Elliott's Mess

...In a brief reference to then-Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill's "adamant" opposition to approving new funds for the contras, Abrams snidely attributes O'Neill's views to "a niece of his who was a Maryknoll nun," who "apparently believed the Sandinistas were distributing loaves and fishes, Bible in hand...

...You had to tell...

...As with the rest of his life, Abrams turned to his wife...

...I entered here [Washington], this concretecovered swamp, almost 12 years ago, left New York and all behind me, brimming with hope...

...This "relic of the Carter foreign policy," he writes, was "smaller, less prestigious, and less influential" than the bureau Abrams was leaving but he could turn it into a Reagan tool...

...role in Nicaragua...

...I shout at him inside my head, 'You son of a bitch, fuck you fuck you fuck you, you son of a bitch!' at such tremendous, thundering pitch, I wonder if I am actually saying it out loud, if he can hear it...

...We learn this through a letter she wrote to a friend that Abrams includes in his book...

...Another Elliott Abrams emerges, a fragile man frightened out of his wits...

...But nowhere in this book does one get the sense that Abrams ever had second thoughts about the legitimacy of his policies and the terrible loss of life and destruction they brought to people in Nicaragua...

...From watching his performances on television in the late eighties and reading about him, I grew to question his views...

...I left Rachel to try and answer questions that I had tried hard not to ask myself...

...Then comes the kind of self-revelation in this book that makes it fascinating...

...And he is so self-centered that when he becomes the focus of an investigation that can't be stopped by his political bosses, he considers himself a victim of unprecedented persecution...

...The most sophisticated child in this particular family was Jacob, the 10-year-old...

...She felt, above all, a violent rage at the people who were doing this to her husband...

...After Abrams gave him a briefing "of the facts," Jacob asked his dad: "If they're accusing you, what about Ronald Reagan...

...So just months later, carrying his assistant secretary rank, Abrams slid over to a new job, heading the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs...

...One week before a key congressional vote on the $100 million request for the contras, he cooked up the story of a Nicaraguan defector who claimed the Sandinistas were going to assemble a half-million-person army...

...And I am saying, no it isn't...

...Later he generated fears about an invasion of Honduras by the Sandinistas...

...In that time I have met my share of ambitious political appointees and ideologues from the left, right, and center...

...A brief precis: As chairman of the Restricted Interagency Group, Abrams, along with Oliver North and Alan D. Fiers Jr., chief of the CIA's Central American Task Force, effectively ran American policy in a way that some critics now say kept the fighting going an extra year in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...Too bad...

...Elliott's Mess by Walter Pincus In an attempt to clear his name, Elliott Abrams further muddies it Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes Elliott Abrams...

...First, the post-election transition team sent him to the Agency for International Development...

...Both investigations resulted in new legislation: The first in a tougher registration law for foreign lobbyists and the second in an amendment limiting appropriations for the Vietnam War...

...The most memorable is when Abrams and his wife decided they had to tell their three children that their father might be publicly involved in the Iran-contra scandal...

...That was the Abrams most of his critics knew and disliked, a shallow hired gun on the make...

...The whole background of Abrams' alleged crime is curiously absent...

...According to Abrams, Walsh relentlessly and unjustly pursued him, influenced and assisted by a group of fame-seeking, bloodthirsty, and—God forbid— ambitious young lawyers...

...It's a scene out of a neocon Ozzie and Harriet show...

...policy toward the U.N...

...Abrams was the confident, knowitall, top-level Reagan administration appointee in the State Department who pushed the controversial pro-contra program from 1985 to 1987...

...When I told Moynihan what I hoped to ask the Reagan personnel office for, he raised an eyebrow: Why deputy assistant secretary, he asked...

...Early in the book, when Walsh's hot breath is upon him, Abrams ruminates: "I never wondered what Rachel felt...

...It was with this background, a bias some may say, and six years covering the Iran-contra scandal, that I approached this book...

...After graduating from Harvard Law School, he worked on the 1976 campaign of Senator Henry Jackson and then took a Capitol Hill job with the newly elected senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...Why indeed...

...What the hell...

...But he takes it one step further...

...But in 1985, the ultimate plum fell his way...

...aid while hiding knowledge that secret funding for the rebels was coming from the Saudis...

...Well, I knew lots of secrets about that, and Secretary Shultz and President Reagan didn't want me to tell...

...Abrams doesn't outline them but apparently they were "spirited anti-communism" and "American military strength"—two qualities, he says, that convinced him that Ronald Reagan should win...

...My staff would grow from 25 to 200...

...But it didn't have the power he wanted because, as he puts it, "real influence" over U.S...

...Compare that to the Boland amendments enacted in the late eighties and intended to limit the Reagan administration's support of Nicaraguan rebels...

...Rachel does not...

...ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick...

...It's just the other way around in the few instances when he reflects on the situation in Central America...

...The Elliott Abrams at the beginning of the book has the flavor—the audacity, the drive, and the hint of operating just over his head—of the man we think we know...

...The Free Press, $22.95...

...Ask for assistant secretary...

...On the other hand, his friends say they became engrossed in the book because Abrams depicts the injustice he felt had been visited on him because he had honestly pursued what he believed were correct policies...

...She describes looking at Gillen in the courtroom as Abrams pled guilty: "My eyes burning with the effort, and I can't unglue them from [Gillen], but he won't look at me...

...There was partisan disagreement on the latter, but once it became law, even the Nixon administration abided by its terms...

...solicitation of third country aid to the contras, he gave inaccurate answers to Congress about that fundraising, cleverly trying to hide his own role in seeking funds from Brunei...

...This Elliott Abrams can't make up his mind and even occasionally wishes he were dead...

...In the best of spirits...

...Reagan's victory set Abrams on a heady trip up the power ladder...

...Abrams never mentions that the Maryknolls became an issue when four members of their order were murdered in El Salvador...

...Instead, this a very personal memoir, sometimes embarrassingly so...

...Walter Pincus is a Washington Post reporter...

...Violent femme A major jolt in the book is the portrait Abrams paints of his wife Rachel...

...Nowhere does Abrams describe what he actually did as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs...

...What about George Bush...

...He emphasized the growth of contra forces during the congressional ban on U.S...

...I have spent 37 years in Washington, the first two in the Army and the rest as a journalist, with only three years off for my two sabbaticals with the Fulbright committee...

...I don't know Elliott Abrams personally...

...They provided me with a firsthand opportunity to see not only the flaws in the congressional system, but also the positive way our system of checks and balances can work when both the executive and the legislature play by common rules and have the country's interests—not their own—uppermost in their minds...

...I thought it would be, as described in its subtitle, "A story of how political differences are turned into crimes...

...What Abrams captures memorably are the physical and mental effects that the fear of prosecution and conviction engenders in him...

...It isn't...

...In 1986, Abrams acted as point man to lobby Congress to renew U.S...

...Abrams knew he was going "from the pantry into a bonfire burning with very high flames...

...As stories leaked out about U.S...

...To save his career, his family, and his money, Abrams pleads guilty to several misdemeanors and comes uncomfortably to accept and live with this decision...

...She would have erased them from the face of the earth without a second thought, and never looked back...

...ThenSecretary of State George Shultz offered Abrams the job of assistant secretary for inter-American affairs...

...He also gave life to every rumor of Soviet and Cuban intervention and dismissed anything critical of the contras...

...By 1980, Abrams had left to practice law on Wall Street...

...I knew...

...After all, these were men, women and children even more innocent than he...

...When a contra resupply plane was shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986, it was Abrams who gave the untrue, blanket denial of U.S...

...He was drawn to that year's presidential campaign, though not to the Democrats who no longer represented his "strongly held views...

...Dear J," it begins, "I am sitting here going mad, crawling out of my skin, feeling this worm of rage turning, turning inside me, and I don't know what to do with it...

...That would have made for just as interesting reading and perhaps even some thought...

...government involvement...

...Martyr dumb There are a few moments of humor in the book, though it's doubtful Abrams intended them as such...

...She would have killed them if she could...

...Rachel's letter goes on for three pages, boiling with rage...

...If you disliked him and the harm the contra policies he espoused caused others (tens of thousands dead in Nicaragua and El Salvador), you'll not be saddened to read of his mental suffering...

...It is she, not Abrams, who is the warrior, the aggressive advocate, the person of steel...

...He obviously enjoyed the role as instigator in rough and tumble confrontational politics, whether with senators and congressmen or members of the press...

...rested with the U.S...

...I was married to this golden man, my prize...

...embassies in Latin America and the Caribbean...

...When they asked you, you had to tell, and not telling is a crime...

...She'd have shot Craig Gillen through the heart and gone on to a Little League game...

...Now, some people are saying, you should have told Congress...

...I would be responsible for the three dozen U.S...

...My tours on Capitol Hill were among the most productive and satisfying professional experiences I've had...

...The book's other villain is Craig A. Gillen, Walsh's deputy counsel...

...Abrams offers another honest reflection about what drives him: "The job had many satisfactions, not least of [having] full assistant secretary rank...

...Walsh, with testimony from Fiers and others, finally got Abrams to plead guilty to withholding information from two congressional committees—he was charged with misdemeanors rather than felonies for the lies he told...

...And there is little in the way of thoughtful reflection about crimes...

...Why don't they get accused too...

...financial support for the covert war in Nicaragua...

...It is riveting because it portrays a man so different from the Elliott Abrams we have come to know through the media...

...or believed in its mission but because Moynihan had been an ambassador there...

...He is so self-indulgent that he appears to have no concern for the impact on others of the policies he and his administration promote...

...I would deal with Latin presidents, with the Defense Department, and the CIA and with the White House and the National Security Council, regularly...

...I spent two 18-month stints during the sixties helping run a pair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigations for Chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas...

...He makes her a foul-mouthed avenger...

...The book contains no serious discussions of the political differences that existed between the White House and Capitol Hill over the U.S...

...But, as usual, his eyes were on the prize...

...He calculated that his Moynihan connection might qualify him for something involving the United Nations, perhaps deputy assistant secretary of state in the International Organization Bureau—not because Abrams knew anything about the U.N...

...Jacob understood it better than I did...

...That version, however, fades with the onset of the Iran-contra scandal and vanishes with his departure from government at the end of the Reagan administration...

...If Rachel's once "golden boy" is a model of the new generation of conservative Republican public servant, we are in for trouble when they occupy the White House again...

...You remember Nicaragua, and the contras, and how they were fighting the communists in Nicaragua...

...Abrams represents a new breed...

...He's someone with so little respect for democratic institutions that when he violates them he doesn't realize it...

...I did, and after a good round of pushing and shoving among the personnel people, got it...

...His appearances on Capitol Hill and his particularly contemptuous attitude toward Congress and the legislative process itself bothered me...

...Whereas Sarah immediately saw the fallacy in anyone arguing you should tell leaky old Congress secret information, Jacob quickly caught a more important nuance...

...He suffers this torment solely because he believes he is being unfairly hounded by Lawrence E. Walsh, a lifelong Republican, former deputy attorney general in the Nixon administration, federal judge, and distinguished Wall Street lawyer, who now is the court-appointed independent counsel investigating the Iran-contra affair...

...And here I am, clenching, grinding my teeth, wondering how to save him from, how to hurt, how to savage, how to kill, the people who have called him a criminal...