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To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21113-2002Dec6.html Back, But Not By Popular Demand By David Greenberg This fall the Democrats came in for some ribbing over the weakness of their bench. When the party suddenly had to field last-minute replacements in crucial Senate races, it exhumed Greatest Generation septuagenarians Frank Lautenberg and Walter Mondale instead of tapping young comers. Now, surveying the presidential aspirants for 2004, some mentioners are eyeing a contender from two decades ago, the newly minted elder statesman Gary Hart. Who says there are no second acts in American life? But if the Democrats' resuscitation of their Pleistocene leadership shows a lack of imagination, the Republicans' recent revival of their own dinosaurs betrays something far more troubling: a hostility to dissent and an eagerness to exercise power that are dismayingly redolent of the heavies they seek to resurrect. Two weeks ago, President Bush placed Henry Kissinger, a veteran of the Nixonian era of secrecy, White House intrigue and dubious foreign ventures, in charge of uncovering intelligence and security flaws preceding the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Then last week, the president gave the National Security Council's top Middle East job to Iran-contra rogue Elliott Abrams. Meanwhile, outrage has belatedly fastened on February's naming of another Iran-contrarian, the pipe-puffing John Poindexter, to run a Big Brother-like Pentagon operation called Total Information Awareness that promises -- if news reports can be believed -- to harvest all known information about everybody into a searchable Internet database. Perhaps we'll see Poindexter and Abrams convene a reunion within the administration, where they can relive their heyday with other contra war alumni who are serving in the administration. You might think that a few of these folks would have had their careers ended by their misdeeds. And you might think that being tough on crime, long a GOP mantra, begins at home. You'd be wrong: On the matter of these men's sordid pasts, the Bush administration has shown an indulgence and permissiveness that would make Dr. Spock blanch. (If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been indicted.) As a result, these vintage villains are not on parole but on parade. It's an '80s nostalgia party, as thrown by Ed Meese. In one sense, these appointments shouldn't be shocking, since Iran-contra has now -- strange to tell -- receded into history. Many of today's White House correspondents weren't old enough to drink beer when Poindexter, as national security adviser, led up the illegal Iran-contra scheme or when Abrams, as a State Department official, abetted the efforts. These journalists are not likely to hype the story. Indeed, even devoted political junkies might be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what Poindexter and Abrams did wrong. (The answer: Poindexter supervised the secret arms-for-hostages sales to Iran that violated Ronald Reagan's professed policies and possibly also the Arms Export Control Act. He green-lighted the funneling of profits from those sales to the Nicaraguan contras, in knowing defiance of a law barring government funding of those rebels. And he concealed his activities, destroyed evidence and lied to Congress. Abrams also misled Congress about the scheme.) The public's natural forgetfulness was assisted by the work of Republican judges and higher-ups. Poindexter was convicted by a federal jury for lying and obstruction of justice. Though sentenced to prison, he escaped hard time thanks to conservative appellate judges Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle (later of Lewinsky affair fame), who overturned his conviction; they ruled that independent counsel Lawrence Walsh had relied too much on testimony that the NSC adviser himself gave while under congressional immunity. Abrams won his Get Out of Jail Free card from an even higher authority. Convicted on two counts of lying to Congress, he avoided even probation and community service when, as a lame duck, President Bush senior gave Abrams and five others Christmas Eve pardons that ensured that no more information would surface. Bush's pardons helped give Iran-contra its final burial. Unlike Watergate, which has remained the benchmark for political wrongdoing for 30 years even as people forget its byzantine details, the Reagan scandals have lately grown dim -- occluded, partly, by the recent wash of gauzy tributes to the senescent former president in his twilight years. In their own time, of course, the Watergate felons staged comebacks, too. John Ehrlichman reinvented himself as a pulp novelist, G. Gordon Liddy as a radio talk-show host and Chuck Colson as a man of the cloth. (The last of these strategies was briefly pursued also by Abrams, who rode the coattails of his father-in-law, conservative commentator Norman Podhoretz, into the world of letters where, as a born-again Jew, he took to browbeating his co-religionists about the evils of both intermarriage and strict church-state separation.) Significantly, however, until now none of the Nixon crowd ever returned to positions of government authority, only to the role of cultural curiosities. What's more, they all knew they would be forever tied to Watergate. Indeed, they counted on our memory of their notoriety to earn them attention in their new guises; had their criminal behavior not catapulted them to fame in the Nixon years, no one would have ever published (or read) an Ehrlichman novel, aired (or tuned in to) a Liddy broadcast or printed (or commented on) a Colson op-ed. In contrast, Poindexter, Abrams and company are relying on our amnesia to effect their transformations into upstanding citizens worthy of wielding power again. In the current crop of Republican retreads, Watergate survivor Kissinger is the exception that proves this rule. Unlike Liddy or Colson, Kissinger had (and still has) a reputation apart from the Nixonian miasma. He is counting on our selective memory: the China opening, not the secret bombing of Cambodia; shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, not the phony peace in Vietnam or his meddling in Chile. He has used his image as a pillar of the foreign policy establishment to shirk accountability for his role in what John Mitchell famously called the "White House horrors." What's unfortunate about the left's hyperbolic "war criminal" taunts is that Kissinger's actions were plenty bad without any embellishment. Another reminder may be in order: As Nixon's national security adviser, Kissinger (as he admitted in his own memoir) targeted journalists and administration officials to be secretly -- and, the Supreme Court ruled, illegally -- wiretapped. That sordid episode, which started in 1969, was the first of many abuses of power that fell under the collective rubric of Watergate and brought Nixon down. But Kissinger emerged from the rubble unscathed because he was as deft at charming Washington's elites as Nixon was inept. He convinced those influential circles that his ouster would imperil what remained of an American foreign policy in 1973 and 1974. And many of them still rally to his defense. But the question remains: Why has Bush chosen to resuscitate men with rather unusual résumés? The answer is that he appears not to think they did anything wrong. For all the differences between Watergate and Iran-contra, the scandals shared one key aspect: their perpetrators' belief in the virtue of secrecy and White House prerogative at the expense of democratic rules. Kissinger justified wiretapping private citizens without a warrant -- Watergate's first chapter -- by claiming that "national security" was at stake; we now know it wasn't, and he would have needed a court order, anyway. Iran-contra was, at bottom, a purposeful ploy to subvert Congress's will because administration officials judged that they were better suited to the big boys' work of fighting communism and terrorism. Poindexter and Abrams, like Nixon and Kissinger, harbored a contempt for Congress, for the opposition party and for the public, all of whom they considered short-sighted and ignorant, meddlesome and soft. These groups not only didn't have to approve of what was going on, it was decided; they didn't even have to know. If you can't see any immorality and illegality at work here, then you might downplay these scandals as mere politics -- as some Bush aides seem inclined to do. Abrams, for one, wrote a book chalking up his criminal conviction to "political differences." Queried about Abrams, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called Iran-contra -- in what was, technically, an accurate description -- "a matter of the past." Watergate isn't whisked away so easily, but it should be remembered that in the summer of 1974, Karl Rove, then head of the College Republicans, was among the active minority fighting Nixon's impeachment -- circulating literature that painted the constitutional crisis as nothing more than a political witch hunt. Few dare voice that view today, but one wonders how many former foot soldiers, deep down, still believe it. Still, you might ask, if the Bush team can't grasp the wrongdoing its recent appointees committed, doesn't it at least grasp the political sensitivities? On the contrary. Ever since the Florida recount fight, the Bush governance strategy has been to assert that they're in the right and to brook no intimations otherwise. All along, the Bush team has understood that images can be self-fulfilling -- and that the best way to shore up a shaky position is to act as if your legitimacy isn't in doubt. If your decisions are assailed, hang tough, grit your teeth, shrug off the questioners and brazen it out. That attitude has been particularly marked in the waging of the war on terrorism, where the administration's fetish for secrecy and disdain for Congress are eerily reminiscent of -- guess who? -- John Poindexter and Henry Kissinger. The attempt to rehabilitate the party's scandal-scarred lions must be seen in the context of this governing strategy. If you try something controversial and get away with it, it makes you stronger. The recent appointments -- and the refusal to even acknowledge the legitimate outcry they have occasioned -- are a deliberate demonstration of power, a flaunting of contempt for opposition and dissent, in the expectation that such a show will likely deter, not spur, critics. Why has Bush appointed Kissinger, Poindexter and Abrams? It's like the old riddle: because he can. David Greenberg, a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a historian and columnist for Slate. His book on Richard Nixon and political image-making is due out from W.W. Norton next fall. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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