Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Defection of the NEOCONS Date: Tue, 27 Oct 92 13:27:07 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE \HD Defection of the NEOCONS \SH Why Democrats like Richard Schiffer feel they can go home again \BY Cathryn Donohoe \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES He was Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Until March he was George Bush's, too. Even now, with the Soviet Union a memory, he wears clipped to his gray tie the badge of the hotly anti-communist group he helped to found: the Committee on the Present Danger. He disdains America-bashers, isolationists and "single-issue activists of the Left." He resists race-based domestic programs. He rejects community-action schemes. He opposes multiculturalism, cherishes "the melting pot," speaks of England as the root of America's common culture. He believes Ronald Reagan's military buildup ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. He believes in the Thousand Points of Light. He's working for Bill Clinton. But for Richard Schifter, 69, since 1981 a fixture in the Reagan-Bush administrations - first as a representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later as human rights chief at State under George Shultz and James A. Baker III - there's no irony in that. Because Richard Schifter, Democrat, estranged from the isolationist, left-leaning, blame-America-first style that has dominated his party since George McGovern captured it 20 years ago, thinks he can go home now. "What Bill Clinton is doing, and has done, in the Democratic Party, is to return it to where it was before 1972," the human-rights lawyer says in that quiet voice, almost a whisper, that in its days on humanitarian missions for State cajoled Soviet authorities to release hundreds of their political prisoners. * * * In the broadest sense, the Schifter story is that of the so-called neoconservatives. That small but intellectually influential band of Democrats - liberal on domestic issues but hawkish on foreign affairs - split from the McGovern-Carter wing of the party, later flocked to Ronald Reagan's banner and now, with a few exceptions, are renewing their ties to the organizational party. The list is long. It includes the likes of Mr. Schifter; Penn Kemble, a senior associate at Freedom House; and Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. But Mr. Schifter's story is uniquely his own, not least because he is one of those who has taken the point in persuading hesitant colleagues - through newspaper ads, magazine articles and personal conversation - that with the end of the Cold War those other guys, the Carterites who dominate the Clinton foreign policy apparatus, really have changed. In fact he is collaborating on an op-ed piece with Clinton adviser Anthony Lake, chief of policy planning in Jimmy Carter's dovish State Department, designed to show that the two points of view - roughly, the interventionist and the isolationist - have merged. If Mr. Clinton's Oct. 1 foreign affairs speech in Milwaukee is any guide, the blend has resulted in a "pro-democracy foreign policy" that would use trade sanctions or even force to protect human rights abroad and encourage the growth of democratic institutions. "If you compare that speech with my Commentary article," Mr. Schifter says, referring to his piece in last month's issue of the neoconservative magazine, "I'm not saying anyone cribbed it from there, but it's basically the same outlook." * * * A quarter-century ago Richard Schifter, then a partner in the well-connected Washington firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, was the "good-government" chairman of Montgomery County's Democratic Central Committee and - according to veteran county Democrat Blair Lee IV - "the closest thing the county's ever had to a boss." Now, in a posh office in downtown Bethesda, minutes from home, Mr. Schifter writes speeches for his own delivery and policy papers for the Clinton campaign. He spends good portions of each day on the phone, reassuring hesitant "Reagan Democrats" that their worries are groundless. "The people with whom we are working are nonisolationists," he says, referring principally to Mr. Lake. "And our concern in the past was with the isolationists." About Mr. Clinton, Mr. Schifter has no doubts. He met the candidate a few years ago and was impressed, he says, by his grasp of issues and his willingness to declare himself "a different kind of Democrat." And on Dec. 31, 1990, Mr. Schifter says, specifying the date because the issue is in question, Bill Clinton assured him that he favored military action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. How does he square that with the candidate's now-famed straddle of the issue, Mr. Clinton's assertion at the time that, though he agreed with the arguments of those in Congress who opposed the Persian Gulf war, he would have voted with the pro-war majority if the vote had been close? Mr. Schifter says he has "perfectly accepted" the governor's explanation - that he was trying to show Arkansas' two senators, who opposed the war, that he understood their position. "I can understand that," Mr. Schifter says. "As a matter of fact, I think it's the kind of thing that somebody who wants to be effective in politics needs to do - that is, try to indicate to people who are key political figures that they play a role. "At no time do you burn your bridges, in a way that would prevent you from dealing with them in the future. You minimize the number of persons you want to antagonize." That, of course, is the main point made by observers of Mr. Clinton: that he tries to accommodate everyone. * * * But to Mr. Schifter, in some ways that's a plus. Mr. Clinton learned in his past 10 years as governor, Mr. Schifter says, what it takes to be successful. "You don't ram your head through the wall. What you try to do is work with the various political forces to develop a program that's suitable in terms of its really working," Mr. Schifter says. For Mr. Schifter, it's persuasion, persuasion, persuasion, learned over long years of negotiation with some of the world's most repressive governments. "He has a very quiet, pleasant manner, almost courtly," says Bush partisan George Shultz of the approach Mr. Schifter took when dealing with Soviet bureaucrats on human rights abuses. "At the same time he is very realistic. He has a thorough grasp of the facts and the practices, and is just relentless in working at them." Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the conservative columnist and former chief of naval operations who has known Mr. Schifter since the 1970s, calls him "saintly." "He has a force that emanates from him, a respect for each individual who speaks to him, that makes people accept him as kind of oracular," the admiral says. * * * Perhaps it's Mr. Schifter's personal history showing through. Jewish, Viennese-born, and sent alone to New York at 15 - by parents anxious to see at least one of their family members escape the coming Holocaust - Mr. Schifter lost his mother and father, all his aunts and uncles, and 35 cousins to the death camps. He assumes, because he couldn't find all the facts when he went back to track their fate, that his parents died at Maidanek in November 1942. That, above all else, has fueled his passion in life, the building of democratic institutions on the American model. He even met his wife through that interest: In Berlin after the war, as an economic investigator for the occupation, he and Lilo Krueger (a German who has since converted to Judaism) worked together for a club they belonged to, translating the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights into German. "Look," he says, sharply for a moment. "I would be dead today if it weren't for the United States. I would have been dead at the age of 18, or earlier." So if Bill Clinton's speeches show signs of a new Democratic inclination toward "humanitarian intervention," as Mr. Schifter calls it, no one should wonder. "I happen to think that one of the things that's unique as far as the general American public is concerned," Mr. Schifter says, "is that their response to the question in Genesis, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is 'yes.' " * * * It is partly because of those concerns that Mr. Schifter broke with the Bush administration. In his Commentary article he pictured White House policy makers as practitioners of realpolitik, analyzing population, resources and markets in a distressed region before deciding whether to act on human suffering. In fact one of the key reasons for his leaving, he says, was the administration's repeated attempts to send him to Iraq - in 1989 and again in 1990 - to discuss human rights abuses at a time when, Mr. Schifter says, the administration was favoring Saddam Hussein because of his oil and Iraq's strategic position. "To somehow be able to say, 'Well, we've got someone over there talking about human rights,' " he says. "I came to the conclusion that I was not going to be able to, and the result of it would be that it would be just putting a nice face on it. . . . I refused to go." That's not the way Richard Schifter wants to operate. And as if to underline the point, he recites in German, "Moralpolitik ist die beste Realpolitik." "That means," he says, "a foreign policy based on morality is the best policy in the national interest." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM