Just as the government prepared to release the Cox Report, which would reveal that the communist regime in Beijing had stolen design information for every advanced nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the Democratic National Committee announced the appointment of a longtime communist sympathizer, Carlottia Scott, as its new "political issues director." Scott is a former mistress of the Marxist dictator of Grenada, and was an ardent supporter of America's communist adversaries during the Cold War.
The timing of the DNC's announcement was appropriately ironic, in that this appointment tells us volumes about the roots of the nation's growing security crisis: the dramatic erosion of America's military credibility in an ill-conceived war, and the theft of its nuclear arsenal by an adversary the administration claims is a "strategic partner."
Carlottia Scott was for many years the chief aide to Rep. Ron Dellums, a Berkeley radical who, with the approval of the congressional Democratic leadership, was appointed first to the Armed Services Committee and then to the chair of its subcommittee on military installations, which oversees U.S. bases worldwide. The Democratic leadership apparently saw no problem in the fact that every year during the Cold War with the Soviet empire, Dellums introduced a "peace" budget, which would have required a 75 percent reduction in government spending on America's defenses.
Nor did they have any problem with Dellums' performance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. As Soviet troops poured across the Afghan border and President Carter called for the resumption of the military draft, Dellums told a "Stop the Draft" rally in Berkeley that "Washington, D.C., is a very evil place," and the only "arc" of a crisis that he could see was "the one that runs between the basement of the West Wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon."
Among the government documents retrieved when the Marxist government in Grenada was overthrown were the love letters of Dellums' chief aide, Carlottia Scott, to its anti-American dictator, Maurice Bishop. Scott wrote: "Ron has become truly committed to Grenada ... He's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong ... The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel."
Bishop and Fidel were not the only communists in the Americas favored by Dellums and his aide. About the time these letters were retrieved, Dellums was opening his congressional office to a Cuban intelligence agent who proceeded to organize support committees in the United States for the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. Yet, when Dellums' retired, the Clinton administration's secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, bestowed on him the highest civilian honor the Pentagon can award "for service to his country."
After Dellums' retirement, Scott became the chief of staff to his successor, Berkeley leftist Barbara Lee. In the 1970s Lee was a confidential aide to Huey Newton, the "minister of defense" of the Black Panther Party, whose calling card was the "Red Book" of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Among the documents liberated from Grenada were minutes from a politburo meeting attended by Lee and the Marxist junta. The minutes state that "Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes."
The airport in question was being built by the Cuban military and, according to U.S. intelligence sources, was designed to accommodate Soviet warplanes. The Reagan administration regarded the airport project as part of a larger Soviet plan to establish a military base in this hemisphere, and administration officials invoked its construction as a national security justification for the invasion that followed.
In an effort to forestall such an invasion, and as head of the military installations subcommittee of the House, Dellums made a "fact-finding" trip to Grenada and issued his own report on the airport, concluding that it was being built "for the purpose of economic development, and is not for military use." Dellums' report also made the political claim that the Reagan administration's concerns about national security in regard to the airport were "absurd, patronizing and totally unwarranted." In other words, the captured minutes of the politburo meeting show that Dellums and his aide Lee colluded with the dictator of a communist state to cover up the fact that the Soviet Union was building a military airport that posed a threat to the security of the United States.
Despite this betrayal, and with the approval of her Democratic colleagues in the House, Lee is now a member of the House International Relations Committee, which deals with issues affecting the security of the United States. With equal disregard for national security, the DNC has now made Scott -- an abettor of these treacherous schemes -- its political issues director. When I asked a leading Democratic political strategist, who is not a leftist, how it was possible that the leaders of the Democratic Party could appoint someone like Scott to such a post at such a time, he replied: "You have to understand that in the 1960s these people (the party's leaders) were chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win!"
The left-wing culture that thus pervades both the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration is at the heart of the current national security crisis. These are people who never conceded that the Soviet Union was an evil empire; who never grasped the dimensions of the Soviet military threat; who regarded America's democracy as an imperialist empire and as morally convergent with the Soviet state; and who insisted (and still insist) that the ferreting out of Soviet loyalists and domestic spies during the early Cold War years was merely an ideological witch-hunt. They opposed the Reagan military buildup and the development of an anti-ballistic missile system in the 1980s and consistently called for unilateral steps to reduce America's nuclear deterrent.
Given this history, they could hardly be expected to take the post-Cold War threat from the Chinese communist dictatorship seriously. And they have not.
In fact, the current national security crisis may be said to have begun when President Clinton appointed anti-military environmental leftist Hazel O'Leary to be secretary of energy, and therefore in charge of the nation's nuclear weapons labs. O'Leary promptly surrounded herself with other political leftists (including a "Marxist-Feminist") and anti-nuclear activists, appointing them as assistant secretaries with responsibility for the nuclear labs.
In one of her first acts, O'Leary declassified 11 million pages of reports, including information on 204 nuclear tests, a move she described as an action to safeguard the environment and as a protest against a "bomb-building" culture. Having made America's nuclear weapons secrets available to adversary powers, O'Leary then took steps to relax security precautions at the labs under her control. She appointed Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton National Security Council staffer with extreme anti-nuclear views, to be director in charge of national security issues. Gottemoeller had been previously nominated to fill the post -- long-vacant in the Clinton administration - of assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. But her appointment was successfully blocked by congressional Republicans because of her radical disarmament views. The Clinton response to her rejection on security grounds was to appoint her to be in charge of security for the nation's nuclear weapons labs.
The architect of America's China policy over the course of the current disaster has been Clinton's national security advisor, Sandy Berger. Berger began his political life as a Vietnam War protestor and member of the radical "Peace Now" movement, which regards Israel as the aggressor in the Middle East. Berger first met Clinton as an activist in the McGovern for president camp, the most left-wing Democratic presidential campaign in American history. Berger's law practice, prior to his appointment, was lobbying for the business arm of China's communist dictatorship. (The other root cause of the present security crisis is, of course, greed -- a major factor in all its aspects, and on both sides of the political aisle.)
It is hardly surprising that a political leftist and business lobbyist for China's rulers should take steps to lift the security controls that previously protected U.S. military technology. Or that, under his tenure, invitations to the White House should be extended to agents of Chinese intelligence and China's military. Or, for that matter, that appointments like that of John Huang to posts with top security clearance should be considered perfectly reasonable.
Nor is it surprising, given the politics of the Clinton managers, that the administration should place its faith in arms control agreements that depend on trustworthy partners, while strenuously opposing measures to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses that do not. (Even now, after the revelations of China's thefts, Berger and the Clinton administration continue to oppose the implementation of anti-ballistic missile defense programs, while pressing to keep China's most-favored-nation trading status secure.)
After all, this is a Democratic Party whose political culture is so dominated by left-wing illusions and deceits that it has worked assiduously to obstruct the investigations of the debts of the Clinton-Gore campaign to the Chinese dictators. No wonder it remains irresponsibly complacent in the face of the revelations of the Cox Report.
There is perhaps nothing more alarming for the prospects of the two-party system, however, than the wall of denial that has been hastily and irresponsibly erected around these issues by Democratic leaders like Tom Daschle in the wake of the Cox disclosures. To say, as the Senate minority leader has, that there is nothing really new in these revelations is patently absurd. Which previous administrations dismantled vital security procedures; accepted illegal monies from foreign intelligence services and then blocked investigations when the illegalities were revealed; presided over the wholesale evaporation of the nation's nuclear weapons advantage; abetted the transfer of missile technologies that can strike American cities; and opposed the development of weapons systems that could defend against such attacks?
The honest answer is none.
At the heart of the current crisis is a White House that has loaded its administration with officials deeply disenchanted with, if not actively hostile to, America's essential character and purposes. Behind that White House and still supporting its coverup is a party that lacks proper pride in America's national achievement and proper loyalty to America's national interests. This is a party whose leader has spent enormous political capital apologizing to the world for America's role in it. This is a party that even in the face of the most massive breach of security in America's history is still taking the position that, like Monica, "Everybody does it."
Democrats should think carefully before they proceed any further down this slippery path. Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 by asking voters the question: "Do you feel better off now than you did four years ago?"
The next Republican presidential candidate will surely pose another obvious question: "Do you feel safer now than you did eight years ago?"
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