A TIME FOR A PROFILE IN COURAGE: WILL SARBANES OPPOSE UNQUALIFIED DEMOCRATIC AMBASSADORIAL NOMINEES?

(Washington, D.C.): On Wednesday, 4
May, the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee is scheduled to vote on two
controversial Clinton nominations to
sensitive ambassadorial posts. Sam Brown,
to become U.S. representative to the
Conference on Cooperation and Security in
Europe, and Derek Shearer, to serve as
the American Ambassador to Finland. The
former was a leading opponent of the
Vietnam war who subsequently served as
the director of the Carter
Administration’s ACTION; the latter a
long-time “movement” radical
who is Deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott’s brother-in-law and a close
friend of President Clinton.

What makes this meeting particularly
interesting is the possibility that the
fate of these two nominations may rest in
the hands of a single Senator — Paul
Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland. When
Brown’s nomination was first considered
by the Committee on 22 March, it was
narrowly approved, 11 to 9, with Sen.
Sarbanes’ support. Thanks to a procedural
misstep, however, the Senator and his
colleagues have been given an opportunity
to reconsider their initial votes for Sam
Brown at the same meeting where they will
be asked to act on the appointment of his
comrade, Derek Shearer. If anything, the
latter may be in more difficulty than the
former.

The Sarbanes Standard

Sen. Sarbanes is particularly pivotal
because he has, in the past, been a
vehement critic of the practice of
president’s appointing unqualified
political cronies to important diplomatic
missions. For example, on the
MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on 29 September
l989, Sen. Sarbanes denounced President
Bush for nominating a number of major
political contributors who lacked other
qualifications to be U.S. ambassadors:

“I don’t mind people’s
political involvements, in fact, I
encourage it. But they ought to have
other dimensions to them that warrant
being picked as an ambassador. This
is serious business and there are
important American interests at stake
in terms of what our representatives
can do in the countries to which they
are sent.”

On 8 November 1989, Sen. Sarbanes
announced to his Committee colleagues
that he was “out to put an end to
this … ambassadorial spoils
system,” leading efforts to defeat
nomination she deemed to be unqualified.
He and eight other Democrats decried one
such Bush appointee — Joseph Zappala to
be ambassador to Spain — writing in
minority views:

“It is now proposed to send
an ambassador to Spain who possesses
no prior experience or educational
background in foreign policy, no
particular interest in or knowledge
about Spain and no Spanish language
ability …. [Given the growing
record of] nominees lacking serious
qualifications, we ought not let this
process deteriorate any
further.”

In so doing, the senior Senator from
Maryland asserted that he was seeking
nothing more than compliance with the
1980 Foreign Service Act which stipulates
that U.S. ambassadorial nominees, should
have a “‘useful knowledge’ of the
language and of the history, culture,
economics, politics and interests of the
host country.” ⁽¹⁾
Clearly, neither Sam Brown nor Derek
Shearer meet these tests.

The Foreign Service View

Not surprisingly, this is typically
the view as well of career diplomats. Tex
Harris, president of the American Foreign
Service Association, for example, told
the Associated Press on 5 November 1993
that:

“In an age of shrinking
governmental resources, we can no
longer afford the former luxury of
bringing aboard generous political
contributors to an 18- to 20 month
training session on how to be an
American ambassador. We have got to
choose Americans who have experience
and a track record in international
affairs. We cannot afford to send
amateurs. The age of amateurs is
over.”

One of Mr. Harris’ predecessors
Theodore Wilkinson noted that:

“The requirement for Senate
confirmation of ambassadors was
designed by the founding fathers …
to preclude [just] this kind of
misuse of ambassadorships. Explaining
[this] requirement, Alexander
Hamilton wrote: ‘It would be an
excellent check upon a spirit of
favoritism in the president, and
would tend greatly to prevent the
appointment of unfit
characters.'”

In connection with the nomination of
several unqualified republican political
appointees, Sen. Sarbanes and his allies
in the career diplomatic service have
resorted to ridicule: Citing documents
prepared to satisfy the State
Department’s statutory obligation to
certify the “competence” of
ambassador postings, the Senator from
Maryland took to reading identical
statements of two hapless Bush appointees
each of whom claimed: “I
have been known as a coalition builder,
able to organize my colleagues and peers
to action in support of worthy civic,
charitable and political causes.”

Sounds Like Messrs. Brown
and Shearer

The truth of the matter, however, is
that such a statement is about the best
that can be said about Sam Brown and
Derek Shearer’s
“qualifications” for their
respective nominations. There is, of
course, a big difference between the
sorts of “coalitions” and
“organiz[ing of their] colleagues
and peers” that Messrs. Brown and
Shearer have been involved in and that
with which President Bush’s dubious
appointees — and for that matter
President Clinton’s big donor/ambassadors
— have been associated: Brown
and Shearer have worked for the radical
overhaul of the American political and
economic system. By contrast, the other
nominees have used their success in the
latter financially to lubricate — and
promote themselves in — the former.

The following are among the radical
ideas, organizational activities and
agitation that have apparently earned Sam
Brown and Derek Shearer the kind of
presidential gratitude usually reserved
for major campaign contributors:

• Sam Brown was a prime-mover in
  the Vietnam Moratorium Committee,
  and through it, in the New
  Mobilization Committee to End the
  War in Vietnam (“New
  Mobe”). These organizations
  were instrumental in catalyzing
  American public opinion against
  the conflict in Southeast Asia.
  The latter determined by the
  House Committee on Internal
  Security in 1970 to have been
  under “communist
  domination.’ ⁽²⁾
• Brown subsequently became —
  together with Derek Shearer — a
  key activist in the National
  Conference on Alterative State
  and Local Public Policy
  (NCASLPP). According to its own
  literature, this organization was
  a “new network…established
  to strengthen the programmatic
  work of the Left” and to
  “end the sense of isolation
  felt by elected and appointed
  officials, organizers and
  planners who share a populist or
  radical outlook.’ ⁽³⁾

The purposes of NCASLPP were
perhaps best expressed by its
radical National Conference
Coordinator, Barbara Bick:

“There are two
categories: revolutionaries,
and those who make
revolutions work …. You
have to have people who know
how to run things and develop
programs. In a way this is
what we are doing ….
[NCASLPP assumed the
responsibility [for creating
through its network] of
populist, progressive,
socialist [leaders, the
beginnings] of a real
domestic program that is more
than just reform. It is
talking about structural
change, given the fact that
this is a capitalist country.
[It is intended to achieve
goals beyond reform politics
… a politics of how to
change to a democratic,
decentralized socialism from
a corporate, monopolistic
state.” ⁽⁴⁾

• Brown at one point publicly
  stated that “I take
  second place to no one in my
  hatred of the [U.S.] Intelligence
  agencies.” ⁽⁵⁾
• According to a published report
  in Newsday, while at
  ACTION, Sam Brown let it be known
  that he believed “anyone who
  had stayed in the government
  while Richard Nixon was president
  had no moral character
  whatsoever.” ⁽⁶⁾
• Like Derek Shearer, Sam Brown has
  enthused over concepts of
  “economic democracy” (a
  term Shearer has, on occasion,
  acknowledged was a euphemism for
  socialism) and “workplace
  democracy.” While at ACTION,
  Brown reportedly told a meeting
  in the U.S. State Department of
  the “Secretary’s Open Forum
  “that this is a
  “concept ill-developed in
  American society. It is another
  of the places where we stand to
  learn from Jamaica, from
  Tanzania, from Cuba, from
  Yugoslavia…” ⁽⁷⁾
• While director of ACTION, Brown
  participated in a 25 September
  l977 rally in New York City
  sponsored by communist Vietnam
  upon the occasion of its
  admission to the U.N. The
  spectacle prompted respected
  newsman Eric Sevareid to observe:

“One newspaper
describes the gathering as
the anti-war movement come
together again. It was,
rather, that part of the
antiwar movement which was
not anti-war at all.- it was
anti the American role in the
war and pro-Hanoi …. Most
of those in the New York
theater were not celebrating
peace. They were celebrating
the triumph of communist
totalitarianism, which is
what they had always been
working for in the guise of a
peace movement.” ⁽⁸⁾

• In addition to his own active
  involvement in NCASLPP, Derek
  Shearer was a driving force
  behind myriad other, hard-left
  organizations including:

The California
Public Policy Center (CPPC)
— an institution that
was described in the
January 1980 issue of Libertarian
Review as the
“superstructure”
for a number of
associated radical
entities. At various
times over several years,
Shearer was CPPC’s vice
president,
secretary-treasurer and a
member of the board of
directors.

The Economy
Project of the
CPPC — a project
directed by Shearer to
promote his theories
of”economic
democracy.” In a
November l977 article
entitled, “Economic
Alternatives —
Fundamental Political
Alternatives,”
Shearer asserted:
“My premise is that
it is impossible for a
Left political movement
with ostensible humane
values to accomplish its
goals without a parallel
alternative economic
movement.”

The Campaign
for Economic Democracy
(CED)– a radical
movement led by Tom
Hayden and utilized to
bring Shearer, his
hard-left wife — Ruth
Yannatta Goldberg — and
sympathizers to power in
the city of Santa Monica
in the early 1980s. The
campaign’s rallying cause
was the institution of
one of the country’s most
draconian rent control
laws. Shearer served on
the board of the CED and
is widely credited with
having been the
strategist behind its
insidious platform and
activities. ⁽⁹⁾

The Foundation
for National Progress
(FNP) — an
organization that
sponsored hard-left
research, seminars,
conferences and published
the radical magazine, Mother
Jones.

The New School
for Democratic Management
— what Shearer once
called”our
alternative business
school” and”an
ideological challenge to
the rest of
society.” Shearer
used courses conducted
under this rubric and
funded by the FNP to
promote his
“economic
democracy” agenda:
to provide “the
beginnings of a movement
aimed at building a more
fully human
economy.”⁽¹⁰⁾

These organizations have one
important thing in addition to
having benefitted from Derek
Shearer’s considerable energies
and cunning over the years: They
are all associated, in one way or
another, with the notorious
Institute for Policy Studies
(IPS).

The IPS Connection

While the Institute for Policy
Studies has gone to considerable lengths
over its thirty years of radical
agitation to “spin-off’ and
otherwise disguise its relationships to
what it has called “sister
organizations,” there is ample
evidence of continuing associations
between them if one cares to look for it.
For example:

• the IPS started the National
  Conference on State and Local
  Public Policies and its
  headquarters were for a number of
  years located in the Institute’s
  offices;
• according to its own internal
  documents, the California Public
  Policy Center’s Economy Project
  was funded by a
  “one-time-only grant from
  the Institute for Policy
  Studies.”⁽¹¹⁾
• the Foundation for National
  Progress was, according to its
  internal financial report for
  1976, “formed in 1975 to
  carry out on the West Coast the
  charitable and educational
  activities of the Institute for
  Policy Studies.⁽¹²⁾
• as noted above, the New School
  was a project of IPS’ Foundation
  for National Progress.

The Bottom Line

What makes these facts so significant
is that both Brown and Shearer have, to
varying degrees misrepresented their past
records and associations to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. For
instance, Brown implausibly claimed that
he had simply stumbled upon the
Vietnamese victory celebration that so
inflamed Eric Sevareid and many other
Americans while walking the streets of
New York.

Derek Shearer was even more brazen in
denying any significant involvement with
the IPS. the CPPC, the CED, and the
NCASLPP when the record clearly shows
otherwise. No less astounding are his
assertions that he was unaware of the
Institute’s intimate connections with
many of these organizations.

As a result, Democratic members of the
Foreign Relations Committee should have
ample grounds for rejecting these
nominations tomorrow. Not only are they
manifestly unqualified for the positions
to which they have been nominated, they
have dissembled — if not lied outright
— about their actual credentials.

At the very least, it is hard
to imagine that Senator Sarbanes will be
able to bring himself to vote for such
individuals. Should he
nonetheless do so, his past, righteous
indignation over deplorable republican
ambassadorial appointments nominations
will be shown to be but the crassest of
partisan posturing. Who knows, it may
even cost him some votes, come
November.

– 30 –

1. See Theodore
Wilkinson “Let’s Take the ‘For Sale’
Signs Off Our Embassies,” Newsday,
5 August 1990, p. 5.

2. House of
Representatives Committee on Internal
Security Annual Report for 1970, as
recounted in Heritage Foundation Backgrounder
entitled, “The New Left in
Government: From Protest to
Policy-Making,” November 1973, p.
10.

3. From a July
1975 press release issued under the
letterhead of the Institute for Policy
Studies.

4. See an
interview with Barbara Bick which
appeared in the left-wing magazine Communities
in its January-February 1977 edition.

5. From an
interview with Sam Brown which appeared
in the December 1977 issue of Penthouse
Magazine.

6. Elaine Gulla
Kamarck, Newsday, December 1988.

7. Reported in a
column by Patrick Buchanan according to a
Heritage Foundation Backgrounder
entitled, “The New Left in
Government: From Protest to
Policy-Making.’ November 1978. In
response to questioning by Senator Jesse
Helms (R-NC) about this statement, Brown
did not deny ranking it. Instead, he
referred admiringly to a concept of
worker participation that it number of
American companies arc experimenting with
that bears little resemblance to the
“workplace democracy” of Cuba
or the former Yugoslavia.

8. Congressional
Record, 27 September 1977, p. 31215.

9. An op.ed. in
the 17 March 1994 edition of the Wall
Street Journal entitled,
“Aftershocks Jar Santa Monica’s Rent
Controllers,” suggested that the
legacy of Shearer’s machinations in Santa
Monica may have contributed to
the widespread destruction of property in
that community during the latest
earthquake — property that had not, due
to rent control, been improved as it
should have been.

10. From an
undated New School document entitled,
‘Announcing a Business School for
Economic Democracy – circulated in early
1977.

11. See the CPPCs
‘1975 Operations and Litigation Report,’
approved on 7 April 1976 at a meeting of
its board of directors sa reported in the
Heritage Backgrounder “Campaign for
Economic Democracy: Part II — The
Institute for Policy Studies
Network,” April 1981.

12. Op.cit.