David Ifshin's Journey
Kondracke, Morton M.
David Ifshin's Journey by Morton M. Kondracke IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAD followed the ideological path of David Ifshin-from student antiwar protester to true "New Democrat"-it might have remained...
...He went to Irael in 1973 and found his center of gravity working on a kibbutz...
...God knows how many lives have been messed up by Vietnam, but you've got a good sense now of what you believe, and don't let anyone ridicule you for where you've been...
...Ifshin says that Kantor called him in desperation because, Kantor said, New York was falling apart...
...Ifshin said into a tape recorder that the United States was in Vietnam "to aggressively threaten other countries" and that if the South Vietnamese could pursue their own destiny, they would "not support the investment of private capital...
...In his 47 years, he has popped up all over recent American political history-as the National Student Association president who made an infamous radio broadcast in North Vietnam, as an official of the National Welfare Rights Organization, then a convert to Henry Jackson's neoconservative foreign policy, staunch defender of Israel, counsel to both the Mondale and Clinton presidential campaigns, and passionate foe of leftist influence in the Democratic party...
...Ifshin remained general counsel, but on the fringe of the main campaign action-until the New York primary, where Clinton was in a must-win situation against Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas...
...If Clinton hadn't allowed left-wingers in his entourage to block Ifshin from an administration post, Clinton might not have to remake himself as a centrist to get reelected...
...It's not unusual for people your age to be enamored of the Left...
...Polls showed that Clinton was running roughly even with Brown and Tsongas among Jews, despite the fact that Brown had promised to make Jesse Jackson his running mate...
...Ifshin has apologized many times for his actions, though he still believes that the war was unwinnable from the outset and a vast waste of human life...
...David Ifshin's biography, though, is far from a saga of might-have-beens...
...It was as transforming an experience for me as the Chicago convention," he says...
...His political epiphany came during the Yom Kippur War, when he helped unload the C5As that the United States was sending, in wave after wave, to resupply Israel with military equipment at a time when no other nation would...
...Jews were relegated to finance positions despite the importance of the Jewish vote in New York...
...Henry Jackson, who persuaded him not to abandon politics...
...I am writing about him now because David Ifshin is wasting away with cancer that was diagnosed only five months ago, and it seems proper to recount his fascinating career while he is still with us...
...And then he committed his appalling act in North Vietnam during a 1970 visit...
...He moved to Washington and got involved in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the neocon rump group inspired by Scoop Jackson to toughen Democratic foreign policy...
...The same is true of me...
...The desolation I felt about Vietnam, when we dropped so much ordnance in a huge mistake," he says, "was turned around for me by the demonstration of what good American power could do...
...They golfed and schmoozed together at Renaissance Weekends and as activists in the Democratic Leadership Council, the 1980s successor to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority...
...When Clinton won the primary with 41 percent, to 29 percent for Paul Tsongas and 26 percent for Brown- and with Clinton carrying the Jewish vote by 55 percent to 34 percent over Tsongas-Clinton came to his hotel room to say thanks...
...To rescue the situation, Ifshin-with credibility based on his Mondale connection and his service as chief counsel for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Israel lobby in Washington-organized top figures in the Jewish community to listen to and vouch for Clinton...
...He was elected president of the National Student Association because he ran against demands for special budget assistance to a black student group on the basis of race...
...I believed that he was one of the few Democrats who could really persuade old Democrats that the only way we could win was to make cuts in entitlements and so on," Ifshin says...
...Ifshin has concluded that, ideologically, Clinton is more a McGovernite than a New Democrat and thinks it's probable that in a second term, Ickes and Hillary Clinton would dominate administration policy, acing out Vice President Al Gore's staff...
...Ifshin became one of the nation's foremost experts on campaign finance law...
...They met up again during the McGovern campaign, but got to know each other well after Clinton became Arkansas governor in 1979...
...Before his eyes were opened about Clinton, Ifshin signed on as general counsel to Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...Ifshin told Kantor, "If you don't level" and Clinton gets elected, "you'll wind up with a special prosecutor...
...Those words, like Jane Fonda's, became a North Vietnamese propaganda coup...
...Ifshin discovered that Ickes, Clinton's New York manager, had organized the campaign around the coalition of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and liberals that had elected his friend David Dinkins mayor of New York and that Dinkins was counting on to reelect him in 1993...
...Instead, as James Stewart recounts in Blood Sport, the Whitewater matter was seized by New York lawyer Susan Thomases, best buddy of Hillary Clinton and political ally of Harold Ickes, once manager of Jesse Jackson's campaign and Ifshin's longtime nemesis...
...In 1972, he helped push a destructive guaranteed-income proposal at Democratic platform hearings-"$5,500 or fight"-but he bailed out of the National Welfare Rights Organization when its leader, George Wiley, insisted on staging a protest demonstration at the Democratic convention in spite of an agreement with the McGovern campaign to avoid one...
...In 1984, as chief lawyer for the Mondale presidential campaign, he earned the enmity of party left-wingers by leading the resistance to demands from Jesse Jackson-who'd hugged Yasser Arafat and called New York "Hymietown"-for concessions at the Democratic convention and a prominent role in the campaign...
...If Bill Clinton had heeded David Ifshin's advice in early 1992, he might not have the Whitewater scandal hanging over his head...
...He has to win at all costs, and he doesn't have the confidence to do it without people like Harold...
...Some enemies Ifshin made then would later clobber him in the Clinton campaign...
...He'd just say that crazy things happen in campaigns," Ifshin says...
...Jackson told him, "All my good friends were Communists once...
...I've never seen such hatred in people's eyes...
...He went back to Syracuse, was elected student-body president, and carefully worked to keep anti-war rallies he was involved in peaceful-indeed, he organized just such a rally and was horrified 22 years later to find it portrayed as a violent uprising in Oliver Stone's movie Born on the Fourth of July...
...Neither Ickes nor Clinton responded to interview requests...
...To go along with Clinton's positives, though, Ifshin says there is "a dark side, almost like Nixon...
...David Ifshin is loyal to his friends, even those who disappoint him...
...Ifshin returned home to go to law school and in early 1976 met up with Sen...
...Ifshin put together one crucial event at which Clinton delivered a boffo line first suggested by Ifshin's friend Tom Tisch: "If all you knew about Israel came from what you saw on TV and the newspapers, you'd have a pretty negative impression...
...And shortly after his trip to Vietnam, he became a convert to anti-communism when he visited Salvador Allende's Chile and saw the Left arming its supporters to convert an electoral plurality into a permanent dictatorship...
...Stick with it...
...When Ifshin told Ickes at campaign headquarters that the primary campaign was now "all worked out," Ickes became enraged and began shoving him...
...He says he had a kindred experience in domestic policy over welfare rights...
...After Clinton won the presidency, Ifshin was shut out of any policy job (few DLC types got such jobs), and when he was considered for ambassador to Indonesia, even that got torpedoed...
...Ifshin still likes Clinton: "He's warm...
...Ifshin worked in that campaign as a get-out-the-vote organizer but now considers the candidate's foreign-policy and defense views "naive...
...Ifshin was shoved out of the way because, campaign chairman Mickey Kantor told him, "the candidates" (note the plural) didn't agree with his advice...
...I always thought he was a mix of New Democrat and old Democrat, but I thought he was going to be a tough guy...
...I think he could do it...
...In spite of his conduct in Hanoi, he was never pro-Communist...
...Ifshin grew up middle class in the Washington suburbs, the son of a liquor-store owner, and went off to Syracuse University in 1966 as a supporter of the Vietnam war...
...I thought he'd do the opposite of what he did on health care, welfare, and the minumum wage...
...The Left has too much center of gravity in the party, though...
...Standing out in the hall were Hillary and Susan Thomases," Ifshin recalls...
...He was shown bomb damage and burn victims, after which two European "peace" doctors taunted him, a Jew, for doing as little to stop the "genocide" as a German who knew the Holocaust was underway and merely muttered his dissent...
...He's gracious...
...He's good-hearted...
...You don't realize," Ifshin recalls Ickes yelling, "we're going to get rid of you right after the New York primary...
...Morton M. Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call...
...Gradually, he got caught up in campus protest, turned against the war, and watched friends get clubbed by police-for no good reason, he says-at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago...
...Ifshin was warned again that Ickes and Thomases planned to get him fired, and when I wrote a column in Roll Call about the way Clinton won New York, Kantor called Ifshin in a rage and delivered the axe on grounds of disloy alty...
...Even so, Ifshin says, if he's alive in November, he'll still vote for Clinton...
...Ifshin first met Bill Clinton in 1970, when Ifshin was NSA president and Clinton a Yale law student...
...He organized a huge bank loan to keep the campaign going after the Gennifer Flowers eruption-and warned, when New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth started looking into Whitewater, against repeating the Mondale campaign's pattern when Geraldine Ferraro's finances got questioned: "Put it all out, and in the next news cycle...
...Indeed, Clinton invited Ifshin, his wife, and their three kids to spend a night in the Lincoln rooms of the White House recently and bounced Ifshin's 6-year-old on his knee...
...But the two have never discussed 1992...
...David Ifshin's Journey by Morton M. Kondracke IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAD followed the ideological path of David Ifshin-from student antiwar protester to true "New Democrat"-it might have remained the majority party...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 32
