By William Safire
March 18, 1999
Holbrooke became an issue only because the Reno Justice Department's discredited "Public Integrity" office, after taking a dive for Clinton in Chinagate, wanted to show it could embarrass a lesser Democrat. It buffed up a weak State report about conflict of interest and threatened Holbrooke with a lifetime in limbo; without acknowledging wrongdoing, he anted up a $5,000 settlement to move the nomination forward.
Now Senate Foreign Relations staff is diligently wading through all the records he produced. But the private dealings of this particular nominee -- despite pouting by bureaucrats aggrieved by his sharp elbows and blunt style -- are not what will delay his dispatch to the Kosovo front with the necessary senatorial imprimatur. Nor is resentment of the U.N. the issue, although it is all too often a bastion of appeasement and anti-U.S. sentiment. Secretary General Kofi Annan has cut his payroll and is carrying out many of the reforms he promised the Foreign Relations chairman, Jesse Helms, who proposes to cut the U.S. share of the U.N. upkeep from 25 percent to 20.
Abortion is the sticking point. Pro-life absolutists in the House and pro-choice absolutists in the White House have combined to make us diplomatic deadbeats. Holbrooke is this year's symbol of their grudge fight. Two years ago, Helms and the ranking Democrat, Joe Biden, hammered out a compromise to pay our back dues provided the U.N. cleaned up its act. But Representative Chris Smith attached a rider in the House including the Reagan-Bush order prohibiting U.S. funding of all organizations that perform abortions abroad, an order that Clinton had revoked soon after his election.
An irate Helms told Smith, "I was fighting abortion when you were still wetting your diapers," and to attach his rider to something else. No soap. Facing a certain veto, Helms and Biden worked out with Speaker Gingrich a milder substitute, stopping taxpayer subsidies only to organizations that lobby governments to change abortion laws. But in the Year of Monica, feminists' silence was more important to Clinton than any agreement to break our U.N. impasse. NOW delivered, zipping its lip about sexual harassment, and the President killed the Helms-Biden compromise.
In today's move-on mode, can new life be breathed into that bipartisan bill to rejoin the world? The Senate is ready but the President is not. Not only does Clinton object to the modified Smith rider ending Planned Parenthood's subsidy, he wants to keep our share up at 25 percent, and to pay what the U.N says we owe in arrears, not what we say we owe, a difference of $76 million. Then he wants to diminish budget oversight and make "technical adjustments."
Reached in his wheelchair in the Senate, the recovering Jesse Helms says: "We didn't stop paying U.N. dues because we were broke, but because the U.N. was in a mess. I had a good visit with Kofi Annan, and he agreed to a 20 percent U.S. share." What about a Helms-Biden bill stripped of its controversial abortion rider? "We forwarded him a good piece of legislation. I'd like to hear him say 'I'll sign the bill if you get this rider out of it.' Then it would be up to the House to be helpful, and that would get this matter moving." Clinton wants not only an abortion victory, but a giveback of all his compromises. "Now he's saying we've got to pay all the arrears the U.N. claims. Well, I dissent." If Clinton wants to make a deal, he has a trusted go-between in Secretary Albright: "Madeleine never lied to me, and that goes a distance in this city."
And Holbrooke's nomination? It's a pawn Clinton seems willing to sacrifice, despite its weakening his Balkan negotiation. "I'm not going to cry if we don't send anybody to the U.N. for a while," says Helms. "We can wait. I'm available, if the President wants to do business, but he's been 'silent in seven languages.' " He adds, "That's a North Carolina expression."
