The Politics of Principle

...World War II left this country with its head held high, celebrating a generation of heroes...

...But there was no doubting the seriousness of his dedication to the cause of hemispheric free trade...

...Bush clearly intends to be not only a good neighbor to Latino countries, but thebestneighbor on the block...

...One of the dissidents showed me a ration book that allowed for meat once a year...

...Conservative," confided shortly before his death that he would probably be considered too liberal for the contemporary Republican Party...

...I put that question to my friend Seymour Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing My Lai...

...Starting with the election of moderate Mohammad Khatami as Iranian president in 1997, President Bill Clinton began pursuing a policy of reconciliation with Iran...

...Jeffords challenges the Republicans to decide who they are...

...By the summer of 1999, President Clinton was persuaded there was solid evidence of Iranian involvement...

...The report was never published, and the FBI was long stymied by the Saudis in its own investigation...

...Harder for Freeh to understand was the foot-dragging in the U.S...

...As early as 1967, New Yorker correspondent Jonathan Schell wrote of being driven in a jeep by a GI who suddenly turned around and said, "You wouldn't believe the things that go on in this war...

...That reason lies in the year 2000 census and how it is changing the country'spolitical landscape...

...George S. McGovern flew 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot operating from Italy...

...It was, they try to tell you, that kind of war...

...It says the function of government is to serve the public, not the interests of a dictator...

...Many other future politicians who willingly served in World War II did not make it to the White House...

...Worst of all, she said, was emigration control...

...Is Thanh Phong another atrocity like My Lai, where civilians were massacred in 1968...

...Reining in the FBI On May 16, the day Timothy J. McVeigh was originally supposed to be executed, it looked as though the FBI might be executed instead...

...But there seems to be a closer-to-home reason for becoming the champion of economic relations with our friends south of the border...

...Playing the Hispanic Card President Bush addressed Canada's French- and English-speaking Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, as "amigo" during the recent Summit of the Americas in Quebec...

...The question is why Bush has chosen to embrace this third effort in seven years to bring down trade barriers from the Arctic to the tip of Argentina...

...Kerrey's group, if you accept the version of most of them, was a jittery response on a dark night to a perceived attack...

...The mystery is why the conspiracy has remained a mystery for so long...

...Since the late 1980s, the mantle of America's leadership has passed from a generation that came of age in World War II to one whose concepts of military service were shaped in the murky moral and political minefields of the Vietnam War...

...Outgoing Director Louis J. Freeh, appearing before a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee, acknowledged some of the scandals ("tragedies" he called them): the penetration by master spy Robert P. Hanssen...

...Attorney General John Ashcroft received a draft deferment for eachofthe seven years he was eligible to serve...

...It was, of course, the 50-50 head count in the Senate that gave one man the strength of many...

...As Governor Angus King of Maine put it, the Republicans of his region tend to be fiscal conservatives, but social moderates...

...The Republicans may be facing their self-examination now...

...Here foreign trade policy merges with political policy...

...That mission in 1969 ended with the deaths of more than a dozen unarmed civilians...

...It has triggered a massive shift in power and a game of musical chairmanships...

...Recalled in a House hearing was the FBI leak that tarnished the reputation of an innocent Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympic bombing...

...If it doesn't, he plans to at least tell the families of the 19 Americans who were killed who did it and, maybe, who obstructed justice...

...What Lieutenant Kennedy did in the Solomon Islands was extraordinary...

...He delivered lines like, "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce...

...And now about the Navy seals who killed a dozen or so innocent people...

...When Freeh went to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to ask for indictments...

...Narrow separation in the government and in the electorate also reflects the alienation and confusion of the times...

...So I took one evening off from the festivities to go and meet with four of the discontented—open dissidents, that is...

...And so history leaves us with the Bob Kerreys— good men in a dirty war...

...Lowell P. Weicker, Connecticut's former Republican Senator and independent Governor, recalls that longtime Senator and onetime GOP Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, "Mr...

...President George W Bush found his way into the National Guard...

...Former President Clinton managed to avoid being drafted by a combination of deferments and ROTC assignments...

...Then it watched in wonderment the Florida vote count struggle and the bizarre spectacle of Gore presiding over a hypothetically Democratic Senate for 17 days, until the inauguration of President George W. Bush...

...There was, of course, General Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...the botched investigation of scientist Wen Ho Lee at Los Alamos National Laboratory overa 19-yearperiod...

...Bush, Navy pilot, was shot down on a mission to bomb a Japanese-held island and was rescued by a submarine...

...The Bush Administration stayed a discreet distance away from the Kerrey controversy...

...troops were housed...

...The Saudis' foot-dragging was not hard to figure out: fear of its pro-Iranian Shi'ites, fear of Iran and fear of American retaliation against Iran...

...Khatami said he didn't know what Clinton was talking about...

...His motor torpedo boat rammed by a Japanese destroyer, he dived overboard and spent 30 of the next 36 hours in the water to rescue his crew...

...He wrote to President Khatami asking for help in the investigation...

...It was easy, in a showcase hotel and conference center, to believe El Jefe's boasts about a generally contented people enjoying health care in a welfare state despite the American trade embargo...

...Freeh started having trouble with the State Department in getting approval for his officers to travel to Saudi Arabia...

...But no party switch has had the seismic impact of Vermont Senator James M. Jeffords' agonized conversion on May 24...

...At the time he spoke of his "only unfinished piece of business...

...He was only one of seven future Presidents who served in World War II...

...But along with close division between parties there comes division within parties...

...On Capitol Hill it felt like the mid-'70s, when the bureau was hung out to dry after revelations of J. Edgar Hoover's softness on organized crime and hardness on antiwar and civil rights activists...

...Fidel Castro, much in evidence, talked almost nonstop about his victory then and the progress of his revolution since...

...It was well-advised to do so...

...I returned to Cuba this past April for a Cuban-American conference reviewing that invasion...

...As early as August 1996, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry told National Public Radio's Martha Raddatz that Saudi Arabia would soon be issuing the results of its investigation and would implicate Iran...

...Whatever is done to rein in the FBI is unlikely to affect Freeh, who announced on May 1 that he would retire at the end of June...

...Former Vice President Dan Quayle joined the Indiana National Guard...

...But America has found out about some things—about My Lai, about Marines torching thatched huts with Zippo lighters, about the Phoenix assassination program involving the CIA...

...The President, Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and former President Bill Clinton, to name a few, are political figures who avoided the Vietnam War in which Kerrey served as a Navy volunteer...

...To Kennedy, to be fighting in a cause generally understood and supported was ordinary...

...The nation split its vote in last November's Presidential contest, so that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader lost the election for Vice President Al Gore...

...Jimmy Carter was in the Naval Academy and became a submarine officer...

...Former Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich, a great battler on Capitol Hill, did not serve in the military, nor did Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas...

...The real problem, as Jeffords made clear, was his inability to live with a President who talked education and shortchanged schools...

...John Kerry (D.-Mass...

...For some of the more famous Senate party-switchers one has to go back to Wayne Morse of Oregon, Republican turned independent in 1952 and Democrat in 1955, or Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Democrat turned Republican in 1964...

...In the McVeigh case, the ultimate issue was the discovery of some 3,000 pages of material that the bureau had not turned over to the defense—probably the least blameworthy in a series of episodes suggesting FBI high-handedness with an admixture of incompetence...

...Gerald R. Ford joined the Navy as an ensign and served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Monterey in combat in the Pacific...

...Cuba Revisited I first visited Havana in 1960, in the early days of the Castro regime and a year before the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs fiasco...

...And President Clinton promised Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that the U.S...

...Even after 30 years, there are Vietnam veterans with uneasy memories of killing civilians, including women and children...

...That "business" was going after the Iranian-sponsored terrorists behind the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, where U.S...

...There was no soul-searching about whether this was a just war...

...and Chuck Hagel (R.-Neb...

...But today, as a quarter-century ago, it is unlikely that Congress, having been thoroughly aroused, will be easily deflected from a broad investigation—or investigations, since the bureau reports to both the Judiciary and Intelligence committees...

...War hero and war criminal were not very far apart in that war...

...Barry Goldwater served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps and came home a captain with a chestful of medals...

...Uneasy Memories Bob Kerrey's former colleagues in the United States Senate have been speaking out on his behalf and arguing against the idea of a Pentagon investigation into a combat mission the Nebraska Democrat led in Vietnam...

...Senator McCain said a soldier in Vietnam did inhuman things because his country asked him to do them...

...By coincidence, Robert J. Donovan's 40-year-old book, PT109, the account of John F Kennedy's heroism in the Pacific during World War II, has been reissued...

...Or to ignore deep differences over spending decisions, missile defense, energy, and "a host of other issues...

...The Vietnam War left this country with a divisive legacy and a less certain moral compass...

...George H.W...

...the overkill, literally, at Ruby Ridge and Waco...

...The FBI has too much power over the lives of citizens to be left to what has been termedits "cowboy culture...

...Their most seditious act was to urge Cubans to boycott legislative elections, and to encourage foreign investors not to invest in Cuba until human rights abuses stopped...

...The Democrats had their big shakeup in 1992 when Bill Clinton promoted the New Democrats...

...Army in Italy...

...No," he said, "My Lai was a systematic murder by daylight against no resistance...

...Recalled in a Senate hearing was the bureau's withholding of evidence that delayed for years the prosecution in the Alabama church bombing case of 1963...

...This is a matter of great concern to the White House inner circle known as the "Strategery Group.'- According to the Washington Post, these senior advisers calculate that if minorities vote in 2004 in the same percentage as last year, Bush would lose by 3.5 million votes...

...would not to take military action against Iran without consulting the Saudis...

...In Florida and California, Hispanics now outnumber blacks...

...Now, as then, a series of missteps and abuses finally reached a tipping point...

...Because pharmacies demand dollars, those without dollars stand outside pharmacies begging those with dollars to buy them needed medicine...

...For $ 150 you can get an emigration permit, but not if you intend to return...

...As for conditions in Cuba, they reported that the "dollarization" of the economy in 1993 had created two classes of Cubans: those with and those without dollars...

...By contrast, when the future politicians of the Vietnam War generation reached arms-bearing age they confronted a war without consensus and without the galvanizing impulse of a clear and present danger...

...Serving the Nation The Kerrey controversy has raised anew the larger question of how our political leaders reacted to calls for wartime service...

...Max Cleland (D.-Ga...

...Onbothsides of Capitol Hill, there is now talk of naming an outside inspector general to ride herd over the FBI and report to Congress...

...Then, Lyndon B. Johnson, Navy Reservist, the first member of Congress to volunteer the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...No one's ever going to find out about some things...

...His country" meant Presidents John F Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon...

...Where goes free trade, says the President, goes democracy—although looking at China, for one, that may be arguable...

...There were no hawks and doves then...

...I have written a preface for the new edition, from which I quote: Whatever happened to the willingness of those who aspire to be the nation's leaders to face personal risk in service to that nation...

...Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the FBI has had "too many failures, too many blunders," and the mistakes are undermining the confidence of the American people in the agency...

...In November 1998, Freeh had hard evidence that Brigadier General Ahmad Sharifi of the Revolutionary Guards had selected the Khobar Towers as a target at the behest of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's late spiritual leader...

...Berger said, according to the FBI Director, "That's just hearsay...

...Three of the four had served prison terms for sedition, disseminating enemy propaganda and rebellion—even though their protests were entirely peaceful...

...The challenge to the White House is to prevent Hispanics from becoming as solidly Democratic as the blacks...

...Marta, an economist, gave me as a souvenir a shirt-pocket-sized booklet titled "The Homeland Belongs to All of Us...

...John McCain (R.-Ariz...

...The evidence led to the high command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards...

...Almost all basic commodities are rationed...

...government...

...Richard M. Nixon, a young lawyer, served in the Pacific as a Navy lieutenant in the Combat Air Transport Command...

...Sergeant Daniel K. Inouye, also in Italy, advanced alone against a German machine-gun nest and had his arm shattered by a rifle grenade...

...Robert Dole lost the use of an arm serving with the U.S...

...The Republican leadership's difficulty with Jeffords went beyond the tactical...

...Freeh decided to wait for a change in administrations, and since then has been awaiting the decision on indictments from President George W. Bush...

...have drawn a defensive line around Kerrey...

...In multiple media appearances they have sought to convey that unless one experienced the war in Vietnam, one can hardly understand the awful things that happened there...

...New England Republicans are not like Sunbelt Republicans, many of whom are religious conservatives...

...Vietnam was not a generally supported war and it did not elicit the reflexes that sent a Jack Kennedy into battle...

...A White House official told the Wall Street Journal that it has become a top legislative priority, surpassing even Social Security and Medicare reform...

...the shoddy work in the FBI laboratory...

...Freehpromised that the FBI would do better in the future...

...Since 1990, the Hispanic population has grown 5 8 per cent to 35.3 million people, pulling about even with blacks...

...If the case finally comes to prosecution, it will be almost entirely because of Louis Freeh'sdoggedness...