From McCain to Bush
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr From McCain to Bush Following is a letter Senator John McCain, the likely Republican standard bearer, might have—I repeat, might have—sent to President...
...So we have a Patriot Act, a Protect America Act, and military tribunals that evade individual rights, as a nervous President tries to cope with an elusive peril...
...Attorney to conduct a criminal inquiry...
...Negative coattails, one might say...
...They are fighting over actions and policies related to the socalled War on Terror—on three fronts...
...Kosovo officially declared its independence on February 17...
...Castro once told an Associated Press correspondent at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana that if U.S.leaders did not stop their attempts to kill Cuban leaders, “They themselves will not be safe...
...Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a ’60s civil rights leader, remained a supporter of Hillary’s candidacy until shortly before the Ohio and Texas primaries...
...This campaign may be turning into a transforming event...
...Georgetown University Professor of Law James Forman Jr., whose father was a civil rights activist, says “Everyone is begging the media to lose the stupid race coverage...
...shores, and that led to the Cuban Missue Crisis...
...I consider you a good friend...
...Attorney Christopher J. Christie, a New Jersey Republican and possible candidate for governor, awarded the 18month contract, estimated to be worth at least $28 million, to the consulting firm headed by Ashcroft...
...Nixon came away with the impression that Castro was “incredibly naïve about Communism...
...To ward off Soviet penetration, the U.S...
...It took me back eight years to another primary fight, when we were saying some unfriendly things about each other...
...When I was condemning your Christian Right supporters as “agents of intolerance...
...The Bay of Pigs fiasco may have led Castro to ask the Soviet Union for missiles to defend the island nation 90 milesfrom US...
...Obama was probably justified in saying, as he did in his Iowa victory speech, that it was a “defining moment in history...
...Dear Mr...
...He is reaching for the high ground with a unifying theme of moving on from “the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington...
...That was a nice gesture on your part, and I appreciate it...
...Monitoring Scandals When Candidates on the campaign trail talk of the need for change in Washington they talk about many kinds of abuses...
...The networks, which have been giving unprecedented time to this political spectator sport, helped to nationalize the state-by-state primaries...
...I hope to see you at my inauguration on January 20...
...I would suggest that all of this happens when a President is running scared in the face of a perceived threat he is not sure he can repel...
...attorneys—bringing in Administration supporters who won’t rock the boat...
...attorney that puts an Administration crony in the boardroom...
...Wiretapping: The Administration is fighting for reauthorization of a massive surveillance program, propagandistically called the Protect America Act...
...The Economist called it a “postracial triumph,” and wrote that Obama “seemed to embody the hope that America could transcend its divisions...
...ambassador to the United Nations, has argued that former President Bill Clinton is “every bit as black” as Senator Obama...
...in the Caribbean...
...There were also some harebrained ideas like giving Castro a poisoned cigar...
...No one responsible for the bombings was ever convicted...
...To maintain its foothold in the Balkans, it will need a heavy infusion of foreign aid...
...A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and now here you are praising my “sound and solid conservative principles,” but at the same time saying I have some convincing to do of other conservatives...
...A threat of retaliation...
...Andrew Young, a one-time aide to Martin Luther King Jr...
...supported the Contras in a civil war in Nicaragua, backed the bloody regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and invaded the little island of Grenada...
...The United States is committed to supporting Kosovo against Serbian efforts to regain control...
...One more addition to the list of what needs changing...
...In 1941, after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order authorizing the military to round up some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans and hold them in internment camps for the duration of the Wa r. None of them was ever convicted of any espionage for Japan...
...In his State of the Union address, the President asserted a “solemn duty” to “stop the terrorists from carrying out their plans...
...That could make a President feel he has lost control...
...Now 9/11, and a sinister new enemy without borders...
...Waterboarding: Attor ney General Michael B. Mukasey, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, maintained his refusal to define waterboarding as illegal...
...But that was looking backward...
...Senator Hillary Clinton answered Obama by citing her 35 years of fighting for change...
...The monitoring scandal has to do with companies that escape prosecution by promising to mend their ways...
...There is the revolving-door scandal—leaving Congress to make more money lobbying on Capitol Hill for some well-paying interest...
...The latest to break away is Kosovo, a province of Serbia...
...At the same time the Kremlin, never fully reconciled to seeing its backyard become NATOs front yard supports separatist movements in two enclaves of Georgia...
...President, a lot of people on the Right of you, and the Left, don’t think well of you...
...In the fall of that year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized a CIAsupported invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, which was inherited and carried out by President John F Kennedy...
...In the postracial era personified by Obama, civil rights veterans of the past century are consigned to history and Americans start to make race-free judgments about who should lead them...
...President, That was quite a surprise—your praise of me as a “true conservative” in your interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News...
...Something similar has occurred before in our history...
...If nothing else avails, I can imagine Bush giving a blanket pardon to phone companies that may have broken the law...
...attorneys are friendly to business, the companies do not have to worry too much...
...Bush has presided over actions playing fast and loose with legality...
...Castro thus came to be regarded as the extended Soviet arm in the Western Hemisphere...
...He, too, must be wondering how the Administration could have so violated individual rights...
...Yours, John Postracial Politics Not Everybody was bowled over by the emergence of a Barack Obama coalition of the young and the independent, rallying around the magical word “change...
...It was especially surprising after you said you would take no position on the candidates in the Presidential race...
...To put it bluntly, Mr...
...and former U.S...
...But if that was ever true, it is no longer...
...As long ago as February 2007 the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote in the student newspaper, the Crimson, that Democrats and some Republicans were responding to Obama’s political message, and that he had “the great potential to unify this divided nation...
...The monitor is selected by the Federal prosecutor...
...Then there is Russia, where the province of Chechnya has fought two bloody and losing wars to gain its freedom...
...And I can see these backstage battles spinning on for the rest of the President’s term...
...As I watched the Attorney General almost squirming in his seat while he fended off questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about waterboarding, I wondered how the Administration had gotten itself into such a fix...
...But for now, I ask you to cool it on publicly supporting me...
...The New Yorker wrote of a “postracial generation...
...But there is no telling what a President will do when he is scared...
...Having followed the assassination of President Kennedy since 1963, I have come to a conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald may have read that interview, and when he shot Kennedy, he did it as the self-appointed avenger of his hero, Fidel Castro...
...What a price to pay for America’s effort to dislodge a bone in its throat...
...So today, when Russia threatens to veto any United Nations effort to recognize a Kosovo republic, its stand must be understood against the backdrop of continuing rivalry between Russia and the United States for mastery in Europe...
...Remember how I denounced you for spreading a negative “message of fear” and running on an empty slogan of “reform...
...Remember when your campaign people were circulating rumors that I was a liar and a fraud...
...The term began to come into vogue after the Senator from Illinois won in Iowa...
...He would only say that the practice is not currently being used...
...When Kosovo—most of whose 2 million people are ethnic Albanians—began agitating for independence, Serbia launched an ethnic cleansing campaign that ended only after it was bombed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces...
...So don’t misunderstand my asking you to return to your previous position of staying out of the primary fight...
...In this case U.S...
...It may or may not be relevant that Obama, at 46, is the youngest of all the candidates...
...Maybe colorblurred...
...The monitorship practice, apparently, allows a company to flout the law and escape punishment...
...The act expired February 16, but was extended for another 15 days while the skirmish went on...
...It isn’t that I’m not grateful for your kind words about me, but my campaign advisers have been telling me that being linked to you might not necessarily help me with some groups...
...They agree to have monitors, whom they will pay, to make sure they stay on the straight and narrow...
...Yes, the one who made himself a hero by refusing, on his hospital bed, to sign an extension of the surveillance law...
...As you yourself told Chris Wallace, some animosity against me is probably directed against you...
...There is the earmark scandal—sneaking items into appropriation bills that will serve some specific interest at home...
...The standoff between the two big powers is symbolized by the slogans of Serbian demonstrators—“Down With America” and “Russia Help...
...At issue between the White House and Congressional Democrats is the demand for retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that have cooperated with the eavesdropping undertaking...
...He told Time magazine that the U.S...
...Certainly it has added a new buzzword to the political lexicon—“postracial...
...It may still be too early to speak of a generation of color-blind voters...
...All it has to do is strike a deal with a U.S...
...And perhaps more to the point, against Russian efforts to exert its control on Eastern Europe...
...Cheeky Kosovo Youmight Call the last few decades “the era of breakaway states...
...Issuing an independence declaration was a cheeky thing for Kosovo to do, considering that it is short of resources, short of electric power, and short of most attributes of a sovereign state...
...Like the Palmer raids, this remains a stain on America’s honor...
...Civil liberties and privacy tend to become the first casualties of Presidential nervousness...
...Hundreds were deported...
...Its sovereignty is recognized by the United States and its principal European allies, but ardently opposed by countries worried about their own separatist movements—like Spain, Romania and Cyprus...
...But perhaps the most disastrous decision of all was made by the Kennedy Administration, when the CIA enlisted the Mafia in a scheme to assassinate Castro...
...Obama does not have a lock on the magical word...
...And since the Administration has seen to it that most U.S...
...Besides enlisting telecommunications companies in massive wiretapping operations, the Administration has rounded up hundreds of suspected terrorists and spirited many of them away to foreign countries for rougher treatment than they might get here...
...That, he said, requires “liability protection for companies” that have participated in the eavesdropping program...
...Obviously, had he said otherwise, he might have exposed interrogators who did use waterboarding to legal action...
...Mukasey has named a U.S...
...And there is the scandal of firing U.S...
...And indeed, the battle-scarred veterans of the civil rights conflict of 40 years ago appear less enchanted with Obama than those who were not yet alive then...
...When President Lyndon B. Johnson came into office, he was appalled at what he found...
...There was no bidding...
...It has arguably been the most mindless, most self-destructive long-term policy in American history...
...That has enabled Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former CIA Clandestine Services chief, to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify before the House Intelligence Committee without immunity from prosecution...
...There is the Jack Abramoff-type lobbying scandal—planting cohorts in the Administration who will then do the bidding of your clients...
...had been running a “Murder Inc...
...Now there is a perversion I never heard of before, the monitoring scandal—involving, of all people, former Attorney General John Ashcroft...
...That is also what made Bill Clinton seem disconnected when he compared Obama’s campaign to the efforts of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988...
...Your praise, therefore, might be counterproductive...
...I hardly ever think anymore of the things that got me so mad at you eight years ago in South Carolina, when you deployed the Christian Coalition against me...
...Castro’s Avenger In 1959, Fidel Castro met privately with Vice President Richard M. Nixon in Washington...
...It will need to keep the almost 16,000 NATO troops that have been on peacekeeping assignment since the end of the civil war...
...It’s time for a change” is a staple of political campaigns...
...Peter Boyer writes in the New Yorker, “The wish for a postracial politics is a powerful force, and rewards those who seem to carry its promise...
...The 66 per cent of Americans who tell pollsters America is on the wrong track seem to be demanding a break with a corrupt and partisan past and a new set of names, faces and ideas...
...You know, I had to smile...
...This did not start on Mukasey’s watch...
...That is what Obama signaled in his South Carolina victory speech when he told of the woman who used to work for segregationist Strom Thurmond and today knocks on doors for his campaign...
...Russia has made common cause with Serbia to resist Western encroachment on the region of Europe that the Kremlin calls its “near abroad...
...CIA Tapes: Hundreds of hours of videotaped CIA interrogations of terror suspects were destroyed on orders from . . . well, that is the question...
...As revealed by the Washington Post, when the Zimmer Company, a medical equipment maker in Indiana, was threatened with prosecution in New Jersey for paying kickbacks to doctors to promote its products, it promised to reform and agreed to a monitorship...
...One Cuban major recruited to kill Castro was believed to be a Cuban double agent...
...Running Scared Although upstaged by the primaries and the country’s economic problems, a low-intensity war is going on between Congressional Democrats and the Bush Administration...
...Hundreds more were shipped to Guantánamo Bay, where the Administration is unsure now of what to do with them...
...It is commonplace to say that the Iowa caucuses are oddball and atypical, and tell you nothing about what will happen in subsequent contests, starting with New Hampshire...
...In 1919, after a series of bombings in eight American cities, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered a massive roundup and detention of people suspected of being “alien Reds...
...That marked the inception of 50 years of hostility toward the bearded revolutionary by 10 Presidents...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr From McCain to Bush Following is a letter Senator John McCain, the likely Republican standard bearer, might have—I repeat, might have—sent to President George W. Bush...
...Thousands of mostly Russian and East European immigrants were detained in the so-called Palmer Raids, without charges or access to lawyers...
Vol. 91 • January 2008 • No. 1
