Nuclear Politics

...As a result, Kennedy explained to Reston, he would have to increase American troop strength in Europe and confront Communism in Vietnam to disabuse Khrushchev of the idea that he was a "pushover...

...Paul Weyrich, a founder of the movement, has written, "We need to drop out of this culture.' Beginning Something The division of Korea, like the division of so much else, came from a bigpower wartime arrangement...

...The principals in the race have not hesitated to attack each other's credibility either, notably on Social Security...

...Now Ray has hired more lawyers and said that the matter of an indictment "has not been closed...

...Starr advised the House Judiciary Committee in November 1998 that he was postponing the subject of a Clinton indictment until the impeachment process had run its course...

...In unified Berlin, President Kim said the leaders of the two Koreas should meet...

...There is a question of timing...

...Chairman Dan Burton (R.-Ind...

...What seemed to impress Chinese students was not so much whom the Taiwanese voted for, but that a formidable government was turned out of office and accepted a peaceful transfer of power...

...Mao Zedong's heirs are learning that power comes not only from the barrel of a gun but from the image on a screen...

...But when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba yet not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev concluded that he was dealing with an inexperienced young man who could be intimidated and blackmailed...

...A three-day summit scheduled to be held in Pyongyang in June would clearly be only the beginning of something, far from the end...

...It is theoretically possible that Ray has already asked a grand jury for an indictment, to be held under seal until January 20, when Clinton's successor is sworn in...

...Both China and Taiwan have subscribed to the formula of "One China.' They have not agreed, though, on what that one China will be...

...That was due, in the first place, to Governor Bush's ill-advised visit to reactionary anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, and, in the second place, to Senator McCain's attack on Christian Coalition leaders as an evil influence...

...The lesson of Taiwan's democracy must surely be sending sparks flying around the Forbidden City...

...And so it goes...

...This could not be sustained...

...Pretty Cool...

...There is a great irony here...

...Bush laughs a sardonic laugh...

...People in Beijing seem to know all about the election in Taiwan, despite the skimpy coverage by the official media...

...Jimmy Carter campaigned as a born-again Christian...

...Shortly before then, the House Investigating Committee received a sanitized version of the memo...

...The East German Communists were never really able to stabilize their repressive rule because people looked at West Berlin television despite threats of jail...

...North Korea is the "rogue state" American officials have in mind when they say we need a national missile defense system...

...The human cost was tremendous—perhaps a million lives and millions of famished people...

...policy into boycotts, embargoes, sanctions against third parties, and assassination conspiracies, leaving the international community shaking its head in wonderment...

...Or when a South Korean airliner crashes...

...In recent months, North Korea has been quietly reaching out to west European countries, talking to Japan, raising questions about entry into international trade organizations...

...At various times the Pyongyang regime made gestures of conciliation...

...Without Russian agreement on amending the ABM Treaty, the President would have to abrogate it altogether if he were to go ahead with developing a limited missile defense against rogue states...

...The President said Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs...

...But, 50 years after North Korea's attempt at forceful unification, we may be witnessing the liquidation of the last armed conflict between East and West...

...If anyone is looking for new slogans, the Wall Street Journal has a couple of suggestions: "Gore more years" and "Vote for the son of a Bush...

...North Korea's Kim II Sung, having lost his Soviet patron, tried to go it alone and even attempted to develop a nuclear missile system...

...Since that time, says University of Miami scholar Max Castro, there has been a "tangled, tragic and dysfunctional" relationship between the exiles and the Federal government that has profoundly affected the course of history...

...That decision is supposed to come this summer after one more test of the antimissile missile in late June...

...Senator Helms and Governor Bush may derive satisfaction from having made President Clinton truly a lame duck in negotiating on both offensive and defensive nuclear weapons...

...President Bill Clinton, though, may well consider canceling his Moscow meeting with President Vladimir V Putin scheduled for early June— to avoid risking a humiliating defeat...

...We may be witnessing the latest example of the ability of communications technology to pierce borders and spread freedom...

...Or when the Administration says it cannot afford to join a ban on land mines...

...That was also the year the Republicans, in vain, tagged the Democrats as "the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion...

...In Germany, the Christian Democrats are enmeshed in a campaign funding scandal...

...At the 1945 Yalta Conference in the Crimea, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to give Joseph Stalin a piece of the peninsula as an inducement for the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan...

...We have lived with the consequences for half a century...

...Indeed, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov's meeting in Washington on April 26 with Governor George W. Bush, who opposes any Russian deal with the incumbent, suggests that the Kremlin has started looking past Clinton...

...Putin has warned that if the United States does not comply with the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, all bets are off and the nuclear arms race is on again...

...The Constitution says an official impeached and convicted by the Senate "shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment...

...White House press spokesman Joe Lockhart says Clinton will not seek a pardon from the next President, nor will he pardon himself, one of the options that President Nixon's lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, presented to him as constitutionally feasible...

...It's hard to know, therefore, when we will be able to say, as President Ford said, that "our long national nightmare is over...

...Five years later, Stalin gave North Korea's Kim II Sung leave to invade South Korea...

...Five months after the failed invasion...

...But in catchy, mudslinging slogans, this campaign has not begun to match some of the famous battles of the past...

...has demanded the full text from the Justice Department...

...Presumably that remains true if not convicted by the Senate...

...That being the case, Putin has little incentive to compromise...

...religion has turned up sporadically...

...He faces possible disbarment proceedings in Arkansas...

...Meanwhile the CubanAmerican community, by its single-minded dedication to the anti-Castro cause, has managed to guide U.S...

...HepaidPaulaJones$850,000 in an out-of-court settlement of her harassment claim, and another $90,000 to her legal team because a judge held that he gave false testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky...

...A Korean summit was tentatively agreed upon in 1994, but did not happen because of Kim II Sung's death...

...It became unfinished business that Starr left to his successor...

...So there was a line that led from the Bay of Pigs morass to the quagmire in Vietnam...

...Sectarian politics is familiar in Europe, where parties in Germany and Italy, mainly Catholic, have the word "Christian" in their names...

...In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was finished when the rebels captured the central TV studios...

...Gore said he has learned from his mistakes and is now passionate about campaign funding reform, a passion he shares with Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz...

...But the President is also on notice from Chairman Jesse Helms (R.-N.C...

...In China, we know that the fax machine has been a potent instrument, linking dissidents and their supporters abroad...

...Variations on 'Liar' You may have wondered about the Republican television ads showing Vice President Al Gore mingling with the Buddhist monks at that 1996 fund-raiser...

...At the end of the session Kennedy told James Reston of the New York Times that Khrushchev had "bullied him and threatened him with war over Berlin...

...Bush strategist Karl Rove said on television that sometimes the Vice President "has a big problem telling the truth...

...Both candidates apologized—Bush to the late Cardinal ?'Connor, McCain through the press...

...President Kennedy met Soviet Prime Minister Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna...

...The Christian Right entered the political arena as a significant factor in 1980 when candidate Ronald Reagan embraced it, saying, "You can't endorse me, but I endorse you...

...After all, it is what led Castro to demand Soviet nuclear missiles for defense against an American invasion...

...He has been a bone in the throat of successive Presidents from the day he took power in 1959...

...Before long the religious conservatives were a powerful force, almost dictating Republican policy on issues like abortion and school prayer...

...Governor Bush said the memo raises "troubling questions...

...In Czechoslovakia in 1989, rebellious television technicians broadcast scenes of the suppression of anti-Communist demonstrations and the regime was doomed...

...After the Soviet Union collapsed, the two Germanys reunited without the need for a summit...

...This has special meaning to the Chinese, who know that their Communist regime is hip deep in Army controlled businesses and corrupt practices...

...You may also have wondered about the Los Angeles Times scoop on the hushhush 1998 memorandum of former prosecutor Charles LaBella, urging an independent investigation of Clinton-Gore finances...

...President John F. Kennedy, who approved the operation conceived by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Administration, later said, "How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead...

...and 24 other Senators that any arms control treaty negotiated by the Administration will be dead on arrival at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...National Nightmare President Clinton was impeached by the House, although not convicted by the Senate...

...The Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world has come to nuclear war, can be credited as well to the chain of events that started at the Bay of Pigs...

...You know it is going to be immoderate when variations of the word "liar" start flying around this early in the season...

...Conceivably, his adamant opposition to amending the 1972 agreement could be overcome by Clinton...

...The White House calls that "outrageous and disgusting...

...Tangled Passions To understand the passions generated among the Miami Cubans by the Elian González affair you have to go back to April 17, 1961, and the CIA's disastrous landing of Cuban exiles without air cover at the Bay of Pigs, where they were killed or captured by Fidel Castro's forces...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Nuclear Politics In the twilight of their White House days, most recent Presidents have looked forward to that last big-power summit and the chance for a grand bargain on arms control...

...This was just the beginning of what will certainly be the longest and possibly one of the nastiest Presidential campaigns...

...Using the same medium, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association accused Gore, along with President Clinton, not only of lying but of accepting "a certain level of killing to further a political agenda...

...Now this country has been left shaking its head over the uproar about a child that a highly motivated minority tried to save from Fidel Castro...

...But they have been suffering reverses as the center of gravity on the Continent moves toward the Social Democrats...

...Impressive, too, was the news that President-elect Chen Shui-bian plans to break up Taiwan's multibillion-dollar empire of banks, factories, television stations, and foreign real estate that the Nationalists built up during their 50-year rule...

...But he would then lose the opportunity to offer Putin start III, scaling down from start II limits on strategic weapons, in return for acquiescence to an American limited missile defense system...

...But an old cliché will have to be amended: Politics starts at the water's edge...

...In 1974, the Watergate grand j ury was told by Special Prosecutor Leon A. Jaworski that President Richard M. Nixon could not be indicted while in office...

...A further complication is the fact that the Duma made ratification of START II contingent on keeping the ABM Treaty intact...

...The banner year was probably 1884...

...Then they became not only a force but an issue...

...The process has to be vindicated," he says, "no person is above the law...

...And the end of Clinton's legal troubles is not yet...

...The video came from the Federal District Court, where it was introduced by the prosecution in the trial of Gore friend and fund-raiser Maria Hsia...

...Independent counsel Robert W. Ray, Kenneth W. Starr's successor, has let it be known that criminal indictments for perjury and obstruction of justice are an "open" matter he is actively considering...

...The Contagion of Freedom On the community bulletin board in Beijing the day of Taiwan's election (March 18),a Wall Street Jounial reporter observed the following poster: "Taiwan Can Elect Its Own Leaders...

...Here in the US...

...The Democratic war cry against James G. Blaine was "Blaine, Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine...

...After Nixon's resignation, Jaworski advised President Gerald R. Ford that indictment was imminent in the absence of a pardon, and Ford rushed to issue one...

...More recently, South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung has been sending aid to North Korea under a "Sunshine" policy, as he calls it...

...He would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or had destroyed him...

...The Christian Right had already been in trouble, with some evangelicals beginning to return to shunning the political arena...

...He mentioned the possibility of opening the border for family visits as a first step...

...Clearly, he has the power to do so...

...The Republicans called Governor Grover Cleveland a "rake, libertine and moral leper...

...And former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, with President Clinton's blessing, has drawn up a strategic plan for rapprochement with the North...

...Now the Internet is sending shudders through Communist bosses...

...Resisting Religion In trying to be the unifier of disparate Republican factions, George W. must constantly resist the injection of a religious issue into his campaign...

...In any event, Ray conveys the impression that he is not just talking theory...

...JFK, on his way to becoming the first Catholic President, assured Southern Protestants that he would not take orders from the Pope...

...Thus arms control may not only be stopped in its tracks, it could move backward...

...With his hands tied by Helms and company, the President may leave the missile defense issue to the next President...