October Surprise!
By Michael Rust
Insight Magazine
insightmag.com
Autumns have been seasons of surprise during
campaign years. Democrats and Republicans
wonder if any sudden shocks will emerge in time
for Election Day.
s earthshaking events go, real October surprises -- such as
the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 or Bill Buckner's
bobbling of the ground ball that cost the Boston Red Sox
the 1986 World Series -- are few and far between. But the
phrase "October surprise" has entered the American political
lexicon in an almost self-fulfilling way, as politicians hold their
breath in October of election years.
. . . . With this year's midterm-election campaign entering its
final weeks, it would seem difficult for any surprise to top the
seemingly endless nine-month stream of revelations, allegations
and acts of contrition that began in January with online gossip
maven Matt Drudge's reporting of a delayed Newsweek
scoop of the relationship between President Clinton and former
White House intern Monica Lewinsky. And, indeed, when
political aficionados exchange speculation and gossip about
great October surprises of the past, they usually focus on
presidential contests.
. . . . The most obvious recent example came in 1992 when
Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the
Iran-Contra swap of missiles and guns for support of
anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua, chose the weekend before
the elections to indict former Reagan administration officials,
including defense secretary Caspar Weinberger. President
Bush had been rising in the polls due to attacks on the veracity
of challenger Bill Clinton. But Walsh's action killed the flicker of
Bush's momentum and may have ensured Clinton's victory.
. . . . Trouble with Iran had helped popularize the phrase
"October surprise" during the 1980 campaign when many
speculated that a breakthrough in negotiations for release of
American hostages in Iran might take place in time to boost the
flagging fortunes of President Carter. However, by the end of
the decade the vagaries of politics had led to a reverse spin on
the original scenario. Gary Sick, a former Carter administration
official, claimed that the campaign of GOP nominee Ronald
Reagan had met with Iranian officials in Paris to coordinate an
Iranian refusal to release the hostages until after the election.
(The hostages were released within minutes of Reagan's
inauguration.)
. . . . A 1993 report by the Democrat-controlled House of
Representatives found "no credible evidence" to support the
Sick charges, a conclusion reinforced by the Washington Post
and New Republic. But that wasn't until after the allegations
had been widely disseminated, first through a
public-broadcasting report and later a book, October
Surprise, authored by Sick. Left-wing journalist Robert Parry,
a former Newsweek reporter, since has argued that
documents found in a Capitol Hill storage room support his
contention that a senior CIA official secretly testified that he
and Reagan campaign chief William Casey boasted in 1981
that they had disrupted Carter's October surprise of a hostage
release.
. . . . For those with a taste for such things, foreign adventures
provide rich fodder for conspiracy theories and dark
speculation. This year, the most promising opportunity for such
musings came within days of the president's disastrous Aug. 17
televised remarks concerning the Lewinsky matter. In
retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, the beleaguered Clinton ordered U.S. missile strikes
against alleged terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan that he
linked to the bombings.
. . . . The White House said the facilities attacked by the United
States had ties to Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi
multimillionaire whom U.S. officials call a major sponsor of
terrorism. However, Sudan vehemently denied that the
destroyed factory had any ties to terrorists, and the reluctance
of the Clinton administration to provide validating evidence
seemed to lend credence to the Sudanese claims.
Congressional investigators are reviewing the matter and
suspect not all is as claimed.
. . . . Back at home, the president seemed in danger of being
hoist, in essence, on his own petard. The first couple has
exploited their friendships with various Hollywood figures for
political profit, but the U.S. attacks were linked by many with a
recent Hollywood movie, Wag the Dog. Forrest McDonald, a
historian of the U.S. presidency who teaches at the University
of Alabama, refers to the recent film featuring an incumbent
president who distracts attention from a sex scandal by hiring a
Hollywood producer to stage-manage a military intervention in
Albania. "Look what happened when we went off and bombed
the real target and the fake target a few weeks ago: Is there
anybody who at least didn't have Wag the Dog thoughts?"
Even so, he tells Insight, "everybody rallied around."
. . . . This is in keeping with recent history, says McDonald,
author of The American Presidency. "It's a weird thing about
approval ratings," he says. "Historically, the one time that a
president's polls are guaranteed to go up is when he suffers a
foreign-policy reversal. I've tracked that since World War II."
And, in fact, during the Kennedy administration, first an
out-and-out disaster -- 1961's failed Bay of Pigs invasion --
and a genuinely traumatic October event -- 1962's
Cuban-missile crisis -- resulted in boosts for the
administration's poll numbers.
. . . . The revelation and removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from
Fidel Castro's island was in many ways the October surprise of
the Cold War era. Yet, almost forgotten in discussion of the
event by historians is the way it turned Democratic fortunes
around. "I predicted the Cuban-missile crisis," says McDonald,
at the time a professor at Brown University. "[The October
surprise] worked then. Kennedy was in trouble. It looked as
though the Republicans were going to gain control of one or
both houses of Congress. We forget how very unpopular
[Kennedy] was while he was alive."
. . . . While no one argues that JFK actually encouraged the
crisis, revelations of recent years show that the administration,
understandably enough, was very aware of the political
ramifications. Memoirs in the early 1970s by Kennedy aides
Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers recalled a president
receiving word of the missiles and commenting, "We've just
elected [GOP Sen. Homer] Capehart in Indiana and [GOP
Sen.] Ken Keating will probably be the next president of the
United States." Yet, as it turned out, Democrats made gains in
both houses, and Capehart was defeated by young New
Frontier loyalist Birch Bayh. (Keating of New York was
defeated in 1964 by Robert Kennedy.)
. . . . Obviously, dross was turned into gold by the October
alchemy. Sen. Frank Church, an incumbent liberal Democrat in
conservative Idaho, was expected to lose his bid for a second
term. Years later in a memoir of his father, Church's son, F.
Forrester Church, described how his dad told his mother that
the crisis meant certain defeat unless the White House could
help him. Stopping at a highway pay phone, the senator called
the White House and somehow managed to get in touch with
Robert Kennedy, who told him to return to Washington
immediately. Once in Washington, the White House made sure
Church received a huge amount of media attention, sending the
message to Idaho voters that their senator was helping guide
the country through crisis. Church was returned to the Senate
-- where he spent the next 18 years.
. . . . Six years after the missile crisis, the United States was
embroiled in what would turn out to be its greatest
foreign-policy disaster -- the war in Vietnam. Recent
scholarship by historian Robert Dallek and former diplomat
William Bundy have lent credence to long-standing rumors that
while peace negotiations in Paris were being conducted, the
presidential campaign of Republican nominee Richard Nixon
and the White House of Lyndon Johnson were using the talks
as a political football.
. . . . In this scenario, Nixon used longtime anticommunist
activist Ana Chenault to tell the South Vietnamese government
to stand firm and resist any breakthrough in the Paris
negotiations that presumably would have boosted the
late-surging campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
According to this scenario, the White House discovered this
through wiretaps of Chenault, but both Johnson and Humphrey
decided not to go public with it. Shortly before LBJ's death, the
story goes, Johnson informed Nixon that he still had those
tapes.
. . . . This October surprise very well might be true, argues
Michael Lind, the Washington editor of Harper's, but it
doesn't mean it deserves its place in academic mythology as a
decisive moment of Cold War history. Lind, author of a
forthcoming book on the Vietnam War, says "the conclusion
you have to come to looking at all of this stuff is it made no
difference, because [South Vietnamese President] Thieu hated
Humphrey anyway! He wanted him to lose."
. . . . Lind says the American left cherishes this as the "greatest
October myth in history." The myth, as Lind describes it, is that
"if only Humphrey had revealed this, the day before the
election, everyone would have been so horrified that South
Vietnam was not going to surrender immediately they would
have voted for Humphrey. So go figure."
. . . . Actually, Lind reports, research in the Soviet archives
shows that the Soviets were pressuring the North Vietnamese
to make concessions in Paris to boost Humphrey's chances.
There is a memo to Hanoi in the archives, he says, "of what the
consequences of a Nixon victory would be and to make
concessions. That was the real [1968] October surprise."
. . . . Columnist William Safire recently suggested that the
Clinton White House may try to pull off a "Camp David
One-and-a-Half," with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu
and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat clasping hands in an
electorate-soothing photo opportunity shortly before Election
Day. Of course, the trouble with foreign-policy surprises is that
they usually are out of the control of domestic politicians. When
Chinese troops invaded Korea in 1950 and sent U.N. troops
reeling back down that embattled peninsula, frustrated
American voters reacted by punishing Democratic incumbents.
And while Harry Truman's popularity ratings were far lower at
the time than Clinton's today, the current incumbent suffers
from a prodigious lack of trust among both supporters and
detractors.
. . . . "If it came from outside -- let's say if [Saddam] Hussein
or somebody did something crazy -- that might look very bad
for the president," points out McDonald. The president doesn't
have a lot of credibility, he notes. "I'd be leery, if I were
advising the president, of trying anything right now, because it
would just be too much." The Clinton administration
nonetheless is briefing aggressively on Capitol Hill concerning a
possible further military adventure in the Yugoslav province of
Kosovo as Insight goes to press.
. . . . But perhaps, too, if a surprise does come, it will come
from that numbing fount of recent Washington surprises -- the
scandal imbroglio in Washington. The most likely surprise
would be one or both of the parties deciding it is safe enough to
take a risk and declare the congressional election to be a
referendum on Bill Clinton's embattled presidency. Certainly,
right now, the outcome is so difficult to predict that both
Democrats and Republicans shy away from doing anything so
confident or desperate.
. . . . Since 1994, the Republicans have controlled both houses
of Congress, albeit with a small House majority. Any additional
seats for the Republicans would bolster a call for impeachment
proceedings against Clinton by the party's more conservative
wing. On the other hand, a Democratic victory in either house
likely would put an end to talk of forcing Clinton out of office,
although he still might be reprimanded or made to pay some
sort of fine.
. . . . But while the White House would like to boost its base of
congressional support, congressional Democrats have been
reluctant to make the president the focal point of their
campaigns. A proposed effort by the AFL-CIO and the liberal
advocacy group People for the American Way to mount a
multimillion-dollar media campaign in support of the president
quickly was nixed by Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill who
were angered that such a project would be considered when
Democratic incumbents and challengers are scrambling for
cash.
. . . . And nobody from either party is willing, so far, to suggest
that the Nov. 3 elections become a referendum on Clinton. "It
could be a danger for both sides," Rep. Henry Hyde, an Illinois
Republican, told reporters at the end of September. The
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which will decide
whether Clinton should face impeachment proceedings in the
Senate, Hyde warned that the idea of a referendum could
backfire on the Republicans "if they are seen to be unfair to the
president" and on the Democrats "if voters remain angry at the
president."
. . . . Opinion polls, the entrails that political soothsayers consult
faithfully, have been unclear. Respected political analyst Stuart
Rothenberg recently said the Republicans have received a push
from Clinton's admission to his affair with Lewinsky, but it does
not amount to a tidal wave of support. And while the
Democrats could improve their score in Congress by accusing
the Republicans of being unfair toward the president, most
Democratic candidates facing serious threats in the upcoming
vote seem reluctant to take up Clinton's cause, Rothenberg
wrote recently in Roll Call.
. . . . One of the overlooked aspects of the polls is the deep
mistrust of Clinton, with a majority of those polled favoring
impeachment or resignation if the president is found to have
committed perjury before the grand jury or to have urged
others to lie on his behalf. If another scandal shoe drops, as
many Democrats and Republicans expect, then this year's
October surprise may be voters sending a signal to Clinton to
resign, lest Congress force him out.
. . . . While waiting for that shoe to drop, both sides warily will
circle each other, alternately hoping and fearing a surprise will
arrive. The problem with a Clinton-engineered surprise, says
McDonald, is that "the press has got too many people thinking
he's just a little too tricky. I don't know how much he
understands that. He may not. Those guys around him will try
anything. But I think the better part of wisdom would be not to
try anything fancy."
. . . . Of course, like independent counsel Walsh, Kenneth
Starr may be planning his own October surprise, and the
Justice Department could produce a surprise or two of its own
before the elections. In the end, however, the real October
surprise might be Democrats joining Republicans in an
impeachment inquiry to uncover all the facts that those polled
believe they are not being told, whether it's about sex or other
abuses in office. |
