agree on its needs, then the United States would undertake to help Europe to its feet...

...President Bill Clinton's praise for the much-maligned FBI and CIA appears to be clearly merited...

...On October 28,1956, the day I talked to Khrushchev, the Communist Party Politburo, or Presidium as it was then called, held the first of a series of meetings on how to deal with the Hungarian Revolution...

...Another Day at the Politburo In late October 1956, with Hungary engulfed in an anti-Communist uprising, Western correspondents in Moscow heard rumors of a meeting of Soviet bigwigs facing a fateful decision...

...The New Democrat and the new Laborite seemed to be reading from the same script as they talked of moving from Left to Center and leading leaner governments with overhauled welfare systems into the 21 st century...

...I was in constant contact with Woodward while writing the screenplay, and I guess he made it up...

...You will not find that in any of the statues in the memorial...

...And for President Clinton, the prophet of free and more global trade, it will spell trouble if Europe starts heading the other way...

...There is Timothy McVeigh, seemingly as typical an American as you can find...

...I wanted to refer to that famous line of Deep Throat, "Follow the money, always follow the money...

...Eventually, though, he said he realized that it was not, and that this was inexplicable...

...He got that—along with seven and a half acres of granite...

...The Marshall Plan became as much an instrument of ideological exclusion as an instrument of economic inclusion...

...The door to retreat was left wide open...

...And there was white supremacist Richard Snow, who, just before the Oklahoma City bombing, was executed in Arkansas for killing a policeman...

...Nice Work, Spooks Speaking of terrorism, let's hearit for the FBI and the CIA, which have distinguished themselves by cracking two cases of foreign terrorism...

...The village depended on its spinning mill, the stoopspinerij te Nyverdal, and the factory was in danger of shutting down for lack of cotton...

...The hunt for Kansi had been going on for four years, with two FBI agents in Pakistan rotated every six weeks...

...I watched the bales of cotton arriving...

...Myself, I thought it would have been more delicately brought off in the memorial if the great seated figure had been draped in a cape that might have concealed a wheelchair...

...Jospin campaigned on a pledge to create public-sector jobs and reduce the workweek without loss of pay...

...In the end, it appears that playing the waiting game and increasing the reward to S2 million or more probably broke the clannish code of silence in the Asian wild west of Baluchistan...

...It is easier to get Poland into NATO than into the European Union, which fears low wage and low price competition from the east...

...FDR is remembered for the cigarette holder he held between his teeth at a jaunty angle...

...But political terrorism was something we associated with foreigners, bomb-throwing anarchists...

...Still, what a commentary on the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, which was dedicated to keeping Communists out of power...

...Although convinced that his withdrawal would only reinforce the appearance of a double standard, Ralston listened to the loud silence emanating from the White House and the Pentagon and withdrew, saying loyally, "This is solely my decision...

...But then "anonymous high-level" Pentagon sources let it be known it would be better for the military and all concerned if the General did pull out...

...The Marshall Plan united 16 generally viable countries that needed only a jump start provided by the United States and sustained by a common fear of Communism...

...You have heard about the great battle of the wheelchair...

...Cotton had to be bought with dollars, and the Netherlands was short of dollars...

...It was also agreed that the President and the Secretary should avoid facing questions about Ralston on weekend television...

...The argument is that if he had known what we know today about tobacco, he wouldn't have smoked...

...I know because the Wilson International Center, as part of its Cold War History Proj ect, has been translating and publishing once-secret documents from the Soviet archives...

...Fifty years ago, I was reporting from Europe and was able to witness its profound impact...

...But the patient, dogged, synchronized efforts that landed Mir Aimal Kansi, suspect in the 1993 killing of two CIA officers outside the agency's headquarters in Virginia, and Hani al-Sayegh, suspect in the bombing of a U.S...

...The longstanding French-German partnership that started with Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer and continued through Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl may well be replaced now by a BritishFrench partnership: Blair-Jospin...

...The course of events suggests that the Secretary took his cue from President Clinton, whose own record of standing behind nominees is not spotless...

...Such ordinary men wielding such extraordinary power...

...Ralston told Cohen he was ready to make the fight for confirmation, and Cohen said the General should feel under no pressure to pull out...

...military apartment complex in Saudi Arabia last year, look like textbook models of unremitting investigation in the murky field of Middle East terrorism...

...Why does everybody with a cause seem to know that FDR and Eleanor today would be sharing that cause...

...Not about his identity, which the Washington Post's Woodward has managed to keep hidden all these years, even from publisher Katharine Graham...

...There is Theodore Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber...

...For the conspiracy-minded, the stage for the McVeigh frame-up plot has already been set...

...William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay, had described in an essay "how hard I slaved to get it right," how hard he tried for "dry dust authenticity...

...Why does it matter 25 years later...

...On one occasion, with Pakistani military help, they raided a residential compound where Kansi was believed to be hiding, but he eluded capture, probably fleeing into Afghanistan...

...But the blood bath that ensued clearly had its effect on the nerves of the Communist bosses...

...Here were men turning Hungary into a killing field and preoccupied with their personal feuds...

...The ideological divide no longer runs through Europe, but the economic divide does...

...Goldman said he would have been proud to be the author of the most famous line of the era, but it wasn't he—it had to be Woodward...

...Then, with some $ 12 billion in American money, the miracle of rebuilding shattered economies took shape...

...The mayor said that with taxes from the factory, he could go ahead building schools and budgeting for social welfare...

...The 2,000 workers stayed at work...

...Now terrorist violence has come home...

...Finally he said, "I can't believe I made it up...

...Molotov snapped back, "You should keep quiet and stop being so overbearing...

...FDR himself was determined that he would never be seen with it in public...

...Some 40 years later, I finally know what was happening back then behind the Kremlin walls...

...Khrushchev expressed alarm because the workers were supporting the uprising...

...Not that it won't happen anyway...

...Canada, where Sayegh had gone shortly after the incident, was induced to threaten him with deportation to Saudi Arabia, something that he dreaded...

...Europe Leans Leftward Probably the best-remembered scene of President Clinton's visit to Europe in May was hisjoint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair...

...One can now better understand why, the following June, Khrushchev purged these members of what he called the "antiparty group...

...Yet as a reflection of where Europe as a whole is today, the impression of a Rightward shift may be misleading...

...McVeigh himself exhibits the strange composure of one who is ready to enter some Valhalla of victims of government, peopled by those who died in Waco and Ruby Ridge, and perhaps by earlier generations of foes of the feds, like white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan...

...There may be diplomatic shifts as well...

...If Germany, with its economic woes, turns Left in next year's election, that will confirm a shift of tidal proportions...

...Following 'Follow the Money' A quarter-century after the June 17 break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building that started President Richard M. Nixon on the road to ruin, I ran across an intriguing little mystery...

...Hardly a month later, the countries of Western Europe met in Paris and formed the Organization for European Economic Cooperation...

...Airbrushing the Roosevelts Is it something about the fractious time we live in that makes us want to have our dead heroes live up to our contemporary prejudices...

...Marshall Plan Memories Since the birth of the Marshall Plan half a century ago, the map of Europe has changed repeatedly...

...According to published accounts, when the Washington Post recently reported General Ralston's affair with a CIA employee a decade ago, Cohen met with the President in the White House, and they agreed that Congress' view should be evaluated before they decided what to do...

...Now that site in Oklahoma City serves as a monument to terrorism as an American way of strife...

...The less visible curtain that divides Europe today runs between the nations that have made it economically and those that have not...

...That was not all: The bakery store windows of Nyverdal displayed signs reading, "The grain in this bread comes from the American Marshall Plan...

...Mission chief Alan Valentine sent it forward to W. Averell Harriman, the European chief in Paris, who recommended an allocation of dollars for cotton for Nyverdal...

...Because the history of Watergate and Nixon's downfall is incomplete without knowing who could have been so highly placed as to be privy to intimate White House and campaign secrets, and yet so bent on Nixon's destruction...

...The core of his defense was that he was being set up to take the rap for a bombing actually carried out by a foreign power, probably Iraqis or maybe Afghans or Pakistanis...

...The argument among Europeans about whether to include West Germany, the fallen enemy, ended when Stalin blockaded Berlin in 1948...

...It was embarrassing to realize, after McVeigh was caught, how easy it is to yield to xenophobia...

...At the next session two days later, the mood seemed to have shifted toward avoiding intervention and perhaps even withdrawing Soviet tanks from Hungary...

...It was more in the tradition of President Clinton, who turned his back on Zoë Baird, Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier when they ran into opposition...

...FBI agents spent six months around Kansi's home town of Quetta in southwestern Pakistan (once a CIA staging area for the war in Afghanistan...

...Remember how many, including news organizations, were ready in the hours after the bombing to assume that this was the work of Islamic terrorists, like the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York...

...As President Lyndon Johnson's National Commission on Violence reported in 1969, America has a history of crime, vigilantism and rioting...

...On November 6, feeling pressure from the hardliners, Khrushchev accused Presidium member Lazar Kaganovich of "toadying to Molotov" and of engaging in "screeching and face-slapping...

...Nice as it would be to say that the Cold War was only a long time-out in the unification of Europe, the resumption of which President Clinton now proclaims, the truth is somewhat different...

...But now the advocates for the disabled say that if FDR were living now, he would surely want the wheelchair as a symbol of transcending his handicap...

...In The Hague a half century later, President Clinton suggested picking up where the Marshall Plan left off, offering inclusion to former Cold War foes...

...To make sure I had it right, I went back to the Woodward-Bernstein book All the President's Men...

...The others—including Nikolay Bulganin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Marshal Georgy Zhukov—quickly fell in line behind Khrushchev...

...But it is also true that America has not had much experience with native terrorism...

...The stealth operation was not in the tradition of President Reagan, who nominated Robert Bork for the Supreme Court and stood by him, and President Bush, who nominated John Tower for Secretary of Defense and stuck with him until Tower was rejected by the Senate...

...These are not the militant pro-Soviet Communists of the old days...

...Cohen then chose not to defend the position that the case of General Joseph W. Ralston was quite unlike the case of Air Force Lieutenant Kelly Flinn...

...Even when terrorism was practiced on American soil, it was usually by people from elsewhere—Croatian hijackers of an airplane, Puerto Rican fighters for independence, a Jordanian assassin of Robert Kennedy...

...President Clinton, who says his own knee injury has given him deeper understanding, has ordered that a statue with a wheelchair be made...

...The Leftward shift is bound to generate pressure for easing anti-inflation austerity in order to create jobs...

...In two complicated situations, as hunting down foreign terrorists is bound to be, they apparently performed the way one hopes they always would...

...Canadian officials then agreed to deport him to the United States on the ground that Boston had been the last stop on his trip to Canada from the Middle East...

...At a diplomatic reception, I tried to smoke out some word from Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev by saying that my CBS bosses wouldn't let me leave on vacation because of the rumors of a special session of the Communist leadership...

...Our intelligence agencies have taken a lot of flak, much of it deserved, for failing to ferret out their moles, for failing to coordinate their investigations, for being walked over by the White House (in the case of the FBI) and by murderous Latin American colonels (in the case of the CIA...

...And that was still not all: Guilder equivalents of the Marshall Plan dollars, called "counterpart funds," were used to finance Fulbright Scholars studying in America...

...They all promised to support him, although they warned of a bruising fight on the floor...

...It's about the authenticity of the electrifying things that Deep Throat was supposed to have told Woodward in their meetings in that underground garage...

...I had three other persons read the book and it wasn't there...

...But this is not an age for subtlety...

...Like Woodward, Goldman at first insisted to me that the line had to be in the book...

...Indeed, Europe as a whole has been veering Leftward, with the Labor victory over the Tories in Britain and especially the stunning Socialist victory in France that brought two Communists into Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's Cabinet...

...Khrushchev lowered his voice to a confidential whisper and said, "You can go on vacation...

...Not to mention the fact that from the European cooperation started by the Marshall Plan came the European Coal Steel Community and, eventually, the European Community...

...But he was speaking of private investment, not of large-scale economic aid...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt wished to have as his memorial a simple slab the size of his desktop...

...To my amazement, I couldn't find it...

...The Black militant H. Rap Brown put it pithily: "Violence is as American as cherry pie...

...About the Marshall Plan, let me offer a bit of history that is also a bit of autobiography...

...Out Like Flinn In his first engagement as Secretary of Defense, William Cohenhas won honors for rapid deployment, but not for courage in action...

...I found it in Nyverdal near Almelo in the eastern Dutch province of Twente, population 9,000...

...And we must take the initiative in restoring order in Hungary...

...It's about Bob Woodward's famous high-level source, dubbed "Deep Throat...

...Relaxing monetary restraints, in turn, means that France, among others, may not be able to meet the conditions for a single European currency by 1999 as planned...

...Eventually, researchers led me to the motion picture of the same name, supposedly a faithful rendering of the book...

...Not really...

...When I called Woodward, he at first said it was simply impossible that Deep Throat's most famous line was not in the book...

...The media, less adversarial than today, cooperated...

...They would have included their wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, but Stalin vetoed that— an early harbinger of the Cold War...

...The eagle-eyed columnist Mary McGrory noted that Mrs...

...At first, sentiments seemed to favor military intervention...

...Cohen clearly made a technical mistake in trying to draw the line on enforcing the military's rule against adultery at a four-star general, opening himself to charges of a double standard...

...The Christian Science Monitor, for which I was writing in those days, asked if I could find one concrete example of the Marshall Plan at work...

...Organized labor in Europe, as in the United States, tends to resist integration and trade globalization in the interests of protecting jobs at home...