To Debate or Not to Debate
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr To Debate or Not to Debate You remember, of course, the first ever Presidential debate. No, not Lincoln-Douglas—that was for U.S. Senator. It was...
...Let me try you out on the source of a few other quotes that have resounded around the country: 1.) "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue...
...In this media age, a Presidential heritage assures you of name recognition and maybe a little free TV time, but not much more...
...China was able to get over the denunciation of its human rights policy and, even though it took a long time, the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade...
...It was between Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota, running forthe Republican nomination in 1948 to oppose President Harry S. Truman...
...Given how many of them have been won on quips, boners and attitudes, there is reason to wonder whether there isn t some better way to test our leaders...
...Something tells me that although the expelled Vladimir Gusev is missed by Russian intelligence, he will be, or has been, replaced...
...In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was overheard talking to his fiancée, Nancy Maginnis, asking how he looked and sounded during a televised speech...
...Individual words that have resonated, and those who uttered them, occupy a place in the political hall of fame too...
...The intelligence reports say the arms shipments from Iran arrive by air at Damascus airport, then go overland to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon...
...It was no accident that Germany, struggling with its own past, took the initiative in the European Union (EU) to isolate Austria...
...The last known tow missiles to be acquired by Iran were sold through Israel, in 1986, in exchange for what turned out to be two U.S...
...Or candidate Bob Dole, in California in 1996, congratulating the "Brooklyn" Dodgers on a nohit game, although the team had been the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1958...
...Governor Bush wanted to "strengthen our alliances in the Far East" and called China a "competitor," not a partner...
...Truman wouldn't dream of debating Dewey...
...intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death...
...the conventional wisdom at the time was that a joint appearance with the incumbent gave a leg up to the challenger...
...In all, our Presidents have had 56 sons who lived long enough to qualify as the country's Chief Executive...
...Asked if he was too old to be President, Reagan's winning response was that he didn't want to "exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience...
...In 1960, though, Vice President Richard M. Nixon agreed to three TV face-offs with the Democratic challenger, Senator John E Kennedy...
...Who can forget Vice President Dan Quayle correcting a student in a spelling bee by adding an "e" to "potato...
...As of 1992, when Mitrokhin defected, there had been no cutbacks...
...It is a part of Cold War history that the U.S...
...Spiro Agnew, Nixon's running mate in 1968...
...Iranian aid to the Hezbollah, and to the Hamas Palestinians, is regarded by Israel as part of a determined Iranian drive to undercut the peace process and to hold on to Syria, whose defection from the thinning ranks of confrontational Arab states would shift the power balance in the Middle East...
...Republican' in the Senate, but failed to win a Presidential nomination...
...The third was the talk in Congress about including Taiwan, as well as Japan, in a theater missile defense system...
...Still Listening In 1980, Victor Lozenko, a KGB technical intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover, attended a conference in a room also used by the System Planning Corporation, which did classified work for the Pentagon...
...In 1988, Michael S. Dukakis, on the podium with Vice President George Bush, muffed a tough question about what he would do if his wife was raped and murdered...
...Fudging on China Policy Foreign policy has so far played little part in the Presidential race, but that may change...
...However, Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, stirred special memories...
...UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said at the time, "The nuns were also political activists...
...As a lieutenant in the German Wehrmacht, he was involved in massacres in Yugoslavia...
...But the arming of Taiwan, bubbling up from CongTess into the Presidential campaign, could mean that some rough times lie ahead...
...Candidate Carter in a Playboy magazine interview...
...Listening to them on radio in Germany, I thought Nixon had done well...
...Undercutting Mideast Peace According to Israeli intelligence reports, the Hezbollah guerrillas in southem Lebanon have recently received large shipments of arms from Iran, including American-made tow anti- tank missiles...
...But the Kennedy confrontations were a big mistake...
...All this time the State Department was telling Horman's parents they had no idea what happened to him...
...Early on, the major candidates could get away with statements limited to supporting trade with China under various conditions...
...Maybe their heyday has passed...
...Only one grandson of a President has made it to the White House, Benjamin Harrison...
...Only one has ever been elected to the Oval Office, John Quincy Adams—in a contested election that ended up in the House of Representatives...
...The closest thing to a real family dynasty we have known recently is the Kennedys...
...Television was made for Reagan, who carried the day with a single quip, "There you go again...
...In 1992, billionaire Ross H. Perot joined President Bush and Governor Bill Clinton for three debates...
...It took three years and the intervention of then Representative Robert G. Torricelli (D.-N.J...
...was ready to intervene to unseat Left-wing governments from Chile to Nicaragua...
...Israeli sources believe the Hezbollah is preparing for a ground war against the Israel Defense Forces even if they withdraw from southern Lebanon by July 8, as Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his Cabinet have said they will...
...Although under Nazi rule for only seven of its 700 years, Austria is remembered for how enthusiastically it embraced Anschluss with Germany...
...After his Checkers speech four years earlier saved his place on the Dwight D. Eisenhower ticket, Nixon was convinced he was a television star...
...American Dynasties Americans generally have not taken to the idea of a family dynasty...
...Neither President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 nor President Nixon in 1972 would appear with their opponents...
...Robert A. Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, was "Mr...
...Admiral Dennis Blair, commander of U.S...
...He instructed the CIA to help mount a coup against it...
...and James, did not get further than the House...
...In 1964, 40 bugs were pried out of the walls of the American Embassy in Moscow...
...Forfour years startingin 1969, too, the KGB bugged a meeting room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...And Austria was the country that elected former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as president after the disclosure of his wartime role...
...government...
...The Clinton Administration was slow to get involved in a situation that resulted from a free democratic election...
...to learn that a Guatemalan colonel on the American payroll ordered the killing...
...So pleased was the KGB with Lozenko's haul that it awarded him the Order of the Red Star...
...FDR's two politician sons, Franklin Jr...
...Russian espionage has devoted more resources to eavesdropping than to human spying...
...I learned this soon after my first American political assignment in 1966, covering Governor George W. Romney's resounding re-election in Michigan...
...By 1982, the Soviets employed 350,000 intercept operators and other technicians worldwide, about five times as many as employed by American intelligence...
...Europe, closer to its own history, remembering that Hitler came to power after a democratic election, had no such compunctions...
...As the primaries have shown, Presidential debates no longer command vast television audiences...
...This provided the KGB with information about the deployment of American nuclear weapons in Europe, American chemical weapons and a lot of other things...
...For the next 10 months, the bug was monitored by cars with diplomatic plates from nine nearby locations...
...He did much the same when Walter E Mondale was the Democrat opposite him in 1984...
...In 1992, a guerrilla leader in Guatemala married to an American woman, Jennifer Harbury, was captured by the Army, tortured and killed...
...In 1969, Soviet eavesdroppers intercepted White House telephone conversations about candidates for positions in the Nixon Administration...
...In 1985, construction of a new embassy was halted because it was so riddled with bugs...
...Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, testifying on Capitol Hill, speculated that "the vehicle...
...Thanks to President Clinton's order to declassify documents bearing on human rights violations under Pinochet, we know the State Department long ago concluded that the Pinochet regime killed the men in 1973...
...Other European countries— France, Belgium, Italy—have their extremist groupings...
...As Stephen Hess, the author of America's Political Dynasties, has put it, the famous name gives you "one step upward, but then you're on your own...
...Only doing my job," he said...
...Forty years ago, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a pioneer of European integration, told me that one purpose of the EU was to put a restraint on unhealthy nationalist tendencies in his own country...
...A high-ranking Bush aide has responded that the request "will receive the consideration it deserves...
...Of the rest, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt...
...And, "U.S...
...Communications from Andrews Air Force Base with the President's plane were similarly monitored...
...What a historic irony...
...When that was reported to Moscow, word came back that KGB chief Yuri V. Andropov "loved the intercepted conversation," that it revealed Kissinger's vanity...
...Now we have the answer as well to the 26-year mystery about what happened to Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, two young supporters of Allende who disappeared during General Augusto Pinochet's coup...
...It is remarkable how simple sentences, even phrases, can stick to political figures, often to their detriment...
...Senator Robert F. Kennedy's Presidential aspirations were cut short by an assassin's bullet, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy's by a scandal...
...Senator John McCain asked for strict enforcement of trade rules...
...It is much like the story of Vladimir Gusev, caught eavesdropping at several parking spots after a bug was placed on the seventh floor of the State Department...
...Two debates did not help Senator Robert Dole overcome President Clinton in 1996...
...Army's College of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia...
...I once went to Vienna to interview Carl Silberbauer, the Nazi cop who broke into Anne Frank's garret hiding place in Amsterdam...
...Now Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic standard bearer, has challenged George W. Bush, his presumptive Republican opponent, to a twice-weekly debate during the fall campaign, with both sides forgoing those ubiquitous 30-second spot commercials...
...And it was on radio, television then being in its infancy...
...That was Senator Barry Goldwater, nominated for President in 1964...
...But in September 1967, while criticizing President Johnson's policy on Vietnam, Romney said he had experienced "the greatest brainwashing that anyone can get," during a trip there...
...I didn't see what 75 million Americans saw—a pallid Vice President with five-o'clock shadow and a handsome young Senator...
...Eventually, five soldiers were convicted of the crime, but American government investigators did not interrogate the officers in command, some of whom had been trained at the U.S...
...Aside from the shaky status of the trade agreement in Congress, there were three military developments that Beijing branded as hostile acts...
...The impressive victory made Romney the instant front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968...
...Vice President Gore, walking a line between Administration support for and labor opposition to expanded trade with China, put his emphasis on not saying in advance what would embroil the United States in the Taiwan dispute...
...Before leaving, Lozenko planted a listening device under the table...
...2.) "I've looked on a lot of women with lust, I've committed adultery in my heart many times...
...The second was the plan being considered by the Pentagon to sell Taiwan four billion-dollar-plus ArleighBurke class destroyers with advanced Aegis air defense radars...
...may have tried to run a roadblock...
...Catch Phrases If I asked who said, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," or who said, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles," I imagine you would have less trouble than if I asked you about some high policy statement by Presidents Clinton or Reagan...
...Ford blew it with one confused answer to a question about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe...
...Unfortunate Complicity On September 15, 1970, President Nixon said, in an Oval Office meeting with his national security team, that a regime in Chile headed by Left-wing Salvador Allende "would not be acceptable to the United States...
...About "Grecian' and "Kosovarian," I need not elaborate...
...So the next verbal contest at the top pitted unelected President Gerald R. Ford against a little-known ex-governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter...
...forces in the Pacific, flew to Beijing in an effort to resume the cooperative military-to-military relationship that former Defense Secretary William J. Perry promoted some five years ago...
...One was the bill passed by the House to enhance Taiwan's security...
...Isolating Austria A collective shudder has run through Europe at the thought of Austria being governed by a coalition that includes the extremist Freedom Party of Jörg Haider, a xénophobe who is soft on Hitler and the Waffen SS...
...But developments are making it harder to fudge on China policy...
...Antipathy to the idea is undoubtedly connected with this nation's republican beginnings and a Constitution that bans hereditary titles of nobility...
...McFarlane told me, "You'll rememberthatthelsraelispushed that deal...
...Of all the unstable situations simmering on the horizon—Russia and Chechnya, Serbs and Albanians, Arabs and Israelis—the issue most likely to roil the political waters is the mounting tension over China and Taiwan...
...In 1980, three American nuns and a religious volunteer were kidnapped, raped and murdered in El Salvador...
...In fact, for several months in 1994 Italy was governed by a coalition that included the extremist National Alliance...
...That was the Iran-contra deal engineered by Reagan aides Robert C. McFarlane and Oliver L. North...
...And maybe that's just as well...
...A 1976 internal report by the State Department said the Chilean government "might have believed this American [Horman] could be killed without negative fallout from the U.S...
...The story is told in a revealing book, The Sword and the Shield by British scholar Christopher Andrews, based on files spirited out of the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters over aperiodof30 years by Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected in 1992...
...President Carter then debated former Governor Ronald Reagan in 1980 before 100 million TV viewers, and that wasn't wise...
...Not so well-known is that Washington was less than zealous in protecting Americans who got into trouble with dictatorial regimes...
...But the atmosphere had changed...
...hostages in Lebanon...
...Old Moscow hands will remember the bug planted in the great seal of the United States behind Ambassador George F. Kennan's desk in the early '50s...
...3.) "If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all" The answers: (1...
...Bush, with his stammers, his grimaces and his looking at his watch, was accounted the loser...
...If this sounds familiar, it should...
...A disturbing new phase may have opened on February 21 when the Beijing government, shortly after a high-level American delegation had left, issued an 11,000-word blast containing the most explicit threat yet to use force if Taiwan did not soon start talks on reunification...
...The brainwashing image appalled many voters and may have cost him the nomination—which went to Richard Nixon...
...Austrians also were some of the most brutal of concentration camp guards...
Vol. 83 • March 2000 • No. 1
