Who Is Barbara Lee? John Fund this morning.
Does she represent the opinion of her district? Probably.
Who Is Barbara Lee?
And was her "no" vote motivated by pacifism or anti-Americanism?
Monday, September 17, 2001 12:00 a.m. EDT
"Let us not become the evil we deplore," Rep. Barbara Lee said on the House floor last Friday in explaining why she was the "1" in the 420-1 vote against a resolution giving President Bush authority to use necessary force against terrorism.
"Violence begets violence, and we don't want that to happen. That kills people," she told her colleagues. She suggested that as an alternative the U.S. capture and try those responsible for the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York and enhance security at key installations. Apologists for the Ms. Lee, a California Democrat whose district includes Oakland and Berkeley, are already explaining that her vote is consistent with her lifelong commitment to nonviolence, which includes a bill to establish a "Department of Peace."
One wishes Ms. Lee were just a clueless liberal, but her history leads me to conclude that she is the kind of "San Francisco Democrat" that former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized in 1984: someone who "always blames America first."
American history is chock full of examples of lone voices standing up against the conventional wisdom. Some were profiles in courage, such as Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which upheld Jim Crow laws in the South. Others were men of principle, such as Sen. Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning. These two Democrats cast the only votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, suspecting correctly that LBJ wasn't being fully candid with Congress and would turn the authority to wage war into a blank check.
Others were sincerely confused. Rep. Jeanette Rankin, a Montana Republican, voted against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 and was promptly turned out of office. A full 22 years later, forgiving voters elected her to another term--just in time for her to cast the lone vote against U.S. entry into World War II. She wisely chose to retire from public life at that point, though she briefly considered another race just before her death in 1973.
We won't be so lucky with Rep. Lee. She frequently intervenes in controversial issues with an unapologetically left-wing perspective. Last year, she traveled to Cuba with Rep. Maxine Waters to hear "firsthand how the people of Cuba feel about" Elian Gonzalez. Ms. Lee returned to say that "as a trained social worker, I can unequivocally say that Elian's father is totally fit and equipped to raise his son in a loving environment."
In 1998, she was one of five House members to oppose retaliatory air strikes against Iraq. In 1999 she was the lone vote to oppose a resolution supporting U.S. troops during the conflict with Serbia. "I believe in peace," she explained. "I believe the way we resolve conflict is not through military action and bombing." But she was aware of the fact that other peace activists had voted in support of U.S. troops. "I was surprised," she admitted. "Being the only 'no' vote is troubling. You wonder if there's something you've missed."
On the surface, Ms. Lee is consistent in her pacifism. She was appalled that the U.S. didn't do more to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 people died. "We should have been there," she said, "but not with bombs. We should have negotiated, and put our stake down." She left unsaid how the U.S. could have negotiated with the rampaging machete-wielding madmen who massacred whole villages.
Rather than dismiss Ms. Lee as a starry-eyed innocent, I believe her history shows her to be an intelligent and focused opponent of the use of American power. In 1975, she graduated with a master's degree in social work and started a community mental health center. In 1979, at 33, she joined the staff of Rep. Ron Dellums, a radical product of the antiwar movement. She rose to become his chief of staff.
The radical politics of Rep. Dellums and much of his staff came to light in 1983, when the U.S. invaded Grenada, freed a group of American medical students and deposed a Marxist regime that was building a large airfield with Cuban personnel. Shortly before the invasion, Mr. Dellums and his staff had conducted a "fact finding" mission to the island designed to show that the airfield could never be used for military purposes. His office prepared a report on the trip and asked for the Marxist regime to vet it, according to documents from a meeting of the communist government's politburo that American troops captured.
"Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums," the documents read. "They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make changes." The meeting documents go on to discuss possible military uses of the airfield.
Another document captured by American troops was the diary of Grenada's Marxist defense minister. He wrote "The Revo[lution] has been able to crush counter-revolution internationally. Airport will be used for Cuban and Soviet military." The implication of this is that the Dellums team either were hopeless dupes or something more sinister. Mr. Dellums's final report to Congress on the airfield concluded that "nothing being done in Grenada constitutes a threat to the United States or her allies."
Nothing was done to discipline Mr. Dellums after these revelations, even though a letter from Mr. Dellums's special assistant Carlottia Scott to the island's Marxist ruler said that Mr. Dellums is "really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revo and making it strong." A Reagan administration official explained to me at the time that stripping Mr. Dellums of his senior status on the House Armed Services Commitee would only make a martyr of him.
The documents have appeared in few places outside of National Review, Human Events and the syndicated column of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Authors David Horowitz and Peter Collier, who were left-wing editors of the radical journal Ramparts in the 1960s but became disillusioned and are now conservatives, wrote that that Rep. Dellums was part of a "Fifth Column Left" that during the Cold War used allegations of "McCarthyism" to "pre-empt scrutiny of their divided loyalties and covert agendas."
Rep. Lee's district is perhaps the most radicial in the country. Last year the 9% of the vote that Ralph Nader's won there almost equaled George W. Bush's 12% showing. Oakland's Mayor Jerry Brown, a political independent, says his biggest policy challenge often is dealing with people for whom the excesses of the late 1960s are still today's reality. But I suspect that even in Berkeley, there are constituents of Rep. Lee for whom her latest departure from sanity is too much. America has been attacked, and while pacifism has an honorable tradition in this country, what Ms. Lee seems to use as a cloak for her belief that when it comes to the use of American power, her country can never do right. |
