So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (20 page)

I told the volunteers their job was to help empower the poor, outsiders, and the powerless and that for guidance they should read, among others, Saul Alinsky. Except for some volunteers in specific programs, such as those developing and physically setting up savings and loan associations in rural, financially underserved areas, the great majority of the volunteers in Peru (and later in all Latin America when I became regional director) were trained and placed as community organizers.

The volunteers were, for the most part, decent, patriotic, and, if at all aware politically, more likely to be what is today called liberal than conservative. That put them generally on the side of democracy, the oppressed, and the poor and thus, more often than not, in local political strife, anti-American.

*   *   *

Some of my Peace Corps duties in Peru led to the types of counterintuitive friendships perhaps found only in Washington, D.C.

One of the more interesting diversions in Peru to me as the Peace Corps country director was the occasional congressional delegation, or CODEL, as the foreign service types called them. One such delegation was headed by Marguerite Stitt Church of Illinois, a Republican of the now nearly extinct variety called moderate. Unhappily, Ms. Church had taken a fall in Ecuador the day preceding her visit and arrived in Peru with a wrapped ankle and on crutches. She was thus clearly unfit for the three-day trek through the country, including some Andean hiking and a side trip to Machu Picchu, we had scheduled after showcasing the Peace Corps. So we hastily arranged a largely administrative tour in Lima for Ms. Church and a colleague, while she sent a young congressional staff aide to go with me on the three-day trek up-country. The young aide, I learned, was a politically savvy and aspiring Illinois politician named Donald Rumsfeld. He and I hit it off well, in part because I shared his view of the almost feudal society in the country. When his delegation boarded a flight at the airport three days later, I felt we had formed a friendship that might last—as, indeed, it has for nearly fifty years.

Ms. Church did not run for reelection in 1962, and I was not surprised to find that her successor, easily elected in a solid Republican district, was thirty-year-old Don Rumsfeld. We exchanged a few phone calls after I returned to Washington as the Peace Corps regional director for Latin America, and he established himself as a solid Republican moderate—and a solid supporter of the Peace Corps. Our friendship resumed and ripened in 1966 through a British foundation, named Ditchley for the country estate it occupied, with a well-established program of inviting a promising young U.S. Republican and an up-and-coming young Democrat to Ditchley for one-week stints, there to “get to know each other” and see what common bonds might be struck while meeting and spending time with equally up-and-coming British parliamentarians and comers in the Conservative and Labour parties. One week that summer, Ditchley invited me, then the press secretary to Senator Robert Kennedy, and Congressman Don Rumsfeld (and our wives) to share the experience. We enjoyed the time with our English counterparts, and with each other, and even developed some agreements on political issues, mainly centered on poverty and race.

So, when after the assassination of Senator Kennedy I moved on to become a syndicated newspaper columnist and TV news anchor, I would rely from time to time on Congressman Rumsfeld as a commentator and special guest, particularly because he seemed to me then an uncomfortable Republican in the increasingly conservative environs of his party in those years. Indeed, it came as no great surprise to me when President Richard Nixon named Rumsfeld director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)—the tarted-up War on Poverty. I thought it a good opportunity for Rumsfeld, and the country, if Nixon let him do the job—and in any event good cover for Nixon. It was good for Rumsfeld, too, because it moved him easily to the Gerald Ford (post-Watergate and post-Nixon) administration as the new president’s chief of staff.

Later, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and Rumsfeld in wildly successful private business, there was less opportunity to get together. But one day, while working in public relations, I was representing a major satellite manufacturer (Hughes Electronics) in some difficulty with the government, and thought again of Don Rumsfeld. Hughes was accused of being too close to the government of China, which had sponsored—as was often the case—a satellite launch that then failed, spectacularly. Worse, when Hughes engineers and the Chinese had met to investigate what had gone wrong and to plan the next launch, the U.S. government claimed our client had exchanged classified information with the (then) hated Chinese Reds, and dire threats, including the word “debarment,” were exchanged.

I advised the client one way out was to appoint a commission of inquiry, with a distinguished chairman (the former attorney general Griffin Bell had been the chairman of choice for embattled companies seeking a truly trusted whitewasher), to sift the evidence and then exonerate the manufacturers—at best as innocent or, at worst, as makers of an innocent mistake.

I called, naturally enough, my old pal Rumsfeld to see if, for several hundred thousand dollars, he would undertake to lead the investigation. He initially agreed and then, after a week to think it over, called me back to decline, reluctantly. It seemed, he said, he might soon be offered a position that, if he accepted, would make the investigation of the satellite failure too much of a conflict of interest. I reluctantly concurred and was hardly surprised when, a few weeks later, President-elect George W. Bush named him Secretary of Defense.

Somewhere along the line, Rumsfeld’s politics had taken a rather severe turn, and so, apparently, had his attitudes and his view of political life because, at Defense, he was suddenly not only a committed hawk but often a rather nasty and outspoken one as well. The new Secretary of Defense was no longer the OEO director who would defy Nixon on behalf of the poor.

Nevertheless, I was more than willing, several months later, to enthusiastically endorse to Rumsfeld the proposed appointment of a colleague of mine, Torie Clarke, as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. She was appointed, and I went to the Pentagon to witness her swearing in. There, I was hardly surprised to see a roomful of high brass—the Joint Chiefs, former Secretaries of Defense—never so many medals and ribbons in one room, I thought, since Audie Murphy had dined alone. I felt like a strange and hostile outsider. My negative opinion of both Bush presidencies was quite public, and I had, after all, been a high-ranking member of Nixon’s enemies list.

Secretary Rumsfeld entered the reception, accompanied by some staff officers. Spotting me, he came over and gave me a big hug (to, I was sure, the mystification of most people in the room) and then greeted the group by acknowledging—rather perfunctorily, I thought—the presence of the really high uniformed and civilian brass, adding, “And I’m especially pleased to see my good friend Frank Mankiewicz here.” A strange place, Washington, but in many ways a pleasing one.

*   *   *

I was in Peru during the Cuban missile crisis, and though I could easily follow the hour-by-hour, day-by-day events on radio and the newspapers (both Peruvian and U.S. coverage), America’s hatred and fear of Castro mystified me. In fact, I admired Castro in some respects. First of all, the Batista regime he overcame was one of the most repressive and corrupt in the world. He began a true revolution, giving Cubans housing, education, and health care, and, of course, ended the Mafia-run institutions, among them the tourist hotels, casinos, and brothels catering to vacationing Americans. That, plus a takeover of the major American institutions deeply resented by the Cubans—Coca-Cola, Western Union, all the utilities—made him a hero to most Latin Americans and at least in part to me. True, what we think of as civil liberties were largely missing, but Castro at least substituted permission—indeed, encouragement—to leave the country instead of internment camps and prisons, for most of his political opponents. If, when Castro took over, we had embraced him as a compatriot and a democratic leader, Cuba today would, I believe, be a stalwart companion of the United States. Cubans share most American values—cleanliness, promptness, and, above all, hard work and patriotism. Plus, baseball is
the
national sport.

I was also in Peru when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and I soon began to notice two pictures on the wall of every home I entered in the
barriadas,
John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. Pope John died on June 3, 1963, less than six months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy; he was known at the time (and has gone down in history) for liberalizing church doctrine.

Footnote: In 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, I was able, recalling my Latin American experience, to quote the splendid line then popular among liberal journalists: “Throughout the entire world, there is not one young person who, in the middle of the night, goes out to paint in large letters on a wall, ‘Viva LBJ!’”

*   *   *

I can remember what most Americans, living and in the future, will never experience: the exact moment I crossed into “Wow, the president lies to us!” country. Younger Americans, with memories and experiences built upon events such as Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, assume the president and the U.S. government tell lies. Forgotten—or, most likely, never known—is that the vast majority of the American people once assumed the president of the United States always told them the truth.

Promoted to be Latin America regional director of the Peace Corps in 1964, I moved to Washington, D.C., where we negotiated for, placed, and supervised the training and service of several thousand Peace Corps volunteers in nearly two dozen countries. It was a time of turmoil; countries with substantial resources—mainly in oil—had the vast majority of their people living in extreme, seemingly intractable poverty. Some were passionate about overthrowing hated governments—mostly military and supported by the United States—and establishing democratic republics with regular elections, political parties, and free campaigns.

A half a century has gone by since then. These countries have earned billions of dollars from their resources in that time, and yet the great majority of their people still live in poverty. “Democratic elections” are obviously not an automatic solution. In 1965, for example, some lower-level officers in the Dominican Republic, led by Colonel Francisco Caamaño, took to the streets in a surprisingly well-ordered manner to restore the legally elected president, Juan Bosch, who had been rather brutally deposed by a collection of senior officers led by General Elías Wessin y Wessin, handsomely supported by the landed elite and their urban allies and, of course, quickly recognized by the United States. The Peace Corps volunteers, concentrated in the poorest urban centers, naturally supported the
Constitucionalistas,
as Caamaño’s forces called themselves, while the United States, as was our wont, labeled the democracy-seeking officers rebels and Communists and sent in several battalions of marines, ostensibly to protect the Americans on the premises and to seek a “peaceful solution,” but in reality to help General Wessin put down the “rebellion.”

It was a situation made to order for
The New York Times,
whose splendid Latin America reporter, the late Tad Szulc, took to interviewing individual Peace Corps volunteers in Santo Domingo and other urban centers and discovered they (roughly 150 of them) were almost unanimously supporting the “rebels” and opposing General Wessin, particularly because the “rebels” had the virtually unanimous support of the people with whom the Peace Corps volunteers were living and working. As the pro-Bosch sentiments of volunteers—and official U.S. support for the dictators—became more and more prominent in the
Times,
the
New York Herald Tribune,
and elsewhere (daily newspapers still dominated what is today called the news cycle), the more irritated became the official U.S. leadership, led by President Johnson.

As a result, Bill Moyers called me one day (he had left the Peace Corps to become LBJ’s press secretary) and asked me to lunch at the White House. The president, he told me, was furious and threatening to pull the Peace Corps out of the Dominican Republic unless the volunteers quieted down and stopped attacking his policy—and him—in the U.S. press. I told Bill I had neither the authority nor the desire to impose a gag rule on the volunteers but that I would do what I could. But I also told Bill I thought there were three wars going on in the Dominican Republic—arms, class, and culture—and that we were on the wrong side of all three, as we had been, pre-JFK, in most of the Latin American countries. While we were at lunch at the White House Mess, a waiter brought over a telephone for Moyers and plugged it in. It turned out the president was on the line. I could hear Moyers’s end of the conversation: “Yes, Mr. President, I’m having lunch with him right now—he’s not authorized to do just that—well, I’m not sure he agrees—very well, Mr. President, we’ll be right up.” Whereupon he turned to me and said, “Let’s go. He wants to see us, mostly you.”

We went upstairs at the White House—my first time—by elevator, and Bill led me into one of the family sitting rooms. There was LBJ at the head of a dining-room-size table, with Jack Valenti nearby, and he motioned Bill and me to two adjoining seats. As we were sitting down, Thomas Mann entered the room; Mann had been appointed by the president as his number one assistant for Latin American matters—the go-to guy, as we would now call him. “Tom,” asked the president, “how do we deal with all this criticism of my policy on the Dominican Republic from
The Washington Post
and
New York Times
?” Mann was quick to reply. “The
Post
and the
Times,
” he began, “always take the Communist side in any foreign controversy.” I saw where things stood.

Bill then introduced me to the president and explained my experience in Latin America. LBJ then asked me my view of what was happening in the Dominican Republic and specifically to explain the attitude of the volunteers. I explained that culturally and from the standpoint of clear class divisions the overwhelming majority of Dominicans saw themselves as the victims of the upper classes, which they saw as dominated by America, to which had now been added the hated military leaders. LBJ seemed to treat what I had said as a sort of silent pause in the conversation and then asked me what I thought we should do “to gain the approval of the Latin American people.” I replied, somewhat cheekily as I now recall, that he should demonstrate opposition to each of their presidents because, I explained, “if there’s anyone most ordinary Latinos hate more than our leaders, it’s their own.”