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Records of the White House Office of Speechwriting (George H. W. Bush Administration)
Tony Snow Subject Files
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Record Group/Collection:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Records
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Speechwriting, White House Office of
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Snow, Tony, Files
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Subject File, 1988-1993
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[News Releases, 3/89 - 3/90]
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1ST DOCUMENT of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Public Papers of the Presidents
Remarks to the Students and Faculty of Conestoga Valley High
School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 395
March 22, 1989
LENGTH: 2467 words
Chad, thank you, and Mr. Wirth, thank you, sir, for having us here. I'm sorry
we had a little bad weather a week or two ago, and postponing this visit.
Thinking back, regrettably quite a few years, to my own school days, I can
imagine one thought that might have run through your mind: I hope he comes back
--- anything to get out of class. [Laugther] So, I apologize for any inconvenience
on the tests. But I want to thank the students; the parents; the teachers here;
Mr. Wirth, your principal; and Chad Weaver, the study body president. Listening
to him and his poise up here, I don't know how Senator Specter or Governor Casey
or even I might feel. This guy might run against us someday. He sounds
terrific --[laughter] pretty tough.
I am particularly grateful to the Governor of the Commonwealth for being here
with us and Senator Specter, a most respected leader in the United States
Senate, for taking the time out to come here. Your own Congressman has a vote,
an important vote, on our side of the aisle - his side - today that keeps
determining the leadership there that keeps him. I think he planned to be with
us if that vote hadn't taken place. But I do want to pay my respects to Bob
Walker. And then my special introduction to you one who you know well and
who has been a symbol of propriety and leadership and enthusiasm for
Pennsylvania and that, of course, is your own ex-Governor and now the
Attorney General of the United States, Dick Thornburgh. What a job he is doing.
And the other i'm not sure he's been here, but he's been almost every place
else. I expect he's been to Lancaster. But Bill Bennett, a former Secretary of
Education, is now the first drug czar. Why, in the United States we use the
word "czar" to establish a real leader I don't know. But he's tough as the
czars were, and he is going to help us whip the scourge of drugs. And here he
is, Bill Bennett. [Applause]
You know we often think of drug abuse as an urban, inner-city phenomenon.
Millions of Americans think of their own communities, and they say, It can't
happen here. Well, the people of rural Pennsylvania know that's not true. And
in the past couple of years, drug abuse has escalated here. And the good news
is you're fighting back. Your community is too proud, your traditions here too
deeply rooted for an invader to threaten your safety and well-being without a
fight. And when drugs come here to the Conestoga Valley, that's proof that the
drug epidemic is a national problem. Look, Lancaster is a strong community, a
place where small town values is not a cliche. It's a way of life. And you
know what matters: family and faith and being a good neighbor and a member of
the community. The rising problem here simply shows how vulnerable every
American city and town is to the menace of drug abuse. And recognizing this
fact is the first step towards finding a solution. And Lancaster is on its way.
This morning you heard from Thomas Hipple and Peter True, two young men who
for reasons of their own have made a commitment to help others understand the
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 395
lasting damage that drugs can do and prevent their peers from making what can be
a life-shattering choice. What Tom and Peter are doing takes tremendous courage
and commitment. And I'm here to say that you're not alone in this -- battling
the drug problem. You have partners in your community and in others across the
United States, and you have partners in the war on drugs in Washington, right
there on Pennsylvania Avenue. And as I said in my Inaugural Address -- and I
will keep saying it because I feel driven by this commitment - I am committed
to the ending of the scourge of drugs across the United States of America, and I
need your help.
Our task is not just to deplore the drug problem but to take action against
it. What the banners that I've seen here say to me is that this valley and the
people of Lancaster are ready to take action to stop the drug scourge. And one
of the most powerful weapons against drug use is education.
And of course, there's another side to the drug program. I'm going to be
going down with Dick Thornburgh and Bill Bennett, down to Wilmington later on,
on my way back to Washington. And there we'll be talking about interdiction,
stopping drugs from coming in, and also enforcement, the law enforcement side
that Dick Thornburgh has the responsibility for -- our effort to stop the
illegal drugs, shut down the trade. But this morning, I want to talk to you all
on the means of prevention, on drying up the demand for illegal drugs.
Antidrug education and awareness can help provide the kids and the young
adults with both the reasons and the willpower to resist the lure of drugs. And
that's the aim of an antidrug education program called DARE- D-A-R-E -- Drug
Abuse Resistance Education, and that's helping, as the people involved with DARE
like to say, "drug-proof" our children. The program was pioneered,
incidentally, by the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. public school
system. I've been out there and witnessed the program in action, and DARE sends
these police officers into the classroom to work with the kids, build their
self-esteem, teach them that they can refuse when they're pressured to try
drugs. And the DARE program is teaching youngsters something else: that the
police and their schools are united in a common effort to stop drug abuse. In
the 6 years since the program began in California, DARE has caught on
nationwide. And this year, in 1,200 communities in 45 States, 3 million
children will participate.
DARE is just one example of the kind of program that can provide our children
both the reasons and the willpower to resist the lure of drugs. There is no one
right answer when it comes to battling drug abuse. Each community will find
what works best, and we'll learn from each other.
I'm told that right here in Lancaster you have a program called High-Risk
Youth in the elementary schools and another called High-Risk Youth in the
elementary schools and another called SCIP, the School Community Intervention
Program, in place that one's in the high schools and in the junior highs.
And they aim at indentifying young people whose circumstances and family
situations make them most vulnerable to the lure of drugs. Targeting these
youth for special attention is crucial, and with High-Risk Youth and SCIP,
you're doing something to stop drug problems before they begin.
For my part, I'm going to see that drug education receives the funding it
needs. Most of the funding, as you know, comes from local school boards and
States. I think it's 7 percent of the funding is Federal. But our budget
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 395
this year for 1990 calls for a full $1.1 billion for drug prevention and
antidrug education activity. And even in these tight budget times. that's up 16
percent over 1989. I've urged Congress to provide $392 million for the Drug
Free Schools and Communities program, funds that go to the States and
institutions of higher education.
And then as I mentioned earlier with great pride, and I'll say it again, I
have selected Bill Bennett to serve as the Director - this is his official
title, I told you the nickname - the Director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy to map the strategy and oversee the antidrug campaign. And I'll
tell you, I picked him because he's knowledgeable, he's tough, and he is
determined and, most importantly though, he cares deeply about the young people
of this country.
These initiatives are important, and they're going to have an impact. But
there's a role for each of us in the war on drugs, and I hope you'll join me in
asking what you can do to help, especially to advance the antidrug education and
awareness. You know, we can all play a part in increasing awareness about the
ravages of drug dependency. We must get the message across that drugs are not a
form of entertainment or a helpless, harmless means of escape. Drugs are a
poison, to users and to our communities. But a widespread awareness of the
dangers of drug abuse depends on sending consistent signals, on sending a clear
message that using drugs is not fasionable, is not fun, and above all else, it
is not safe.
For too long - and this isn't the fault of the young people here -- because
for too long, our culture, our popular culture glorified drug use. I think
that's changing now, and that's a real change for the better. Consider the
antidrug abuse campaign on television. Not long ago, I was told a story about a
little girl 4 years old, who's getting the message. She got up from in front of
the television to tell her parents something important. "Drugs," she said, "fry
your brain like an egg." We've all seen that commercial the little girl was
talking about. Whether you're 4 or 14 or 40, the message gets across. And
let's carry that message, all of us. And I would say right here: I hope that
the movie producers and the movie directors and those involved in the
entertainment business will stop, will put an end to the glorification of its
humorous treatment of narcotics.
And let's shed some of the perceptions about the drug problem that are
comforting, but are completely incorrect. There's no room for saying, Drug
abuse doesn't affect me. Think about the costs of drug abuse: the lost time,
the waste, the crime, the accidents that can be traced to the influence of
drugs. Twenty-three million Americans used illegal drugs last year. Countless
thousands died. And the fact is that none of us - none of us -- is immune to
the problems that drug use can cause. So, together, let's you and me send a
message on drug abuse to the so-called casual user: Face up to the fact that
your so-called recreational drug use contributes to the drug culture -- to the
crime, the death, and degradation associated with the drug trade.
The other day I was in New York, and I talked to a group of DEA agents, drug
enforcement agents, who lay their lives on the line for us, as they try to
interdict narcotics and stop it right there in the street. But there was a team
that had worked in a white-collar business, in the brokerage business, of all
things, down on Wall Street. They looked like they belonged on Wall Street -
nice clean-cut guys, you know - a wonderful looking young man and a young
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 395
woman. And they said that in that culture there, if people stayed over and
worked overtime, their reward might be some cocaine to stay on a little later in
the office. It isn't just the impoverished. It isn't just those who are
fighting trauma in their lives. There's the whole concept that recreational
drug use has been condoned, and we've got to stop it. We have got to make
people understand, whatever walk of life you're in, that drug use is bad, it's
death, it is degradation. And so, the fight is not going to be just in the
ghettos, where the impoverished and the hopeless are; it's going to be all
across-the-board.
To parents: Your children know more than you realize about drugs. Make it
your business as a parent to know about drug abuse yourself. Educate
yourselves. Don't hide from the reality of drug abuse in our communities and
then hope for the best - hope that someone else will solve the problem. Your
children depend on you to help separate the fact from the fiction, to help them
make a choice and then stick with it, when it comes to resisting drugs.
To the kids: Let's send the message that drugs are dangerous; that you don't
need drugs to feel good about yourself or to win approval from others; that your
parents, the people in your schools and your community care. But most of all,
you must understand that the decision against drugs is yours to make, no one
else's. When it's time to draw the line against drugs, the final choice is
yours.
I get a lot of mail. Some of it is very serious. Some of it very
disturbing. And some of it quite amusing. Get a lot of letters from school
kids. I got not one long ago from a girl in California -- fifth grader. She
told me how she wanted to change the world - wonderfully idealistic -- and that
making the world a better place meant putting an end to drug abuse. And then
she wrote, "I don't know if I can do it all by myself. I need your hlep." Well,
she does, and she's going to get it. And, yes, I can help, and so can all of
you. And that's the answer we owe our children. But there's something else
that the little girl who wrote that letter needs to know. There is something
that she can do, that all of us here can do, to bring ourselves one step closer
to winning the war on drugs: We can take a stand and say, We don't do drugs.
And anytime anyone of us takes that stand, that is another battle won. As a
community, we must work to make it easy as possible for our children to make the
choice against drugs. We can do it by creating an environment - a safe, secure
space, if you will where our kids can acquire a sense of self and
self-confidence so secure that no amount of peer group pressure can push them
into taking drugs.
I mentioned that I'm going to talk about enforcement later on today, but I
don't want to leave here without saying to you the enforcement side of this
equation is absolutely essential, whether it's in the corridors of this
outstanding high achievement school or whether it's downtown Lancaster or
wherever it is. The authorities must enforce the law, and we must make an
example of those who are pushing drugs on to the lives of the others around
here. You know, most Americans want to see their towns restored to a time when
drugs came in from the prescriptions from the local doctor. But with your hard
work and commitment, that day will come sonner. It must come.
So, my message to you today is: Don't do drugs. Keep fighting back. Fight
for your community, for your childrem. The war on drugs will ultimately be won
one day, one battle at a time -- the battles each and every one of us wage to
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 395
keep our families and communities free from drug abuse. We've learned a hard
lesson. Unless we join together and fight, it can happen here. But if we do
work as a team and as a community, it won't.
And so, let these banners be a battle cry - and that Conestoge Valley, in
Lancaster, in communities like yours all over the country, we will join
together, turn the tide, and bring the drug epidemic to an end with finality -
over -- history. Now, we need your help.
Thank you very much. Thank you all.
Note: The President spoke at 9:17 a.m. in the school gymnasium. He was
introduced by Chad Weaver, president of the student body. Prior to the remarks,
the President met with participants in a drug rehabilitation program and their
families.
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2ND STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 U.S.News & World Report
April 10, 1989
SECTION: U.S. NEWS; Vol. 106, No. 14; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 5232 words
HEADLINE: Dead zones
BYLINE: By Thomas Moore; Ted Gest; Gordon Witkin; Jeffery L. Sheler; Peter
Carey; Stephen J. Hedges; Joseph P. Shapiro; Scott Minerbrook; Pamela
Ellis-Simmons; Patrick Barry
DATELINE: New York; Chicago; Los Angeles
HIGHLIGHT:
Whole sections of urban America are being written off as anarchic badlands,
places where cops fear to go and acknowledge: "This is Beirut, U.S.A."
BODY:
In "Crack Heaven," a three-block area off Nostrand Avenue in the Flatbush
section of Brooklyn, the noise of automatic and semiautomatic weapons, of
ambulances and police cars would begin around 8 p.m., residents say, and
continue through the night. It often woke up the children in Elaine Underwood's
apartment building on East 24th Street. Then, on March 3, New York City police
officer Robert Machate was shot to death with his own gun by a man he was
trying to arrest, and things got quiet for a while. "It's a terrible thing to
say," says Underwood, who is the mother of a 2-year-old daughter named Akisha,
"but when that officer died, we all slept through the night for the first time
since, I don't know, months. The helicopters and police cars stopped the drug
dealers from doing business for about a week. It sounds terrible, but that's
when we got some rest."
Twenty years after nightly news programs spilled the carnage of Vietnam into
our living rooms, television and daily newspapers are bringing us, live, another
escalating war that we are losing. But this time the firefights are taking place
on our own territory, within the hearts of our major cities. Every day, there
are haunting pictures of the dead being carried off in body bags, of angry,
grieving families, of commandos breaking down doors of dilapidated buildings, of
armed gangs and wounded children, of burned-out cars and the flash of gunfire.
As if to underline this grim message of civil dissolution, these scenes of
guerrilla drug battles are often juxtaposed with similar visuals from Beirut,
Lebanon, a place that has become a metaphor for institutionalized disorder.
The image that overrides all others is that of urban war zone. However
complex the causes and dynamics, however remote any chance of soon resolving
this new civil war, one truth is inescapable: From Gangland Los Angeles to
Murder Capital Washington, D.C., city after city now tolerates its own Beirut,
a no man's land where drug dealers shoot it out to command street corners, where
children grow up under a reign of "narcoterror" and civil authority has
basically broken down.
Police confirm that identifiable geographical areas with combatlike
conditions exist in more than a dozen major cities surveyed by U.S. News
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(c) 1989 U.S. News & World Report, April 10, 1989
correspondents. They include: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Washington, Miami, Cleveland, East St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, New
Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Oakland and Los Angeles. Some cities, like Denver and
Seattle, have not yet developed outright war zones but are already experiencing
skirmishes that may soon ravage some of their neighborhoods as well.
The extent and nature of these dangerous no man's lands vary from city to
city. Some are just open-air drug markets on street corners. Some are housing
projects and surrounding tenements riddled with crack houses. Some are whole
neighborhoods or vast areas of cities, like South Central L.A. or the West Side
of Chicago. Many have nicknames, like the Graveyard in Miami, the War Zone in
Dallas or the Wild Wild Western District in Baltimore. Some police departments
are more than willing to talk about them, hoping the wave of publicity will lead
politicians to give them more resources to restore order. Others are guarded,
wary that they will be criticized for not doing a better job of controlling
their streets.
What constitutes a war zone? These are places where the level of concentrated
violence has risen so high that city services barely function, not simply
because workers and administrators blatantly redline the areas as in the past or
for lack of resources, but also out of well-grounded fear for their lives. The
sheer firepower is awesome. Chicago's "gunbuster" unit recently raided a West
Side gang's arm cache and found 23 live hand grenades, eight machine guns, seven
sawed-off shotguns, a semiautomatic rifle, 20 handguns, a cluster bomb and
thousands of rounds of ammunition. "I don't even know what a cluster bomb is,"
says Lt. Wayne Wiberg, chief gunbuster, "and I don't want to find out." Cluster
bombs are antipersonnel weapons, normally dropped from airplanes, designed to
kill and maim anybody within a wide area.
Applying triage to crime reports
These local Beiruts look like war zones, too. Unmaintained public housing
is literally crumbling, and garbage piles up obscenely in vacant lots,
attracting haulers who illegally dump tons more from trucks. Ambulances,
firefighters and utility workers often request police escorts, if they go in at
all. In Chicago, a 9-year-old boy suffering from an asthmatic attack died last
December after paramedics refused to enter a war-zone housing project,
claiming they had been assaulted with eggs. Like MASH units in war, overburdened
war-zone police districts apply triage to crime reports, focusing mainly on
murders and shootings and ignoring burglaries. Implicitly, if not explicitly,
many have adopted a policy of crime containment rather than prevention. "Why not
let the bozos shoot it out, then go in, pick up the bodies and arrest the
winner?" says Cleveland Detective Doug Charney. "That's not what we're paid for,
but at least we're using our brains now."
The significance of these Little Beiruts, and what they say about our
country, is only now hitting home. Many cops, business people and average
citizens had written off the drug-dominated chronic-crime areas of inner cities,
arguing that the bad guys, like Mafia gangsters, were largely just killing each
other, that the shoot-outs did not affect downtown districts or surrounding
middle-class neighborhoods. Even liberal police chiefs, politicians and city
officials took the view that the problem was too big and that they had too
little money to do much about it. "I don't see how we can manage this problem
with our resources in New York," New York Governor Mario Cuomo said recently,
echoing the frustration of many other government officials. "It's possible you
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won't be able to solve the problem. That's how horrible it is."
But as the homicide tolls continue to jump, city councils, Congress and
ultimately President Bush have begun to consider drastic action, such as hiring
hundreds of more cops, launching police sweeps in housing projects and
schools, and even sending in the National Guard to cordon off the worst areas.
Newly confirmed drug czar William Bennett expressed the sudden sense of urgency
as well as anyone. Rather than wait the full six months he was given to come up
with an overall drug strategy, he launched a number of initiatives he believes
will amount to sorely needed "shock treatment" right now. They ranged from
declaring the nation's capital the first "high-intensity drug-trafficking area"
to pushing Bush, a life member of the National Rifle Association, to halt the
import of assault weapons, 50 many of which end up in the hands of drug dealers.
Bennett plans to announce a comprehensive attack plan for Washington this month.
"We don't turn to this because we think we've got a quick fix," Bennett said.
"We turn to this because, by God, something has got to be done."
Three-year-old Quarshon "Twiggy" Mottley was playing in her home in a
drug-plagued northeast Houston neighborhood last summer when her mother's
boyfriend burst in, stabbed to death the mother, Lotti Mae Nora, 33, and took
her jewelry from her body. He then slashed Twiggy's throat with a butcher knife
and threw her bleeding into a closet. Only days before, the 30-year-old man had
baby-sat the child in a crack house while the woman ran errands. Twiggy
recovered, but she has had trouble adjusting. "She would just go into a daze
where she looked off into nowhere," says her father, truckdriver Darwin Mottley,
30. "I have to take her everywhere with me, even to work. She doesn't cry any
more, but she'll wake up sometimes and holler, 'Daddy, he got Mama."
Slums, run-down housing projects and other bad areas have long been
neglected by police and other city services, have always harbored drug dealers
and users and have always been dangerous places to live or visit. But crack, a
powerful and cheap derivative of cocaine, was the powder that ignited many of
these neglected areas into actual war zones. Pharmacologists have proved that
crack induces considerably more paranoia and violence than most other street
drugs. Some 54 percent to 90 percent of those arrested for serious crimes in 11
big cities tested positive for drugs, according to a Justice Department study.
But the economics of crack undid these neighborhoods more than its chemistry.
When cocaine, long considered the rich man's drug, suddenly became available in
$ 5 crack rocks, even the poor could afford it. What was formerly an
upscale-niche product was soon mass-marketed, creating an industry that
generates tens of billions of dollars all by itself. Established drug markets
that centered on poor neighborhoods and housing projects, and were frequented
by suburbanites and down-and-outers alike, suddenly bustled with the profitable
new business. Adam Smith's invisible hand of capitalism never worked better.
Supply and demand converged there, pumping in serious money and soon serious
weaponry and gangsters to take and hold market share. The business lent itself
to entrepreneurship. Any kid who mixed baking soda and water with cocaine could
start dealing off a street corner, and established gangs had to fight it out
with interlopers from out of town or new cowboys from their own turf.
AS the foot soldiers of crack established beachheads in city after city,
these places spiraled out of control:
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* Los Angeles. Drug dealing and high-tech weaponry have escalated the warfare
between the city's long-established loosely knit gangs, the Crips and the
Bloods. A favorite expression for killing someone these days is "boo-yah" - the
sound from a sawed-off shotgun. The hottest battlefields are four mostly black
communities extending from the Harbor Freeway on the east to Los Angeles Airport
on the west, touching the San Diego Freeway on the south and coming within 20
blocks of the affluent University of Southern California campus on the north.
Outright lawlessness reigns around several projects, according to Deputy Chief
William Rathburn, who runs the city's two toughest districts. "We average a
murder a day in South Central," he says. "We have drive-by shootings with great
regularity. The increase in gang violence has been accelerated by the
competition for drug sales, and you are talking large amounts of money, which
have provided the gangs with more sophisticated weapons. They buy the AK-47 and
a case of ammunition. They are firing 60 rounds at a drive-by."
Several months ago, three telephone-company employes were shot in the area.
Martin Luther King, Jr., hospital in Watts has ordered metal detectors for its
emergency waiting room to prevent gang members from bringing their guns with
them when checking up on injured buddies The hospital is having trouble filling
90 vacancies on its nursing staff largely because of safety concerns, according
to one nurse. People in the hottest areas do not use their front rooms at night
for fear of drive-bys, Rathburn adds. Many will not turn on lights at night. And
some have told him they sleep on the floor for fear of indiscriminate shootings.
Rathburn has a tape he made on New Year's Eve from the police-station roof in
the hard-core area that captured the constant popping or crackling of guns being
fired, occasionally interrupted by machine-gun pumping.
* East St. Louis, Ill. With one of the highest crime rates in the state, the
city recently called in the Illinois State Police to patrol its war zones during
the night. "There is no order in East St. Louis, there are no neighborhoods that
are safe," says John Baricevic, St. Clair County state's attorney. Across the
river in St. Louis, ambulance crews routinely call for police escort into the
Cabanne Courts and West Side Apartments complex. Says Gary Ludwig, deputy chief
of emergency medical services, "We call it Little Vietnam up there."
* New Orleans. There is a large city map on the wall of the police homicide
bureau stuck with dozens of red pins that indicate where every murder of the
year took place. The map shows that murder occurs across the city not at random
but according to a distinct pattern. Most of the pins are clustered in and
around several shaded areas, riddled with pinholes from the year before,
denoting the most notorious of the city's 11 housing projects. The biggest in
the city, a project named Desire, has drawn the largest cluster of red pins this
year and last.
A labyrinth of three-story army-type barracks spread over 97 acres, Desire
houses some 9,000 women and children on public welfare and assorted male friends
and "uncles" who come and go, sometimes protecting the tenants but more often
preying on them at will. Apartments and whole buildings are burned out, their
roofs caving in as if they had been hit by distant artillery fire. Brick walls
are crumbling, and holes big enough for people to crawl through gape between
stairways and apartments.
Drug dealers have turned the project into a vast and dangerous bazaar of
narcotics that attracts customers from all over the city, the state and
Mississippi next door. Courtyards specializing in one drug or another boast
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names like Cocaine Alley and Clicker Street. The parking lots have been turned
into open-air garages where stolen cars are brought to be stripped. "The maze of
buildings creates a casbah effect that breeds crime," says police Superintendent
Warren Woodfork. "Whoever designed the projects never thought the 1980s were
going to come." Mayor Sidney Barthelemy pinned the label Beirut on the place and
hopes to eventually tear much of it down, if he can ever find money to relocate
the tenants in smaller units scattered elsewhere.
* Washington, D.C. On Clifton and Euclid Streets, on Orleans Place and Drake
Place, S.E., in Trinidad and Columbia Heights, the story is sadly the same. Much
of the southeast and southwest quadrants of Washington, D.C., is soaked in
drug-related violence and murder (see box, page 30). The city's homicide rate
last year, 59.4 per 100,000 population, edged out Detroit's to make it the
murder capital of the United States. Killings are even worse this year: 127 dead
by the end of March VS. 81 a year ago. "The problem is not under control, to put
it mildly," says Assistant Police Chief Isaac Fulwood, Jr.
A study of murder in the District from 1985 to 1988, done by the D.C. Office
of Criminal Justice Plans and Analysis, shows that 72 percent of homicide
victims were age 18-39; 90 percent of the victims were black, and 63 percent had
drugs or alcohol in their systems; of the assailants, 96 percent were black and
75 percent were age 18-39; 26 percent of the perpetrators tested positive for
cocaine, 23 percent for PCP and 12 percent for opiates, such as heroin. The
majority of homicides were not domestic disputes but targeted murders created by
drug conflicts.
Some police and criminologists argue that the absence of dominant organized
gangs in Washington is the cause of the recent escalation in violence. In their
view, this temporary cycle of turf wars will subside when one group establishes
control, providing discipline and structure to the free-wheeling drug markets.
This cyclical view of gang development could be no more than wishful thinking,
however. Detroit police say the decline in the city's murder rate last year had
more to do with the department's crackdown on drug activities than with the
establishment of any one gang. And this year neither theory seems to account for
a new jump in homicides. By the end of February, 95 people had been murdered,
compared with 82 a year ago.
Avoiding aggressive enforcement
The most disturbing confirmation that cities now face combat conditions in
some areas rather than traditional crime is the widely held view among
law-enforcement professionals that police can no longer handle the problem
alone. Patrick Murphy, a former chief of police for New York, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., and a law-enforcement consultant to the U.S. Conference of
Mayors, reports that many of the police chiefs he spoke to at a recent mayors'
conference in Washington on urban crime now believe that things are so dangerous
in war-zone areas that some police will avoid aggressive enforcement for fear of
getting hurt. "Many cops still roam through public housing every day and night
like combat troops who believe that their number won't come up that day," he
says. "But in some areas, police won't go in unless there are four or five
officers. That attitude frightens me."
Many officials are starting to talk openly about the need for federal troops.
"The police don't have the staying power or the manpower," says Hubert Williams,
president of the Washington, D.C.-based Police Foundation and former Newark
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police chief. "We need to declare martial law and get the drug dealers out of
there." Some officials in Los Angeles; Compton, Calif.; Washington, D.C., and
New York have called for sending in the National Guard to cordon off and patrol
war zones. Under a $ 40 million appropriation in last year's Anti-Drug Abuse
Act, the Guard is already helping Texas and Florida patrol borders for drug
smugglers and last week announced it would provide similar drug-interdiction
services for law-enforcement agencies in 10 other states. Customs agents have
been pleased with the help. But many local officials say they are opposed to
using federal troops. "I think it would be a farce. It would be Kent State all
over again," says New York special prosecutor Charles Hynes, referring to the
college campus where young, inexperienced guardsmen killed four persons during
an antiwar protest.
A year ago, February 26, rookie New York City police officer Edward Byrne,
22, was sitting alone in his police car in South Jamaica, Queens, where he was
guarding the front door of a drug-trial witness. Two members of a crack "crew,"
allegedly acting on orders from the dealer on trial, sauntered up to the car at
3 a.m. and shot Byrne in the head. One of the men now on trial for the murder
bragged to his girlfriend about shooting the cop. "Bang, bang, bang, bang, four
to the head," said Todd Scott, according to testimony. "That's all it took."
Assistant District Attorney Kirke Bartley called it "a declaration of war
against our society and a message: 'Oppose us and die." After a day's
deliberation, a jury convicted Scott, 20, and two accomplices of second-degree
murder last week.
Short of sending in the Guard, cities are beginning to experiment with a
number of other extreme police measures. The evidence seems to be that drastic
action can indeed be effective, but only for a short time. Last September, the
Chicago Housing Authority enlisted police help to cordon off five of its
buildings, searched every apartment for drugs and threw out anyone who was not
related to tenants, including boyfriends. The crackdown led to a small rash of
marriages and a nose dive in the crime rate. The 24 members of Atlanta's elite
year-old "Red Dog" unit, armed with sawed-off shotguns and wearing blue
jumpsuits, yellow ascots and flak jackets, started assaulting street dealers in
"jump-out" operations about a year ago. In eight months, they arrested 987
people and confiscated $ 106,000 in cash, 175 weapons and 8,000 hits of crack.
Riding horses, vans and patrol cars, Dallas police last fall raided a downtown
area known as the War Zone, rounded up drug dealers and bulldozed empty
buildings. Houston police have launched similar raids this year. And New York
City's Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) has conducted buy-and-bust operations in
targeted crime-ridden neighborhoods for a year. After TNT troops moved in,
homicide rates fell dramatically, down 50 percent in an area of Southeast Queens
and another area in East Harlem.
A question of civil liberties
The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged many of these police
actions, arguing that many suspects are arrested based on scant evidence of drug
violations. The ACLU won an out-of-court agreement with the Chicago Housing
Authority, for example, which subsequently dropped the visitor curbs and limited
searches to housekeeping inspections that preclude rummaging through tenants'
drawers. Others question what these actions accomplish. One common complaint is
that such raids just shove dealers out of one neighborhood and into another. The
police, caught between critics who say they are doing too little and those who
say their aggressive tactics are overburdening the system and trammeling civil
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liberties, have become understandably testy about the whole issue. "What more do
you want us to do?" Washington police Chief Maurice Turner snapped at reporters
after a TV interview recently. "We arrested 43,000 people last year."
What Turner is really asking, as are many other police chiefs in major cities
around the U.S., is what is the U.S. government going to do? The drug problem
and its accompanying violence have clearly outstripped the resources and
capability of local governments, police departments, courts and prisons to cope
with them. It is a national epidemic that spreads from city to city, attacking
communities with the weakest resistance, infecting healthier surrounding sites
and then overwhelming the immune system of the whole body politic. Exasperated
local police chiefs like Turner, who have seen their forces trimmed in the face
of rising crime, and seen their veteran cops drained off by better-paying jobs,
admit their efforts are just a holding action until the federal government steps
in. "The phenomenon we're witnessing in Washington is not one the
criminal-justice system as originally conceived was really designed to deal
with," says Jay Stephens, U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. "It was [designed
as] a system to deal with aberrant behavior
What
we're
seeing
now
is
not
aberrant criminal behavior but widespread disregard for the law, and
lawlessness."
The unavoidable fact is that even as law-enforcement agencies bring in more
drug offenders, they are overwhelming already-creaky back-office operations,
from crime labs to courts to prisons. Police crackdowns cannot hope to be
successful if those arrested cannot be brought to trial and put away. Next to
low pay, the cops' biggest complaint around the country is that the criminals
they risk their lives to bust end up back out on the street, sometimes before
the officers have finished the paper work.
Since the system's resources are not keeping pace with the exploding demand
to imprison drug convicts, street dealers know the odds are in their favor. The
chance that any offender will end up in prison is low. Of 185,423 state and
local drug-trafficking arrests in 1986, only 28,282 did more than one year in
jail. Of 18,106 federal narcotics cases referred to prosecutors, just over half
did time. The median sentence was 3 1/2 years.
Special efforts to address the drug menace often run into these existing
problems. Drug courts set up to expedite the backlog in cases in New York and
New Orleans have speeded up trials and increased convictions. But with
sentencing up, says Harry Connick, New Orleans's district attorney, "the state
prison is full, and the jail is backing up with people waiting to get into
prison." Many are housed temporarily behind police headquarters in a tent city
that resembles a POW camp.
The massive volume of drug arrests has jails bulging all around the country.
In Chicago, misdemeanor busts have become almost meaningless because the
5,580-bed Cook County Jail is overflowing, forcing the release of some 90
offenders a day on individual-recognizance bonds. The nation's state-prison
population is growing by a net of 900 inmates a week - the equivalent of two
new prisons opening weekly pushing the total to an estimated 630,000 at the
end of last year, a number that exceeds national prison capacity. Add the
300,000 in local jails at any given time and another 50,000 or so in federal
prisons and the U.S. could hit the million mark this year.
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Back in 1977, Tedd Miller saw Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood as a
smart place to buy a house. "It seemed to be an up-and-coming neighborhood,"
says Miller, 43, associate admissions director for the Georgetown University Law
Center. But two years ago, the atmosphere started to change. "You're approached
by someone trying to sell crack, and then next thing you know, there's three of
them," he says. Last year, neighbors who wanted to sell a house figured they'd
wait until the cold weather so prospective buyers wouldn't see the crack dealers
hanging around. "But in the winter, they stayed there," laments Miller. "If it
was raining, they had an umbrella. If it was snowing, they had heavy coats and
boots. That's when we knew we had an entrenched problem."
Today there is an open-air drug market on the corner near his house. There
are more crack houses around the corner. People walk up and down selling crack
24 hours a day. He hears gunshots on a regular basis, and there was a murder
around the corner at the beginning of the year over drug trafficking. After
Miller joined the neighborhood advisory commission and attended numerous rallies
against crime and drug trafficking, he was threatened. Last spring, he bought a
vicious Rottweiler to roust addicts from a garage next door. About the same
time, his son Atiba, 12, was approached by a fellow sixth grader with an offer
to become a drug courier. And last fall, someone menacingly accosted Atiba on
the street and told him that local dealers knew who he was and knew who his
father was. The Millers reported the incident, but police said there was little
they could do. "I used to send my son out after dark to pick up a bottle of milk
at a nearby store. Now, not only will I not ask him to go out, but I wouldn't go
out unnecessarily myself."
At the same time he fears for his family's safety, Miller worries that he and
his family and friends are becoming dangerously indifferent to the violence that
surrounds them: "We're tolerating more than we would have even eight months ago.
The height of it was about three months ago when I saw a man dead with a bullet
wound in his head. I remember how I used to feel if I saw a dead animal in the
road or something. I couldn't eat. But this just sort of struck me as routine,
like I almost expected to see it."
The most effective efforts to restore law and order in war-zone areas have
originated not with the police but with communities that have decided to fight
back, with or without the police. Some have taken a page out of the movie "The
Magnificent Seven" in which a poor Mexican village terrorized by banditos hires
a group of gunslingers from Texas to drive the villains out. In Washington, for
instance, tenants at the Mayfair Mansions housing complex invited in the Black
Muslims, who began patrolling the area 24 hours a day by foot and confronting
street dealers directly. Today, crime has largely disappeared there, gunfire is
rarely heard and children play football and skip rope outdoors once more. The
antidrug campaign of the Muslims, who call their security unit the Dopebusters
of the Fruit of Islam, is so popular that the group has been deluged with
requests to help elsewhere.
Some people resort to outright vigilantism. In Detroit last year, 25
residents of an old Polish-Ukrainian neighborhood on the city's southwest side,
disgusted by drug dealers propositioning their children and engaging in sex on
the front porch of a crack house, armed themselves with baseball bats, boards
and pipes and stormed the place. Days later, someone torched the house. Last
fall, two men were acquitted of arson charges even though they admitted burning
down two suspected crack houses. "They were pushed to a point where they felt
they had to take action," said one juror. "The police couldn't stop the crack
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dealers." Dealers now avoid the neighborhood.
Special vigilance
In Cleveland, a group of tenants at the Lakeview Terrace Estates housing
project, fed up with drug dealing, violence and the lack of security, pressured
the housing authority to let them run the complex themselves. They immediately
shifted more of their budget to security, hiring their own force of six armed
guards and four dispatchers to protect the 834 units, compared with 47 guards
the city employs for its 12,000 other units. Lakeview residents, led by
organizer Lena Jackson, scrutinized prospective tenants more closely and helped
police evict and convict drug dealers by hiring a detective and organizing their
own sting operation. Now, the tenants' association helps set up drug
counseling and treatment for residents, including putting preteen children of
abusers into "Ala-Tot," a support program modeled after the Al-Anon and Alateen
programs for relatives of alcoholics. Before they took over, some residents
called the project "Saigon," recalls current resident manager Dexter Lowe,
"because you had to fight your way out of here just like you had to fight your
way out of Saigon." Today, the crime rate has dropped significantly, and there
are 3,000 people on the waiting list trying to get in.
One of the more successful strategists plotting ways for communities to take
back their own ground is Bill Lindsey, the visionary director of Fort
Lauderdale's housing authority. He moved into a privately owned slum
tenement there in 1972 as a VISTA volunteer, packed a .38-caliber handgun, hired
some ex-cons to help him oust dealers and organize a rent strike, cleaned up the
building and eventually 50 impressed the city that he won the
housing -authority job. Lindsey has since turned 10 other projects in the
city's worst neighborhoods into model housing, or "oases," as he calls them.
The idea is that, by creating these oases of good housing in bad areas, the
surrounding apartment buildings in between will slowly be persuaded to clean up
their own act too.
"Police fail because they attack and withdraw," says Lindsey, explaining why
law-enforcement agencies cannot eliminate war zones by themselves. "I can't
think of anything more politically expedient and less long-term problem solving
than running around doing drug raids in public housing. What that does is
enforce the government failure model that 'We're doing all that we can do, and
nothing can be done.' They have to have a war plan, and the war plan has to take
into consideration that they're going to have to occupy the neighborhood on a
long-term basis."
Politicians and cops have made careers talking tough about the war on crime
and drugs. But tougher laws and more police sweeps will do little, if any, good
if criminals bounce back out on the street in short order. The truly tough
officials will be those who manage to do something with the criminals that
police arrest. Allocating more money for jails, prosecutors and treatment
programs is hazardous for politicians constrained by tight budgets, but the
political dangers pale beside the life-threatening risks people take every day
in city war zones. Two weeks ago, Lee Arthur Lawrence, 51, a Miami grocer who
received a flurry of local publicity for driving drug dealers away from his
parking lot, was shot dead in a drive-by execution.
GRAPHIC: Picture, No caption, STEVEN M. FALK FOR USN≀ Picture, Street lords.
Los Angeles gang members rule communities with awful shows of force. The local
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expression for killing someone is "boo-yah"-the sound from a sawed-off shotgun,
PATRICK FRILLET ---- SIPA; Picture, Body counters. In Boston, as in other places,
medics and police attend the wounded, but they have little power in the worst
areas, RICH FRIEDMAN -- BLACK STAR FOR USN≀ Picture, Guardian. Residents of
some besieged war zones, like those in this Chicago housing project, have
fought back by tightening security and screening all arrivals, KEVIN HORAN FOR
USN≀ Picture, Shut-in. When Washington, D.C., crack dealers approached Atiba
Miller, 12, his father bought a menacing Rottweiler and forbade Atiba to walk
outside alone, CHARLIE ARCHAMBAULT FOR USN≀ Picture, Handcuffed, Most cities,
like Boston, have overflowing jails, RICK FRIEDMAN -- BLACK STAR FOR USN&WR
SUBJECT: Crime
ENHANCEMENT: Drug and narcotic violations; Metropolitan areas; Crim rate;
Murder; Gangs
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5TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
February 11, 1989, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: REAL ESTATE; PAGE E3
LENGTH: 865 words
HEADLINE: New Law Banning Adult-Only Apartments Has Some in Industry Confused
BYLINE: H. Jane Lehman, Special to the Washington Post
BODY:
With only four weeks until a new fair housing law that bars discrimination
against families with children takes effect, the apartment industry is still
trying to sort out what it must do to comply with recently released rules
interpreting the legislation.
Looming largest in the minds of apartment owners of high-rise buildings and
adult-only developments with such amenities as sun decks, pools and lakes is
whether they are vulnerable to lawsuits if children are injured on the premises,
which were designed for use exclusively by adults.
The new law, which also prohibits discrimination against the handicapped,
goes into effect March 12. However, the industry is grumbling that the rules
published Jan. 23 by the federal government for implementing the Fair Housing
Amendments Act of 1988 failed to answer several questions regarding the
housing of families.
"They punted," said Jonathan L. Kempner, president of the National Multi
Housing Council, a trade group that represents apartment owners and
developers.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will
administer the new rules, the law does not "limit the ability of landlords or
other property managers to develop and implement reasonable rules and
regulations relating to the use of facilities associated with dwellings for the
health and safety of persons."
According to Kempner, however, the language raises more questions than it
answers: = 'Reasonable' - what the hell does that mean?" he said. "We won't
know until somebody litigates."
In theory, said Colleen Fisher, director of government relations for the
National Apartment Association, another group representing the apartment
industry, the new law does not require landlords to make any changes in their
operations, other than to revise rental policies that excluded families with
children.
In practice, though, Fisher predicted that landlords will cover up swimming
pools, fence off ponds and lakes and close down sun decks. "That's what happened
in California," she said, where the state's Supreme Court banned all-adult
communities a few years ago.
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The owners of the Oakwood Apartments at Landmark, a formerly all-adult
community in Northern Virginia, aren't taking any chances. Soon after the
federal legislation was signed into law in September, Oakwood's manager, R&B
Enterprises of Los Angeles, closed the sun deck atop the 18-story high rise,
according to a worker at the complex. The building's balconies also will undergo
renovation this spring to make the units safer for children, the worker added.
At the other extreme, Southern Management Corp., the largest apartment
owner in the Washington area, with 18,000 units, isn't taking any additional
steps at its buildings, which include 10 all-adult communities. "We've never
relaxed our safety precautions [just] because all of the tenants were adults,"
said Ronald Frank, the firm's vice president.
In fact, Southern Management isn't even informing its existing tenants in the
all-adult buildings of the new rental policy that will allow children, which the
company will institute March 1. "You can overreact to things, and I don't choose
to make an issue of it," said Frank.
Word of the law hasn't even reached the management of at least one apartment
community. "What law? I hope my boss knows about this," Judy Ladd, resident
manager of Colesville Towers in downtown Silver Spring, said when asked
whether the building would undergo any physical changes because of the new law.
Industry officials said they also question whether the law will supercede an
existing HUD policy, which, said Fisher, recognizes high-rise elevator buildings
as an unsuitable environment for children living in government-assisted
housing. "What makes kids in public housing any different?" she asked.
However, a HUD official said the industry has misinterpreted that policy. The
1977 Housing and Community Development Act merely encourages the HUD secretary
to "look for alternatives" to high-rise elevator buildings, said Harry L. Carey,
an assistant general counsel with HUD.
The apartment industry also was disappointed that HUD declined to adopt
guidelines that would restrict the number of occupants who can live in a
dwelling based on the number of bedrooms.
Elliot Bernold, president of Edgewood Management Corp., which manages 9,123
units in the Baltimore -to-Richmond corridor, is worried that the law "could be
used to create future slums" because it would allow families with children to
"shoehorn" as many people as possible into an apartment in an effort to cope
with the lack of affordable rental housing.
In another area, however, the final regulations did satisfy concerns raised
by Rep. Don Edwards (D-Calif.) that the original draft of the rules improperly
delved into the use of various marketing techniques to achieve integrated
housing.
Edwards -- who, as chairman of the House Civil and Constitutional Rights
subcommittee, had threatened to hold up the regulations said HUD complied
with his wishes by taking out all such references. "Our bill did not address
that question and we think it's going to be better that the courts work it out,"
he said.
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(c) 1989 The Washington Post, February 11, 1989
TYPE: NATIONAL NEWS
SUBJECT: APARTMENTS AND CONDOMINIUMS; ADULTS (AGE 21-65); TENANTS; COMMERCIAL
REGULATION; CIVIL RIGHTS
ORGANIZATION: FAIR HOUSING AMENDMENTS ACT; OAKWOOD APARTMENTS; SOUTHERN
MANAGEMENT CORP.
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6TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1988 The New York Times Company;
The New York Times
November 20, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 6; Page 45, Column 1; Magazine Desk
LENGTH: 4052 words
HEADLINE: D.C., The Other Washington
BYLINE: By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak; Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is a
Washington-based freelance
BODY:
'WASHINGTON'' MAY BE THE ULTIMATE Rorschach test for Americans. To some, the
White House and the Washington Monument symbolize the capital of the free world;
to others, they epitomize the trappings of a company town. The Capitol building
and the Pentagon can evoke images of dedicated Government servants or of greedy
lobbyists.
Shifts in Presidential power accentuate the clash of contrasting images. When
John F. Kennedy arrived, Washington became ''Camelot.''
Eight years ago, it was declared 'Hollywood on the Potomac. Like others
absorbed in the workings of the Federal City, Ronald Reagan has never given any
visible sense that a real city surrounds him. Nor is President-elect George Bush
likely to, even though the White House is only four blocks from Washington's
city hall.
Unless one has acquired the kind of knowledge not generally found in the
corridors of power or on the blue-and-white tourmobiles, one image is likely to
be rare: Washington as the capital of black America. 'We have the very best of
what black America has to offer and we also have the very worst, says
Catherine Liggins Hughes, owner of radio stations WOL and WMMJ, talk show host
and community activist.
Seventy percent of Washington, D.C.'s 638,333 residents are black. Most of
the city's elected officials are black. The city has the highest median
black-household income in the country, a stable black middle class and a large
black intelligentsia, including many former Cabinet members and political
appointees, such as Donald F. McHenry, Clifford L. Alexander Jr. and Roger W.
Wilkins, who have stayed on in the capital.
This is ''the other Washington,' largely unknown, even to white residents of
the capital, a city whose municipal schizophrenia is evident even in its name:
high-powered officials and socialites who take the shuttle to New York live in
''Washington,'' but the city hall employee or the kid in the go-go music club is
from ''D.C.'
Two cities, two cultures, many tensions. ''Race relations are awful,' says a
frustrated former black political appointee. Washington's often contentious
Mayor, Marion S. Barry Jr., agrees. ''I think we are getting along better in the
workplace; I think it's worse socially,' he says. ' 'Now we go to white affairs
and my wife and I are the only black people there. And we got there because I
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am the Mayor. We go to black affairs and see no whites.
Perhaps the most powerful symbol of the distance and fundamental lack of
understanding between Washington's black and white residents is a concept called
'The Plan'' - the theory that white people systematically intend to reclaim the
city they lost control of during the troubled 60's. As evidence, believers point
to the continuing gentrification of formerly black neighborhoods, like Foggy
Bottom and Capitol Hill. They point to real-estate developers, the predominantly
white banking system and The Washington Post as The Plan's principal conduits.
They point to David A. Clarke, chairman of the City Council of the District of
Columbia, as foreshadowing one of The Plan's central tenets: a white mayor.
Although many people of all colors and economic levels dismiss the notion of
The Plan as preposterous, it has become a point of reference for most blacks.
When The Plan was mentioned to white people during a series of recent
interviews, few knew what it meant; black people knew, and had an opinion.
'Whites are going to drive the housing prices up, make it difficult for
blacks to get loans, and they are going to elect a white mayor, says Grier M.
Greene, a 27-year-old native Washingtonian who works as an information analyst
at The Greater Washington Research Center. Those are the basics of The Plan.
WHEN ASKED ABOUT LIFE IN ' ' THE OTHER Washington,' many of the 30 black and
white politicians, community, business and religious leaders, urban planners,
poor people, rich people and young adults interviewed pointed to the paradoxes
of living in the capital of the free world. Not until 1964 were Washingtonians
able to vote in Presidential elections. Since 1971, they have been represented
in Congress by a nonvoting delegate.
And only in 1974 did they regain a semblance of home rule (lost following the
Civil War), with an elected mayor and 13 City Council members.
They say that some of the tensions in the local political and social life of
today are the inevitable growing pains of a city that has undergone rapid
political and economic growth.
What also surfaces is the profound, almost conspiratorial, sense residents
have of living in a secret city within a national city, one which 19 million
tourists visited last year and to which 400,00 suburbanites commute each day,
many to Federal Government jobs.
With it all, Dennis E. Gale, professor of urban planning at George Washington
University and director of the Center for Washington Area Studies, says, ''This
city has developed new approaches to low-income housing and urban development,
so other cities look to D.C. for some ideas.
Catherine Hughes is less academic when speaking of the city's expansive
social welfare system, ''If you answer 'Yes' to 'Are you alive?' then we say,
'O.K., can we get you 50me clothes, can we get you some food, some housing?
she says. ' 'Need some transportation? How about some day care?' Poor people here
ain't poor by other people's standards.'
WHILE 'WASHINGTON'' CONCERNED ITSELF WITH Presidential politics, ''D.C.''
was more fascinated this summer with three events: the fight over whether
out-of-towners could hold city jobs, the proliferation of drugs and the
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early-morning shooting of a white teen-age intruder by Carl T. Rowan, a black
newspaper columnist. To outsiders, these may seem to have been unrelated; they
were, in fact, bound together in what many perceive as a web of racial politics.
''The mayor plays race politics, (Continued on Page 58) the white people on
the City Council play race politics, everybody is playing race politics, says
John A. Wilson, a black City Council member from Ward 2, which includes the poor
black neighborhood of Shaw and the elite white enclave of Georgetown. ''Our
biggest problem is the racial healing that needs to take place.
Roger Wilkins, the writer and civil rights leader, recognizes that the city
has made progress: 'Whatever people say about the District of Columbia today,
no matter how difficult things get, I am here to tell you that it is a lot
better now for everybody than it was before home rule. Then, many black people
lived in slum conditions and all blacks encountered almost daily humiliation in
a city dominated by a white police force and ruled by apppointed white
commissioners.
Under the current home-rule charter, Congress reserved the right to review
D.C.'s appropriated budget -of which the Federal Government provides only 16.6
percent - and all legislation passed by the City Council. It also retained
direct control over the Federal enclave, which encompasses 41 percent of the
city's 69 square miles.
One of the most confrontational episodes between Captiol Hill and the
District government occurred this summer. What catalyzed the dispute was a city
law requiring people who work in municipal jobs to live in D.C. Of the 45,000
city employees, 41 percent are not D.C. residents, having been grandfathered in
when the law took effect in 1980 or were exempted as essential employees with an
expertise unavailable among city residents.
A Congressional amendment that would permit nonresidents to qualify for
municipal jobs, while giving preference to D. C. residents, was introduced in
June by Representative Stan E. Parris. The D.C. Congressional committee member
represents a predominately white Virginia suburban district with 83,000
constituents who work in Washington. To expedite its passage, Parris tied the
motion to Congressional approval of the District's $3.2 billion 1989 budget.
Reaction in the city was swift. On the narrow streets of poor and black
neighborhoods in the Southeast and on radio call-in shows, Parris's contention
that qualified workers had to be brought in was seen as camouflage for something
else: people in mostly white suburbs were coveting the jobs of people living in
the mostly black city.
At a Ward 4 forum for City Council candidates, more than 40 residents in this
primarily black middle-class and residential area in one Northwest section of
the city vented their frustration over Congressional intrusion. Many saw it as
the unfolding of yet another phase of The Plan.
''I will not be deprived of a job in this city or pay taxes to support these
people who come into our community from the suburbs and then leave, a woman in
her early 30's said angrily.
The residency issue triggered an avalanche of Congressional intrusion into
local affairs. Congress not only canceled D.C.'s residency requirement, it
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repealed a key gay rights section of the city's human rights law, altered the
municipal government's AIDS insurance law and eliminated all public funding for
abortions in D.C., unless the mother's life was in danger. It tied these items
to the loss of funds if the City Council did not implement the measures by
certain dates. Congress also prohibited D.C. from expanding a chronically
overcrowded correctional facility in Lorton, Va. Stunned, some D.C. officials
threatened to ''close down the city.'' Once more, Congressional clout prevailed.
The District's Congressional delegate, Walter E. Fauntroy, observed: ' 'Now I
understand why Nelson Mandela said, 'I'd rather die in jail than to come out and
be told' that he did not deserve self-government.
THE CASE OF CARL Rowan's shooting a white 18-year-old student from the elite
suburb of Chevy Chase in the wrist began early on the morning of June 14 and
preoccupied the city for months.
Rowan argued that he was protecting his home and his family. Benjamin N.
Smith contended that he and his companions were only doing what everybody does
-sneaking into private pools in the overlapping Chevy Chase-D.C. neighborhood
for a middle-of-the-night swim.
The United States Attorney's office dropped unlawful entry charges against
Smith and 19-year-old Laura A. Bachman, the only two apprehended, on the
condition that they complete 40 hours of community service. But Rowan had to
stand trial for unlawful possession of an unregistered gun and unregistered
ammunition. Had the case not resulted in a mistrial, with a decision not to
retry, Rowan could have faced, if convicted, up to one year in prison and a
$1,000 fine on each count.
Residents of D.C. took the case personally. Typical of their reactions was
one from a caller to a radio talk show, who said: ''I can tell you that if those
children had been my black children and Carl Rowan had been David Brinkley my
babies would be in jail right now. Calvin W. Rolark, publisher of The
Washington Informer, a black weekly and a recognized community leader, accused
Frederick D. Cooke, the black District corporation counsel, of racism in
pressing charges against Rowan, who frequently criticizes the city government in
his columns. Rolark was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, ''I wish that
the corporation counsel were as judicious with Carl Rowan as the special
prosecutor was with Ed Meese.
DESPITE A GUN-CON-trol law that is one of the toughest in the country, D.C.
has the third highest murder rate in the nation. This summer, the rate soared.
During August, someone was killed every 18 hours on D.C. streets. By September,
the homicide rate topped the previous year's total of 225, and early in November
stood at 300.
A top rap song in the Washington area throughout the summer was ''D.C. Don't
Stand for Dodge City,'' by the Go Go Posse.
There is no law, no order
'cept the gun you hold.
Like the wild, wild
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West in all its calamity, but D.C. DON'T MEAN DODGE CITY
...
I looked in
the paper and there I read that three were injured and two were dead from crimes
motivated by a common tug, that five letter word we know as drugs
...
D.C.'s a capital town, but
...
sometimes it's like DODGE CITY
COPYRIGHT c1988, TIGER FLOWER PUBLISHING COMPANY.
As the song points out, the murder rate is a symptom of a serious drug
problem -Washington is one of the leading cities in cocaine- and heroin-related
deaths. When asked why he has not been able to control the problem, Mayor Barry
said, 'To blame me for the drug epidemic is like blaming you for being at 14th
and U'' - a rough neighborhood - ' 'and being robbed.'
''Epidemic''' accurately defines the problem's dimensions: between 1985 and
1987, adult drug arrests for sales rose 70 percent and juvenile arrests
increased an astonishing 456 percent. ''All these young people using drugs and
getting arrested,' Mayor Barry says, 'means we have an effective police
department.
With a local police force of 4,080, and a multidepartmental Federal force of
3,100, covering Federal buildings, parks and Embassy Row, Washington is among
the most heavily policed cities -yet there are still more than 80 open-air drug
markets. On a neighborhood level, some residents have taken matters into their
own hands. In the predominantly black Mayfair Mansions housing complex,
residents invited Nation of Islam members to drive drug dealers away. At
Kenilworth-Parkside, Kimi 0. Gray, a tenant leader in public housing, battles
drug dealers more directly. When thousands of junkies invaded her neighborhood,
she said, ' ' I organized our residents and we walked through this area for days
getting them out.'
Experts have long agreed that the real trick in controlling drug use is
education, prevention and treatment. But the drug problem has greatly stretched
the resources of D.C.'s existing treatment centers.
Mayor Barry offers an additional explanation for the intractability of the
drug problem. ''All these people who read Regardie's'' - a Washington business
magazine - ' 'and complain about drugs would be the first to say they don't want
facilities in their neighborhoods,' he says. ' 'These people who read
Regardie's'' are mostly whites.
Drugs in D.C. have also stigmatized those who neither deal nor use them.
Grier Greene knows that to be young, black and male in this city is to be
immediately suspect. Greene, whose role models are the entrepreneurs on the
cover of Black Enterprise, moonlights after his daytime white-collar job
delivering pizzas. ''You certainly don't make nearly as much money delivering
pizzas as selling crack,' he says ruefully. When he went to buy a car recently,
Greene, who comes from one of Washington's thousands of stable black families,
says, ''The woman sat there with my application and financial statement in front
of her and said, 'Do you work?' in this sort of insinuating tone. She was just
assuming that I sold drugs.'
LOCATED AS IT IS below the Mason- Dixon line, Washingon has traditionally
been Southern and, until the 1950's, segregated. Yet even during segregation, it
had a large, well-educated black middle and upper-middle class. Government jobs
were the vehicle of economic opportunity for the blacks who flooded into
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Washington after the 1940's.
After graduating from college in 1951, Elsie M. Monroe came to Washington to
work for the Army Map Service as a microfilm operator. ''The job wasn't really
rewarding,'' she recently recalled. ''But I was extremely proud because I was
working 5 days a week and I had sick and annual leave and, most importantly, I
was working for the Government.'
Yet D.C. was not the city Monroe had imagined. ''As the nation's capital it
was very disappointing, she said. ''I am from Richmond, the Gateway to the
South, and I never remember being turned away from a store there. But blacks
could not shop at Garfinckel's, an exclusive Washington store. Her eyes filled
with tears of remembered humiliation. ''You had the money; the money was the
color green, but your money would not spend in that store.
When Elsie Monroe arrived in Washington, the former Nixon speechwriter
Patrick J. Buchanan was growing up in the Northwest section of the city, an area
that continues to define the city for most white residents. Many businesses,
embassies, luxury hotels and fine restaurants are located there. The residential
areas are lush with large lawns and tree-lined streets.
'There were no race problems because we simply didn't interact,' Pat
Buchanan recalled one afternoon while waiting to tape a television show. ''That
bus on Connecticut Avenue symbolized it all: Black women came into our
neighborhood in the mornings to work in homes, while white men in their
snap-brimmed hats got on the bus to go to work downtown.
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and riots erupted
throughout Washington, this time of simplicity ended.
Nell E. MacCracken was having lunch at the Rive Gauche Restaurant in
Georgetown when, she recollected, ''They told us that we had better get home
because they were burning down the city. Blond and imposing, MacCracken is a
representative of a dying breed called cave dwellers' - white and affluent
members of Washington families of at least two generations long considered the
backbone of Washington society.
For many cave dwellers, the riots and home rule marked the decline of their
home town; it was now a more threatening place. Yet they were largely unaffected
by the riots; black neighborhoods burned, black people died.
THE PREDOMI-nantly black area across the Anacostia River is perceived by most
whites as a no-man's land. Poverty is, indeed, a part of life in many sections
east of the river, where 41 percent of local public housing is located. But
there is burgeoning community development, with local black groups like the
Marshall Heights Community Development Organization Inc. purchasing shopping
centers and luring banks to open branch offices. There are also gracious
neighborhoods to rival those in Chevy Chase; the only difference is that black
people, like Mayor Marion Barry, live in them.
Kimi Gray, a 43-year-old native Washingtonian and mother of five by the time
she was 19, is one of the moving forces behind resident management of public
housing. Gray's own 464-unit Kenilworth complex, whose tenants were recently
given five years to buy their apartments, now provides a number of services not
previously available: a co-op food store, a barber and beauty shop, a snack
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bar, a recreation center and a youth education program.
One of Gray's political heroes is Marion Barry. She believes that residents
of ' 'the other Washington,' or those whose children go to public schools and
who are black, will guarantee his re-election in 1990.
Not all residents east of the river are Barry supporters. Absalom F. Jordan
quit his $35,000-a-year municipal job to make an unsuccessful bid this year for
city council representative from Ward 8. His campaign office was broken into and
burglarized before the primary election. Jordan attributed it to dirty tricks,
not vandalism. As he sat toying with the parts for a home-security system,
Jordan said, 'There have been lots and lots of promises made to this part of
the city, but fortunately,' - for Barry - ' ' voters here have a short memory.
During the 1960's, Washington became the national focus of the civil rights
movement and a metaphor for it locally. Among those who appeared on the
political scene then was Marion Barry. AS a dashiki-wearing community organizer
for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Barry was 50 effective that
The Washington Post reported that ' 'he was fast becoming the leading catalyst
for change in Washington.
His reputation since he was elected Mayor in 1978 has suffered from personal
excesses and managerial problems: at least 11 municipal officials have been
convicted of corruption, and a dozen have resigned or left under a cloud of
alleged misconduct.
Barry himself has gained unwanted attention for escapades in his private life
and for frequent unofficial absences from the city. This summer when he went on
vacation to an undisclosed location billing D.C. more than $2,000 for rooms
booked at the New York Hilton and Towers to mislead the press -he had to deny
rumors that he was at a drug treatment center. He later revealed that he had
gone to a health spa in upstate New York to recover from the stress of being
mayor.
His response to such visible city problems like clearing snow off the streets
or filling potholes has been interpreted as increasing indifference to the nuts
and bolts of managing a city. Yet Barry has effectively attracted new
development and created an expansive social-welfare system. After the
Congressional assault on home rule, when demonstrations were being organized on
Capitol Hill by community leaders, Barry's was one of the few voices urging
moderation.
His third term runs out in 1990, but he has made it abundantly clear that he
has no plans to retire. ''I'm not perfect, but I am perfect for Washington, is
one of his most frequently heard sayings. When asked if he thought he had an
image problem, Barry shook his head and said, ''I have a media problem.
Aside from Barry's deep affection for the office and a well-entrenched
political machine, there is another reason behind his being derisively referred
to by one small white- owned local paper as 'Mayor for Life.
As Dennis Gale, the Washington specialist sees it, ''Marion Barry is a guy
who is all dressed up politically with no place to go. Does he become a Senator
or a Congressman? No, he can't. Why do you think there is so much interest in
this city for statehood?''
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THE DISTRICT OF CO-lumbia, in effect, has a one-party - Democratic system.
Carol Schwartz, white, Jewish, Republican, female and raised in Texas ''I have
every handicap there 15'' - is the only non-Democrat on the City Council. ' 'The
one thing I don't like about Washington, she says, ''is that you don't have
the competition of a two-party system. It has not been helpful in establishing
good government.'
Since 1975, there have been about 25 elections for various D.C. officials and
only 10 incumbents from the 25 major elected offices have been unseated. In
September's Democratic primary - the real election in D.C. all the incumbents
who ran were re-elected, despite the stench of ethics charges against a City
Council member and Federal and city probes about alleged misuse of funds by
another.
Political gridlock extends from the school board to the city's first and only
Congressional delegate, Walter Fauntroy, who was one of Martin Luther King's
closest advisers. When asked if, after 17 years, he had any plans to leave
Congress, Fauntroy was incredulous. ''You mean
just,
quit?
Why
no,''
he
said. ' ' When I first came to Congress I thought the seniority system was a
terrible thing, but now I have seniority in several committees. This is all the
clout that the people of the District of Columbia have.'
Technically, Fauntroy is correct. But he may be missing the point.
''I don't mean this as being critical of the current group of people, but we
have to make the transition to the next generation of leaders, says Frederick
Cooke, the District corporation counsel. ''Like lots of cities that happen to
have had black leadership in the recent past, our leaders tended to be people
who were very much involved in the civil rights movement. The manager-leader,
like Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore, is maybe the kind of person we are headed
for.
John Wilson, the City Council member who also rose through the civil rights
movement and is seen as a possible successor to Marion Barry, is acutely
sensitive to the problems and tensions in D.C. He says:
''I am in one of the only wards that could elect a white person. And every
year a group of white people ask me if I'm going to go 50 that there will be an
opportunity for more white leadership in this city. And I wonder if they ever
ask themselves how I feel when they do that,' he said, his voice cracking with
emotion.
''I don't think that there has been anybody on the City Council more
protective of the interests of all ethnic groups and still they ask me that. I
have had a wonderful life in this city. I really love it. But I hurt. I truly
hurt.'
GRAPHIC: Photos of Grier Greene an information analyst (pg. 44); Kimi Gray with
neighbor children (Eugene Richards/Magnum) (pg. 45); Talk-show host Catherine
Hughes (pg. 46); young women and family in her neighborhood (pg. 47); Marion
Barry, Washington's Mayor in 1978 (pg. 47);
SUBJECT: BLACKS (IN US)
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(c) 1988 The New York Times, November 20, 1988
NAME: SZEGEDY-MASZAK, MARIANNE
GEOGRAPHIC: WASHINGTON (DC)
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13TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
The Associated Press
The materials in the AP file were compiled by The Associated Press. These
materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The
Associated Press.
August 1, 1985, Thursday, AM cycle
SECTION: Washington Dateline
LENGTH: 151 words
HEADLINE: Self-Help Group Gets Private Grant
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
KEYWORD: BRF--Public Housing
BODY:
A national self-help group said Wednesday it has received a private $1.9
million grant to promote resident management, home ownership and business
development at public housing projects in 15 cities.
Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise,
said resident management associations at six projects have reduced crime,
improved services and rehabilitated housing.
"Not only is it good for the people living there, but it is cost-effective,"
he said.
The money from the Amoco Foundation will be used to train prospective
resident managers, offer staff support, and hire a national accounting firm to
provide information on financing home purchases.
Participating in the program are housing projects in Atlanta, Baltimore,
Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Jersey City, Kansas City, Los Angeles,
Louisville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Tulsa and Washington.
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6TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 Newsday, Inc.;
Newsday
May 30, 1989, Tuesday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. 48
LENGTH: 790 words
HEADLINE: A Faint Pulse Detected in Foreign Policy
BYLINE: William Pfaff. William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist based at the
International Herald Tribune in Paris.
KEYWORD: COLUMN; OPINION; GEORGE BUSH; TRAVEL; MIDEAST; FOREIGN POLICY; NORTH
ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION; ANNIVERSARY; SOVIET UNION; ARMS CONTROL
BODY:
PRESIDENT GEORGE Bush travels to the 40th anniversary North Atlantic Treaty
summit with elements - but only elements - of a rethought American foreign
policy in his briefcase. The vast policy re-examination his administration has
conducted since January seems to have been a waste of time, producing, as such
exercises do, recapitulations of conventional views, expressed in
committee-speak. On the other hand, two important recent shifts imply change of
direction and of pace, suggesting that individual intelligence is being
substituted for committee work.
First is movement on the Middle East, presaged by the Reagan administration's
decision to open talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Secretary of
State James Baker's measured speech a week ago to the American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee expressed a welcome firmness in distinguishing American from
Israeli interests - as the current Israeli government defines its interests -
and in defending the American conception of what a Middle East peace settlement
requires.
Despite Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's rejection of Baker's
comments, they have had serious effect. Shamir is an intelligent and complex
leader in an extremely difficult domestic political situation. Baker's "useless"
comments (Shamir's word) may prove anything but useless to Shamir in dealing
with his domestic problem. The very reiteration of that epithet by Shamir was,
psychologically speaking, of interest. The Middle East deadlock has been shifted
a whit, thanks to this sober statement of what the U.S. government wants to 522
happen, and by its adoption of public as well as private diplomacy to get what
it wants.
Equally welcome is Bush's new tone in reacting to the latest Soviet arms
reduction proposals, evident in his speech Wednesday to the Coast Guard
Academy. The president apparently rejected the draft speech that had been
prepared for him and in the text actually delivered responded warmly to the
Soviet Union's latest proposal on conventional arms reductions.
It was a marked departure from the grudgingly defensive series of foreign
policy speeches he has given in recent weeks. Meant to redefine U.S. foreign
policy, they actually displayed a disturbing poverty of thought.
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Wednesday's speech in Connecticut was no doubt Bush's reaction to the
battering his administration has been taking in the press for its negativism and
passivity, faced with Mikhail Gorbachey's initiatives - leading up to the White
House's foolish characterization of Gorbachev as "a drugstore cowboy." This
attitude toward Moscow has seemed motivated more by political timidity, though,
than by calculation. Bush's people did not want to go wrong, or to run domestic
political risk, hence they practiced what they thought was prudence, demanding
further tests of Soviet seriousness and still more Soviet concessions. This
merely made them seem unserious. They sought the safety of inaction, which
actually proved costly.
They function in a Washington where most of the political class remains
confused, even disoriented, by the changes that have come in the Soviet Union
and in the rest of the Marxist world, and are now coming in all of Europe. Forty
years of Cold War provided a framework and the parameters of the country's
modern foreign policy, and as these change the country's political class is
rather lost. Senators and congressmen, as well as the administration, are
assailed by ideologues of press and think-tank, too often with investments in
the closed mind. The executive branch of government is full of people with
professional commitments to existing policy and existing solutions, hence to
immobility.
Washington is not a particularly intellectual place, and relatively few
people there (or anyplace else) think seriously and professionally about where
U.S. foreign policy ought ultimately take the country. Henry Kissinger became a
celebrity in the 1970s because he was virtually the only man in high office who
did think and talk about that while actually possessing power.
Neither President Bush nor Secretary Baker would pretend to be intellectuals
or heavy geopolitical thinkers, but they seem to be listening to something other
than the conventional judgments and the conventional wisdom; and this is
reassuring. The risk the United States has courted in recent months has been
that of irrelevance. One reason the West Germans launched into an independent
course on short-range nuclear missile negotiations was that they could not get
an intelligent response from Washington to their real political problems.
Washington simply has not seemed a serious place, and it is overdue that this
changes. Mikhail Gorbachev is serious - all too serious.
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7TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The New York Times Company;
The New York Times
May 30, 1989, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 12, Column 1; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 1323 words
HEADLINE: How a Frustrated Bush Moved to Out-Gorbachev Gorbachev on Weapons
BYLINE: By BERNARD WEINRAUB, Special to The New York Times
DATELINE: BRUSSELS, May 29
BODY:
Ten days ago, a handful of the highest-ranking officials of the Bush
Administration gathered in George Bush's Kennebunkport home on a rocky
promontory overlooking the Maine coast. Mr. Bush told the group he wanted to
take ''a bold step'' to deal with Mikhail S. Gorbachey's initiatives.
Administration officials, in relating the events that led up to today's
announcement of Mr. Bush's new arms control proposals, said that Mr. Bush told
the group he was irritated at both his own agencies and at the Europeans.
He was irked that the Defense and State Department bureaucracies had said
that cuts in American troops and planes in Europe were unthinkable. And he was
irritated at the Europeans for complaining to senior American officials that
United States foreign policy seemed improvised and foundering.
He was also unhappy with the West Germans for seeking immediate talks with
the Russians on reducing short-range nuclear weapons. And he was irritated at
domestic critics of his foreign policy speeches.
Annoyance With Gorbachev
Above all, his closest aides said, Mr. Bush was annoyed with Mr. Gorbachev
for privately sending to him what he believed were mixed signals while preparing
to make public a major proposal on reducing troops, tanks and artillery in
Europe.
By the time most of the senior officials left, Mr. Bush had made his basic
decision to cut 30,000 American troops in Europe, accept the Soviet position
that aircraft in Europe should be included in a conventional arms treaty in
Europe and fix a date within the year to accomplish the reductions by 1992 or
1993.
The initiative gave Mr. Bush, who is by nature very cautious, something that
had eluded him for the four months of his Presidency: a foreign policy
initiative that rivaled those of Mr. Gorbachev.
By all accounts, Mr. Bush decided to forge a major arms control initiative
around May 10, when Mr. Gorbachev, in Moscow, indicated privately to the
visiting Secretary of State, James A. Baker 3d, that the Soviet Union was moving
toward the framework of the Western position for cutting conventional arms.
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'Seriousness of Intent'
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had begun conventional arms talks in
Vienna on March 9, proposing that an agreement be limited to tanks, artillery
and armored personnel carriers. The Soviet Union wanted to broaden negotiations
to include aircraft and troops. Now the Soviets seemed to be moving toward the
allies' position.
''Gorbachev discussed with the secretary a general Soviet response to our
March 9 proposal,' a senior Administration official said. ''It was lacking in
several respects as far as we were concerned, but nevertheless did show an
overall thrust in the direction of the NATO proposal, and did indicate a
seriousness of intent.
Mr. Bush quickly ordered Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to shape an arms control initiative in response the secret one made by
Mr. Gorbachev.
But Mr. Bush's enthusiasm was dampened by public comments by Mr. Gorbachev
and his Foreign Secretary, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, in the weeks that followed.
The comments led Administration officials to suggest that Mr. Gorbachev was
grandstanding.
Private VS. Public
At the same time that Mr. Gorbachev was privately informing Washington that
Moscow was moving toward the West on the conventional arms issue, the Soviet
leader announced he would withdraw 500 nuclear warheads from Eastern Europe, a
move described by Mr. Cheney as ''a pittance'' and a ''p.r. ploy'' that only
deepened divisions in the NATO alliance. Mr. Shevardnadze then threatened to
retain SS-23 nuclear missiles banned under the 1987 treaty on intermediate-range
missiles (although he later retracted the threat).
It was then disclosed that Mr. Gorbachev had told Mr. Bush in a letter that
he had stopped sending arms to Nicaragua. This also annoyed Mr. Bush, because he
saw it as another empty gesture in light of what Washington views as Cuba's
major shipments of Soviet-made arms to Nicaragua.
''It was frustrating because Gorbachev was getting a lot of credit but
producing nothing,' a senior Administration official said.
Despite this, Mr. Bush and his senior aides, including Brent Scowcroft, the
national security adviser, and Secretary of State Baker felt that the private
Gorbachev proposals on conventional arms demanded attention.
Crowe Heavily Involved
Adm. William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was heavily
involved in drafting the American plan.
Several Administration aides said that the decisions on the plan were kept to
a handful of ranking officials, and out of the hands of arms control and defense
specialists in the Pentagon and State Department who have argued that reductions
in manpower sought by Moscow would be extremely difficult to verify.
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(c) 1989 The New York Times, May 30, 1989
Reductions in land-based combat aircraft have also been opposed in the past
by some influential officials in the Government, partly in response to French
opposition.
A senior Administration official said that the Soviet proposal to include
planes and helicopters posed a problem because they are regarded as
principally a defensive part of our posture. He said the proposal to reduce
troops was problematic because of the difficulties of verification.
'But the President decided it was important enough to try to exploit this
opportunity,' the official said, and that resulted in the proposal today.
'We'll Deal With Both'
Another senior aide said: ''The President felt we had a very serious
negotiating position from them. We ought to come forward with a position that
meets their concerns.'
'He wanted something clean, easy to understand,'' said a White House aide.
'He wanted to do something bold. Why not focus on U.S. and Soviet troops? It's
easy to implement and, besides, it responds to Congressional pressure on the
need for more burden-sharing by Europe.''
Coincidentally, the Kennebunkport meeting took place on May 19, the day
before the visit of the French President, Francois Mitterrand.
Mr. Baker and Mr. Scowcroft stayed on for the Mitterrand visit and discussed
an element of the proposal designed to ease the dispute between the United
States and West Germany over short-range nuclear missiles.
The United States has resisted Bonn's call for talks soon on the missiles,
arguing that they might result in the elimination of the weapons and leave
Western Europe vulnerable.
'Accelerate the Timetable'
Mr. Mitterrand had suggested days earlier that NATO await the progress of
negotiations on conventional arms before reaching an agreement on short-range
nuclear missiles. The President told the French leader that he was working on a
similar proposal.
In his proposal today, Mr. Bush urged both sides to ''accelerate the
timetable'' for reaching an overall agreement on conventional arms reductions.
The Soviet Union had set a target date of 1997.
''I believe that it should be possible to reach such agreement in six months
or maybe a year, and to accomplish the reductions by 1992 or 1993,' said Mr.
Bush.
It was unclear if Mr. Bush told Mr. Mitterrand about the aircraft proposal,
or if the French were offically informed later in the week by Lawrence S.
Eagleburger, the Deputy Secretary of State, who was sent abroad late last week
to brief allies on the Bush plan.
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(c) 1989 The New York Times, May 30, 1989
Last Tuesday, the Soviets officially placed their conventional arms plan on
the table at the talks in Vienna.
That night, Mr. Bush scrapped a foreign policy speech he planned to deliver
at a commencement ceremony the next day at the Coast Guard Academy in New
London, Conn. Speechwriters worked on drafts through the night, and Mr. Bush
reviewed the speech at 6:30 the next morning. He was still working on the speech
while flying to New London.
''The Soviets are now being forthcoming,' Mr. Bush told the Coast Guard
graduates. ' 'We hope to achieve the reductions that we seek.
SUBJECT: UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; UNITED STATES ARMAMENT AND
DEFENSE; US-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS-USSR; ARMAMENT, DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES;
ARMS CONTROL AND LIMITATION AND DISARMAMENT
ORGANIZATION: NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION (NATO); NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY
ORGANIZATION (NATO); STATE, DEPARTMENT OF; DEFENSE, DEPARTMENT OF
NAME: WEINRAUB, BERNARD; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL S; BUSH, GEORGE (PRES)
GEOGRAPHIC: EUROPE; UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (USSR); WEST GERMANY
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8
10TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Times Mirror Company;
Los Angeles Times
May 28, 1989, Sunday, Home Edition
SECTION: Opinion; Part 5; Page 1; Column 5; Opinion Desk
LENGTH: 1759 words
HEADLINE: IN WORLD OF CHANGE, BUSH STANDS STILL
BYLINE: By William Schneider, William Schneider is a contributing editor to
Opinion.
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
George Bush is a status-quo politician. That's why he was elected President
last year. Americans liked the status quo under Ronald Reagan and they voted to
preserve it.
Reagan, however, was not a status-quo politician. His response to Mikhail S.
Gorbachev was remarkably open -- some would say naive. But the last thing anyone
would say about Reagan is that he was fearful of change.
That is exactly what people are saying about Bush. "I think perhaps this is a
time for caution," said Bush in response to the stirring upheaval in China.
Caution? At a time when 1 million people are putting their lives on the line for
democracy? That is the sort of thing that could give caution a bad name.
Today Gorbachev has become the symbol of change in the world. Wherever he
goes, he seems to spread democracy in his wake. "We need someone like Gorbachev,
a man with vision," said a student protester in Beijing last week. Imagine a
protester saying that about Bush, who announced that it would be improper for a
U.S. President to advise the students "what their course of action should be."
Bush added, "We do not exhort in a way that is going to stir up a military
confrontation." What does he think he and Reagan have been doing with the
Contras for eight years?
Gorbachev represents previously unthinkable aspirations, namely, reforming
communism and ending the Cold War. The Bush Administration counters with "the
status quo plus," a policy the President describes as "a deliberate,
step-by-step approach to East-West relations." In other words, let's slow things
down.
When Gorbachev said he would stop sending weapons to Nicaragua, the White
House responded with annoyance. Press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater dismissed the
gesture as a "public relations gambit" perpetrated by a "drugstore cowboy." The
White House just doesn't get it. To say the Soviets are engaging in "public
relations" implies that they are being superficial while we are being
substantive. But they are reforming their system and making unilateral arms cuts
while we are saying, "Let's wait and see."
They act. We complain. They withdraw 500 nuclear missiles from Europe.
Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney complains they have "50 many rat-holes
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(c) 1989 Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1989
over there in Eastern Europe that 500 is a pittance." This kind of small-minded
response gives the United States the same image the Soviet Union had when Andrei
Y. Vishinsky represented them at the United Nations and earned the nickname "Mr.
Nyet."
There is more than image at stake, however. The United States does not seem
able to control events -- or even influence them - in Panama, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and China. When a
country loses its ability to influence events, it loses power. The United States
gained power under Reagan because he succeeded so often in controlling events --
although sometimes, as in Lebanon, he failed. Bush seems buffeted by events
more like Jimmy Carter.
Conservatives are becoming critical. They were outraged over an incident that
happened during Bush's visit to China earlier this year. The Chinese government
forcibly excluded China's best-known dissident from a banquet Bush had invited
him to. Bush protested the government's action only after aides pressured him.
Recently, at the urging of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee adopted a resolution supporting the student demonstrators in
Beijing and warning Chinese leaders that violent suppression of the protesters
would "seriously damage relations with the United States." At the same time, a
State Department official said, "The government in trouble in China is a
friendly government with which we have had good relations. We don't wish that
government ill." Asked to characterize Bush's response to the upheaval in China,
one Republican senator said, "He's taken out a patent on banality."
Liberals sometimes sound as if they miss Reagan. Rep. Stephen J. Solarz
(D-N.Y.) urged that Bush "publicly identify himself" with the movement for
democracy in China by inviting Chinese students to meet with him. "It's time for
the President of the United States to find words to encourage them in their
struggle for freedom," Solarz said. "Isn't this what we've been talking about
for all these years?"
Indeed it is. The fact is, we are winning the Cold War. The Soviets are
accepting our initiatives. We have been complaining that it makes no sense for
NATO to negotiate a reduction in short-range nuclear missiles as long as the
Soviets have a significant edge in conventional forces. So last week, the
Soviets offered sweeping reductions in their conventional forces.
The Soviet offer astonished some U.S. officials. But Bush, who had to scrap
his prepared remarks at the Coast Guard Academy the next day, responded
petulantly. The Soviet offers, he said, "confirm what we've said all along -
that Soviet military power far exceeds the levels needed to defend the
legitimate security interests of the U.S.S.R."
Bush hears what the Soviets say, but he says he doesn't see anything
warranting a substantive U.S. response. "I welcome (Gorbachev) proposals," Bush
said last Sunday at Boston University, "but I would like to see them
implemented."
Others are less suspicious. Right now, only 26% of the U.S. public believes
that "the military threat from the Soviet Union is constantly growing and
presents a real, immediate danger to the United States." That figure is down
from 64% in 1983. The status quo is changing. But no one in the Bush
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Administration has the courage or the imagination to say SO.
Remember when Jesse Jackson went to Syria to rescue the captured U.S. pilot?
Reagan refused to be embarrassed. Instead, he held a ceremony at the White House
to celebrate the occasion. Bush seems unable to celebrate the breakthrough in
U.S. -Soviet relations without casting suspicion on Moscow's motives.
It takes a secure leader to do something like that. Reagan was secure.
Despite all the nutty things he said, his sense of personal security was always
reassuring. Bush usually says sensible things, but he is 50 easily rattled that
he makes people nervous. He seems to be paralyzed by two fears -- the fear of
being called a wimp and the fear of creating a controversy.
Bush refuses to criticize the Beijing government for fear of provoking a
controversy. "The world has a stake in China's economic progress, national
security and political vitality," the President said in a statement issued at
the height of the upheaval last week. "The United States hopes to see the
continuing implementation of economic and political reforms, which undoubtedly
will also help advance these goals." Take that, communist oppressors!
Bush takes a tough line with the Soviets to show he's no pushover for this
glasnost thing. In his May 12 speech, Bush demanded the Soviets pass a series of
"tests" to show they had changed. If they passed, the United States would be
willing to go "beyond containment." Last week, the President spelled out the
reward. If the Soviets are good, he offered to "integrate the Soviet Union into
the community of nations." In other words, invite them to accept the status quo.
Bush's foreign policy is Reaganism without risks. Or as one foreign-policy
specialist described it, "the Reagan agenda pushed by civil servants."
The fact is, Gorbachev is doing something conservatives have dreamed about
for 40 years. He is rolling back communism. A free election was held in the
Soviet Union. In China, protesters openly defied the communist government and
succeeded in challenging its legitimacy. In Poland, a communist government will
face an organized opposition movement at the polls next month -- and it will
probably lose. According to the government's poll of Poles, only 12% of the
voters say they will vote for the communists.
Is communism in its death throes? A lot of communists say yes. In Hungary, a
radical reform faction seems likely to take over the Communist Party. They are
calling for a multiparty system, a complete transformation of the economy -- and
withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, in favor of "neutralism guaranteed
by the two superpowers."
The totalitarian model is crumbling. That model depends on keeping a close
link between control of the economy and the monopoly of power. In the Soviet
Union, Gorbachev loosened up on the monopoly of power and allowed non-communist
candidates to compete in elections. As a result, the party is under pressure to
allow a freer economy. In China, Deng Xiaoping loosened up on the party's
control of the economy. Now its monopoly of power is being challenged.
No communist leader, not even Gorbachev, believes a communist party should
have to compete for power with an organized opposition. The purpose of glasnost
is to allow for change and reform within the party. This year's Soviet election
was a gigantic primary. Independents were allowed to participate, but
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communist rule was never threatened.
The protests in China last week were a kind of impromptu Iowa caucus.
Participants started out by calling for a "dialogue" with the authorities and
demanding recognition of their movement as "patriotic" -- that is, as legitimate
rather than "counterrevolutionary." But as in Iowa, the media attention made the
participants feel powerful, and they ended up demanding the ouster of the prime
minister. That's when the authorities decided to crack down.
Totalitarianism requires the party be completely identified with the system.
Opposition to the party becomes "counterrevolutionary" - i.e., treason.
Separate the party from the system, however, and you make democracy possible.
That is what is happening in the Soviet Union, China, Poland and Hungary.
Movements are emerging that claim to be loyal to the system ("patriotic") but
critical of the Communist Party. When will we know that communism is doomed?
When a ruling Communist Party loses power to the opposition. That has never
happened. But at times it looked possible last week.
And it had the Bush Administration worried. Secretary of State James A. Baker
III said at a news conference, "I don't think it would be in the best interests
of the United States for us to see significant instability in the People's
Republic of China, just like I don't think it's in the best interests of the
United States for us to see significant instability in the Soviet Union."
The message of the Bush Administration is clear: Democracy is fine, as long
as it doesn't disturb the status quo.
TYPE: Opinion
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Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
May 28, 1989, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: FIRST SECTION; PAGE A30
LENGTH: 951 words
HEADLINE: Bush Finds Theme of Foreign Policy: 'Beyond Containment'
BYLINE: Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: ROME, May 27, 1989
BODY:
President Bush has found the grand theme of his administration's foreign
policy in the idea of moving "beyond containment" to a new era of international
cooperation with the Soviet Union, according to White House officials
accompanying Bush on his first presidential trip to Europe.
Bush broached the concept in his Soviet policy speech at Texas A&M University
May 12 and repeated it with growing emphasis in his addresses at Boston
University last Sunday, at the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, and in his
departure remarks in Washington and arrival remarks in Rome Friday. So far,
however, the idea has not received the prominence that Bush's aides say it
deserves.
At Boston University last Sunday, Bush defined his approach to the Soviet
Union as "moving beyond containment, to seek to integrate the Soviets into the
community of nations, to help them share the rewards of international
cooperation." In a press conference on the same occasion, Bush called the
concept "a bold one" and described it as a goal of his administration.
If taken seriously as a U.S. goal, the concept is a striking reversal of the
central objective of American policy in the past four decades: to contain the
Soviet Union by building military, economic and political barriers and
counterpressures to Soviet expansion. His aides say such a sweeping shift --
executed in a step-by-by step fashion and tightly conditioned on Soviet
reciprocity is precisely what Bush has in mind.
A White House press briefing Thursday morning by a senior member of the
National Security Council staff further explained Bush's concept. In that
briefing, "beyond containment" was termed "a positive reaction to reform in the
Soviet Union and a radical conceptual departure for American policy in the
postwar period toward the U.S.S.R."
The NSC briefer drew a sharp distinction between this concept and the
short-lived policy of detente in the early 1970s, which he defined as an attempt
to manage superpower competition with "elaborate rules of the game" because of
the implicit assumption on both sides that nothing could be done about the root
causes of the conflict.
"The president's policy is quite different," the briefer declared. "We want
the Soviet Union to become a full partner in the international system and to
enjoy the benefits of a system that has supported political freedom and
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economic prosperity around the world.
"We will of course be prudent, given cycles of cooperation and conflict with
the Soviet Union. But this time the Soviet Union may be ready to alter
fundamentally its military forces, institutions and international behavior. We
and the Soviets, for the first time in the postwar period, can build over time a
stable, cooperative and open relationship that will endure, unlike [in] the
past."
The same White House official, who accompanied Bush to Europe, said today the
concept arose from informal and intimate discussions between the president and
several senior foreign policy advisors in the weeks immediately preceding the
Texas A&M speech.
At that point the formal interagency review of U.S. policy toward the Soviet
Union had been completed, with little in the way of major ideas surviving this
formal and, in the view of senior administation figures, sterile process.
"The label of status quo plus is a fair way to characterize the result of the
policy review," said the NSC official. "But the president had repeatedly said he
wanted something more - a way of expressing a long-term vision for U.S.-Soviet
relations which is optimistic in character yet recognizes that we have to
proceed in a step-by-step way."
As explained by this official, the concept at this point is "a distant
strategic objective -------- like Mt. Kilimanjaro, something you can see in the
distance as a goal."
As to specific actions, the official said no operational blueprint has been
drawn up for reaching Bush's goal, but he maintained that establishing and
enunciating the objective are of fundamental importance. He said many future
actions, including some of the changes to be disclosed early next week in U.S.
and NATO alliance military policy and in Western economic sanctions against the
Soviet Union should be seen in the context of movement toward new relationships
with Moscow.
Going "beyond containment" has been discussed with congressional leaders and,
in diplomatic channels, with key U.S. allies, the official said.
The concept of containment of the Soviet Union was first spelled out in 1946,
in the famous "long telegram" from George F. Kennan, then a senior official in
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and made public the following year in an unsigned
version of Kennan's article published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
A public declaration of U.S. intention to move "beyond containment and
detente" was made on June 15, 1983, by then Secretary of State George P. Shultz
in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Shultz declaration, which was quickly forgotten, came in a period of
unusually high tension between the United States and the Soviet Union shortly
after President Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." Dramatic
progress in improving U.S.-Soviet relations did not begin until Mikhail
Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin in March 1985.
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Moscow's initial reaction to Bush's plan to welcome the Soviet Union into the
commonwealth of nations was less than enthusiastic. After his speech in Texas,
the Communist Party newspaper Pravda accused Bush of condescension, saying, "To
put it mildly, we are bewildered at the attempts of the president to pose
conditions under which the U.S. will work to include the U.S.S.R. in the world
community."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, PRESIDENT BUSH AND ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER CIRIACO DE MITA
EXCHANGE TOASTS FOLLOWING A LAVISH BLACK TIE DINNER AT THE VILLA MADAMA IN ROME
SATURDAY NIGHT. AP; AP,, REUTER, REUTER
TYPE: NATIONAL NEWS, FOREIGN NEWS
SUBJECT: ITALY; GOVERNMENT / OFFICIAL TRAVEL; NATO; SUMMITS AND CONFERENCES;
ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT
NAME: GEORGE BUSH; CIRIACO DE MITA
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Copyright (c) 1989 Reuters
May 26, 1989, Friday, PM cycle
LENGTH: 749 words
HEADLINE: BUSH DEPARTS FOR EUROPE SEEKING ALLIANCE UNITY
BYLINE: By Laurence McQuillan
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
KEYWORD: NATO-BUSH
BODY:
President Bush, starting a European trip highlighted by his first NATO
summit, vowed Friday to tear down the barriers that divide Europe.
"For too long, unnatural and inhuman barriers have divided East from West,"
he said during departure ceremonies at Andrews Air Force Base in the nearby
Maryland suburbs.
"We hope to overcome that division, to see a Europe that is truly free,
united and at peace," he said.
Bush made his remarks amid a newspaper report he was prepared to offer
cutting as many as 34,000 U.S. troops in Europe as a response to a proposal by
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for slashing the size of Eastern bloc forces.
Asked about the Washington Times story, that Bush would propose an up to 10
percent cut in U.S. troop strength in Western Europe when a two-day NATO summit
begins Monday in Brussels, a White House spokesman said "any specific proposal
which he has to make would be made to the allies in Brussels."
Gorbachev formally proposed cutting 1.26 million Soviet troops in Eastern
Europe, along with removing tens of thousands of tanks, artillery and armored
vehicles.
Bush has been criticized for failing to respond to a series of Gorbachev
proposals that the Kremlin leader says would ease East-West tensions.
"America is a proud partner in the Atlantic alliance--and American interests
have been well-served by the alliance," Bush said before departing for Rome, the
first stop in a week-long trip that also will take him to Bonn and London.
Bush faces a major test at his first NATO summit- with the United States and
West Germany pitted against each other in a fight over entering negotiations
with the Soviet Union on reducing short-range nuclear missiles (SNF).
The West Germans have led a spirited challenge to Washington's refusal to
start the talks immediately--straining relations as NATO nears its 40th
anniversary.
The United States and Britain insist that the Soviet Union needs to reduce
the size of its conventional forces in Eastern Europe before negotiations
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could begin on nuclear weapons.
But in a Wednesday speech at the Coast Guard Academy, Bush seemed to
shift his tone by welcoming Gorbachey's latest proposal to trim East bloc
conventional forces in Europe as "forthcoming."
National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft said later that Bush, who
personally rewrote the speech at the last moment, was concerned that an earlier
series of foreign policy addresses had been regarded as too negative.
Bush, in Friday's remarks, stressed that "we welcome the political and
economic liberalization that has taken place 50 far in the Soviet Union and in
some countries of Eastern Europe. We watching hoping that more changes will
follow."
He also reiterated his belief that a vigilant NATO alliance remained
essential to U.S. and European security.
"Today, Europe is enjoying a period of unparalleled prosperity and
uninterrupted peace- longer than any it has known in the modern age. NATO had
made the difference- and the Alliance will prove every bit as important to
Amrican and European security in the decade ahead," he said.
Even as he spoke of the importance of the alliance, he was locked in a thorny
dispute with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl about NATO's nuclear policy.
With the backing of many of the alliance's smaller countries, Kohl is
pressing for early talks with Moscow on reducing SNF weapons with a range of
less than 300 miles.
The West Germany leader also is resisting U.S. and British demands for
modernizing the alliance's aging Lance missiles, which are based in his country.
Washington and London say talks on short-range arms, most of which would be
used on German soil in the event of war, should be put off until the Soviet
Union agrees to and begins implementing a conventional arms reduction agreement
that would give NATO and the Warsaw bloc equivalent forces in Europe.
The United States fears that SNF talks would ultimately lead to the
elimination of nuclear weapons from Europe and leave the continent at the mercy
of Soviet numerical superiority in conventional forces.
White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged Thursday it was unlikely
the dispute over nuclear policy could be resolved in time for next week's
summit. But he insisted the disagreement would dominate the meeting, which has
been intended as a celebration of the alliance's 40th anniversary.
Bush heads for Brussels Sunday after two days in Italy. He plans stops in
West Germany and Britain after the summit.
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Copyright (c) 1989 Chicago Tribune Company;
Chicago Tribune
May 25, 1989, Thursday, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 8; ZONE: C
LENGTH: 718 words
HEADLINE: Open your ledgers, Bush urges Soviets
BYLINE: By Janet Cawley, Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: NEW LONDON, Conn.
BODY:
President Bush on Wednesday praised the Soviets for their "forthcoming"
proposals on arms reductions and suggested they now open their ledgers on
military expenditures, as well.
In his commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy, delivered less than
two days before his departure for Europe and a NATO summit, Bush did not refer
specifically to Soviet proposals Tuesday for further cuts in their military
forces in Europe as part of an agreement with NATO countries on conventional
arms.
But White House aide Roman Popadiuk said Bush included those most recent
proposals, as outlined by Soviet arms negotiators in Vienna, when he said: "The
issues are complex, stakes are very high. But the Soviets are now being
forthcoming and we hope to achieve the (arms) reductions that we seek.
"Let me emphasize our aim is nothing less than removing war as an option in
Europe."
Bush pointed out, however, that the proposals were not enough to erase the
Warsaw Pact's "massive advantage" over NATO.
Presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the latest Soviet proposals -
which actually filled in the specifics of a plan Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
spelled out to Secretary of State James A. Baker III earlier this month -
"provided details in a meaningful way at the negotiating table. It is a serious
proposal and we look forward to the negotiations."
Later, Fitzwater called it "a very promising development from our
standpoint."
Among other things, the Soviet proposed additional cuts of 17,580 tanks,
roughly 27,000 personnel carriers and 45,000 troops beyond those previously
announced by Gorbachev.
Bush, who according to press secretary Marlin Fitzwater spent several hours
working on the speech, spoke primarily in broad strokes and generalities.
He is to leave Friday morning for Europe and the May 29-30 NATO summit in
Brussels, and the speech had been billed as a major foreign-policy address in
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advance of that meeting.
Asked if the speech represented any change in the administration's assessment
of Soviet arms-control proposals, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft
said: "No, it's a matter of appearance.
The President felt he appeared too
negative before, so he's trying to appear more positive now."
Bush pointedly did not refer directly to Washington's dispute with West
Germany over Bonn's position that the U.S. should negotiate with the Soviets to
reduce short range nuclear weapons in Europe. That disagreement threatens to
overshadow the NATO summit, which had been planned as a 40th anniversary
celebration.
But Bush did emphasize: "Deterrence is central to our defense strategy
In today's world, nuclear forces are essential to deterrence."
At one point he declared that communism finally had been recognized as a
"failed system" snd at another, he declared, "Our policy is to seize every, and
I mean every, opportunity to build a better, more stable relationship with the
Soviet Union."
He said that unilateral reductions previously announced by Gorbachev "give us
hope that we can now redress" the advantage that the West says the Warsaw Pact
has in conventional arms in Europe.
Referring to his "open skies" proposal of two weeks ago, in which he
suggested that the Soviet Union and U.S. allow unarmed surveillance flights over
each other's countries, Bush said, "Let us extend this openness to military
expenditures, as well.
"I call on the Soviets to do as we have always done. Let's open the ledgers.
Publish an accurate defense budget."
In a pre-NATO interview with European reporters that was released by the
White House on Wednesday, Bush said he thought Gorbachev was "very good at
public relations
extraordinarily good. And when he makes a proposal to
reduce 500 warheads, everyone jumps up and down and says, 'Hooray.' And we've
already taken out 2,400.
"I want the alliance to remain strong and to recognize that you do not make
foreign policy based on the personality or charm of an individual in another
country. You do it on facts."
Bush said he felt "no personal engagement on the PR front" with Gorbachev "or
any reason to engage personally on a public relations front."
"Mr. Gorbachev knows directly from me that we want to see perestroika succeed
and that we welcome certain steps towards that end," he said.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Wendy Abrisz of Savanna, Ill., is congratulated
Wednesday by her commander in chief after receiving her Coast Guard commission.
TERMS: SPEECH; QUOTE; UNITED STATES; SOVIET UNION; MILITARY; DEFENSE; STATISTIC;
WEAPON; RELATION; BUDGET; ISSUE
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Copyright (c) 1989 The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union;
TASS
May 25, 1989, Thursday
LENGTH: 387 words
HEADLINE: BUSH COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT US COAST GUARD ACADEMY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, MAY 25
BODY:
"THIS IS A TIME OF TREMENDOUS OPPORTUNITY", U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH
TODAY SAID IN NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, IN COMMENCEMENT SPEECH TO GRADUATES OF
THE U.S. COAST GUARD ACADEMY.
THE MAIN TOPIC OF THIS SPEECH, THE LAST MAJOR PRONOUNCEMENTS BY THE HEAD OF
THE U.S. ADMINISTRATION AHEAD OF THE MEETING OF THE NATO COUNTRIES' LEADERS, DUE
TO TAKE PLACE ON MAY 29-30, WAS, AS HE HIMSELF PUT IT, TO DISCUSS "SECURITY
STRATEGY FOR THE 1990S, ONE THAT ADVANCES AMERICAN IDEALS AND UPHOLDS AMERICAN
AIMS".
"OUR POLICY IS TO SEIZE EVERY AND I MEAN EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD A
BETTER, MORE STABLE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SOVIET UNION," THE PRESIDENT SAID.
BUSH REPEATED FOR ONE MORE TIME THAT HE "WANTS TO SEE PERESTROIKA SUCCEEED". HE
WELCOMED THE USSR'S LATEST PROPOSALS ON CONVENTIONAL ARMAMENTS IN EUROPE.
EN ROUTE TO NEW LONDON AN OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN TOLD JOURNALISTS
THAT THE UNITED STATES WOULD THOROUGHLY STUDY THE SERIOUS PROPOSAL TABLED BY THE
USSR AT THE VIENNA TALKS.
HOWEVER, THE U.S. PRESIDENT AGAIN ALLEGED THAT THE REDUCTIONS IN CONVENTIONAL
FORCES AND ARMAMENTS, ENVISAGED BY THESE INITIATIVES, ARE ALLEGEDLY "NOT ENOUGH
TO ELIMINATE THE SIGNIFICANT NUMERICAL SUPERIORITY THAT THE SOVIET UNION ENJOYS
RIGHT NOW". SUCH THESES, WHICH ARE CONSTANTLY IMPOSED BY WASHINGTON OFFICIALDOM,
ARE MEANT TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM NATO'S EDGE IN SEVERAL OTHER CATEGORIES, FROM
THE UNITED STATES' STEADFAST BID TO SHY AWAY FROM NEGOTIATIONS ON CUTTING BACK
NAVAL FORCES, THEIR ARMAMENTS AND ON MONITORING THE ACTIVITY OF FLEETS IN SEA
AREAS ADJACENT TO EUROPE.
EMPHASIZING THAT THE U.S. "AIM IS NOTHING LESS THAN REMOVING WAR AS AN OPTION
IN EUROPE," BUSH SIMULTANEOUSLY UNDERSCORED THE NEED TO CARRY ON "AN EFFECTIVE
DETERRENT" POLICY, ONE THAT DEMONSTRATES "AMERICAN STRENGTH, AMERICAN RESOLVE".
THE PRESIDENT DESCRIBED THE CONSOLIDATION OF AMERICAN NUCLEAR FORCES AS AN
IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF THIS POLICY, UNDERLINING THE U.S. INTENTION TO "DEVELOP AND
DEPLOY A NEW HIGHLY MOBILE SINGLE-WARHEAD MISSILE, MIDGETMAN". HE ALSO STATED
ABOUT THE UNITED STATES' "COMMITMENT" TO GO ON WITH THE 'STAR WARS' PROGRAMME.
BUSH ONCE AGAIN EXPRESSED WASHINGTON'S DISAGREEMENT WITH SEVERAL U.S. NATO
ALLIES WHO ADVOCATE BEGINNING TALKS WITH THE SOVIET UNION ON REDUCING TACTICAL
NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE.
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(c) 1989, The Boston Globe, June 6, 1989
The students praised the president's "measured response" to the crisis but
still spoke of the Chinese troops as the "butchers of Beijing." In explaining
why he had decided to limit his decision to military contacts, Bush told the
students, "I don't want to hurt the Chinese people."
Asked by reporters who were ushered into the Oval Office whether he would
consider further economic sanctions against China, Bush replied: "I reserve the
right to take a whole new look at things if violence escalates."
Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, said that there was general agreement among the
congressional leaders who met with Bush that he should not impose further
economic sanctions at this time nor order the withdrawal of the US ambassador,
James Lilley.
On Capitol Hill, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican, took a harder
stand, saying he will introduce legislation to suspend trade and investment "if
the atrocities continue." Later, Helms told reporters: "You cannot deal with
rattlesnakes and you cannot deal with communist governments. They are all
rattlesnakes and they will bite you when the occasion arises."
Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry also applauded Bush's handling of
the situation.
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(c) 1989, The Boston Globe, June 6, 1989
Bush told reporters yesterday that the administration did not know what had
led the Chinese government, after weeks of tolerance toward the student
demonstrations, to order the violent crackdown. Bush also said he could not
confirm media reports of rebellions in military units by soldiers unwilling to
participate in the crackdown.
Bush's public comments came after early morning meetings with his national
security advisers. White House officials said privately that Bush, who served as
US envoy to China in the mid-1970s, expressed anger at Beijing's decison to have
its army fire on the students.
However, in his public remarks Bush showed he was trying to find a middle
course that would allow him to offer encouragement to the students while
avoiding a hostile reaction from Chinese authorities toward the students or the
United States.
"I want to encourage the things that have helped the Chinese people, and I
think now the suspension is going to send a strong signal," Bush declared. "I'm
not saying it's going to cure the short-range problem in China. I'm not sure any
outside country can cure the short-range, the today-in-Tiananmen-Square
problem.'
Under the steps announced by Bush, military sales to China by the US
government and US corporations would be suspended. Military cooperation between
Washington and Beijing has increased sharply in recent years, with US government
approval of the sale of more than $ 600 million in fighter jet avionics,
artillery modernization, naval torpedoes and radar to the People's Liberation
Army.
In addition, Bush said Chinese students wishing to extend their US visas
would get a sympathetic audience from US officials. Bush said he would encourage
the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies to speed help to the injured.
The State Department advised American students in Beijing to leave their
campuses and gather in hotels because of the chaotic situation. Spokeswoman
Margaret Tutwiler said there had been no threats against the Americans.
Bush said he was trying to send a message to members of the Chinese civilian
and military leadership resisting further violence against the students.
"It's important at this time to act in a way that will encourage the further
development and deepening of the positive elements of that relationship and the
process of democratization," Bush stated. "It would be a tragedy for all if
China were to pull back to its pre-1972 era of isolation and repression."
However, Bush stressed that if attacks against the students continue he would
move toward economic sanctions. US-China trade has been growing steadily since
the two countries resumed diplomatic relations in 1972. China is seeking
admission into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the collection of
Western nations and their trading partners.
While approximately 3,000 supporters of the Chinese students were
demonstrating on Capitol Hill, Bush met with four Chinese students attending
Washington-area universities as well as a group of congressional leaders.
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4TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 Globe Newspaper Company;
The Boston Globe
June 6, 1989, Tuesday, City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1035 words
HEADLINE: TURMOIL IN CHINA;
Bush suspends sale of arms
BYLINE: By Stephen Kurkjian, Globe Staff, Globe reporters John Robinson and
Michael Frisby contributed to this story.
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
KEYWORD: GEORGE BUSH; CHINA; RELATION; WEAPON; BUSINESS; MAJOR STORY
BODY:
Appealing to the Chinese government to stop its "violent and bloody" attacks
on student demonstrators, President Bush yesterday suspended US military sales
to China and warned of more significant economic sanctions if the repression
continues.
At a hastily called news conference, Bush said that he had decided against
imposing the deeper sanctions against China that some congressmen urged. Bush
said stronger sanctions would damage the long-term relationship between the
United States and China.
"I don't want to see a total break in this relationship, and I will not
encourage a total break in the relationship," Bush declared. "This would be a
bad time for the United States to withdraw and pull back," leaving the students
"to the devices of a leadership that might decide to crack down further."
In a speech to a business group last night, Bush invoked the scene shown
throughout the world via television, of the single Chinese demonstrator who had
been able to stop a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square for several minutes.
"That image I think is going to be with us a long time," Bush said.
"What is it that gives him the courage to stand up in front of a column of
tanks right there in front of the world?" Bush asked. "All I can say to him,
wherever he might be, and to the people around the world is we are and we must
stand with him."
Bush told members of the Business Roundtable that US companies should
continue to trade with China and that despite the military brutality, he did not
support a suspension of trade.
Bush's actions yesterday were the first taken by the US government since
the student takeover of Tiananmen Square began last month. In previous
interviews about the situation in China, Bush and other members of his
administration have struck a cautious tone, saying the United States should take
no action that might provoke the Chinese government to violence.
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19TH STORY of Level 2 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1981 The New York Times Company;
The New York Times
March 23, 1981, Monday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section C; Page 16, Column 1; Cultural Desk
LENGTH: 344 words
HEADLINE: CONCERT: CZECHS HONOR OWN DVORAK
BODY:
WHEN the Czech Philharmonic, Antonin Dvorak and Carneqie Hall were united
on Wednesday night in a performance of the 11 New World'' Symphony, the
participants had quite a history behind them. The composer conducted the
Czechoslovak orchestra in its first concert in 1896. He also attended the
world premiere of the work in 1893 - in Carneqie Hall.
Because the orchestra is also one of the world's most distinquished ensembles
playing music by one of its most distinquished countrymen, the conjunction was
most promising. And under the direction of its chief conductor, Vaclav Neumann,
the orchestra did indeed make the score sound with precision and energy.
It was freshly played, cleaned of lush Romanticism. The melodies of the work
were sunq simply, with eleqant instrumental balances. The brassy. final movement
was sharp and controlled. The orchestra played with the same crisp clarity that
it brought to a performance of Smetana's Overture to ''The Bartered Bride.
But Mr. Neumannn did not weave the striking orchestral moments into an
effective musical statement. After makinq one impression, the music moved on to
another. Rhythms in the Scherzo were not more than accurate; the multiple
climaxes in the final Alleqro became repetitions of identical musical qestures.
The similar problems in the performance of Martinu's Symphony No. 6 could be
partly blamed on the score, with its potpourri of ideas and effects. But in the
Dvorak work, there is an evocation of innocent hopefulness and expanse,
sometimes anticipating effects of Copland. While working on the score, Dvorak
stated: ''The influence of America can be felt by anyone who has 'a nose. As
heard in Mr. Neumann's performance, late 19th-century European interest in the
young country sounded like a considered collection of pleasant impressions,
rather than a more impassioned, more dramatic dream of a New World. Edward
Rothstein
TYPE: Review
SUBJECT: MUSIC; MUSIC; CONCERTS AND RECITALS
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Copyright (c) 1989 The New York Times Company;
The New York Times
July 21, 1989, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Page 9, Column 1; National Desk
LENGTH: 1145 words
HEADLINE: 2 Congressmen Deal Blows to Nomination for Top Civil Rights Post
BYLINE: By JULIE JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 20
BODY:
Further doubt was cast today on the confirmation prospects of William C.
Lucas, the Bush Administration's nominee to head the Justice Department's civil
rights division, when an important Congressional ally withdrew his endorsement.
Expressing dismay with Mr. Lucas's testimony Wednesday that he viewed as
''sound'' recent Supreme Court rulings that civil rights groups contend sharply
narrowed Federal anti-discrimination law, Representative John Conyers Jr.,
Democrat of Michigan, told the Senate Judiciary Committee, ''I come here to
withdraw my endorsement of Bill Lucas.
That shift by Mr. Conyers, who only a day before had introduced Mr. Lucas to
the committee with a wholehearted recommendation, was quickly followed by
another setback for the nominee: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of
Delaware, the committee's chairman, said the was now inclined to vote against Mr.
Lucas's confirmation.
Mr. Biden, who had said he planned to back the nomination, cited Mr. Lucas's
lack of opinion Wednesday when Mr. Biden asked him ' 'whether or not he thought
we were moving in the right direction or the wrong direction on civil rights.
'81 Statement Discussed
After Mr. Biden's statement, Stephen Gillers, a New York University professor
who is a legal ethics expert, testified about Mr. Lucas's 1981 application to
practice law in New York State. Appearing at the request of Senators Herbert H.
Kohl of Wisconsin, Paul Simon of Illinois and Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio, all
Democratic members of the committee, Mr. Gillers discussed Mr. Lcuas's failure
to disclose that he failed the District of Columbia bar examination in 1963 or
that he had been involved in lawsuits when he was the Sheriff in Wayne County,
Mich., from 1969 to 1982.
Professor Gillers told the committee that legal committees on character and
fitness that screen applicants to the bar must rely almost entirely on the
forthrightness of the individuals. While he would not speculate that Mr. Lucas's
actions could prompt a revocation of his license to practice law in New York,
Mr. Gillers said in an interview later: ' ' I wouldn't rule it out.
Rights Groups Split
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(c) 1989 The New York Times, July 21, 1989
Mr. Conyers's statement was especially devastating since he had been an early
supporter of Mr. Lucas. His support came at a time when leaders of civil rights
groups were divided over the nominee; he becomes the second prominent black
politican to withdraw his support of Mr. Lucas, who is black. The Rev. Jesse
Jackson did 50 late last month.
Mr. Conyers appeared on Mr. Lucas's behalf on the first day of the hearings
Wednesday, expressing full confidence in his abilities and scolding his
opponents. But today, reading parts of Mr. Lucas's testimony supporting the
recent Supreme Court rulings on civil rights, he told the committee:
was frankly astounded. We are in a crisis in the civil rights movement.
He added: ''If you can't figure out that these cases are seriously
undermining the progress we've made, then there's no point in me waiting for you
to become the assistant attorney general in the civil rights division.'
Personal Commitment Cited
Mr. Conyers said that Mr. Lucas had pledged a personal commitment to civil
rights and that he had believed him. But that promise could not, he said, offset
Mr. Lucas's statement that he agreed with Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's
statements that recent Court rulings do not erode existing civil rights laws.
Mr. Lucas said he would change that opinion only if it could be proven that
the Court's action had been detrimental to the rights of women, blacks and other
minorities.
'Anybody going into that job with these cases hanging over our heads who
would want some more time, you will not get this member of Congress advocating
his nomination,'' Mr. Conyers said today.
A Justice Department official said today Mr. Conyers's switch surprised Mr.
Lucas and Administration officials.
'The Congressman obviously was under enormous pressure from the other
side,' the official said, speaking under the condition he not be identified. He
characterized the opponents of Mr. Lucas as ''the whole group who would like to
see a liberal Democrat appointed to the civil rights division in the Bush
Administration. That's just not going to happen.
But David Runkle, a Justice Department spokesman, said the Administration
still ' 'has every confidence'' that Mr. Lucas would be confirmed by the Senate,
though it is no longer clear that the nomination will leave the committee with a
favorable recommendation.
Vote Expected by Aug. 4
While Senator Biden was unwilling to characterize the current state of the
nomination, he said of Mr. Conyers switch, 'Obviously it doesn't help. A
decision has not yet been made to recall Mr. Lucas for further questioning, he
added. A vote on the nomination is expected sometime before the Senate is
scheduled to adjourn Aug. 4.
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(c) 1989 The New York Times, July 21, 1989
Testimony after the Conyers retraction was divided between representatives of
civil rights groups that oppose Mr. Lucas and that of supporters from Michigan
and law-enforcement groups.
The opposition of Mr. Lucas by civil rights, legal and women's groups has
centered on his lack of. experience.as a lawyer. Mr. Lucas, who graduated from
Fordham Law School in 1962, has spent nearly all of his adult life in
law-enforcement careers and began practicing law part time in 1987, after an
unsuccessful bid as the Republican nominee for Governor of Michigan.
Bid Called 'Demeaning'
Elaine Jones, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Inc., emphasized in her testimony that blacks had long fought for equal
opportunity in employment. ''But we have never fought and do not fight today for
the right to do a job solely because we are black,' she said.
She called the Lucas nomination ''demeaning'' because, while he is suited for
numerous jobs in the Bush Administration, his legal background does not appear
adequate to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. ''The question
is,'' she said, ''if Mr. Lucas were white and knew nothing about civil rights
would he be the nominee?''
Earlier today, Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Mr. Lucas's expressed
agreement with recent Supreme Court rulings should 'embarrass any black who has
embraced him.'
Mr. Hooks spoke at a news conference to announce details for a 'silent
march'' in Washington Aug. 26.
' ' We do not intend to stand idly by and let four men and one woman in black
robes halt our long-delayed march to freedom any more than those who wore
white robes,' said Mr. Hooks, refering to the five Justices who voted to
narrow the law in several civil rights cases.
He also denounced Attorney General Thornburgh, calling him ' 'the most
disappointing member of the Bush Administration.
GRAPHIC: Photo of Representative John Conyers Jr. displaying a letter he sent to
President Bush withdrawing his support for William C. Lucas. (NYT/Michael
Geissinger)
SUBJECT: BLACKS (IN US); CIVIL RIGHTS; APPOINTMENTS AND EXECUTIVE CHANGES
ORGANIZATION: JUSTICE, DEPARTMENT OF
NAME: JOHNSON, JULIE; LUCAS, WILLIAM; BUSH, GEORGE (PRES); CONYERS, JOHN JR
(REPR); BIDEN, JOSEPH R JR (SEN)
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DATE: JULY 25, 1989
CLIENT:
LIBRARY: NEXIS
FILE: OMNI
YOUR SEARCH REQUEST IS:
CONYERS AND JEWS AND LUCAS
NUMBER OF STORIES FOUND WITH YOUR REQUEST THROUGH:
LEVEL 1....
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1ST STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
The New Republic Copyright (c) 1989 Information Access Company;
Copyright (c) The New Republic, Inc. 1989
June 19, 1989
SECTION: Vol. 200; No. 25; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 1352 words
HEADLINE: Token enforcer; Richard L. Thornburgh's selection of William R.
Lucas as assistant attorney general for civil rights is surprise to White
House Notebook
BYLINE: Barnes, Fred
BODY:
In the scheme of things, it was only a small surprise. As President Bush
toured the Far East, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced in Washin ton
on February 24 that he was recommending William Lucas, a black
Democrat-turned-Republicar from Detroit, as assistant attorney general for civil
rights. This was news to nearly everyone at the White House. And since Bush and
his aides don't like surprises, they were ticked. Chase Untermeyer, the White
House personnel chief, "yelled at me," says Murray Dickman, Thornburgh's
lieutenant for personnel and admistration. "Bob Estrada Untermeyer's assistant]
yelled at me. I can't remember whether John Sununu yelled at me or not."
Thornburgh made the worst out of a touchy situation by going public. He figured
that because his recommendation of Lucas had already leaked-even a reporter
traveling with Bush in the Orient had gotten wind of it-he might as well make it
official. Trouble was, the White House then took two months to act on
Thornburgh's advice. In the meantime, critical stories about Lucas appeared,
targeting his minimal experience as a lawyer, a mini-scandal or two in his past,
and a slightly puffed-up resume.. Worse, opposition by an important segment of
the civil rights movement concealed = Lucas paid a price for overenthusiasm at
justice," says a senior White House aide.
The White House-Untermeyer, to be exacthad urged Thornburgh to consider Lucas
for a job. "He was in the pool of people who were going to get something," says
a Bush aide. Lee Atwater, the Republican national chairman, is a Lucas fan,
which didn't hurt. He put Lucas on a list of blacks who should be hired.
Lucas had also been an early Bush supporter in 1988, an important credential.
Untermeyer thought Lucas would make a fine chief U.S. marshal. Or maybe
Lucas could head the Customs Service. or perhaps he'd fit as drug czar Bill
Bennett's deputy. "There were three or four things," says a White House
official "It wasn't as if we pinned him into a job."
Thornburgh and Dickman did that. They believe the civil rights job was forever
changed by Brad Reynolds, the conservative who held it for eight years under
President Reagan. "I'd interviewed 20 people who were interested in the job,"
says Dickman. "Most of them were good white, male, Republican lawyers with good
civil rights backgrounds." But he though t they were wrong for the job.
Post-Reynolds, the job "is more visible. It's a public position with a
public platform." I half-expected Dickman to say that a public spokesman for
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The New Republic (c) 1989 IAC
civil rights enforcement is what he and Thornburgh have in mind. He stopped
short of that. But he scarcely bothered to defend Lucas's credentials as a
lawyer. "We don't accept the notion you have to be the best civil rights lawyer
in the world to be the head of the civil rights division."
Lucas isn't. He served briefly in 1962 and 1963 as an investigator in the
civil rights division, quitting after he flunked the bar exam and wasn't
eligible to become a lawyer there. Since he stepped down as Wayne County
executive in Michigan in 1986, he's worked for a Detroit law firm. But not
much. Last year he was paid $ 25,000 by the firm, and $ 65,000 for work he did
for the Republican National Committee. His inexperience as a litigator prompted
a few Republicans, black and white, to lobby quietly against his nomination.
This caused a backlash. Conservative activists leaned on Thornburgh, Sununu,
and Untermeyer to make sure Bush followed through on the nomination. On April
25, in a perfunctory press release, the White House noted Bush's intention to
nominate Lucas.
The nomination has wreaked havoc in the civil rights community "For us, the
assistant attorney general for civil rights is the most important position in
the executive branch," says Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership
Conference on Civil Rights. "It's not a position for on-thejob training." Neas,
Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, and others met with Lucas to assess his legal
skill. They were unimpressed. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus
conferred with Lucas and were alarmed at his fuzzy knowledge of an important
Supreme Court ruling that limits minority setasides. Oddly enough, another
critic of Lucas is conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein. He says Lucas
isn't capable of defending the "colorblind, genderblind jurisprudence" pioneered
by the Reagan justice Department.
The Leadership Conference on May 9 voted to oppose the nomination. Hours after
that was announced, Lucas bravely showed up at the organization's annual
dinner in Washington. The next day the conference issued a statement saying
Lucas "may well be qualified for other important positions in the federal
government, but he does not have the experience, the subs tantive knowledge of
the increasingly technical field of civil rights, or the litigation skills to
carry out the duties of the civil rights office effectively." At the justice
Department, Dickman dismisses this opposition as "Ralph Neas's spring project."
But the Leadership Conference doesn't throw its opposition around lightly. It
opposed only three non-judicial nominees (Ed Meese as attorney general, Reynolds
as deputy attorney general, and an obscure fellow picked for general counsel of
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) in the Reagan years. It defeated
two of them. Neas, of course, spearheaded the lobbying effort that blocked the
confirmation of Robe rt Bork for the Supreme Court.
Lucas is not isolated from the civil rights movement the way Bork was. He has
supporters. On May 2, Thornburgh recruited an important one. He met with Jesse
Jackson to talk about discrimination against sugar cane workers. "I hope you
can support Bill Lucas, $$ Thornburgh interjected. Jackson said he likes
Lucas, but suggested that someone with more legal experience should have been
chosen, Still, he told Thornburgh he'd back Lucas. Lucas himself lined up
Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who is black. When
Lucas switched parties in 1985 and ran for governor as a Republican, Conyers
likened him to "some Jews who led their brothers and sisters into the ovens of
the Holocaust.' After talking to Lucas, Conyers said he's persuaded Lucas
is "committed to civil rights enforcement and affirmative actio n."
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The New Republic (c) 1989 IAC
Chances are the complaints of Neas, Hooks, and other civil rights leader won't
defeat Lucas. As of early June no Democrats on the Senate judiciary Committee
had voiced opposition to Lucas, and one, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, wrote
Thornburgh in support of the nomination. Lucas and DeConcini served together
on the Bicentennial Commission. Six of the seven Republicans on the committee
are pledged to Lucas. The seventh, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, is
undecided. So long as Lucas doesn't blunder badly when he testifies before
the committee, probably in late June, he should pass the civil rights test.
But there's another test for nominees in 1989-ethics. And Lucas has several
trouble spots. The fact that a resume once called him a civil rights "attorney"
at justice isn't serious. Nor is the matter of his having taken some trips to
Las Vegas in 1975 that were arranged by a man with mob connections. That's
ancient history. Rather, judiciary Committee investigators are concentrating on
contracts Lucas awarded as Wayne County executive. A $ 138 million contract
to renovate a county office building went to a development group headed by
Lucas's chief fund-raiser. And Lucas knew his chief of staff held a 15
percent interest in a construction firm set to work on the project. Then last
year Lucas got $ 15,000 from a businessman and $ 10,000 from a lawyer who had
benefited earlier from a contract he awarded. Lucas has been exonerated
before on questions about contracts, and he passed the prenomination check by
the FBI. But now he's got to defend himself forcefully in front of the
committee. If he does, he's in. If he doesn't, Thornburgh may regret having
nominated him early or ever.
SUBJECT: United States. Department of Justice. Civil Rights Div., officials and
employees
NAME: Lucas, William R., selection and appointment; Thornburgh, Richard L.,
personnel management; Bush, George, political activity; Untermeyer, Charles G.,
political activity
LOAD-DATE-MDC: July 20, 1989
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DATE: JULY 25, 1989
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6TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
The Associated Press
The materials in the AP file were compiled by The Associated Press. These
materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The
Associated Press.
July 10, 1989, Monday, PM cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 487 words
HEADLINE: NAACP Leader Says Supreme Court Eroding Civil Rights Gains
BYLINE: By JOSE MARTINEZ, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: DETROIT
KEYWORD: NAACP Convention
BODY:
President Bush has lifted the "iron curtain" separating blacks from the White
House, but recent Supreme Court rulings pose a critical challenge to minorities,
according to the NAACP's executive director.
"The conservative majority that now holds sway seem determined, and yes,
hellbent on consigning civil rights and affirmative action gains to the ash
heap of history," Benjamin Hooks said Sunday.
Hooks addressed a crowd of 3,800 on the first night of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People's annual convention, which
runs through Thursday.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp was scheduled to speak this
morning. Vice President Dan Quayle will address the civil rights organization
Wednesday.
"This Supreme Court is dangerous to the well being of black people, women and
other minorities," Hooks said Sunday.
"It is more dangerous to the legitimate hopes and aspirations of black people
in this nation than any Bull Connor with a firehose; than any Jim Clark with a
billy club; more dangerous than any Ross Barnett standing in the schoolhouse
saying, 'They shall not pass'; more dangerous than George Wallace proclaiming
'Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," he said.
Connor was public safety commissioner in Birmingham, Ala., and Clark was a
sheriff in Alabama during the desegregation of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Barnett and Wallace were governors of Mississippi and Alabama, respectively.
Minority group leaders may need to revive the civil disobedience of past
decades if the Bush administration and Congress fail to counter the anti- civil
rights sentiment fostered by the high court, Hooks said.
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The Associated Press, July 10, 1989
"If Congress does not act, we must call upon our citizenry to mount such
powerful demonstrations that the group gathered in China not long ago will
look like a few compared with the millions that we mobilize," he said.
Hooks gave Bush qualified praise for some of the people he appointed to serve
in the administration and for meeting with Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott
King.
"Bush has brought civility to Pennsylvania Avenue," he said. "There is no
question that President Bush had done much to raise the iron curtain that had
separated the White House from black Americans over the past several years."
The NAACP, however, has not given blanket approval to the administration,
Hooks said.
"Attorney General Richard Thornburgh must pull his head out of the sand and
realize that his advice to the president on these court rulings was totally
wrong. We urge him to rethink his position that nothing has really changed,"
Hooks said.
Bush can make a difference in civil rights legislation, but must take a
stronger public stand, the NAACP leader said.
The president, for example, should consider either revamping or dismantling
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which Hooks said became an "unmitigated
disaster" during the Reagan era.
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Copyright (c) 1989 The New York Times Company;
The New York Times
October 29, 1989, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Page 23, Column 2; Editorial Desk
LENGTH: 799 words
HEADLINE: As Ideology Dies, Analogies Rise
BYLINE: By Owen Harries; Owen Harries is co-editor of The National Interest, a
quarterly journal.
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
While much is utterly unpredictable - Mikhail Gorbachey's staying power, the
limits of Soviet tolerance in the Baltic and Eastern Europe, China after Deng
Xiaoping, the consequences of the European Community's move toward complete
economic integration in 1992 - two international developments seem to have
achieved a degree of probability approaching certainty.
First, the ideological hostility of international politics is destined to
disappear. Whatever happens in the Communist world, the days of Marxism-Leninism
as an ideology capable of competing seriously with liberal democracy are over.
Too much has been conceded, too much made known, by the Soviet regime, for the
mystique to work again.
Second, the extreme bipolarity of the last 40 years is ending and being
replaced by a more even distribution of power. Multipolarity - a system with
four, five or six major players -is around the corner. Japan, Western Europe,
China and perhaps India will be less amenable to superpower influence, more
assertive, more promiscuous in their alignments.
What will a multipolar, unideological international system at the end of the
20th century be like? To answer, some commentators - for example, the columnist
Charles Krauthammer - turn to pre-1914 Europe. The best analogy, they suggest,
is the 19th century's ''classical'' power politics regime, in which states
maneuvered to advance their national interests through the manipulation of
alliances and the balance of power, with little concern for ideology.
Analogies are probably indispensable but are also hazardous to intellectual
health and tend to take on a life of their own. They need to be carefully
scrutinized, especially when advanced by influential opinion-makers.
The 19th century analogy does not bear much scrutiny. For one thing, that
century was not a period of ''classical'' power politics, as claimed, but one in
which the game of realpolitik was distorted by ideology almost as much as in the
recent past.
The main theme of European politics after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 was
the struggle between the upholders of the principle of dynastic legitimacy, led
by the Hapsburg Chancellor, Metternich, and the forces of liberalism and
nationalism unleashed by the French Revolution.
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Nationalism posed a threat to many regimes: a centrifugal threat in the case
of multinational states like the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, a centripetal one
in the case of the smaller states of Italy and Germany, where each sovereign
entity represented only a fraction of a nation.
Faced with these threats, rulers regularly set aside the rules of realpolitik
in the interest of dynastic solidarity. Thus, in the 1848 Revolution in Europe,
the Czar of Russia and the King of Prussia stood by the Hapsburgs instead of
moving to exploit the Hapsburg empire's difficulties. Thus, too, a shared
concern over Polish nationalism kept Prussia and Russia at peace throughout the
century.
Sir Lewis Namier, the great Polish-English historian, once observed that a
cardinal rule of European power politics - the rule of odd and even numbers,
according to which in adjoining states No. 1 and 3 would naturally ally against
No. 2 and 4 - was inoperative for much of the 19th century because of overriding
and cross-cutting ideological concerns.
Those who wish to present a historical model of ' ' pure' ' nonideological
realpolitik would do better to turn to the 18th century. In that long breathing
space between the religious fanaticism of the previous century and nationalistic
fanaticism to come, power politics assumed its most stylized, rational, gamelike
character. That game often is depicted as restrained and rather exquisite. In
practice, it could be rough: In the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763), Prussia lost
half a million lives out of a population of six million.
But even invoking the 18th century analogy, there is a critical problem: How
much difference do nuclear weapons make? In the earlier age, war was the ultima
ratio regum -the last argument of kings. Clubs were always trumps, and the
knowledge that they would be resorted to if all else failed clarified all minds
and provided a common basis for calculation.
In the ideologically charged cold-war world, in which international politics
were conceived as a life-or-death struggle, that logic continued to work. There
was enough fear and hatred present for a theory of mutual deterrence, to be
credible.
But will it continue to work in the multipolar, unideological system that we
appear destined to experience in the near future - a system that will be more
complex and volatile, less ideologically passionate and marked by further
nuclear proliferation? We have no theory to cover that state of affairs. Until
we do, we should be wary of all historical analogies.
TYPE: Op-ed
SUBJECT: Terms not available
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8TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
October 27, 1989, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; PAGE A19
LENGTH: 876 words
HEADLINE: Baker on Perestroika's Promise
BYLINE: Charles Krauthammer
Commentators game:
BODY:
Who is
Is Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union's Jimmy Carter? His conduct, which has
post-Afghanistan syndrome written all over it, is strikingly reminiscent of
American conduct at a similar malaise-ridden juncture in our history. Consider:
Gorbachev repudiates his country's role in a losing foreign adventure,
denouncing the invasion of Afghanistan as immoral and illegal. He openly admits
to a whole host of national sins, the latest being the brazen Soviet violation
of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He pledges absolute independence and
hands off for countries previously under Soviet domination. He at least suspends
the Brezhnev Doctrine and lets Eastern Europe go its own way (much as Carter did
for our back yard, Latin America -- backing off Nicaragua, decolonizing the
Panama Canal and generally retiring the Monroe Doctrine for the rest of the
hemisphere). He repeatedly renounces hegemony and embraces interdependence,
which recalls Sestanovich's Law (named for the noted Sovietologist) that
countries that talk about interdependence --- the United States in the '70s, the
Soviets today - are invariably in decline. His domestic economy is failing,
with inflation surging and living standards falling. For his labors, he is
earning points abroad, while steadily losing support at home.
The reason that this should be a cautionary analogy is that while the Carter
years were good for the U.S.S.R., which acquired an impressive Third World
empire during that time. Those years were immediately followed by the Reagan
K!
reaction, which was bad for the Soviet Union. It is thus quite possible that the
Gorbachev years will be followed by the Ligachev reaction --- though the betting
is that if there is a Soviet counterrevolution, Gorbachev will lead it -- that
will not be good for us.
The corollary is that for now Gorbachev is good for us. Secretary of State
James Baker's loud and official declaration to that effect is a welcome
development. We do have a large stake in the success of Gorbachey's program.
True, the chances of that success are small and receding. Gorbachev's attempt to
reform the Soviet economy incrementally has been likened to a country trying to
switch, gradually, from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.
Nonetheless, even if perestroika ultimately fails, we have an interest in its
mere continuation. The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to reverse its
effects. And these effects are dramatic: the rapid de-communization of Hungary
and Poland, with East Germany and Czechoslovakia to follow; the arousal of
nationalist feelings within the Soviet republics; and, most important, the rise
of civil society as a challenge to the state throughout the Soviet Empire, a
challenge that heretofore totalitarianism had specialized in crushing.
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China shows that these expressions of popular sentiment are not irreversible.
They can be put down. But the longer they go on and the more organized they
become, the higher the cost of putting them down and, thus, the less the
likelihood of massive repression if Moscow suffers a change of regime or
Gorbachev a change of heart.
Baker is less convincing when he says that because Gorbachev may not be there
forever, all the more reason for us to hurry and conclude arms control
agreements with him while we can. His point is that if these agreements impose
structural constraints on the Soviets -- troop withdrawals, reductions in
military personnel, destruction of weapons -- even a new regime in the Kremlin
could not easily reverse these changes.
True, but it could still reverse them far more easily than any American
government could. (Arms agreements would impose structural changes on the United
States too.) When it comes to rearmament, the White House is far more
politically constrained than the Kremlin. In a soured international environment,
which country would be more likely to rebuild the military, reactivate the
assembly lines and return troops to Central Europe?
This is not to argue against concluding arms treaties with Gorbachev. It is
only to argue against rushing into them. They have to be framed in such a way
that if post-Gorbachev they are broken, as the Soviets now admit they broke the
ABM Treaty, Western deterrence will not have been fatally compromised.
Those who issue such cautions are usually derided as hard-liners, closed to
the marvelous new possibilities of the Gorbachevian universe. As I recall,
however, not too long ago those who insisted that the Soviets unconditionally
tear down their radar station at Krasnoyarsk were also denounced as hard-liners
--- seeking, by stressing Soviet violations, to undermine the entire arms control
enterprise. It was a group of congressional soft-liners who traveled to
Krasnoyarsk, looked at the radar, and said, with wonderful sophistry, that while
it might be illegal it wasn't. Why? Because "it is clearly not deployed. Thus we
judge it not to be a violation of the ABM Treaty at this time."
Soft-liners are now in retreat. Indeed, they have suffered the ultimate
humiliation: they are being refuted, not by Cap Weinberger but by Eduard
Shevardnadze. It is Gorbachev who is telling us that the hard-liners were right
all along. His authority is good enough for me.
TYPE: OPINION EDITORIAL
SUBJECT: UNITED STATES; U.S.S.R.; INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
NAMED-PERSONS: MIKHAIL GORBACHEV; JAMES BAKER III
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13TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
October 20, 1989, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; PAGE A23
LENGTH: 781 words
HEADLINE: Grumpy At the Movies
BYLINE: Charles Krauthammer
BODY:
I'm 39 and getting out of sorts with my generation. I've developed this
grumpiness at the movies, which is not a bad place to commune with my fellow
baby boomers, because much of our common consciousness was shaped there. Twenty
years ago, I too got off on "The Graduate," "Zabriskie Point," "Monterey Pop"
and "Easy Rider." Now I go to the movies and find myself totally out of step. I
feel as if I've landed on the moon.
I'm the only (male) person I know who didn't need a hanky to get through
"Field of Dreams," which I found merely ridiculous. (Some time ago, I committed
that judgment to print. My mail was not friendly.)
I went to "Parenthood" hoping for a good two hours of Steve Martin parodying
the current preoccupation of all my contemporaries: raising kids. Instead, I got
two hours of melodramatic psycho-babble relieved at rare intervals by vintage
Martin shtick. Too rare. The reviewers loved it. I walked out around Act Two.
Then I'm getting grumpier --- there was "Dead Poets Society," a romantic
self-indulgence so sentimental it made "Field of Dreams" look austere. I sit
through two hours of phony setup (liberated teacher VS. repressed prep school,
free spirited son VS. tyrannical father, individual VS. society -- not a cliche'
is missed), and when the credits come on the audience bursts into wild applause,
the kind that during the revolution we used to reserve for a Hermann Hesse
reading. You would have thought that what ails America in this age of
Mapplethorpe and Trump, of rainbow hair and day-glow joggers is a dearth of
self-expression.
I don't get it. The hero/martyr in "Dead Poets" is an aspiring actor who puts
a bullet through his head rather than, as dad insists, go to Harvard Medical
School. A rather unkind judgment on contemporary medical education. Having. been
through Harvard Medical School, I can say with confidence that it is an
experience to be preferred to suicide. Even, I dare say, to life imprisonment.
(Dental school, of course, is another matter.)
Now, however, having just endured Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors," I
am headed for meltdown. Theaters are packed. Critics rave. The New York Times
solicits the views of no less than three theologians to plumb the picture's
depths.
I am truly baffled. Yes, Allen does discover the problem of death and the
problem of evil, important issues for our time that the Aspen Institute has done
a marvelous job of tracking. Allen might even one day make the problem of death
and evil interesting. But in "Crimes" it becomes the occasion for a cascade of
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banalities -- of the "God sees," "Oh yeah? What about Auschwitz?" variety --
that would be an embarrassment in a late-night bull session at the freshman
dorm.
Woody Allen is a clown, a brilliant clown. His tragedy is that he is an
artistic transsexual: he is convinced he is Ingmar Bergman trapped in Allen
Konigsberg's body. The result is a pretentiousness that is comical.
The banality extends from dialogue to stock characters to imagery. Night.
Villain drives to the scene of the crime. Camera pointedly lingers on the
headlight being doused. Symbol! (The central metaphor of "Crimes" being ocular:
the all-seeing/non-seeing eye of God.) This is exactly the kind of heavy
handedness we delighted in seeing Allen parody 20 years ago.
Croons one reviewer, "Crimes" is "about love and death, lust and murder, and
attempts to reconcile religious faith in a world where it's now taken for
granted that E=mc2." I say, leave Einstein out of this. Allen did once make a
wonderful movie about love and death. He called it "Love and Death," his last
true farce before he turned serious. It was hilarious in lampooning the
metaphysical cant he cannot now help reproducing.
In the '60s, young people were flattered by a culture that declared us
uniquely honest, uniquely creative, uniquely "authentic," notions of which we
have now, with some embarrassment, been disabused. But boomers have found
narcissism hard to give up. So we have adapted it. We think ourselves the first
generation to discover the pain of aging parents, of raising children, of making
compromises with reality, of having to choose medicine over theater. Movies
cater to this narcissism because it has become a reliable formula for success.
After all, this generation constitutes a market uniquely large and uniquely
flatterable. A little angst, a few laughs, a dose of heaviosity - and you've
got a hit.
Before "Crimes," a preview was shown for a new movie about fathers and sons
called "Dad." It's got everything: aging grandfather, young grandson, boomer
poised between the two. Just up my alley, I thought.
I thought again. Better stay home.
TYPE: OPINION EDITORIAL
SUBJECT: FILMS; MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY
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22ND STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 Newsweek
October 2, 1989, UNITED STATES EDITION
SECTION: THE COLUMNISTS; Meg Greenfield; Pg. 80
LENGTH: 1048 words
HEADLINE: Needed: A New Compass
BYLINE: MEG GREENFIELD
HIGHLIGHT:
We can no longer put our minds on automatic in thinking about these things. It's
a damned outrage.
BODY:
These days when I open my paper I am put in mind of that old man in the
cartoons who walks around with a sign saying, "Repent, the end is nigh." For the
end, we are told, of practically everything is nigh: history, liberalism,
ideology, the cold war. I suspect that all these entities actually have a
little more life in them and that what's happening is something different. What
we are confronting is the destruction of many of our premises and expectations
about all of the above. Our pat arquments don't work anymore. We can no longer
put our minds on automatic. It is, of course, a damned outrage, as this means
we all have to start thinking again.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in our internal conflicts over foreign
policy. For years 15 seemed enough to many people to take their foreign-policy
compass reading from what the other side in the domestic argument said; whatever
it was, they took the opposite stand and were confirmed in their judgment by the
looniness of the forces rallied against them.
Thus, a lot of conservatives did not much credit either complexity or
constructive change in communist countries. Evidence of either was dismissed as
a trick or a fantasy of the liberal goo-goos, and they could continue to pursue
1951-type approaches to 1980s-style governments in Eastern Europe. This was
enough for their liberal counterparts, who found in these absurd rigidities of
the right-wingers justification for their own brand of non-sense --- namely, the
notion that it was benighted to look upon those governments as oppressive
("mindless anticommunism" was their phrase); they habitually put the word
"threat" in quotes when it followed the word "communist."
These were two groups of people 50 busily and happily fighting each other
here at home that for a while they seemed almost not to notice when the objects
of their argument abroad managed to mortally undermine both their positions.
For only the most paranoid an dimwitted of right-wing observers would any longer
deny the reality of enormous change for the better in large parts of the
communist world. And only the lunatic left could refuse to see in the reforms
and uprisings and remarkable confessions, exposes and commentary coming from the
East evidence that the repression has been much more onerous and diabolical than
liberal discourse often implied.
If only the changes in the Soviet-bloc world had been clean, clear and
totally transforming it would have been easy, but they have not been. We are
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faced with an uneven, uncertain and only partially changed situation, one that
could, at least in some measure, revert to the old status quo. Therefore across
the whole American political spectrum those who would participate in the policy
response have been forced to think, to weigh, to choose.
What do we want, anyway, from and for the communist countries? What was and
is the nature of their threat to us? Does the definition of our interest begin
and end with protecting ourselves against aggression? Or dose it also include
attempting to preserve and actually extended democratic values? Do we give a
hoot what kind of domestic political lives other countries laid? If Third World
disputes were not overlaid with East-West meaning, would we care how they came
out? Would we be concerned only as our economic interests were affected?
Outside the cold-war context, does any of the currently burgeoning ethnic mayhem
around the world matter to us, warfare between peoples with exotic names who
have been trying to annihilate each other for centuries and whom most of us
probably never even heard of until the 6 o'clock news tonight?
Many questions: All of these questions are being wrangled in the current
political debate over what to do about Eastern Europe. There are ironies and
oversimplifyings. The self-evident truth that the Soviet military is
exceedingly strong and still being stoked by the Gorbachev leadership is invoked
as a way of answering more questions than it actually does. To point to their
military might and continuing military ambitions answers the question as to
whether this country needs to maintain its own military strength, but it does
not tell you how to capitalize on the genuine political changes that are
occurring in the Soviet Union. To say that Poland and Hungary, now at the
cutting edge of democratic reform, could yet revert to the old dispensation does
not tell you what steps we should take to try to encourage them the other way.
And to say simply "more money, more money" for the countries struggling to shed
their repressive systems does not really address the tougher issues of whether
their reforms are solid enough to justify the investment and whether a huge
injection of money might not in effect harm reform by enabling the recipients to
avoid the painful steps they must take to restructure their economies. These,
in other words, are no yes-no, black-white, am too-are not questions. They are
questions of proportion and degree and as such require through, calculation,
trade-off.
But there is an even more taxing order of questions that have arisen in the
wake of the change in Eastern Europe than those concerned with policy and
program responses to what is going on. These are the big, blowzy but critical
questions of our basic purpose. They have always lurked, unresolved, in our
acrimonious debates about human rights, authoritarians versus totalitarians,
whose dictators those of the left or the right -- are worse, and what if any
our interest may be in the various places in which we intervene around the
world. Some on the same side of the debate over intervention were always
arguing from different values ---- American strategic interest, for instance, and
American missionary democracy. Are we out there to do good or merely to do in
anyone who threatens our well-being?
Charles Krauthammer has wisely written about the way these arguments are
playing out within the American conservative complex. The conservatives aren't
the only ones affected. The cold war may or may not be over. What is clearly
over is the intellectually easy cold-war period in which there seemed to be only
two sides in the world and only two ways of thinking about their relationship
here at home.
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24TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
September 28, 1989, Thursday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; PAGE A31
LENGTH: 888 words
HEADLINE: Stealing From The Future
BYLINE: Charles Krauthammer
BODY:
Budget czar Richard Darman has been waxing eloquent lately on the subject of
"now-now-ism." Now-now-ism, explains Darman is a "shorthand label for our
collective shortsightedness, our obsession with the here and now, our reluctance
adequately to address the future." It afflicts not just business and culture,
argues Darman, but government too. The result? We are "engaged in a massive
backward Robin Hood transaction -- robbing the future to give to the present."
Darman is, as usual, right. But the administration for which he is the chief
economic thinker is offering the American people what may be the most egregious
now-now budget trick of the decade: the two-year capital gains tax cut. The
administration, to be fair, wants a permanent cut, but in its uncompromising
pursuit of compromise, is foursquare behind a compromise plan that would cut
capital gains taxes to 19.6 percent through 1991, then, in 1992, return them to
28 percent, with gains now indexed to inflation.
A two-year capital gains cut is nothing more than a quick-buck device to
raise cash for the Treasury. Everyone agrees that during these two years the
Treasury will take in a few billion more dollars in taxes, as people prematurely
sell stock and bonds and real estate in order to benefit from the temporarily
lower rate. And what happens after those two years? Tax revenues will, of
course, decline. Since so many capital gains will have been prematurely cashed
in, they won't be around in the 1990s to provide tax revenues. As Robert S.
McIntyre wrote in The New Republic, "It is exactly like offering people 30
percent off next year's taxes, provided they pay in advance, then claiming
you've found a great new revenue source."
It is hard to imagine a purer example of stealing from the future to pay for
the present. The purpose of the quick fix is to reach, artificially, the
Gramm-Rudman deficit targets for 1990 and 1991 without having to do anything
real, such as cutting spending or raising taxes.
Democrats have turned the issue into an us/them, rich/poor class war. The
rich do benefit vastly more from a capital gains tax cut than everyone else. But
if, as the capital gains fundamentalists claim, this tax cut would increase
savings and productivity, it would certainly be worth it. If while lifting all
boats a few yachts get lifted too, so what?
The problem with the fundamentalists' claim is that it does not hold up. It
is contradicted by a 1985 Congressional Budget Office study of the last round of
capital gains cuts. And by Herbert Stein, former chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers under presidents Nixon and Ford, who says flatly that we don't
know whether such a cut will increase savings. The question is simply
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unanswered.
Moreover, says Stein, the claim that cutting capital gains will stimulate
"risk-taking" investment is an odd one. Why, after all, should government
substitute for the market in telling investors what kind of risks to run?
"What's so great about risk taking, after all?" he asks. "A good tax system
would neither prefer nor penalize risk taking." If you believe in the market,
let the market decide.
The best tax code is one that is neutral, that best imitates a world in which
there were no taxes at all. It allows the investor to make his decision based on
market factors, rather than on Washington's political preferences. By
artificially lowering the tax on one kind of income, the investors'
decision-making is skewed. And, if you believe in a free market, the more skewed
are investors' decisions, the more inefficient is the market, the worse off
everyone is in the long run.
We all know what will happen with the capital gains loophole. The only
industry it is sure to rebuild is the tax-shelter industry. The cut invites
economically pointless schemes, like investing in see-through office towers, for
turning present income (high tax) into capital gains (low tax).
A preferential tax on one kind of income corrupts the free market. But it is
even more corrupting to the political system. It opens the door to the kinds of
special interest tax advantages that were largely swept away by the tax reform
of 1986. The current capital gains tax proposal, for example, will treat all
sales of timber as capital gains. Timber -- but not, say, medicines or motor
scooters. Why is the sale of timber a capital gain and thus a preferentially
treated transaction? Because Congress says SO. And why does Congress say so?
Because the key congressmen needed to get the capital gains cut passed are
timber-state Democrats (mostly from the South).
The capital gains tax cut is but an opening wedge. It invites corruption and
inefficiencies in future tax writing that will only get worse. That is because
the general good -- lower rates for everyone and no loopholes for special
interests --- is no match for the determined efforts of well-funded special
interests to promote their own good.
The principle that underlay the tax reform of 1986 was that the best tax code
is that which gets the government off the backs of the people and out of the
minds of investors. Once that principle is undermined, there is no stopping the
loophole writers. The capital gains plan will kill tax reform. Free marketeers,
as Republicans claim to be, should be stopping the crime, not abetting it.
TYPE: OPINION EDITORIAL
SUBJECT: BUDGET; TAX SYSTEM; TAX LAWS
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26TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
September 22, 1989, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; PAGE A27
LENGTH: 879 words
HEADLINE: The Conservative Crackup
BYLINE: Charles Krauthammer
BODY:
The conservative crackup is near. It has never been easy keeping all the
strains of conservatism under one roof: the libertarians and the cultural
conservatives, the prewar isolationists and the postwar interventionists, the
paleoconservatives (conservative since birth) and the neoconservatives
(conservative since Vietnam, roughly).
What kept these unlikely comrades under the same tent was "The Enemy."
Anticommunism has been the cement of the conservative alliance for 40 years. As
communism unravels, 50 does its anti, and with it, as night follows day, the
conservative alliance.
On foreign policy, the splitting of the conservative coalition is at hand.
Neoconservatives generally contend that if the decline of the Soviet empire
renders anticommunism obsolete, the new motif of American foreign policy should
be the promotion of democracy: with such institutions as the National Endowment
for Democracy, the United States should actively work around the world, from
Poland to Chile, to foster democratic structures and institutions.
Paleoconservatives are skeptical of this new democratic universalism. They
generally want the country to return to a more traditional and narrow pursuit of
American national interest. What makes them particularly sore is that during the
reign of that paleo hero, Ronald Reagan, the neos carried the debate. It was
during the Reagan years that American foreign policy shifted gradually from
anticommunism to pro-democracy. It was the Reagan administration that helped
banish Ferdinand Marcos, tried to undercut Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile and
pushed for land reform in E1 Salvador. It was Reagan who created that paleo
nemesis, the National Endowment for Democracy.
Some months ago, columnist Ben Wattenberg gave a spirited and unapologetic
exposition of the neo view. This week, having let the fuse burn long enough, Pat
Buchanan delivered the paleo response, one of the loudest cannon shots in the
brewing conservative civil war. It can only be called amazing.
In his column, Buchanan has nothing but contempt for democracy abroad (though
he apparently still approves of it at home). He has the warmest recollection of
those friendly dictators on whom we could count. Democratic Sweden traded with
North Vietnam, he notes, while dictatorial South Korea and the Philippines
fought beside us. (He conveniently omits the fact that 50 did democratic
Australia. Nor does he recall, for example, that it was our friend the shah of
Iran who led a cabal of other dictators in engineering the oil shocks of the
'70s that nearly brought America to its knees.)
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His affection for authoritarianism extends from Franco, Marcos and Pinochet
to Napoleon and Louis XVI - all the way, in fact, to South Africa, which
Buchanan quaintly insists on calling "The Boer Republic," as if the Afrikaaner
is still feistily fighting European imperialism.
Which brings us to the transition from the merely amusing to the truly
amazing. Not content to ask what the "democracies" (his quote marks) have done
for us lately, he finally declares for unreconstructed isolationism: "When this
Cold War is over, America should come home."
Isolationism has deep roots and great power as an American idea. To be fair,
it even has its geopolitical logic: America is a continental island without an
obvious need for involvement in the world. It was predictable, therefore, that
isolationism would enjoy a resurgence with the waning of the Cold War.
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that it should reemerge so soon and 50
unrepentantly. Prewar isolationists, after all, did their best to keep us not
only out of but also unprepared for World War II.
Buchanan's anticipatory isolationism is important not for what it tells us
about the thinking of one columnist but for what it tells us about the thinking
of a significant element of the conservative coalition. Those who think that
Arthur Vandenberg's postwar conversion of the Republican Party to
internationalism 15 permanent should think again.
And those who think that postwar ideological lines dividing left and right in
America are permanent should think again too. Buchanan's isolationism is
expressed in language that consciously echoes George McGovern's 1972 campaign
slogan, "Come Home, America." It points to the odd and fascinating new
coalitions we can expect in a post-Cold War world.
Four years ago I wrote an article called "Isolationism, Left and Right."
Liberal isolationism has, since Vietnam, been quite undisguised. At the time,
however, discerning the isolationist tendencies of conservatives required some
reading between the lines. Buchanan - subtlety is not his specialty - has now
made such interpretative work obsolete. He is out of the closet. Others are sure
to follow.
In some respects we may be headed back to the 1930s, when left and right
isolationists made common cause. Liberal isolationism will soon be joined by a
strain of conservative isolationism that has been in embarrassed hibernation
since Pearl Harbor.
I don't quite expect to see Buchanan and McGovern, arms linked, leading an
"America First" parade on the 4th of July. But let the Soviet empire spin off a
few more provinces, and who knows? After all, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary
toured together.
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION, CONRAD FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
TYPE: OPINION EDITORIAL
SUBJECT: CONSERVATIVES; INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
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17TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
October 13, 1989, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; PAGE A19
LENGTH: 889 words
HEADLINE: Holding On To Brezhney's Empire
BYLINE: Charles Krauthammer
BODY:
The Soviet Empire is collapsing in the most paradoxical way: the inner empire
is rapidly falling apart, while the external empire is managing to hold
together. That's not the way things are supposed to happen. That certainly is
not the way it had been predicted, say, a year ago when it seemed that the
Soviets were being pushed out of their newer colonies of Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Angola and Ethiopia.
The collapse of the East European inner empire is proceeding at an
astonishing pace. Poland is actively decommunizing under Solidarity. (Though
Solidarity may have rushed history a bit by agreeing to act as bill collector
for 40 years of Communist misrule.) And Hungary's Communists have molted into
what they say is a traditional, albeit left-wing, social democratic party.
East Germany, however, presents the Soviets with the most insoluble imperial
dilemma. Hungary or Poland can exist without communism. East Germany cannot. It
is not a country but a creation. It exists solely 50 that one group of Germans
may experience the joys of a workers' state. Take that away, and the state
ceases to have a reason for existence. Which is why reform in East Germany is
almost a contradiction of terms. Perestroika will not solve East Germany's
problems. It will make them terminal.
We are speaking here, of course, just of Warsaw Pact allies. Gorbachev has to
worry even more about the centrifugal forces at work in Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, the Ukraine and the Soviet Moslem
republics.
Which makes for the oddity: while the Soviet inner empire, the crown jewel of
its postwar conquests, spins out of control, the external Third World empire
remains intact:
Afghanistan. The puppet government of Najibullah (like Cher and Charlemagne,
he goes by one name) has survived far longer than anyone thought possible when
Soviet soldiers pulled out in February.
Cambodia. As Vietnam withdraws, its puppet (Hun Sen) is gathering grudging
support, even in the West, as perhaps the only realistic alternative to Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge.
Angola. Jonas Savimbi, trying to topple the Soviet client regime, is on the
defensive and having increasing difficulty getting supplies.
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Nicaragua. The contras get ready to test Miami's housing market. The
Sandinista regime is as secure as at any time in its 10-year history.
Ethiopia. This may be the exception. Mengistu's regime is retreating in the
face of advances by Tigray and Eritrean secessionists. But even this would not
be quite the loss it seems, because both the Tigrayans and the Eritreans are led
by Communists.
What is going on? It is not an accident, comrade, that Gorbachev is holding
on to these colonies. Contrary to expectations, he did not write them off when
he began withdrawing Soviet (and proxy Cuban and Vietnamese) troops and calling
for negotiation rather than confrontation. He is instead trying to do what Nixon
tried to do in South Vietnam: sustain, with huge amounts of aid, a client regime
after the metropolitan support troops have gone home. The U.S. Congress cut
short that experiment in proxy power in 1975. The Soviet parliament is unlikely
to follow suit.
The size of Gorbachev's continued investment in the colonies is breathtaking.
Afghanistan is getting a quarter of a billion dollars a month in military
supplies from a Soviet economy that is self-advertised as bankrupt. Cambodian
aid has apparently doubled in the last year to about half a billion dollars a
year. Aid to Angola holds steady at a cool $ 1 billion a year. And the
Sandinistas are getting their usual half a billion, albeit, now in the age of
perestroika, laundered through Eastern Europe and Cuba.
Which raises the question: Why, at a time when soap, salt and sugar are
rationed even in Moscow, is Gorbachev investing at least $ 5 billion a year to
maintain Brezhnev's empire?
Because empires, even those cobbled together absent-mindedly, do not
voluntarily dissolve themselves. As they shed their ideology, the Soviets are
reverting to the natural condition of a great power: trying to maintain power
where they have it and extend it where they don't. To assume otherwise is to
assume that they have not only overthrown Communist ideology but reversed human
nature. Great powers do not voluntarily abjure power. Small countries, like
Canada or Finland, living in the protective shadow of great powers, sometimes
do. But great powers, unless utterly defeated in war, like Germany and Japan, do
not.
About Eastern Europe, Gorbachev can do little. The growth of civil society
has reached the point at which its challenge to the Soviet-imposed state cannot
be resisted. Gorbachev has few tools to arrest the dissolution of the inner
empire. Accordingly, his strategy is to finesse the crisis by trying to
Finlandize states that he can no longer control.
In the external empire, on the other hand, the anticolonial battle is more
primitive: tanks and guns can still decide the issue. And tanks and guns are a
Soviet specialty. Gorbachev will use them to try to hang on to what he can.
Gorbachev is not a decolonizer. He is a realist. He will decolonize only
where he must. The external empire can still be held together militarily. The
internal empire cannot. Where he still retains the means to resist, he shows
every willingness of doing 50.
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7TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
November 25, 1989, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: FIRST SECTION; PAGE A1
LENGTH: 1436 words
HEADLINE: Dubcek Returns;
'Prague Spring' Reformer Cheered in Wenceslas Square;
Prague Ousts Leaders, Offers Opponents a Role
BYLINE: David Remnick, Marc Fisher, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: PRAGUE, Nov. 24, 1989
BODY:
Alexander Dubcek, Czechoslovakia's symbol of change, returned tonight for the
first time to Wenceslas Square, where 21 years ago Soviet tanks crushed the
"Prague Spring" reform movement that he led. This time Dubcek drank champagne.
Dubcek, after a triumphant speech to 300,000 people jammed into the square,
appeared at a press conference at the Magic Lantern Theater together with
playwright and reform leader Vaclav Havel. A5 Dubcek spoke, Havel's brother
suddenly ran in from the wings and whispered the news of the fall of the entire
Communist Party leadership.
Havel threw his arms into the air. Dubcek, unaware, kept talking. Seconds
later, Havel passed the word to Dubcek, and for the first time all evening,
Dubcek's face broke into a broad smile. His expression immediately announced the
news to the rest of the room.
Suddenly, glasses and champagne appeared. Havel hugged Dubcek, then stood up
to give the victory toast: "Long live free Czechoslovakia!" Dubcek, vindicated
after 20 years of political humiliation, downed his champagne in one long gulp.
What now? a reporter asked. Flustered, Dubcek paused. "I really don't know,"
he said. "Let developments take their course, and perhaps tomorrow we will be
wiser."
By now the news had spread throughout Prague. Champagne corks popped. Taxi
drivers led a manic procession through Wenceslas Square, honking their horns. A
man carried a victory cake to the center of the celebration. All around, people
were lighting firecrackers and sparklers.
A single trumpeter, like the leader of a New Orleans jazz funeral, led a few
hundred people up the promenade. Their fingers forming the victory symbol, they
softly sang the national anthem. Four soldiers in uniform ran laughing through
the square, waving a red, white and blue Czechoslovak flag given to them by
celebrating citizens.
"I have no illusions about the gentlemen who will replace those who will
resign,' Havel said. "But as long as these people do not return to the party
leadership, then the door will remain open. All of society will rush through
this door to create a democratic Czechoslovakia."
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Havel and Dubcek, along with student leaders, promised that a two-hour
general strike set for midday Monday will take place as scheduled. The strike is
intended, Havel said, as a show of popular participation in the country's
political future.
Dubcek, who has spent recent years in obscurity as a low-level bureaucrat
working for the Forestry Ministry in Bratislava, said any question of his return
to power was a "very complicated issue. My role is to stay low-key and keep my
feet firmly on the ground."
He endorsed the general demands of the reformers, calling for the Communist
Party to relinquish its constitutionally guaranteed "leading role" in the
government. "I am outside political parties now," Dubcek said.
Although Dubcek and Havel shared the platform and toasted one another on
their victory, their approaches to reform are not precisely in sync. Both call
themselves socialists, but while Dubcek speaks in Gorbachevian terms of a broad
renewal of socialism, Havel embraces a mixed economy that would include limited
private enterprises.
Theories of the nation's future, however, were secondary this afternoon, when
Dubcek, after two decades of enforced silence, stepped through a door and onto a
small balcony of the Socialist Party newspaper, the Free Word, overlooking
Wenceslas Square.
Below him a sea of people campaigning for democracy in Czechoslovakia
erupted, cheering and chanting "Long live Dubcek!" and "Bring him back to
power!" News of the government's mass resignation would not come for another few
hours.
Dubcek waited for the roaring to subside, and said, "Twenty years ago, we
tried to reform socialism, to make it better. In those days, the army and the
police stood with the people, and I am sure it will be the same again today."
All day long, students had roamed the city spreading the word of Dubcek's
homecoming. Handbills and banners covered store windows, the sides of streetcars
and the doors of government buildings. Businesses shut down. Flag-waving crowds
moved into the square and waited, chanting and dangling keyrings and bells to
signify the final hour of control by the government headed by Jakes.
The crowd roared for the captain of the national Sparta soccer team and for a
folk singer, who led a song about "the lies" of the government. But it was the
arrival of Dubcek that triggered the most extraordinary explosion of chants,
shouts and cheers.
"Dubcek! Dubcek! Bring him back to the palace!" Old men embraced. Teenagers
climbed trees for a better view.
Dubcek spoke in a strained voice, exhorting the people to fight on, but
cautioning them to resist "the tendency toward confrontation. Our culture should
be evident in all our deeds and passed on to the younger generation."
Dubcek said the present political movement "dates back to the invasion in
1968. This is our terrible legacy, what was called 'normalization. = He
demanded the ouster of all Communist Party leaders tied to the Soviet invasion
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- a demand that would be fulfilled just a few hours later.
Throughout the afternoon the crowd added to its arsenal of chants: "We have
had enough!" they cried. "Jakes's head will fall!" "State TV lies!" and "Europe,
we are coming!"
One of the most dramatic moments of the afternoon came when Marta Kubisova, a
singer who had been banned from the stage 21 years ago for performing songs
directed against the Communist Party, stepped out onto the balcony and delivered
a haunting rendition of "A Prayer." The song tells the story of a 17th-century
Bohemian hero who fought for the liberation of his people only to find himself
cast into exile.
The crowd begged for another song, asking Kubisova to sing the national
anthem. Instead, she announced that Roman Catholic Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek
would allow her to sing the anthem, called "Where Is My Home," at a mass
Saturday morning.
Vera Caslavsa, a gymnast who gave her three gold medals from the 1968 Mexico
City 01ympic Games to the Dubcek government, told the crowd that the road to
political democracy was like the long course of a "marathon runner. We are still
in the middle of the race."
After the rally, the demonstrators marched across the Vltava River to the
Communist Party headquarters to wait for the outcome of the meeting there. One
of the first hints that historic change was in the making came when state
television showed for the first time footage of the police beating demonstrators
with riot sticks last Friday night. Until now, state censors had prohibited
broadcasters and state-run newspapers from describing the bloodshed.
Other crowds gathered in front of stores to watch television coverage of the
party Central Committee meeting. Despite a police occupation of the state
television center, its staff met and decided they would broadcast all the news
they could, a radical break with the practice of decades.
Support for the students' strike and demonstrations spread throughout the
country's cultural bureaucracy, shutting down all museums, libraries and
theaters. For at least a week, the entire city focused almost solely on
Czechoslovakia's political fate.
Havel described the reform movement, which coalesced into a single Civic
Forum umbrella group only five days ago, as one of inexperienced amateurs.
"Everybody here, with the exception of Mr. Dubcek, is an amateur politician,"
Havel said. "However, that does not mean that tomorrow we will not be ready to
deal with the business of government in a highly competent manner."
The students of Charles University and other institutions had led the massive
organizational effort to stage daily street demonstrations and inform a populace
left largely in the dark by the state-run media. Thanking them, Havel said,
"After 20 years, the students have returned time and history to this country."
Students had gathered early this morning as usual to photocopy pictures of
the demonstrations, petitions and news accounts of the protests, taking them to
factories, shops and state offices, posting them on street corners and bulletin
boards. The participation of hundreds of factories in both the demonstrations
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and the upcoming strike has been instrumental in the extraordinary growth of the
democracy movement here.
Late this evening, Jiri Hajek, who served as foreign minister in Dubcek's
government two decades ago, welcomed the demise of a leadership that had been
installed by Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union. "All I can say is I'm sorry
it took so long," Hajek said.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, FRIDAY'S EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE, AP; ILLUSTRATION, TWP
TYPE: FOREIGN NEWS
SUBJECT: CZECHOSLOVAKIA; DEMONSTRATIONS; FOREIGN HEADS OF STATE; TIME / HISTORY;
FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS
NAMED-PERSONS: ALEXANDER DUBCEK; VACLAV HAVEL
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2ND STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1989 The Washington Post
December 5, 1989, Tuesday, Final Edition
SECTION: STYLE; PAGE C1
LENGTH: 1844 words
HEADLINE: In Prague, a Second Breath of Spring;
Opposition Publications and the Arts Pick Up Where They Left Off in 1968
SERIES: Occasional
BYLINE: Mary Battiata, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: PRAGUE
BODY:
Day 17 of the Czechoslovak revolution.
In a downtown art gallery, intense young women crank illegal mimeograph
machines; men with headbands rush up and down the stairs, staggering under arm
loads of political pamphlets. Outside, the sidewalks are filled once again with
people on the way to the demonstration. There are kids in army surplus jackets
and middle-aged men in ponytails. People flash the Victory sign as they cross in
front of traffic; the drivers flash them back.
"The Soviet invasion froze everything," says Vladislav Mertel, a folk singer,
in his forties. "We were not allowed to age, or gain experience, 50 we have
never lost our idealism. We are all 20 years younger than our physical selves.
"It's true; the ' 60s never ended here; in fact, they are just beginning."
To Wenceslas Square, then, where people strum guitars, candles burn all
night, and there are flowers everywhere.
"Candles and national heroes. It's like Latin America!" says Jachym Topol,
the 27-year-old poet and editor and co-founder of the audacious Revolver Revue.
In the two weeks since a quarter-million people came to Wenceslas Square to
demand democracy, the enormous, brooding statue of mail-draped St. Wenceslas on
his horse has become a kind of mystic national shrine.
By day, it draws students, artists, dissidents and ordinary citizens who have
come together under the banner of Civic Forum, the mass democratic movement led
by the playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel.
Late at night, the setting becomes more surreal. There are deranged people,
drunks and old prostitutes, kneeling and praying before pictures of Alexander
Dubcek, the leader who was ousted in the 1968 Soviet invasion. Hundreds of
colored candles flicker in the dark in memory of the students beaten by police
on Nov. 17.
"I will have to write about this," says Topol.
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Under Topol, Revolver Revue has become the liveliest and most sophisticated
opposition publication. For five years, under police harassment and threat of
imprisonment, Topol and his co-editor published scores of banned Czechoslovak
and foreign authors, as well as political commentary so biting it was rejected
by the leading opposition magazine.
Last February's Revolver, for example, featured Czech novelist Ludwik Vaculik
declaring that "communism has violence in its philosophical genes," and, in a
deliberate swipe at the small-town roots of the Czechoslovak hard-line Communist
leadership, that "when that violence is crossed with the genes of village
stupidity, a red flower blooms."
"It may not seem like much now," Topol says. "But believe, me, it was brave
then."
Since the revolution began, however, playwrights have become politicians,
university students have become detectives, coal miners have become orators and
poets have become pamphleteers.
So Topol and a dozen stalwarts have moved into a second-story art gallery on
Vodickova Street, near Wenceslas Square, where they run the Independent
Information Service, a clearinghouse for news from the streets and the newly
accessible halls of government.
They've produced 100,000 leaflets a day, and 30,000 newsletters. The office,
in a frescoed atelier, has become a mecca for the unsung heroes of the
Czechoslovak uprising.
The office attracts a varied crowd: depressed factory workers hoping to talk
anti-communist tactics, sombrero-topped Slovakian Gypsies offering their
fund-raising services, pink-cheeked septuagenarians bearing reams of paper and
jars of tomato preserves.
And there is "Scarface," the intense young fellow who showed up a few days
ago and now sometimes guards the wrought-iron gate down on the street. An
orphan, and a veteran of a four-year hitch in Afghanistan, he came telling tales
about two special military schools run by the state, where orphans allegedly are
turned into trained assassins.
"We're making a kind of record, a list of what people are thinking in these
days," Topol says.
"If someone comes from a little village in Slovakia, it's not possible for
him to talk to the big bosses" of the Civic Forum movement, Topol explains. "If
someone needs to talk, we talk. We really need a psychologist for these people.
It's a shock for them to be in Prague."
And for Topol, as well.
"Every morning I have to go on the street, and until the moment I see the
first leaflet, the first poster, I still don't believe this has all happened -------------------------
'So this is the end of communism! It was not a dream!' "
"We Don't Act, We Discuss," read the sign on the Balustrade Theater door on
Saturday night.
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It is a testament to the singular nature of this revolution that its story
can be told in a tour of the Prague theater district.
There is the Realist Theater, where the actors first tested the regime's
mettle by staging a Havel play more than two months ago. It is also where the
actors voted to strike, following the brutal police beating of peaceful student
demonstrators on Nov. 17.
There is the Cinoherny Klub, where Havel and several other dissidents,
students and artists met two nights later to form Civic Forum. And the Magic
Lantern, the oldest, most celebrated pantomime theater in Europe, where
Civic Forum set up temporary offices and has held chaotic press conferences
ever since.
Officially, the theaters have been on strike every night for the past two
weeks, but unofficially they've been open for political discussions. Attending
one is a little like watching a Phil Donahue show, only one moderated by the
nation's most thoughtful and elegant stage and screen stars.
The actors sit on stage, the audiences overflow the balconies. The nation has
been muzzled for 20 years, one actress explains, and now nobody can stop
talking.
At the Realist Theater, Mertel, the folk singer, took the stage. "I am
speaking in the name of the cowards," Mertel said. "I have never signed
anything," Mertel went on, referring to the human rights declaration, Charter
77.
"You remember how in earlier times people always said, 'I can't demonstrate,
because I have children who want to study at the university.' It's different
today. Today we must demonstrate because we have children at the university.
"Now we are coming forward. You cowards in our midst, don't lose hope. We are
in the majority."
Last week, the actors at the Realist rigged up a loudspeaker phone, and then
telephoned the state artist who designed the new 100-crown note (worth about $
10). The new bill has a picture of Klement Gottwald, the communist who with the
help of Soviet troops, took over Czechoslovakia in 1948. Almost as soon as the
note appeared this year, people began defacing it. The most popular gesture was
to ink a small, Hitler mustache on Gottwald's upper lip.
"Why did you put this communist murderer on our money?" the theatergoers
demanded.
"I didn't make the decision!" the artist kept saying. "I just designed it."
The state put Topol in a mental hospital for three months when he refused to
join the army. He was lucky. In the office of the Independent News Service there
are people who served years in jail for similar offenses.
But now the years of living dangerously appear to be waning. Under pressure
of Civic Forum, the Czechoslovak Communist Party is slowly, reluctantly,
beginning to surrender power. Free elections may be held by next summer. The
newspapers are freer every day. Television broadcasts live from the Square.
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Topol has gone from being mad, bad and dangerous to know, to trying to figure
out how to pay copyrights.
"All our lives we have been living up against the wall. Now, if that wall is
disappearing, I don't know what we will do," says Topol. He rolls his mordant
blue eyes, pushes back a lock of green-gold hair and gives into the temptation
for a joke. "I guess I will have to go to Romania."
In the next year or two, as it already has in Poland, the center of
Czechoslovak political life will shift from book-lined dissidents' apartments to
government buildings. The moral certainties of being in opposition will be
replaced, if all goes well, by the complexities of political pluralism.
Already, the print world is exploding. Czechoslovak writers met over the
weekend and formed an independent writers union. Novelist Ivan Klima, banned for
years, reckons that he will bring out all of his titles in the next two years.
The leading opposition paper, Lidove Noviny, long banned, has already been
granted office space and equipment, and soon will become the first independent
daily here.
It's a little intimidating for a 27-year-old, no matter how bold.
"We have been making Revolver Revue like pirates," Topol says, smiling wryly.
"If we wanted to publish Sam Shepard, we published him. Now, if we are legal, we
will have to pay. Where will we find the money for that?"
In his audacity, most likely.
Topol is the baby in a small army of a few thousand dissidents who have spent
most of their adult lives openly resisting the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He
is closer in age to newly radicalized university students than longtime
opposition leaders like Havel (who is a friend of Topol's family).
As members readily admit, the venerable Czechoslovak opposition is a kind of
establishment now. Topol's sensibility is more ironic, more modern and much
needed. He is a Talking Head to their Jefferson Airplane.
"Jachym is the poet of the 1990s. I'm still a romantic poet of the 19th
century," says songwriter Mertel. "There's a gap between us of not 10 years, but
a whole century."
The title of Topol's last collection of poems, "I Love You to Madness," was
meant to tweak the Czechoslovak romantic poets who devote their poetry to
tragic, impossible love. One of his poems was about what it feels like to write
a love letter and seal it with a postage stamp that portrays a "mass murderer."
(Gottwald again.)
Revolver Revue has published memoirs of World War II Czechoslovak
anti-communist partisans too, and cheered on the publication at a sister
publication of an expose' on Communist Party treatment of workers entitled "How
to Kill a Miner."
The Revue has also published the gritty American poet Charles Bukowski, and
erotica by Henry Miller and other writing that the older, more established
dissident publications consider obscene.
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That is where Topol expects to find his niche, if he can find a benefactor to
keep Revolver and the Independent News Service going once the revolution is over
and the striking university students who now crank the mimeograph machine have
gone back to class.
"We will be critical, and we will be controversial," says Topol.
He's got an entire issue of articles very critical of Civic Forum. He wants
to publish Celine, who hasn't seen print here since the '30s.
And he's planning to publish a Czech American named Jan Novak. "He's written
three very good novels," says Topol. "But some people from the opposition
establishment told us they think it's pornography.
"The novels are brutal and full of sex. They are 'vulgar.'
"But I don't care," Topol says, grinning. "I will publish him because he is a
good writer."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, CZECHOSLOVAK PUBLISHER JACHYM TOPOL IN THE OFFICES OF HIS
MAGAZINE. CAROL GUZY; PHOTO, REUTER
TYPE: FOREIGN NEWS
SUBJECT: CZECHOSLOVAKIA; DEMONSTRATIONS; POLITICS; FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS
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1ST DOCUMENT of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Public Papers of the Presidents
Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at a White House
Briefing for Members of the Board of Directors of the
National Newspaper Association
25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
March 15, 1990
LENGTH: 3541 words
The President. Actually, I just came from a St. Patrick's Day lunch put on by
Speaker Foley up in the Capitol. Very good hands-across-the aisle kind of
thing.
Well, welcome. We call this the White House complex. That's not the
"beltway syndrome," but this is the White House complex. And you don't have to
show any ID to get out of the place, so, I'll put you at ease. I know it's been
a pain coming in.
But I'm just delighted you all were here. I hope you've benefited from some
of the briefings you've had here. And I'm delighted to 525 you all. We'll go
to the questions, but I want to underscore some of the same points that I tried
to make this morning to the National Association of Manufacturers annual
Washington meeting about the economy.
The fact is that the economy remains sound and steady. The facts are these:
The gross national product, up; the exports, up; personal income, up. Take a
look, then, at the trade deficit; it's down. The Federal deficit -- I'm not
happy with it, but down. And the prime rate -- far better than it was several
years ago. And of course, unemployment is down. Last year's rate was the
lowest in the past 16 years.
So, that is good news, but there's a great deal that we have to do to keep
this expansion going. The economy at this moment isn't as robust as I'd like to
see it; but we've got, basically, I think, a sound economy. Now, we've got to
do certain things. We've got to create incentive for investment. And I get hit
in the political arena on my concept of cutting the capital gains tax, or
reestablishing what we call a capital gains differential, some calling that a
tax that favors the rich. I think it favors jobs. And I cited some statistics
today that Japan taxes capital gains at 5 percent; Korea, Germany, Hong Kong,
Taiwan tax capital gain at O.
Now, you should be saying, What are you doing to help us be more competitive
around the world? And the capital gains - one of the reasons I favored it is,
is I do think it will help us be much more competitive around the world. I'm
also proposing to the Congress incentives to encourage research and development,
so that'll keep us competitive.
Of course the most crucial investment is in the field of education. We know
that we can't remain competitive or remain a world-class economy without
first-class schools. So, we got together with the Governors and adopted
national goals, not trying to tell the local schools what kind of curriculum to
have but goals that all the Governors agreed with, and now try to go forward
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
and try to meet those goals, such as Head Start and a literate America and then
passing certain standards as the kids go from 4th-grade and 8th-grade and
12th-grade level.
And so, we've got sound goals. And if these work and if we're successful,
not only in the tax end but in the education goals, then we're going to have not
a "peace dividend" but a "growth dividend" and a return on our investment in
expanded opportunity, more jobs, and a higher standard of living for Americans.
I made that point this morning, and I will continue to make the point that we
need to do certain things to stimulate investment and savings. And that, I
think, will help us become very competitive. I've had some fascinating meetings
in the last couple of weeks with, first, the Japanese Prime Minister and then
just a few days ago with Takeshita, former Prime Minister and very much of a
power in Japan. And I did my level best to impress on these very important
leaders, these friends of the United States, the need for us to have more access
to their markets. So, we'll see where we end up.
But no further ado, who wants to go - yes, sir?
Soviet Political Developments
Q. I'm Jerry Moriarity [Pine-Palm Publishing], from Minnesota and Arizona.
I'd like to ask you, with all the power that's gravitating into the hands of
Gorbachev while the Soviet world is collapsing about him, do you see any danger
of a dictatorship evolving?
The President. No, because I think there's much less danger today given what
they've done in their Parliament, or in their congressional side of things.
They've come out of the totalitarianism of the past. They give the new
President great power, but I don't see it as a threat, and I certainly don't see
it as a threat at this juncture in history.
You know, I shifted our support from going more like this: "We support reform
and perestroika," to "We support perestroikaand reform, and we want to see
Gorbachev succeed.' I am convinced that one of the reasons we've had peaceful
change in Eastern Europe is because of the approach that Gorbachev himself
brought to bear on the problem. And I've consulted with him, had communications
from him - one, for example, on the question of Germany - and I think he's a
reasonable man.
So, I'm not worried about the constitutional changes because as you look at
the total picture inside the Soviet Union, you see an evolution that none of us
would have believed possible 5 years ago or 3 or 2 in terms of democratic
institutions. And I'm talking about the power in their Congress. They had a
guy named Primakov who is the head of their Congress. And he was over here, and
he came and told me -- he said, "Well, I'm here to learn from the United
States." And I said, "Mr. Primakov, you've come to the wrong guy in telling you
what to do about the Congress. I'm not having too much luck. [Laughter]
But the very fact that he was here, you know, and in a spirit of very good
will, getting -- and I was only being semifacetious there -- but it's very
different, Jerry, than it used to be. It's amazingly different. I dealt with
these guys back in the United Nations, and I can't tell you how different it is
in terms of self-criticism on their part or debate. When you have a
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
difference, you can do it agreeably. It doesn't have to be disagreeable like it
was in the heart of the Cold War days. So, I am not overly concerned.
American Hostages in Lebanon
Q. You said in your national newscast [see news conference, March 13] the
other day that the media and all the people there would be surprised and
fascinated when the hostage situation is resolved. What did you mean by that?
Can you expand on it?
The President. Well, I can't really expand, except to say I was addressing
myself more to this incident of this phone call that proved to be a hoax and
that I am not at liberty to discuss. In terms of the hostages, there was a wave
of speculation a week or so ago that frankly confused me because we are going
down every alley, we are trying every avenue to free the hostages. But there is
no negotiation going on with any part of the U.S. Government or anything of that
nature.
I saw the speculation, and I was wondering if it was some private initiatives
on the part of lawyers or those representing the families of individuals held
hostages, because I wish I could tell you that there was a serious, immediate
effort that would pay off, but that isn't the case. So, when I was talking
there, I was really talking about this phone call. And some of you may remember
there were some cartoonists - - I gave them a great deal of opportunity to have
some fun at, you know, picking up the phone, "Who is this," you know, and all
that. [Laughter]
But I would do it again because I feel -- I don't know why -- it weighs on
me, the burden of Americans held against their will. And I don't mind taking
one on the chin if I go the extra mile. I ought to do that as your President, I
think. And I made the comment that the next phone call of that nature may have
a little more difficulty getting through - [Laughter] but I'm glad we tried.
So, I was talking in that context.
U.S. Economy
Q. More from the spirit of democracy, this good economy - what can be done
to move some of that into the Rust Belt areas, the pockets like the Ohio Valley
Rust Belt?
The President. Not sure I have a specific idea, but I'll guarantee you that
if we are successful in getting the budget deficit down, then you have an
economic climate in which new businesses start up. We've had a reasonable
success - and I'm not crowing about it --- in the creation of small businesses
that are not identified with one industry. And so, I think from the Federal
standpoint the best thing we can do is to see that where we do have assistance
- education, and to installations going into places -- that there's fairplay.
But I really believe, for the Ohio Valley or wherever else it is, that just
fundamentally sound fiscal policy is the answer.
I am not in favor maybe this will be a disappointment, but I had better
level with you all - in targeting funds or kind of choosing winners and losers.
I don't think that is the role of the Federal Government - industrial policy in
a broader sense, where you say we're going to put our efforts into one industry
or another. I don't think that's the role of the Federal Government.
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
Certainly, I don't think it's the philosophy under which I was elected.
So, there are programs. I'm strongly in favor of job retraining - Job
Training Partnership Act --- I think we're doing better on that. I hope our
whole approach to education pays off. So, it's a general response to a very
specific question.
Q. There's a growing sense of frustration across America that the standard
of living in this country may be in decline. We hear the rich are getting
richer, the poor are getting poorer. There are always reports that this country
is no longer able to provide the standards of education, health, care, housing
that other nations in the industrialized world are able to give their people.
The President. We still have the highest standard of living in the world. I
think if we are successful in our battle against narcotics, which is not going
to be done by the Federal Government alone, but certainly I must use the bully
pulpit and our National Drug Strategy I, National Strategy II to try to set a
tone for the rest of the country in what can be done to fight narcotics for a
successful education, antidrug fight, and then the competitiveness legislation
that I've referred to - math and science education, R&D, capital gains - I
believe that we will continue to have the highest living standard.
So, I am not that pessimistic, and yet I don't want to stand here with some
Pollyannish attitude about the economy. There are some signs that worry me.
There are some signs that make me feel that growth will continue and that the
economy may be doing better now than it was a month or two ago. But I don't
accept the premise that we're a second-class power or that we are in decline.
There's a marvelous book that was quoted around here about the decline of the
United States. We've got some problems. But if you want to put it in a broad
philosophical sense, we're winning. Our concept of freedom and democracy is
winning around the world. And I sometimes wish as President that there were
more funds readily available -- read that less of a deficit - to help the
fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe or of our own neighbors to the south,
which we must never neglect.
But even then, even without the largess that we could bestow on others from
budget surplus or operating in balance, we still can help countries; and we are
winning in the ideological battle and the philosophical battle. And if we can
make fair markets help create market incentives and then have fair markets ---
I really believe we're just on the threshold of a whole age of increased living
standards for the United States. But that's our goal.
American Volunteers in Nicaragua
Q. Mr. President, will you encourage the use of Peace Corps volunteers who
see that aid actually gets to the poorest villagers to be a substantial part of
the aid you're seeking for Nicaragua and Panama?
The President. Yes, I'm strongly in favor of the Peace Corps. I've talked
to our Peace Corps Director. You know, it's not quite right there. Let me tell
you something that does trouble me, though, in Nicaragua. I've answered the
question because I'm a great believer in the Peace Corps. And I'll tell you,
the demands for Peace Corps in some of these countries, particularly in Eastern
Europe, now Poland and Czechoslovakia, is wonderful. It's a wonderful tribute
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to the young volunteers that go into the Peace Corps and to the concept of a
great nation willing to help emerging democracies. But I am frustrated a little
bit by some of the Americans that have gone down to Nicaragua, been there for 2
years allegedly to help the people of Nicaragua. And then Nicaragua has a free
and fair election, and it turns out these people were interested in helping the
Sandinistas, the Sandinismos. And now they're picketing. Some of them have
been -- I don't know whether they're still there - in from of the U.S. Embassy
because in their view the wrong people won the election. But that's not the
role of the United States. If we want to help the people and there are
verifiably, certifiably free elections, they ought to stay down there - if
they're acting in this philanthropic way - and try to help, as the Peace Corps
does in Nicaragua. Consider my spleen vented. [Laughter]
Federal Budget
Q. This noon you had lunch with Speaker Foley. In the spirit of St.
Patrick, did you work out a deal on how to reduce defense spending?
The President. No, that has not been worked out. We've made some proposals;
and he is, I think, waiting, in fairness to him, for his budget process to work.
But I find him very reasonable. We differ philosophically on some of these
questions. I've cited capital gains, for example. I mean, I just haven't
properly sold an honorable man like Foley on what it means to create jobs, what
it means to be competitive -- I cited for you now the differential between what
it is in Japan, what it is in Korea, and all of this -- 50 I've got to do better
in communicating with some of those people on the other side.
But on the defense, I think we must retain a reasoned defense. Colin
Powell[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and Cheney [Secretary of Defense]
have testified on a different kind of force. I've had strong support, vocal
support, from Foley on things like our latest proposal on reducing our force
levels in Europe, the proposal with Gorbachev to both reduce to 195,000 in
central Europe and then 30,000 additional troops that can be deployed under
agreement with the Soviets. So, we're getting some support there, and I believe
we will be able to work out an agreed defense program. I hope we will because 1
don't want to have to 522 defense all caught up in politics. And the rapidity
of change is such that I think we are in a good position to negotiate further
reductions with the Soviet Union, and that's one of the reasons I'm looking
forward to the summit with Mr. Gorbachev.
Lithuania
Q. Under what circumstances would the United States begin the process and
when would we begin the process of recognizing an independent Luthuania or any
other Soviet republic?
The President. In the first place, we have never recognized the
incorporation of the Baltic States, which you are talking about - Lithuania,
Estonia, and Latvia -- into the Soviet Union. It was never a question of having
recognized their incorporation into the Soviet Union.
I think there are standards of control over one's country - or control over
one's, in this instance, territory -- that guide recognition. But I think that
the best role for the United States, having encouraged self-determination,
having not been willing to recognize Lithuania being incorporated into the
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
Soviet Union, is to encourage a peaceful evolution from now on.
Lithuania, under the right of self-determination, expressed themselves. To
the credit of the Soviet leaders, all the way from Ligachev[Communist Party
Chairman, Agrarian Policy Commission] to Gorbachev on over, they have said: We
will not use force. We're peaceful. It is very important to the people in
these Baltic States that the evolution be peaceful. And so, I am, just as in
East Germany when the Berlin Wall started down -- some of my political opponents
were saying I was unenthusiastic about it. And I told one of our star TV
commentators, Well, that's the kind of person I am. I mean, some people jump
with joy and do cartwheels, and I've got different genes or something.
[Laughter]
But having said that, another political leader said, Well, you ought to go to
Berlin, and the President should be seen at the Wall. I had communications from
the most respected leaders in East and West, several of them, saying, Don't do
anything silly. I mean, we're concerned now as this evolves.
And sometimes caution and prudence, I think, are right. And I think in this
case it proved right because that evolution has moved peacefully, and we did not
provoke some kind of outbreak through exhorting there at the Berlin Wall that
could have caused other countries to act differently.
I'm very pleased with the way the Lithuanian situation is developing, and
we're watching it closely. We will encourage the fundamental principles of
self-determination, and we will encourage the concept of peaceful change. And I
hope both major parties in that discussion will continue to adhere to peaceful
change.
Voice of America
Q. It seems to me that the Voice of America has been one of our best tools
for exporting the ideas of democracy, and yet I understand that we want to cut
their budget. Don't you think that it would be better if we just maintained the
budget in order to continue to have this influence in the countries of the
Eastern bloc?
The President. I'm embarrassed to say I don't have the figures, but I am not
aware of any cut in the budget. Because like you, I accept your premise, your
hypothesis. And you know why? Because Havel, Vaclav Havel, the playwright
President of Czechoslovakia, expressed his not only appreciation for what the
Voice of America did in keeping the hope of democracy and freedom alive but also
insisted that it's essential that the Voice still go in there.
So, I don't think can someone -- we don't think that we have recommended
cuts in the Voice, but maybe we could get your name. It's a good specific
question. And, Barrie [Barrie Tron, Deputy Director of Media Relations], maybe
you could find that, and we'll let you know the exact numbers.
But whatever the figures, believe me, there is no philosophical commitment to
ratchet down or cut back on the Voice, because I agree with you that it's even
more important that that message of freedom continue to be heard; and I accept
the word of Havel in the process.
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25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 423
Now, we've got one more, and I see an urgent - I've not been very good about
the left side of the room. Yes, sir?
Foreign Aid
Q. Don Mulford, Montclair Times. Does it bother you at all the proportion
of the foreign aid budget going to two nations, Israel and Egypt? Irrespective
of any comment on Jerusalem [laughter] - is there some thought of perhaps
lowering the level of the funds going there in the hope that it might promote
peace - to stop funding both nations on such a large level of our resources?
The President. I would not favor that. I do favor greater flexibility for
the President, which means a weakening of or an elimination of earmarking,
because what's happened is a tremendous percentage, as Don points out, of our
foreign aid budget is going to just a handful of countries. And you cited
Israel, and I could add Egypt - well, you added Egypt -- and there's Pakistan
and one or two others. And by the time that money is disbursed, there is almost
nothing.
And I'll give you an example. In Jamaica, I must confess that when Mr.
Manley[Prime Minister] came in, based on his past record and his proximity to
Cuba and his former fraternity with Mr. Castro [President of Cubal, I didn't
know how it would go. Manley campaigned on a different policy this time. He
said, "I'm not going to push our country into the arms of Fidel Castro." And
he's been very good, and I salute him. And when I go to try to help the
impoverished people of Jamaica, we have very little flexibility.
And so, I don't want to suggest cutting to good friends, but I have asked
that we be accorded more flexibility, perhaps a fund that's known as a
discretionary fund, for the President to be able to prioritize the interests of
this country and go forward with them.
So, Bob Dole raised the question, and I saluted him for raising the question.
And we will continue to work with the Congress. I think there may be some
sentiment for it, but I don't think you'll see it in slashes in the budget to
accomplish that end because there's some strong reasons of friendship for that
and there's some powerful political forces that would argue against that.
Well, listen, thank you all very, very much. A pleasure to be with you.
Note: The President spoke at 3:34 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
Office Building.
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