President stambles over realpolitik

Press, 18 December 1986, Page 16

President stambles over realpolitik

ALEX BRUMMER

of the “Guardian” reports from Wash-

ington on the fault that has tripped the United States last seven Presidents

Just as it seemed that Mr Ronald Reagan, through the authority drawn from his immense personal popularity and decency had bucked the historical tide which ruined his immediate predecessors, the stink of rotting fish, has oozed up from the White House basement.

It is as if there were a systemic flaw in the American democratic tradition under which Administrations find it impossible to convert high moral purpose and ideological fervour into realpolitik. Each of the last seven presidents, in their anxiety to fulfil policy goals before the electoral clock catches up with them, have fallen into the grievous error of believing that secret operations of one kind or another can provide the right answers to complex policy goals. No-one can doubt the genuine commitment and pride which the Americans take into their democratic system. It is a model which they long to export to all corners of the earth in an idealistic effort to end the bloody chaos in Central America, the race wars in southern Africa and the authoritarianism in the Far East. The honest pleasure taken in the replacement of dictator Ferdinand Marcos with the clean innocence of Cory Aquino and the flight of Duvaliers from Haiti (with Colonel North’s help) was palpable.

But more often than not the public adulation of democracy and freedom, especially strong in the Reagan Administration, outpaces what can be achieved. When the President went East earlier this year carrying with

him a speech praising the “winds of freedom” he was confronted in Indonesia with a corrupt and authoritarian regime which turned back Australian journalists travelling with his party. The winds were stilled before Air Force One had touched the ground. The moral superiority which led Mr Reagan’s foreign policy team (with the help of Mrs Thatcher) to drag a strong antiterrorism statement out of the big seven allies in Tokyo and force Congress into appropriate $2.5 billion of anti-terrorism funding strikes a chord in a national of God-fearing people. Now it is seen as the ultimate duplicity — a lie perpetrated on the voter.

The belief, as Mr Reagan has so often eloquently expressed it, is that American was divinely placed where it is a “shining city on a hill” beaming out goodness to the rest of humankind. No matter that it is a misquote of the first Governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, it summarises America’s confidence in its righteousness. It is the all-out pursuit of this Nirvana in an action-orientated society which has crippled Mr Reagan and at least four of his immediate predecessors. Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter all failed in their quests for greatness despite the most lofty ambitions. Having achieved a measure of real stature from Johnson’s Great Society to Nixon’s detente with Moscow and Carter’s Camp David, they saw their presidencies plummet into a mire of investigation, accusation, disarray and eventual collapse.

The supreme goals and high standards set by the American people just became too hard to fulfil through the traditional channels of bureaucracy open to an American leader. Gerald Ford felt the need to make a clean start by pardoning Richard Nixon — the voter never forgave him for his double standard. Richard Nixon despite his immense foreign-policy achievements, allowed his basic insecurities and amorality to overcome his brilliant geo-political vision, and thus lost the confidence of the nation if not the whole world.

Jimmy Carter was perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. In this

strong born-again Southern Baptist Americans felt they had found salvation after the Vietnam experience and the legal horrors of Watergate. But they found their self-righteous leader to be a man whose love of power eventually overcame all else. The frantic struggle over Teheran hostages was not just a fight between two nations divided by an Islamic revolution but an effort by a failing President to hang on to office at all costs.

The man who stayed in the Rose Garden to brave out the hostage crisis emerged to campaign when he saw he was losing the election. The double standard offended a public which expected better of the lay preacher. < The constant tension between the moral goals of an Administration, the electoral timetable and the love of a democracy with a long tradition of rehearsing its policy arguments in the open has now caught up with Ronald Reagan. Admiral John Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North clearly believed they were carrying out God’s work in the basement of the White House. The contras had been lauded by their President as “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” who established American Constitutional freedoms. Nothing was too good in supporting their cause.

The Iranian arms connection, set up for more pedestrian political reasons, gave them the opportunity to pursue one of the President’s goals in a way the State Department — with its rigid bureaucratic structure — would never allow. At the National Security Council every new President cleans house from top to bottom. At the State Department the career diplomats hold the operation together dragging back to reality the political appointees who generally serve as assistant secretaries of state.

With no Congressional oversight and no restraining bureacracy it is easy to see how the N.S.C.’s higher mpral and ideological goals would triumph over its ethics and illegality. It should not be forgotten that despite the President’s own sense of decency, which has so appealed to the American public, his Administration has been riddled with ethical lapses. One

former Cabinet member is currently on trial in New York in a complex mob-related case where charges of fraud, corruption and even murder have been on the table. A former Deputy-Defence Secretary, Mr Paul Thayer, is serving time in a Federal prison for an insider-trading case aimed at enriching his glamorous mistress in Dallas.

The list is endless. The Reagan Administration has been more tainted with the whiff of corruption than any since that of President Warren Harding who died in office in 1923 as the full extent of corruption in his Administration, exemplified by the Teapot Dome Scandal, came home to roost. Despite the punishment meted out to Donovan and Thayer, under Mr Reagan they were not abandoned until it became absolutely necessary.

This misplaced Reagan loyalty to wrongdoers — an unwillingness to cut away the spreading indecency of corruption — which has led to a kind of belief among officials of their own invincibility. If things go wrong Mr Reagan’s personal belief in them, his hatred of messy sackings and his personal popularity would be there to protect them. The critical question now is whether Mr Reagan, with two years of his presidency to run, can turn back the tide of history. It has been noted that both John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and Dwight Eisenhower after the U-2 shooting down in May 1960, managed to turn the tide. They did so by making a clean breast. Jimmy Carter wasn’t so lucky. He came clean on the abortive

hostage rescue mission in the Iranian desert, shook up his Administration and \ changed direction, but continued , to sink like a stone in the opiniori polls. The historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who served as a, White House adviser during the Bay of Pigs, has been quoted as saying that a President can earn the forgiveness of voters “when the President acknowledges he made a mistake, when he takes action to remedy it, and when that action restores confidence in the decision-making process.” i Mr Reagan is falling some way short of the high Schlesinger standards on all three counts. The President still argues that the basic thrust of his Iranian policy, including the arms sales, was right and if there was any error it was that of his aides whose actions “raise serious questions of propriety.” He has gone some way to remedy the mistake by establishing a highlevel commission on the N.S.C. But this again may not be enough. Finally, has Mr Reagan restored credibility to decision making? As yet no. His Chief-of-staff at the White House, Mr Donald Regan, is inexperienced, overconfident and out of his depth in Washington. His Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, is now a marked man by the First Lady and the kitchen cabinet for his lack of loyalty and will almost certainly be on his way back to Stanford University by the spring, and the N.S.C. is in dismal disarray. Unless Mr Reagan acts soon a Nixonian catastrophe awaits his presidency.