Constructive Engagement

...Then the long-ago negotiated agreements on nuclear nonproliferation and other matters were formalized...

...The Democrats raised almost $14 million, an increase of about $3 million...

...Defying the threat of punishment under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act passed last year, a consortium of French, Russian and Malaysian oil companies has signed a $2 billion contract to develop an Iranian gas-field...

...Russian companies have reportedly made another breach in the wall around Iran by helping the Islamic republic build a missile with a 1,200-mile range that would bring Tel Aviv and Ankara within reach of Teheran...

...We have not heard Nixon's voice because the National Archives, the repository of his tapes, allows only transcribing...

...Later on, so did the impeachment investigators of the House Judiciary Committee...

...Overruling LeMay and the whole Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Kennedy ultimately opted for a blockade rather than an attack on Cuba...

...The big deal was that America has what China needs, and America needs to sell it...

...Ford thus found himself in the position of having to deny he made a deal to get the Presidency...

...The Navy sent the aircraft carrier Nimitz steaming toward the Persian Gulf as a warning to both governments not to start an air war...

...Then the rest of the money could be used to solve the next important problem, he said, without naming it...

...President Clinton's defensive "within the letter of the law" takes its place with Vice President Al Gore's "no controlling legal authority," as our leaders are reduced from leadership to legalese...

...Indeed, he is not likely to be the second President in history to appear in public before a Congressional committee...

...School for Givers "To die rich is to die disgraced," said Andrew Carnegie...

...There have been allegations of unseemly quid pro quos, like Presidential meetings with a Chinese arms dealer and a Lebanese-American pipeline promoter...

...Number 28 is Time Warner-CNN's Ted Turner, who has offered up to a billion dollars for benevolent United Nations programs...

...After the scripted state dinner toasts, President Jiang resumed his tour of the icons of America's "relative" democracy in colonial Williamsburg, Philadelphia and Boston...

...Obviously, a President is in a better position than an ex-Senator to dispense favors...

...On October 22, President Kennedy announced the blockade of Cuba and warned Soviet ships to turn back...

...After a pause, Nixon added, "Schorr will know...

...Andrew Carnegie had it right: "To die rich is to die disgraced...

...President...

...Only one President in history has testified in public at a Congressional committee hearing, and he probably wishes he hadn't...

...But, in general, American efforts to maintain the dual containment of Iraq and Iran have run into opposition from countries more concerned about pursuing their economic interests than the superpower's ideological purposes...

...P.S...

...Thanks to the work of diligent scholars, we have been able to hear not only President Kennedy wrestling with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Johnson verbally wrestling with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy...

...Clinton said, on a White House tape, that the TV ads bought with soft money were "central" to his lead in the polls...

...Although France has ostentatiously stuck its thumb in President Clinton's eye, the Administration is apparently having second thoughts about applying sanctions...

...While enforcing a "no fly' zone against Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq, the United States found that zone being violated by Iranian planes attacking Iranian dissident forces in Iraq...

...President Bill Clinton brought up human rights...

...An embarrassed White House said that he chose the itinerary...

...While Chinese antipollution controls are awaited, American industry prepares to sell technology for the cleaner burning of coal...

...The most serious allegation yet to surface, however, concerned the Interior Department's denial of permission for a group of Native Americans to open a gambling casino in Wisconsin...

...He'll know...

...The West German authorities feared that a move by President John F. Kennedy against Cuba would tempt Party Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev to move against West Berlin...

...On May 14, 1973, Nixon was talking to his Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, about the FBI investigation of me that he had ordered J. Edgar Hoover to undertake...

...Meanwhile, in Berlin On October14, 1962,aU-2spyplane monitoring suspicious Soviet installations in Cuba discovered that mediumrange missiles were being installed there...

...The two leaders, at their joint news conference, clashed on human rights and celebrated their common ground and their countries' multifaceted relationship...

...Number one is Bill Gates of Microsoft, at $39.8 billion net worth, running down to number 50, chewing-gum heir William Wrigley, at $2.6 billion...

...In one case, deterring Iraq turned into deterring Iran...

...President Jiang said duly noted and trotted out his Einsteinian theory of "relative" human rights and "relative" democracy...

...Nixon Was Right As far as we know, five Presidents surreptitiously arranged to record White House conversations—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon...

...In the year leading up to the 1996 election, over 60 per cent of the $800 million raised by the two national parties went to TV advertising...

...Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay: "If we don't do anything about Cuba, then they're going to push on Berlin and push real hard, because they've got us on the run...

...Nor was it surprising that President Clinton declined to appear...

...The Disney organization, anxious to build a Shanghai Disneyland, has hired Henry KissingertosootheBeijing's feelings about Disney's forthcoming Dalai Lama film...

...That precipitated the Kennedy-Khrushchev Cuban Missile Crisis—which was, forme, the Berlin Crisis...

...a warning from a Presidential adviser that "we legally cannot intervene with the Secretary of Interior on this issue," followed by the fact of Secretary Bruce Babbitt's intervention...

...And then either way, it would be we lost Berlin because of these mistakes...

...Perhaps, too, money earned suddenly and sometimes accidentally just does not feel real...

...Straightforwardly, Ford said that White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig had raised with him, as Vice President, the question of a pardon if Nixon agreed to resign...

...American intelligence discounts official Russian denials of involvement with missile development in a state labeled as "terrorist" by the U. S. Iraq, meanwhile, returned to its practice of barring the United Nations from inspecting suspected weapons sites...

...But, as I reported from Berlin on October 28, the isolated city was one of the few places where nothing happened in that tumultuous week...

...One can understand why Clinton would not want to testify in public about the sources, the uses, and especially the rewards of soft money...

...After a few tense days, they did...

...Paul Brainerd, who sold his software company for $ 120 million, is establishing a committee to advise on giving...

...Unidentified person: "Mmm-hmm...

...And Berlin was safe...

...The President: "You mean, a nuclear exchange...

...In Luxembourg the European Union, whose members are sending their ambassadors back to Teheran, has formally denounced the United States for trying to enforce its laws in other countries...

...Feeding Demand It was not surprising that ex-Presidential candidate Bob Dole offered to appear before Senator Fred Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee investigating campaign financing...

...On October 18, debating the idea of attacking the missile sites, President Kennedy said: "And then if he [Khrushchev] says, 'If you're going to do that, we're going to grab Berlin,' he'll grab Berlin, of course...

...Haldeman told the President that one of those who believed the cover story was speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, who, Haldeman said, "called in a state of absolute panic, thinking we had lost our senses if we were going to hire Schorr...

...A sort of "nursery school for philanthropy," he calls it...

...A unanimous statement of the 15 Council members warned Baghdad of "serious consequences...

...LeMay adds: "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr...

...Most people don't start giving away their money until they have spent decades gratifying their acquisitive instincts...

...Constructive engagement marches on...

...They said that the supply of campaign money could not be controlled without controlling the demand, and that demand is driven by the cost of TV spots...

...In the post-Cold War era, the slogan may well be, "Cooperation with autocrats friendly to American economic interests...

...Adviser McGeorge Bundy: "Then, it's general war...

...It would have been in competition with an existing casino whose owners contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Clinton campaign...

...The White House had said the reason for the investigation was that I had been under consideration for an Administration appointment...

...The impeachment report said: "The President knew that Schorr had never been considered for any government position...

...More serious than the sources and the uses of soft money, though, was what hard benefits the contributors may have obtained...

...James Traub, in the New Yorker magazine, suggests one reason is that so many became rich so young...

...American economic interests in China, from Boeing aircraft to Westinghouse reactors, are too critical to permit the luxury of bogging down over values...

...Before the Thompson Committee, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute testified as though they were talking about the drug problem...

...In Germany, as in Washington, the big question at this point was: Would Khrushchev, to save face, blockade West Berlin, as he had been threatening to do...

...One can begin to see why campaign adviser Dick Morris generated a money-raising panic in the White House by saying that without millions for television, the election would be lost...

...Babbitt has denied any connection between the casino decision and the contributions...

...Today we have a new generation of tycoons—not millionaires, but billionaires...

...Turner, who once told me that the size of your fortune is how you keep score, has more recently said that how much you give away is how you keep score...

...With the publication of The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, we now know how Berlin was being weighed against Cuba during the tense consultations in progress at the White House...

...But it is a bleak picture that Washington presents to the nation...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Constructive Engagement Maybe Americans were too distracted by stock market gyrations to pay attention to the man from China with the funny tricornered hat...

...During the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan supported cooperation with "moderate autocrats friendly to American interests...

...Failed Containment The Clinton Administration' s policy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran has run into some strange twists and turns that raise the question, Who is containing whom...

...In October 1974, President Gerald R. Ford went up before a House Judiciary Subcommittee to explain his pardon for ex-President Richard M. Nixon...

...At the summit, Tibet was no big deal...

...Cuba, in the end, had weakened, not strengthened, Khrushchev's hand...

...Maybe when all that comes up you can say, well, it [the position] is on a bipartisan board...

...Divergent philosophies were duly discussed...

...I did know...

...What this tape makes clear is that Nixon not only ordered the investigation, but, as with the larger Watergate conspiracy, was personally involved in the coverup...

...That, he added, is where the competition should be...

...The biggest takers, though, are not necessarily the biggest givers...

...Or maybe the drama was sucked out of the occasion by a sense that a script was being meticulously followed: The 21 guns saluted, the protesters protested, the exiled dissenters dissented, and constructive engagement was pursued by the leader of the free world and the leader of, er, the most populous country in the world...

...Most often, the United States finds itself trying to enforce its laws on unwilling allies...

...In the first six months of this year, the Republicans raised almost $22 million in soft money, about $5 million more than at the start of the last election cycle...

...Russia also recently sold three submarines to Iran...

...One tape spotted by Wisconsin historian Stanley Kutler, editor of the new book Abuse of Power, was of particular interest to me...

...Dole called it "generic money," run through the Republican National Committee...

...Nixon, having had the Johnson microphones torn out, later had his own installed...

...Encouraged by President Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm, Carnegie expected that through arbitration of international disputes, peace would soon be permanently established...

...His example led some of the other millionaires—the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck, and eventually the Ford family—to put part of their fortunes into good works...

...Both are on record as having discussed the advantages of diverting "soft money" to buy television time...

...He is only number 27 among the billionaires...

...That's how constructive engagements are born...

...Considering how much money is in private hands, and considering how stingy government has become in addressing public needs, this would be a good time for the Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets to emulate Ted Turner and George Soros and create the next wave of great American philanthropists...

...Taiwan was no big deal...

...But Carnegie used most of the remainder of his money to promote science and education and to open public libraries...

...The unity the United States had found difficult to assemble Iraq had forged...

...Kennedy: "What did you say...

...It was as though a visitor to Egypt asked to see the pyramids...

...Nixon responded, "That's all right, Bob...

...But because Clinton is by nature a more harddriving, hands-on campaigner than Dole, indications are that he was more actively involved in the production of the political commercials...

...The President approved the cover story...

...On the issue of campaign-fund abuses, the risks of testifying would be much greater for Clinton than for his election opponent...

...Were it not for Iraqi provocation, the U.S., trying to isolate its Middle East antagonists, would have found itself isolated...

...Nixon was right...

...Recently the Archives released another 154 hours of Nixon tapes, recorded between February 1971 and July 1973...

...Jiang Zemin duly read from the Gettysburg Address on the wall of the Lincoln bedroom...

...Apparently not trusting the Joint Chiefs, he gave orders that no military officer be allowed to fire nuclear missiles without a specific Presidential order...

...CBS sent me from Bonn to the beleaguered city 110 miles inside East Germany, having been advised by the White House of a possible Soviet blockade...

...What is known of this case looks suspicious: a call from Air Force One after the President was approached by a representative of the existing casino in a receiving line...

...LeMay: "You're in a pretty bad fix...

...Why are so many American plutocrats, who enjoy sudden wealth beyond their dreams, so chintzy...

...Both candidates, in accepting taxpayer money under the Federal election law, promised not to use funds from any other source for their campaigns...

...Financier George Soros, who has offered up to $500 million to Russia for such things as health care and school books, has befriended causes in 32 countries, and is now backing a drug policy reform program in the United States...

...The United States had difficulty enlisting the Security Council in new sanctions until Baghdad, overplaying its hand, ordered the expulsion of American inspectors...

...This encounter, let's face it, was doomed to succeed...

...And in 1910, having sold Carnegie Steel for $50 million, the Scottish immigrant put $ 10 million into creating the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...A USA Today/ CNN poll has reported majorities ranging from 59 to 77 per cent believing that officials are influenced by contributor pressure, that elections are generally for sale, and that new laws will not help...

...As provided in the scenario, there was the unscheduled ice-breaking meeting upstairs in the White House...