By Philip Shenon
June 17, 1999
Washington-- The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms, is refusing to say whether he will allow a vote on the long-stalled nomination of Richard C. Holbrooke to be the American representative at the United Nations, raising the question of whether the nomination might die before it reaches the Senate floor.
Clinton Administration officials and other lawmakers say they believe that Helms will eventually allow a vote and that Holbrooke will be confirmed. But they acknowledge they are unnerved by the Senator's silence on the issue.
Confirmation hearings for Holbrooke begin Thursday.
Helms, who has said that he cannot recall another Cabinet-level nomination "with so much ethical baggage," has used similar procedural tactics before to kill prominent nominations. In 1997, he refused to allow confirmation hearings or a vote on the nomination of a fellow Republican, Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts, to be ambassador to Mexico.
The fiercely conservative 77-year-old North Carolina Republican has the power as chairman to ignore the broad, bipartisan support that Holbrooke enjoys in the Senate.
" Holbrooke has some explaining to do," the Senator said in a statement this month announcing the schedule for the confirmation hearings. "I have not come to a judgment on Holbrooke's nomination. However, I must confess that I cannot recall another Cabinet-level nomination sent to this committee with so much ethical baggage attached to it."
Helms said in his statement that he would grill Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat turned $1 million-a-year investment banker, about the ethical problems that may have been created by his revolving-door career between the Government and Wall Street.
Earlier this year, Holbrooke agreed to pay $5,000 to the Justice Department to settle civil charges that he had violated Federal lobbying laws when, shortly after leaving the State Department in 1996, he sought help from the American ambassador to South Korea in setting up appointments there.
Holbrooke did not admit to wrongdoing and insisted that he accepted the terms of the settlement only because he wanted to move forward with his nomination.
Helms said he would also closely question Holbrooke, President Clinton's longtime envoy to the Balkans and the architect of the 1995 peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia, about "his role and responsibility for this Administration's misguided policy of appeasing Slobodan Milosevic," the Serbian leader.
The statement added: "No vote on the nomination has been scheduled."
Clinton Administration and Congressional officials agree that in Helms, Holbrooke -- whose nomination has survived a year of close scrutiny, including two Federal ethics investigations -- appears to face the final hurdle in his quest to run the United States Mission to the United Nations.
"It's a fluid situation," said Marc A. Thiessen, the Senator's spokesman on the committee. "I think the facts will be laid out and Holbrooke's fate is in his own hands."
