Reminiscing About Royalty
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Reminiscing About Royalty Saint of the Gutters and Saint of the Media: The death of Mother Teresa cast a new light on the Princess Diana frenzy that...
...Similarly, it seemed to me an essential part of Mother Teresa that she touched those she would console—the lepers and diseased—and held them in her arms...
...She wanted my reminiscences of working in Moscow 40 years ago...
...Yes, a Jewish woman, and sometimes she said she regretted having to butcher your copy, because some of the things you said she agreed with...
...Roger Tamraz, a shady oil financier wanted for embezzlement in Lebanon, was apparently a longstanding asset of the CIA...
...Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend from wartime days, cautioned Juliana about the faith healer, to no avail...
...I'm not sure I could face that after 40 years of pent-up rage at a depersonalized monster...
...In time, Queen Juliana, like her mother, abdicated, and her daughter Beatrix became the third successive Dutch female monarch...
...I tried venting my anger by saying on the air, "15 words deleted here," but the Foreign Ministry warnedme that it would not allow an allusion to the existence of censorship...
...Until recently, Queen Elizabeth never showed emotion in public, except perhaps once, and then in Latin...
...The speeches were toned down somewhat...
...In time, Hofmans left the palace...
...President Clinton did not go much further than laying down his criteria for a settlement, with no endorsement for this one...
...A red-faced Senate swiftly voted 95-3 to repeal the provision...
...The governments it helped to overthrow in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and Afghanistan were all succeeded by more brutal regimes...
...She was celebrated for some 50 years of work among the poor...
...A politician like Bill Clinton can impress people by telling them he feels their pain, whether or not he really does...
...The tobacco industry's proposal appears to be dead for this session of Congress, and in its present form, perhaps forever...
...He is strenuously engaged in trying to edge out potential rivals for the Presidential nomination, like House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, and has been assiduously cultivating urban mayors...
...Americans, on the whole, have always been less inhibited...
...Now it appears the whole deal will go down the drain...
...The royalty I knew was in a different time and a different place...
...And tell your grandmother the rest of my message is deleted...
...In time, the story came out in the German news magazine Der Spiegel...
...This is not to diminish Princess Diana, nor to derogate the millions who have identified with her...
...For Mother Teresa there was reverence, and for Princess Diana adoration...
...It is only to note a difference between a noble life well lived, and the life of a noble well cultivated...
...What has been the outcome of the Marik revelations...
...I will never again bridle when someone asks me: "How do you feel about this...
...You guessed it...
...Not all were made, as he claimed, onDemocratic National Committeecreditcards.And,potentiallymostlethal,some of the money went into legally limited "hard money" accounts, apparently without the donor's knowledge...
...The tax break flap turned out to be what broke the camel's back, if you will pardon the expression...
...But, returning from vacation, Congress faced a firestorm...
...He told, too, how a 1995 scheme went sour when a switch was made from a methodical buildup of an alternate regime in northern Iraq to an effort to launch an armed offensive against Saddam Hussein...
...Her husband, a German prince, Bernhard, was known to have extramarital interests, but not a word of it got into the media...
...She insisted on writing her own speeches for an official trip to the United States in 1952...
...It has gradually been brought home to me that feelings may have more validity than opinions...
...On September 12 the Clinton Administration, two months late with an announced 30-day study, finally rejected the industry proposal...
...Exactly how the S50 billion Federal tax credit was slipped into the bipartisan budget agreement is still something of a mystery...
...Many were the hours we spent, day and night, cursing the censor as we waited...
...John Deutch, who was CIA director at the time, said he knewnothing about it...
...Touching People Mother Teresa's funeral was the latest in a series of events to legitimize public grief and to endorse human feelings...
...But she had to follow KGB guidelines...
...Nothing of this appeared in the Dutch press, except for one delicately worded editorial questioning the curious-sounding speeches...
...Attorney General Janet Reno has found herself with no alternative to initiating a preliminary investigation under the independent counsel law...
...Well," she said, "my grandmother was the censor who worked on your copy, and she would come home and tell us about it...
...Driven to distraction, he had concluded that public exposure might serve as shock treatment to get the Queen to drive Hofmans out of the palace...
...The opposition was penetrated by Saddam's agents...
...Smoke and Mirrors For those so smart that they sometimes outsmart themselves, the British have an expression, "too clever by half...
...As the CBS correspondent in Moscow in the mid-1950s, I worked under Soviet official censorship, a holdover from the Stalin days...
...Gore's calls on "a few occasions" were 86 at last count...
...New York's Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan dismissed the tax write-off as a "meaningless concession with no practical effect...
...But finally, good Dutch friends, warning that I might single-handedly bring down the monarchy, persuaded me to withdraw the article—a rare event in my career...
...That's why President Clinton allowed him to make the announcement of S1.1 billion to the states and cities for training welfare recipients...
...Having contributed $300,000 outright to Democratic campaigns in this country, Tamraz wanted to see President Clinton about support for his Caspian Sea pipeline project...
...The CIA says Marik may have violated his written agreement not to disclose confidential information, and it has referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution...
...That meant anything we Western reporters wanted to cable or broadcast had to be brought in triplicate to a counter at the Central Telegraph Office...
...Was he a jackbooted thug...
...Now, as then, the Queen is photographed only with her consent...
...The Queen attributed that to rubella contracted while she was performing a royal chore of welcoming Dutch troops back from Indonesia...
...He was voted down 78-22 by colleagues panting to go home...
...Even as the Agency marked its anniversary, it was involved in a controversy over one of its recent associations...
...The Senate hearings looking into the laundering of contributions for a fund-raising event held in a Buddhist temple that featured the Vice President have added to the pressure on him...
...So her limousine stopped at red lights and many a motorist did a double take, seeing the Queen alongside...
...The House followed suit...
...A radio reporter had the special difficulty of not knowing if his script would come back in time for a scheduled broadcast, or whether the excisions would make it incomprehensible when read into the microphone...
...Tears have become standard fare on television, and Americans think—no, feel—that there is no shame in it...
...I asked how she knew about me...
...I bridled when people asked me how I "felt" about the Middle East crisis or Bosnia...
...And working as a translator...
...In the U.S...
...When her mother, the stern dowager Wilhelmina, abdicated in 1948, Juliana stood awkward and tremulous at her investiture and said, "Who am I that I should do this...
...Nothing was said about this concession when the President and Congressional leaders trumpeted the grand compromise on July 28...
...But three days later Illinois Democrat Richard J. Durbin rose on the Senate floor to blow the whistle and try to block the provision...
...I learned the story of the Queen and the faith healer in part from Mrs...
...Is your grandmother still alive...
...So you can imagine my feelings when I got a telephone call recently from a j ournalist in Moscow on the staff of a Russian news magazine...
...A grieving and angered British public let the royal family know that this was a new age, a time to drop the stiff upper lip...
...All this could not have come at a worse time for Gore...
...The drafts were full of allusions to resignation and acceptance of God's will...
...But surely part of both was recognizing the heart on the sleeve...
...It has created a rhetoric of defense...
...She sought solace in religious mysticism, and fell under the influence of Greet Hofmans, a strange faith healer...
...Yes...
...In 1992, after a rash of divorces and separations in her family, the Queen said that she had suffered an "annus horribilis," a horrible year...
...Juliana of the House of Orange-Nassau never really wanted to be Queen...
...She's a very nice old lady...
...In a forthcoming book, Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman, students of intelligence, write: "A culture that assumes facts are secrets until determined otherwise can have all kinds of pernicious effects...
...When the royals wanted to make peace with the populace, they did it by touching and shaking hands with some of the thousands who offered floral tributes and tears for the Princess...
...And there is one more failure to record: the attempt to mount a coup from northern Iraq in 1991 to topple Saddam Hussein and install a friendlier group...
...As a journalist, I always avoided feelings...
...Its provisions would, among other things, exchange money, Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man for immunity from punitive damage awards...
...A sadistic mastermind...
...When she went to the theater, no announcement of her presence in the royal box was allowed...
...Mother Teresa was celebrated, but she was not a celebrity...
...I said, "No, just say hello forme...
...When Congressional committees try to get to the bottom of the story, the agency will probably invoke its need for secrecy...
...Princess Diana, for all her praiseworthy interest in hospitalized children, land mine victims and the otherwise disadvantaged, lived a life of the advantaged, of yachts and sunny beaches...
...Her Foreign Minister threatened to resign and precipitate a constitutional crisis...
...The British are amazed at their own newly discovered ability to pour out their emotions in public...
...It was the ability to make physical contact with sufferers of AIDS and other afflictions that one also saw in Princess Diana...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott were involved...
...For 50 years the CIA has hunkered down behind the same wall...
...While it usually takes many years before some Congressional committee digs out the full story of a CIA bungling, this time the Agency officer who was in charge of the operation, Warren Marik, now retired, went public to tell the story to ABC television and to Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post...
...And the chances are the Netherlands monarchy will outlast the British monarchy...
...You can't conceive the frustration of having a big story, such as Nikita S. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalinbefore the 20th Communist Party Congress, and not being permitted to breathe a word of it to America...
...Now, as then, the Dutch like their royals and pay little attention to them...
...Panama's General Manuel Noriega, a drug kingpin...
...No longer...
...There a functionary logged it in and passed it through a slit in the wall to the room where the invisible censor worked...
...Do I want now to meet this nice old lady to whom killing my best lines was just a job to be done...
...and Guatemala's Colonel Julio Alpirez, linked to the murder of an American...
...Juliana's family was dysfunctional, like the Windsors...
...Touchy-feely" was a sarcastic phrase...
...That brought her the Nobel Prize, but not the kind of adulation that attended the death of a princess...
...Mother Teresa and Princess Diana have helped millions to confront their own emotions...
...History remembers that as "out of the loop...
...In time, I was decorated by the Queen, presumably for self-censorship...
...Queen Juliana would not permit the police to halt traffic for her car...
...I associated with the hippies of the '60s...
...You would think the Agency would know better by now than to get embroiled in political fund-raising...
...Gore may yet be able to contain the political damage, given the weakness of other Democratic contenders, but this is a trying time for him...
...Leaving aside the humiliation of moles like Aldrich Ames, even the Agency's greatest covert action successes have led to tragic disappointments...
...Critics in the Administration had argued that the proposal would undercut Federal authority to regulate nicotine and do too little to reduce youth smoking...
...Mother Teresa, according to her order, the Missionaries of Charity, left the world owning only two pairs of sandals, two pairs of eyeglasses, a wooden wash bucket, a worn sweater, a much-thumbed Bible, and an olivewood rosary...
...Message Deleted Suddenly finding out who your masked torturer was 40 years ago can be disconcerting...
...That debacle cost about $110 million...
...Damage Control Political scandal has a way of enriching the language, if not the nation...
...In 1973, for example, President Richard M. Nixon's spokesman, Ron Ziegler, announced that because of new developments, White House denials of involvement in Watergate were "no longer operative...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Reminiscing About Royalty Saint of the Gutters and Saint of the Media: The death of Mother Teresa cast a new light on the Princess Diana frenzy that swept Britain and much of the world...
...The Company," as insiders call the CIA, has also shown a penchant for keeping bad company...
...The faith healer's pacifist preachings led the Queen to oppose military alliances, including NATO...
...I considered thoughts important and feelings irrelevant...
...I sold the article to Life magazine, ignoring threats of retaliation from the Dutch government...
...If you ever come to Moscow, you can meet her...
...Those heavy black lines were made by a woman...
...A "rogue elephant" again...
...Company' Losses The 50th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency—on July 26 or September 18, according to conflicting authorities—found it beset and beleaguered...
...As we stood around waiting, we speculated about what he might look like...
...We hated the censor with a consuming passion...
...In 1987 Vice President George Bush, referring to the Iran-contra affair, said he was not in the "decision-making loop...
...Recent years have given them ample occasion to join in grief—from the Kennedy funerals to Pan Am 103 to the bombing in Oklahoma City...
...That entered the lexicon as "inoperative...
...Eventually, the CIA fled in disarray, leaving its local allies to be captured or submit to Saddam, who has effectively reoccupied part of the north...
...Sometimes a copy eventually came back, sometimes it didn't...
...Then there was Vice President Al Gore's tortured statement last March that "no controlling legal authority" said he had violated the law by making campaign fund solicitations from the White House...
...He told of arranging flights of unmanned aircraft over Baghdad to drop leaflets, of organizing military training and providing supplies for Kurdish guerrillas, and of spending millions of dollars on radio and television propaganda denouncing Saddam Hussein's regime...
...The couple's fourth daughter, Maria Christina, was born almost blind...
...Its infamous collaborators have included the Mafia's Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, enlisted to bump off Fidel Castro...
...When she died, she left an estate estimated at $65 million...
...How does it feel...
...Your grandmother...
...When it did, it was usually with words, sentences or whole paragraphs crossed out in heavy black pencil...
...Too clever by half was the tobacco lobby, which contrived in the dark of night to save about $50 billion on a proposed $368 billion settlement of pending suits and related issues—drawn up for Congress' adoption by industry representatives, plaintiffs' lawyers, state attorneys general, and public health advocates...
...The unraveling of a painfully constructed defense is a dismal spectacle...
...After the National Security Council vetoed a meeting with the President, Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler secured the CIA's help through an agent named "Bob," apparently a friend of Tamraz...
...They say Administration representatives, like Budget Director Franklin D. Raines, also participated in the meeting where the deed was done...
...Roosevelt, in part from Greet Hofmans herself, and in part from Prince Bernhard...
...Perhaps...
...But let me start from the beginning...
Vol. 80 • September 1997 • No. 15
