Civics 101: Halperin Nomination Won’t Be Saved By Amateurish Write-In Campaign

In one of the more telling indications of the pathetic character of the coming sales job on Morton Halperin’s nomination to a top Pentagon position, prominent figures in the national security community have recently received a plaintive appeal for help from three of Halperin’s friends. The signatories are:

• Jeremy Stone, an arms control zealot who has — together with Mort Halperin — long been a fixture in what Jeane Kirkpatrick has dubbed "the left-wing of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party";

 

• Alton Frye, a more presentable version of Jeremy Stone by virtue of his lengthy association with the Eastern establishment’s Council on Foreign Relations; and

 

• Arnold Kanter, an individual whose policy views are sufficiently opaque to have permitted him to hold policy positions in the Carter, Reagan and Bush Administrations and who is currently associated with Brent Scowcroft’s Forum for International Policy.

The Stone-Frye-Kanter letter (a copy of which is attached) asserts that a certain unspecified "Center" has "distort[ed] Halperin’s views in a…hardball campaign that already has been picked up in the media and that will likely peak in public hearings in mid-September." With righteous indignation, it denounces a "press release" issued "before…Halperin was formally nominated…" and "littered with innuendo and falsehood." Evidently, they are referring to a Decision Brief(2) issued by the Center for Security Policy on 4 June 1993 — over two months after the White House announced Mr. Clinton’s intention to nominate Halperin to the position of Assistant Secretary for Democracy and Human Rights.

Having thus sanctimoniously staked out the high ground of accuracy and truthfulness, the three signers then proceed to parrot assertions now being circulated by the nominee and by the Department of Defense on his behalf. They contend that: "There is nothing in any recordsuggest Halperin contributed in any way to the disclosure of the [Pentagon] Papers"; "[it] is documentably false — utterly absurd" to accuse Halperin of having "held forth about the need to end all governmen to t security classification"; and it is "inflammatory" to accuse Halperin of having aided and abetted Philip Agee, a CIA turncoat who made a career of endangering former colleagues’ by publishing their names and whereabouts.

On their face, such statements are extraordinarily sweeping and categoric; indeed, they may actually serve to complicate — rather than facilitate — nominee Halperin’s "confirmation conversion." The Center for Security Policy nonetheless welcomes this joining of the debate about Mort Halperin’s record. The Center has already produced a 2 August White Paper entitled The Case Against the Halperin Nomination: Selected Readings from Morton Halperin’s Collected Works. This paper urged President Clinton to follow the precedent he established with his decision to withdraw Lani Guinier’s nomination — by personally examining a controversial nominee’s writings and determining whether he is able and willing to defend the positions taken therein.

With the President’s subsequent decision on 6 August to seek Senate confirmation of the Halperin nomination, however, Mr. Clinton has evidently decided to mount just such a defense of Halperin’s record. If so, he had best address himself to the actual record — not the revisionist version of it being served up by Halperin and his partisans.

Toward this end, the Center for Security Policy will release tomorrow a second edition of its White Paper entitled The Case Against the Halperin Nomination: Expanded Readings from Morton Halperin’s Collected Works and Rebuttals to Halperin’s Defense. This document will offer members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (who will shortly have to act upon the Halperin nomination), the press and the interested public a basis for judging just who is engaging in "innuendo and falsehood."

Copies of any of the aforementioned papers on the Halperin nomination may be obtained by contacting the Center.

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1. The large number of prominent figures who were apparently identified by Mort Halperin to receive this missive were actually offered a "coupon" to clip-and-send Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn. Neither Mr. Nunn nor his colleagues are likely to give more weight to this transparent, form-letter endorsement of Halperin’s "integrity, unusual intelligence and competence and broad experience" than they do to similar post-card campaigns mounted by other special interests.

2. ‘New Democrat’ Watch: Bad Personnel is Bad Policy: If You Liked Lani Guinier, You’ll Love Mort Halperin! (No. 93-D 45).