When the White House Feared Kerry
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2003; 9:00 AM
Every once in awhile, a political profile comes along with a lead so dazzling that it almost redefines the way we think about someone.
It's usually based on old-fashioned journalistic digging -- the poring-over-documents kind -- rather than breathtaking writing.
That's what the Boston Globe has just done with John Kerry.
Globe reporter Michael Kranish revisits the period that made the young Vietnam veteran a public figure -- his opposition, calculated or otherwise, to the war when he returned -- and, shades of Watergate, gets Nixon's take on the future presidential candidate.
Bottom line: Richard Milhous thought Kerry was a phony.
This could be gold in a Democratic primary: Tricky Dick, back in the Watergate era, being so worried about John Kerry that he was practically awarded a spot on the enemies' list.
Of course, others may read this and say, you know what, Nixon had Kerry nailed and he is a phony.
If George W. (whose father served as Nixon's RNC chairman) was as worried about Kerry as the late president was, Kerry would be in good shape.
After a period of rough headlines about everything from his cancer surgery to his Jewish roots, Kerry seems to be getting some better press lately.
But first let's go to part 3 of the Globe's Kerry, the man--the myth--the era series:
"April 28, 1971, 4:33 p.m. President Richard M. Nixon takes a call from his counsel, Charles Colson.
" 'This fellow Kerry that they had on last week,' Colson tells the president, referring to a television appearance by John F. Kerry, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
" 'Yeah,' Nixon responds.
" 'He turns out to be really quite a phony,' Colson says.
" 'Well, he is sort of a phony, isn't he?' Nixon says.
"Yes, Colson says in a gossiping vein, telling the president that Kerry stayed at the home of a Georgetown socialite while other protesters slept on the mall.
" 'He was in Vietnam a total of four months,' Colson scoffs, without mentioning that Kerry earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, and had also been on an earlier tour. 'He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue.' . . .
"Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat.
"The White House feared him like no other protester. Colson, in a secret memo, revealed he had a mission to target Kerry: 'Destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader.' "
Sound bite city!
"The effort by Nixon and his aides to undermine Kerry went much deeper than even Kerry realized. Yet it is this chapter in his life, as much as any other, that helped turn Kerry into a national political figure. By targeting Kerry, the Nixon White House boosted his stature in ways that still are having an impact.
"But at the same time, many of the issues that Nixon and his aides raised more than 30 years ago about Kerry still remain. Echoes of Colson's words can still be heard in Washington: 'He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue, a phony.' "
Those echoes can be so annoying.
Bonus factoid: Morley Safer asked Kerry on "60 Minutes" if he wanted to be president -- this was back in '71. Kerry called the idea crazy.
Dan Kennedy declares it "John Kerry Week in the media" and says of the Globe excavation project: "The series accomplishes its institutional mission: being comprehensive enough that no enterprising news org is likely to come in from the outside and dig up any startling revelations about Kerry's past. . . .
"Slate's William Saletan is stunned to discover that Kerry can be loose and funny. 'If he keeps this up,' Saletan writes, 'he might actually become president.'
"In the New Republic's online 'TNR Primary,' my former Boston Phoenix colleague Michael Crowley -- who wrote an entertainingly (and perhaps excessively) tough profile of Kerry last year -- gives him a 'General Likeability' grade of 'A' on the campaign stump. Crowley also notes that the Globe series reinforces Kerry's 'special moral authority' in going up against the Hero of the Texas Air National Guard, George W. Bush.
"Time magazine columnist Joe Klein follows up the favorable piece he did on Kerry in the New Yorker last year by praising his health-care proposal. Calling it 'the first significant new idea of this political season,' Klein says that only Kerry's plan is responsible enough to restrict benefits to those who need it the most."
Howard Dean and Bob Graham have gotten into a little dustup (be still my heart). Dean was boasting about being the only major candidate in the race who's appointed judges, and when asked about Graham said he's a great guy and all that "but at this point he's not one of the top-tier candidates." Graham's flack fired back that his man "created twice as many jobs when he was governor of Florida than there are people in the state of Vermont," and Dean expressed regret for minimizing Graham's chances.
What exactly are those chances? Slate's William Saletan isn't taking Graham all that seriously: "I'm not going to check his references till he explains why he wants the job.
"Graham has had many chances to make his case. I've seen him speak at the April 9 Children's Defense Fund forum, the May 3 South Carolina debate, his May 6 campaign kickoff, a May 17 AFSCME conference, last weekend's Iowa Democratic Party picnic, and a town hall hosted by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, at which Graham spoke and answered questions for 90 minutes. Each time, I've come away baffled at his failure to explain why anybody should vote for him rather than one of the other Democrats seeking the job. . . .
"He shows poise and maturity. He's got the best temperament in the race. I've never seen him get angry or defensive at hostile questions. He listens more than he talks. . . .
"The trouble is, Graham doesn't seem to know what he wants to do with the job. 'To be elected president, you've got to meet some threshold tests,' he told the town hall audience. First, 'you've got to be prepared to take George Bush on--and then say what your vision and your direction would be.' Second, you 'have to have some fresh ideas' as to how to deal with the nation's problems. So what are Graham's vision and ideas? Search me. The guy had 90 minutes to explain them, and all he conveyed, briefly, was that he cares about the environment.'"
Dean is running a sorry campaign, says the Boston Globe:
"Howard Dean's fire-breathing campaign rhetoric has inspired some party activists, but the inaccuracy of some remarks, as well as his characterizations of some rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, has prompted him to issue several apologies this year.
"Earlier this month, a campaign spokeswoman apologized on Dean's behalf after he said he voted against a congressional resolution authorizing war with Iraq, even though he has never been in Congress. In April, Dean knocked on the door of Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri to make amends for a campaign press release that labeled the congressman's health care proposal 'pie-in-the-sky.' In March, Dean sent a note of apology to John Edwards of North Carolina after saying at a convention of California Democrats that the senator did not stand by his vote in favor of the war. Moments earlier, Edwards had been booed by the delegates for reiterating his support for it.
"The latest apology was made Monday, after the former Vermont governor told a group of New Hampshire business leaders his views about appointing justices to the Supreme Court." That produced the regrets to Graham.
Says the University of Vermont's Garrison Nelson: "Howard's a pop-off."
Here's an unexpected White House move that's certain to spark some debate:
"President Bush today ordered a ban on racial profiling that aides called the most far-reaching in the history of federal law enforcement, but the policy carves out clear exemptions for investigations involving terrorism and other national security matters," the New York Times reports..
"The new policy, governing the conduct of 70 federal law enforcement agencies, forbids agents from using race or ethnicity as factors in routine investigations. A narcotics agent, for instance, could not focus on a specific neighborhood simply because of its racial composition.
"Federal officials said these prohibitions in routine law enforcement investigations go beyond the limitations in the Constitution and in federal case law. In cases involving national security, however, the policy allows the use of race and ethnicity in 'narrow' circumstances in order to help agents 'identify terrorist threats and stop potential catastrophic attacks.' "
The right is unhappy with the emerging prescription-drug compromise, says the Los Angeles Times:
"A landmark expansion of Medicare is barreling through Congress, but one part of President Bush's political base is reluctant to join the bipartisan ride: Free-market conservatives, who have argued for years that Medicare needs to be overhauled before a new prescription drug benefit is added.
"While many Republicans see likely enactment of the benefit for the elderly as a political home run for their party, disgruntled conservatives see it as a public policy strikeout -- the squandering of a unique opportunity to bring fundamental, long-term change to the financially troubled program."
Some liberals aren't thrilled either, notes the LAT.
David Frum takes on the magazine piece by Michael Crowley that we led with yesterday:
"The current New Republic has a vivid description of the sad plight of House Democrats under Republican majority tyranny. . . . Here's a representative quote: '[B]ecause their narrow majority allows so little room for error, Republicans have done a masterful job of exploiting undemocratic mechanisms, such as the Rules Committee, and enforcing a militant party discipline that renders the Democrats irrelevant.' . . .
"The article goes on to insist that the Republicans are behaving entirely differently from the way the Democrats used their majority during their 40 years of dominance in the House, from 1955 until 1995. Crowley rests this claim on two quotations, one from of all absurd sources, Michigan Democrat John Dingell, the notorious one-time tyrant of the House Commerce committee.
"Dingell, you may recall, decided when he still held a chairman's gavel that his power over the nation's trade and commerce entitled him to set himself up as arbiter of scientific truth and launched from the halls of Congress a persecution of a Nobel-prize winning scientist that ought to have become, but never quite did become, a national scandal.
"Everything today's Republicans know about the use of the power of the majority they learned from men like Dingell and Phil Burton and Jim Wright and a host of other men who would most likely have been insulted by Crowley's implicit suggestion that they ever flinched from squeezing their political opponents up to the limit of the rules and beyond."
Crowley responded in an e-mail to Frum: "Nowhere do I insist Republicans are acting 'entirely differently' -- just that Democrats say the GOP is worse than they were -- a point that credible nonpartisan observers agree with. . . . You also imply, again unfairly I think, that the article naively pretends Democrats never did any of this themselves. But I dealt with that question directly."
Andrew Sullivan finds an inconsistency in Hillary Clinton's book:
"Here's an interesting nugget that tells you a lot about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her book contains many inflammatory charges about various political and judicial figures. In particular, Chief Justice Rehnquist is portrayed as a political hack rather than a principled justice. Fair enough. It's a free country. Rehnquist wisely decided not to comment on the smears. But what's remarkable is that Hillary herself, when contacted by The Washington Post, 'declined to be interviewed about the political content of her book.' Huh? There she goes again. Even now, as a Senator in her own right, Hillary still pulls the First Lady schtick to avoid a political fight. Yet the book is highly political. It's not some anodine memoir of private life. It's a tough piece of political rhetoric. Yet she won't allow the press or others to challenge her on the politics of it. She still thinks she's above it all. Perhaps she always will.
OpinionJournal's James Taranto deconstructs the liberal anger over WMD:
"Lurid quagmire fantasies are hard to sustain in the face of lightning victory. So those on the left have changed their tack in recent weeks. Now Iraq isn't another Vietnam, it's another Watergate! This is what's behind the 'debate' over whether the Bush administration 'lied' about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
"Those on the Democratic left think of Watergate as a feather in their cap. They brought down a president! Of course, they didn't really bring down the president, though they helped; he brought himself down by countenancing and then covering up a crime. But left-wing mythology seems to be all about hoping for a recurrence of these decades-old victories.
"Of course, no sensible person thinks the Iraq war is Watergate, any more than it was Vietnam. There's no crime here. The complaint seems to be merely that administration officials spoke with too much assurance when they described their beliefs about the present state of Iraq's weapons programs. In other words, they did what politicians always do when trying to win public support for a policy: They made the most compelling argument they could. It's hardly a scandal that the administration didn't make its opponents' case for them.
"A new Gallup Poll suggests all this scandal talk has failed to persuade anyone. Eighty-six percent of respondents still think it is 'likely' or 'certain' that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons before the war, and only 31% agree that 'the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public.' . . . But 48% of Democrats think the administration lied, which means the party is split between the hard-core partisans--who opposed Iraq's liberation all along--and the more sensible wing."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9016-2003Jun18.html
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Message #2530 from Westi at Jun 19, 2003 1:10 AM
Bush to Choose Ex-Starr Aide
Kavanaugh to Be Nominee For Appeals Court Post
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 19, 2003; Page A25
President Bush plans to nominate White House lawyer Brett M. Kavanaugh, an author of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's report on President Bill Clinton, for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Republican sources said yesterday.
The disclosure came as Bush issued a curt rejection to Democratic senators who had offered to alleviate a fight over a future Supreme Court vacancy by working with him to find a nominee both sides could accept.
Kavanaugh's nomination would suggest Bush is spoiling for a fight with Senate Democrats while the administration's selection of judges is already a raw issue between the parties. The D.C. Circuit court is considered the second most powerful in the land. Kavanaugh, 38, was involved in many of the Clinton administration's legal controversies, and has played a key role in choosing Bush's judicial nominees.
Kavanaugh is undergoing an FBI background check in preparation for his nomination, which will not be announced immediately. He was an appellate expert in Starr's office from 1994 to 1998, and worked on the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation. He also represented Starr in his successful effort to force the release of White House lawyers' notes of conversations with Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a senator. The notes related to the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Kavanaugh's contribution to the Starr report was the section that outlined possible legal grounds for impeachment.
Kavanaugh was a partner with Kirkland & Ellis before becoming an associate White House counsel in January 2001. He has undergraduate and law degrees from Yale, and was a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
The D.C. Circuit court has openings on its 11th and 12th seats. Republicans blocked Clinton from filling at least one of them by arguing that additional judges were not needed.
Bush's rebuff of the overture by Senate Democrats, a departure from his frequent contention that he is eager to work with Congress, is part of intense positioning by both parties for the possibility that a Supreme Court justice will retire at the end of this term. Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) wrote to Bush on Tuesday to recommend that the president convene a meeting of Senate leaders "to begin a bipartisan process of consultation."
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called the idea "a novel new approach to how the Constitution guides the appointment process," and said Bush plans no such meeting. The Constitution gives the president sole power to nominate justices, and then the Senate decides whether to confirm them.
"The Constitution is clear, the Constitution will be followed," Fleischer said. "We always welcome thoughts, but certainly no one wants to suggest that the Constitution be altered."
Fleischer said White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales "is always happy to meet and talk with these individual senators." A twist is that Gonzales, a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court, is one of Bush's most obvious potential nominees.
Gonzales wrote to Daschle yesterday that in case of a vacancy, the Senate "will have an opportunity to assess the president's nominee and exercise its constitutional responsibility." He has sent similar letters to other Senate Democrats.
The selection of judges, from federal district courts to the Supreme Court, is always a bitterly contested issue for the most ideologically committed wings of both parties. It is even more so now because of the GOP's narrow hold on the Senate, and because of rumors about the possible retirement of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 78, or Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 73 -- or both.
A group called Faith2Action is linking with some of the nation's best-known conservative organizations for Project Rosebud, which plans to deliver thousands of roses to the White House next week in support of an antiabortion nominee for any Supreme Court vacancy.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a Judiciary Committee member, wrote Bush last week to suggest potential consensus nominees. Schumer suggested five moderate Republicans, including Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.).
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, had first suggested the bipartisan summit in a separate letter to Bush last week. Leahy said that Democrats were "ready to work with you to help select a nominee or nominees to the Supreme Court behind which all Americans, and all senators, can unite."
Bradford A. Berenson, a former associate White House counsel for Bush, called the letters a political stunt to help Democrats "blame the president for the ugly confirmation fight it appears they already have planned."
Democrats, who contend they are not proposing anything radical, are circulating pages from a book by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) in which he takes credit for suggesting to Clinton the nomination of two sitting justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Hatch wrote last year in his memoir, "Square Peg," that he had asked Clinton whether he had considered Breyer or Ginsburg. "President Clinton indicated he had heard Breyer's name but had not thought about Judge Ginsburg," Hatch recounted.
Hatch said Tuesday on C-SPAN that Democrats were trying to preempt a conservative nominee. "Even though President Clinton did consult with me as chairman of the committee, he made the final decisions," Hatch said.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) said the best way for Bush to avoid a major fight would be to consult with the Senate and send up nominees "without ideological chips on their shoulders."
"But if this president wants a battle," Kennedy said, "he'll get it."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11032-2003Jun18.html |
