CHAPTER 26
The Snopes Clan in the White House
JUST BEFORE the 1976 election, the Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch shocked the newspaper world by purchasing the financially strapped New York Post from Dorothy Schiff for $30 million ($106.7 million in 2007 dollars). Murdoch was despised by the Left, which viewed him as a predatory businessman, a yellow journalist, and a political conservative who was building a global news empire. For him to replace Mrs. Schiff, a doyenne of Manhattan liberalism, was almost too much to bear.
In 1976, you surely would not hear Rowly or me say anything negative about Dolly Schiff. She was Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel, but for nineteen years had fought off demands by Jewish friends—including badly needed advertisers—to remove Evans & Novak from her newspaper. We were sorry Mrs. Schiff had to sell the newspaper she loved. But selfishly, we guessed the future of the Post was more secure as part of the Murdoch empire and our column was more securely anchored in the Post under a conservative proprietor.
But after the 1976 election, we got bad news from a friend’s telephone call. Rupert Murdoch had given an interview to the Village Voice, a far-Left tabloid that ran advertisements by prostitutes, revealing his plans for the Post. My “friend,” a little too eagerly I thought, told me Murdoch said he could not stand the Evans & Novak column and planned to replace it with liberal Mary McGrory.
Quickly obtaining a copy of the Voice, I found Murdoch had been interviewed by the leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn. The pertinent portion of the wide-ranging interview follows:
[T]here really are too many columns in the bloody paper. Eight columns a day. They seem to be there because they’re available, rather than for any quality—a cheap way of filling the paper….
I’m growing irritated by Evans and Novak. It doesn’t represent my point of view, but I like [William] Buckley. I tend to read him. I get cross about it, but his column is articulate. Evans and Novak tend to be sucking up to the political establishment in Washington, because Kissinger is leaking to them, or someone is. But I shouldn’t knock them too much. They often break a story. Carl Rowan I can’t read…I like [James] Wechsler’s column.
It was not as bad as I had been told. Murdoch’s alleged yearning for Mary McGrory was a figment of somebody’s imagination. He did not say he was going to cancel Evans & Novak and even expressed grudging admiration for our reporting. Nevertheless, it was less than a vote of confidence by the new proprietor of our outlet in the nation’s largest city.
Murdoch now was based in Manhattan, and it was no trouble making an appointment for Rowly and me to see him in December 1976 at his unpretentious office in the old Post building along the East River. Rupert was forty-five years old, exactly my age, ten years younger than Rowly, and much more congenial than I had expected.
I told Murdoch that Rowly and I were concerned about his assessment of our column contained in the Village Voice. I had not completed the thought when Murdoch interrupted me with a dismissive wave of his arm. “Oh,” he said in his Australian accent, “don’t pay any attention to that.” He said he liked our column and considered it one of the Post’s assets.
In fact, said Murdoch, he had something else he would like us to consider. Murdoch informed us he owned the National Star (soon shortened to The Star), a supermarket tabloid competing with the National Enquirer for circulation and the most sensational stories. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson had been supplying the Star with a Washington gossip column, but Murdoch complained that Anderson “is just giving us what amounts to his regular column and not tailoring it for us.” So would Evans and Novak be willing to replace Anderson as Washington columnist for the Star?
Rowly and I were not anxious to be writing for a supermarket tabloid. Murdoch also had implied we could not phone it in and had to exert more effort than Anderson. We would have to find time to produce one more original column in addition to our regular five columns, plus our biweekly newsletter.
But we could not say no. We had taken the shuttle to New York, hats in hand, to plead for a stay of execution from Rupert. He had pardoned us, but we owed him a service we could hardly refuse.
The editors of the Star told us most of the paper’s readers were women. With that in mind, we began ten years of writing for the Star. Our gossip column (called “The Washington Grapevine”) included paragraph items with such information as Betty Ford telling husband Jerry not to run for president again because she liked life in the California desert. On alternating weeks, we wrote profiles of such people as Phyllis George, the former Miss America who was now the First Lady of Kentucky.
ROWLY AND I had talked White House Press Secretary Jody Powell into cocktails at the Metropolitan Club at seven p.m. on March 28, 1977. He was not forthcoming with us, and our session broke up in under an hour. Jody then announced he was off to the Class Reunion, a journalists’ hangout several doors down the block, to watch the NCAA championship basketball game between Marquette and North Carolina—and have another drink or two.
The presence of news sources was not enough to attract me to the Class Reunion in 1977. I spent countless hours in the press clubs of Indianapolis and Washington during my twenties and thirties but by 1977 preferred to get away from my journalistic colleagues.
It was not that I no longer enjoyed drinking. Nearly every day I was in Washington, I had lunch with a news source, and I always started with one or two Scotches, often followed by a bottle of beer with the meal. I usually wrote my column after such an alcoholic lunch without taking a nap, a feat I regard with awe a quarter of a century later. Rowly and I usually put the column to bed around seven p.m., and I invariably headed to The Exchange, a bar located on the ground floor of the building next to ours on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was frequented mostly by lawyers, and I typically was the only journalist present. Spending an hour at The Exchange, I would drink two Cutty Sarks and water. I seldom picked up any news there. The argumentative conversation usually was about sports rather than politics and was mostly civil. (An exception occurred one night when a union organizer for the American Newspaper Guild, influenced by too many drinks, wandered in and started calling me a scab. I initiated a scuffle, consisting of pushing, that was quickly broken up by lawyers at the bar.)
Following my session at The Exchange, I would head home to the Maryland suburbs. When I arrived at Luxmanor around eight to eight thirty, Geraldine and I would have our own cocktail hour with a Cutty and water for each of us. (That was the only time during a weekday when I spent any time with Zelda and Alexander, ages twelve and nine in 1977.) At dinner, Geraldine and I would have wine.
That adds up to around eight alcoholic drinks for me during a normal workday. That’s a lot of booze, but there was considerably more intake for me on any day that I attended a dinner party or reception or was on the road, as frequently was the case. And there were occasions when I, a forty-something, would go on a collegiate-style drinking binge.
On one late summer Saturday, I drove 130 miles to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to watch a Washington Redskins intrasquad scrimmage. I was accompanied by Mike Posner, an usher at my wedding to Geraldine who was a reporter for Reuters. Mike and I had been drinking companions at the old Members Bar of the National Press Club when we both were single, and our expedition to Carlisle looked like an attempt to relive old times.
On the way to the game, we stopped at a roadside store and bought fried chicken and several bottles of cheap wine, which we consumed during the scrimmage. Mike and I then concocted a mad scheme of stopping on the way home at every tavern, where each of us would consume a shot of Wild Turkey bourbon, chased down by a glass of beer. Geraldine and I were invited that night to a dinner party at the Northwest Washington home of Ellie and Andy Glass. I was not only very late but also dead drunk. I disguised my condition with uncharacteristic silence. But by intermittently dozing off, I must have excited suspicion.
Not even such behavior prompted me to question whether I might have a drinking problem, as any reasonable person would conclude. I observed that I did not have the warning signs of alcoholism: inability to adhere to work schedules, imbibing in the morning, withdrawal symptoms if deprived of hard drink. Thus reassured, I went on consuming vast amounts of alcohol. In retrospect, I know I had a major drinking problem that would carry grave consequences if not confronted and corrected.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1977, I sat in Hamilton Jordan’s big office in the West Wing of the White House. It had taken plenty of nagging to get him to see me. Jordan was a thirty-one-year-old Georgian who had spent the past eight years as Carter’s political aide and now would be doing everything for the president from trying to kindle warmer relations with the Democratic old guard on Capitol Hill to handling the current military strongman in Panama.
Although the Carter team had been in the White House a couple of weeks, it looked as though Jordan had just moved in. Cartons with books and file folders remained unpacked. Jordan was without a necktie and generally disheveled. As a reader of Faulkner, I felt the white trash Snopes clan had taken over a mansion of the aristocratic Sartoris family. Jordan was neither helpful nor pleasant with me, and another one-on-one meeting between us never happened.
Jordan was an easy target rather than a source for me. Indiscretions extended to what Jordan said, which provided us with column material—such as this item in our Sunday column of October 16, 1977:
Relations between the White House staff and the Cabinet took another downward step when top presidential aide Hamilton Jordan let it be known that—with two exceptions—he does not think much of President Carter’s Cabinet.
Jordan’s remarks came in a private White House session with top assistants of Senators. Only two Cabinet members, he said, are worth much—Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus and Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland.
If Andrus and Bergland are the best, one Senate aide asked, who are the worst? A smiling Jordan quickly replied—he could not single anybody out because one is about as bad as another is.
I had double-sourced the story and I was absolutely sure that was what Jordan had said. But I made a stupid mistake. In a letter to the editor that the Field Newspaper Syndicate distributed to our newspapers, Jordan denied making those comments and wrote: “While I have become accustomed to Evans and Novak columns being erroneous, my tolerance for their casual regard for the facts will not allow me to remain silent after reading their recent column…. I can state categorically that I have never met at the White House in any private sessions with top assistants of Senators. About a month ago, I did attend a breakfast meeting for Senate staff members in the Senate Office Building.” I had gotten the wrong impression about the site of the meeting. I checked several more Senate aides, who confirmed that I was accurate in quoting Jordan. But Jordan, while lying about what he said, emphasized the error I had made about one detail. It was a clever means of undermining our credibility.
Later in the year, Jody Powell asked Rowly and me to see him at six o’clock one evening—the first time he had reached out to us. We were ushered into Powell’s West Wing office but were told he was busy and we should sit tight for a bit. The bit lasted more than twenty-five minutes. When Powell showed up, he had Hamilton Jordan in tow.
Powell and Jordan had a menacing message: The Evans & Novak column was biased, unfair, and determined to destroy the Carter presidency. They warned that the White House was not without resources with which to fight, and they meant to use them. But their threat was undermined by the evening network news blaring on the TV monitors, causing Powell and Jordan to interrupt themselves, or us, when there was something broadcast they wanted to catch.
Rowly was seething and just before seven o’clock stood up and said we had been there for an hour and had an appointment to keep. As we walked out of the White House, Rowly told me he never had been so humiliated.
Whatever Powell and Jordan had in mind, their effort to pressure us had one unintended consequence. Until then, Rowly had been pushing me and himself to find something positive to write about the new president. After the White House meeting, he gave up.
Carter was under fire from both Left and Right in his own party. The new Speaker, Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, suggested Carter was too conservative for congressional Democrats. In a conversation with Rowly and me, O’Neill made it clear he was not modeling his speakership after that of his fellow Massachusetts Democrat John McCormack who was virtually part of President Lyndon Johnson’s staff. I concluded in the Evans & Novak column of May 21, 1977, that O’Neill “has surprisingly shown in four months the potential to be a great Speaker of the House” who is “fine tuned to the mood on the Hill” and will keep at “arm’s length” from Carter. (The praise is ironic considering what O’Neill wrote about our relationship in his memoirs, about which I will report later.)
On the other end of the Democratic spectrum was the new senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Voting against confirmation of Carter’s liberal nominee to be chief disarmament adviser, Moynihan told me that the president and his advisers were under the influence of “an appeasement psychology.”
TREASURY SECRETARY W. Michael Blumenthal came from far outside Carter’s inner circle, derided by Ham Jordan and disliked by the president. Blumenthal was a former Princeton faculty member who held several jobs in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations before going to the Detroit-based Bendix Corporation in 1967. In 1977 at age fifty-one, he was tapped by Carter’s headhunters as a rare major corporation CEO who was a Democrat with government experience.
Blumenthal looked to me at first like a self-righteous liberal who had risen in the corporate world, but I was mistaken. He was likable and unpretentious enough to be one cabinet member who did not insist on having all meals in his office. He came to breakfast or lunch with me occasionally at the Hay Adams, where he learned he could trust me not to quote him by name.
Blumenthal related Carter’s obsession with penny ante tax reform. He told of traveling to Paris for an International Monetary Fund meeting on August 6, 1977. He had billed the government for round-trip first-class commercial airfare to Europe to save the wear and tear of riding in cramped tourist class. I reported in the Evans & Novak column that business executives did the same thing and, for the sake of efficiency, Blumenthal felt they should continue to receive a tax deduction for first-class tickets. I continued:
But influential aides at the White House strongly disagree. They support Sen. Edward Kennedy’s long-standing proposal to permit tax deductions only of tourist-class fares. What’s more important, President Carter feels the same way.
Similar disagreements abound. Blumenthal is skeptical about other Kennedy-style proposals—such as crackdowns against expense-account business luncheons and interest deductions on vacation homes—that would cause irritation without generating much tax revenue.
Those were the petty tax changes Carter loved and that doomed any chances of a serious reform. Early in 1978, Blumenthal gave me a wonderful insight into the president. Rowly and I had signed a contract with Random House, publisher of Nixon in the White House, to do a similar book on Carter prior to the 1980 election. I had begun background interviews. One of the first was with Blumenthal, who told me this story (which never has been published because the book never was written):
Early in 1977, Blumenthal told Carter that he had prepared a reading list for him considering the president’s desire for tax reform. “Oh, Mike,” Carter responded, “I’m way ahead of you. I’ve started reading the Internal Revenue Code.” It was as if somebody interested in automotive engineering had started by reading a mechanic’s manual word for word. “Mr. President,” said Blumenthal, “I really don’t think that’s the way to go about it.” Carter flashed the frozen smile and steely gaze, saying: “But, Mike, I do, and I am the president.” That summed up the Carter presidency.
JOHN CARBAUGH MIGHT have been the best source I ever had, and 1977 was the best year for what he gave me. Carbaugh was a “legislative assistant” on Senator Jesse Helms’s government payroll but had precious little to do with legislation. Carbaugh, age thirty-one in 1977, knew everybody in the right wing of American politics, and had his hands on multiple clandestine operations. He ran a secret organization called the Madison Group (that met at Washington’s luxurious Madison Hotel), consisting of conservatives who plotted initiatives in Congress and the executive branch. He could be found most mornings at breakfast in the Hay Adams dining room whispering to somebody. It was me about once a week. I don’t think John considered me a true-believing conservative then, but he did view me as a reporter who relished an exclusive.
In early February of 1977, two weeks after Carter was inaugurated, Carbaugh showed up in our office on Pennsylvania Avenue to give me an accordion-style manila folder. Twenty-eight years later, I have the folder and its contents before me. It contains copies of documents found in the briefcase of the late Orlando Letelier.
The background of the folder goes back to September 4, 1970, when a minority of Chile’s voters elected as their president Salvador Allende, a Marxist-Leninist aligned with the Soviet Union and Communist Cuba and antagonistic to U.S. interests. Allende’s defense minister (and former foreign minister), fellow Marxist-Leninist Orlando Letelier, was imprisoned after Allende was murdered in a military coup on September 11, 1973. Released in 1974, Letelier came to Washington, where he had been Chile’s ambassador at the start of the Allende regime. Letelier became a fellow at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington and worked with Soviet and Cuban agents to try to restore the Left in Santiago.
On September 21, 1976, an auto carrying Letelier around Sheridan Circle on Washington’s Embassy Row was demolished and its occupants killed by a car bomb. The FBI at length traced the crime to the secret police of Chile’s military dictatorship and apprehended the bombers. District of Columbia police had recovered intact and turned over to the FBI Letelier’s black Samsonite briefcase. Copies of its contents found its way into Carbaugh’s hands via a route kept secret from me.
The handsome, dashing Letelier was a favorite of Washington’s diplomatic circles for his charm, but not for keeping an orderly briefcase. It contained letters, memoranda, an address book, and notations of financial dealings. This collection showed an Orlando Letelier quite different from his self-constructed image in Washington elite circles as a liberal idealist committed to ending the military dictatorship in Chile and returning his country to democracy.
The briefcase revealed links between Letelier and the Soviet, East German, and Cuban intelligence services. It showed that Letelier and his colleagues had received material from Julian Rizo, a Castro spy whose cover was as first secretary with the Cuban delegation to the UN. Letelier’s address book contained Rizo’s telephone number as well as the private Havana number of Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa (whose correspondence with Letelier was contained in the briefcase). Letelier, while nominally working for IPS, was receiving $1,000 a month ($3,557 in 2007 dollars) from the Cuban government.
A March 29, 1976, letter from Letelier to Cuba laid out the strategy for building support in Congress. In the Evans & Novak column of February 16, 1977, I quoted Letelier declaring that his group of Chilean exiles was creating an image of “an apolitical character, oriented exclusively to the problems of human rights.”
“The object is to mobilize the ‘liberals’ and other persons, who if they don’t identify with us from an ideological point of view, are in it for what human rights reflects,” he added. Letelier also expressed concern that the Chilean human rights committee not be linked to Havana “since you know how these ‘liberals’ are. It’s possible that one of the sponsoring Congressmen might fear that they might be connected with Cuba, etc., and eventually stop giving his support to the committee.”
Letelier never mentions “liberals” without quotes around the word. Nor does he have any doubt where he stands. Closing that letter, he declared: “Perhaps some day, not far away, we also will be able to do what has been done in Cuba.”
An example of that strategy was paying the way for an idealistic, liberal congressman from Massachusetts, Michael Harrington, to attend a conference in Mexico condemning the Chilean military regime. Briefcase documents show $544.26 in 1975 ($2,048 in 2007 money) listed as “Harrington fare,” with $174.26 paid from the Cuban fund and the remaining $380 “received from Helsinki.” I speculated, incorrectly, that this might have referred to a money drop in Finland’s capital. I soon found the truth was even worse.
It is difficult to exaggerate the anger that column raised among Washington liberals. For them, Orlando Letelier was a hero in life and a martyr in death. A Washington Post article about him three days after his death began with the adjectives “warm,” “urbane,” “kind,” and “civilized”—“a cosmic optimist.” On the day my column was published in the Post, Letelier’s lawyer called the newspaper to report that the actual black Samsonite briefcase was in his possession and he would show its contents to a representative of the newspaper.
The Post sent Lee Lescaze, one of the newspaper’s top diplomatic correspondents, to the lawyer’s office with a photographer to inspect the contents of the briefcase. I had spent more than a week perusing the documents and getting translations of the Spanish, which I could not read. Lescaze could not read Spanish either, but quickly wrote his analysis as a news story for the next day’s paper, February 17 (with the contents mostly paraphrased rather than translated).
Lescaze disposed of both my column and a December 20 syndicated column by Jack Anderson based on more limited access to the documents (which also ran in the Post): “After going through all the contents of the briefcase, it appears that the columns have followed the darkest possible interpretation of the scanty material.” Lescaze decided that the conclusion reached by both Anderson and me that the money sent from Havana by the wife of a Castroite secret police officer was Cuban government money was “possible but unproven.” Just how personal this had become was suggested by Lescaze when he wrote that the leaked briefcase documents “damage Letelier’s reputation” and “distress his friends and family.”
On the next day, February 18, the Post’s editorial page editor, Phil Geyelin, allowed a thousand words on the op-ed page to leftist activist Saul Landau to rebut me. Landau, a colleague of Letelier’s at IPS, asserted that “a campaign has been launched with the apparent purpose of smearing Letelier’s reputation.” He then proceeded to make the same points as Lescaze and quoted from his story while lecturing on the need to bring Letelier’s killers to justice (which they were).
After facing this rebuttal from the newspaper that had printed the column in the first place, I thought it necessary to write a second column on the Letelier papers. I wanted to clear up the confusion about money “received from Helsinki” and put Landau’s comments in perspective. I admitted that the “mail drop” speculation was wrong about the money for Harrington because the reference to “Helsinki” actually referred to the World Peace Council, a Soviet front based in Helsinki that awarded its 1976 “peace prize” to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. As for Landau, I quoted from a Landau letter in the Letelier briefcase that nobody had mentioned up to this point. Landau wrote:
I think that at age 40 the time has come to dedicate myself to narrower pursuits, namely, making propaganda for American socialism…. We cannot any longer just help out third world movements and revolutions, although obviously we shouldn’t turn our back on them, but get down to the more difficult job of bringing the message home.
While “the Mike Harringtons are truly concerned with human rights,” I concluded, “the Saul Landaus and the Orlando Leteliers use that slogan to further ideological activism. The undisputed need to bring Letelier’s murderers to justice does not alter that political reality.”
I was up early Monday to read that morning’s Post, and was devastated to discover the Letelier II column was nowhere to be found. Since the time the first Evans & Novak column appeared on May 15, 1963, the Post’s editors had spiked only three of our columns. In each instance, we had received a heads-up call from the Post that the column was not running the next day because of a space problem or because it duplicated another column—never, until now, because of displeasure with the column’s content.
It was midafternoon before Phil Geyelin returned my call, and what followed was not pleasant. Geyelin told me he had spiked the column because of its content, adding he would have spiked the first Letelier column had it not escaped his attention. I started to explain additional material in the second column that justified my position and would interest the newspaper’s readers. “No,” Geyelin interrupted me, “I am not going to have you or anybody else dancing on Orlando Letelier’s grave on my op-ed page.” I had been a syndicated columnist for thirteen years, long enough to know there was no point in arguing with a client newspaper’s editor—particularly the most important client newspaper.
I retell this story because the incident was so unusual in my long, friendly relationship with the Washington Post. Four editorial page editors have printed my column for more than forty years. Usually, I was the only columnist used who was neither a Post staffer nor was syndicated by that newspaper. Whatever professional success I have achieved would not have been possible without the incomparable window to Washington provided me by the Post.
Another newspaper that printed the first Letelier column but not the second was the Boston Globe, which assigned its ombudsman to analyze what we had written. He was Charles Whipple, the Globe’s former editorial page editor who was an acquaintance of Rowly’s and mine. Charlie did not contact either of us before he published a scathing report (headlined “Evans and Novak’s McCarthyesque Smear”). He swallowed whole Saul Landau’s arguments and accused us of a “smear job…that would have turned the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy green with envy.” Whipple said we had “blackened the name” of Letelier, referring to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary as a “respected” diplomat.
The second column, Whipple wrote, “appeared in many papers, including Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. It did not appear, however, in The Globe or The Washington Post, and for very good reasons, we think.” To pile it on Whipple solicited a quote from Phil Geyelin, who said the spiked column “broke no new ground,” was “scurrilous,” and impugned the motives of Letelier, “who can’t answer.”
Our relationship with the Boston Globe never recovered from the Letelier papers. The Globe’s use of the Evans & Novak column diminished and remained infrequent until 1984, when Rupert Murdoch bought the Field Syndicate and transferred Evans & Novak to his Boston Herald. Thankfully, we stayed in the Washington Post. But there was further deterioration of Geyelin’s attitude toward us.
If I had it to do all over again, would I have just ignored the file folder brought me by John Carbaugh and saved myself all these troubles? There are some columns I wish I had not written, but not these. The canonization of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary by our colleagues in journalism was their problem, not ours. Nevertheless I felt more alienated after those events from the mainstream of Washington journalism.
NOWHERE WAS THE shift in policy from Nixon-Ford to Carter more abrupt than in southern Africa. Republican ambivalence toward ending white minority rule gave way to Democratic support for immediate empowerment of the black majority. The danger, as seen by Rowly and me as cold warriors, was Soviet domination of the continent.
Rowly had written several columns about the region and wanted to go to Africa for a firsthand report. But Evans had been doing most of the column’s overseas traveling, and this was one I wanted to make. The reason I pushed to go to southern Africa, and the reason Rowly deferred to me, was personal.
The Jews of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Empire faced a bleak future, inducing many—like my grandparents—to go to America. A much smaller number, including relatives of both my mother’s and my father’s families, went to Africa. One of my mother’s relatives founded Cape Town’s premier department store. On my father’s side, my grandfather’s baby sister at age seventeen was sent to Southern Rhodesia for an arranged marriage with a Jewish landowner named Baron. Her son was to become a member of the Rhodesian Parliament.
Relatives in Cape Town from my mother’s family greeted Geraldine and me with warm hospitality and held a big family dinner for us (to which they invited relatives from my father’s side, who had left Rhodesia ahead of black power). It was thrilling to see on the wall in southern Africa the same family tree we had in our house.
As Jews, my relatives always had been liberal on the race question and opposed apartheid—segregation instituted in 1948 by the Afrikaaners and their ruling Nationalist Party. Now they viewed with alarm a black takeover in South Africa.
R. F. (Pik) Botha had just become foreign minister after a hitch as ambassador to Washington. Tall, handsome, and charismatic, Botha had cut quite a figure in the U.S. capital as the first South African diplomat to work the Washington press corps and go on the TV talk circuit. Botha laid out for me his plan to calm his country’s turbulent racial waters. As a verligte (enlightened) Afrikaaner, he wanted to end apartheid gradually while giving nonwhites a slice of the economic pie and a piece of political power.
In his Foreign Ministry office, Botha—speaking as a longtime friend of America—told me of his frustration with Jimmy Carter’s demand for immediate black majority rule: “We South Africans are profoundly concerned about the United States appearing to demand that change should be so fundamental that it might lead to our destruction as a people.” Off the record, Botha told me he worried about the verkrampte (intractable) Afrikaaners reacting to Carter by doing what they wanted all along: going “into the laager”—forming a suicidal armed camp against the rest of the world.
Botha regarded me as sympathetic and talked Prime Minister John Vorster, who normally did not meet with foreign journalists, into seeing me. Botha told me he hoped Vorster, belying his gruff exterior, would be reasonable. But Vorster was barely civil when introduced to me. After I opened the interview by asking his comment on his apparently futile meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale in Vienna the previous month, Vorster exploded in his thick Afrikaaner accent: “Now that is a truly stupid question! I have answered that question many times, and it has appeared in the newspapers. Don’t you read the newspapers? Didn’t you prepare for this meeting? Are you totally uninformed? I am a very busy man, and I think it an insult for you to waste my time.”
I kept my temper and tried to think of a question that would not trigger another outburst. Mercifully, Vorster ended his “interview” with me after twelve minutes. (He was forced out of office on corruption charges a year later.)
I wrote in an Evans & Novak column from Cape Town on June 24 that the “overriding problem” in South Africa was “how minority whites can share decision-making with majority non-whites short of political self destruction.” I added:
It is precisely that delicate question that the new U.S. policy, no longer viewing South Africa as an anti-Communist bulwark against Soviet penetration on the continent, considers irrelevant.
GERALDINE AND I arrived in Salisbury, Rhodesia, from Johannesburg late on a Friday afternoon at the height of happy hour in our hotel. Well-dressed white people of all ages with drinks in their hands spilled out of the cocktail lounge into the lobby. Everyone was talking as loudly as possible. I compared it to a New Year’s Eve celebration just before midnight, except the gaiety seemed forced—even desperate.
If the end of white rule in South Africa was inevitable, in Rhodesia it was imminent. The colony’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain twelve years earlier had alienated the rest of the world. Every day more whites left this beautiful country (with nearly all my relatives gone). To the outside world, the white men who stayed were archreactionaries trying to maintain a privileged way of nineteenth-century colonial life. But I soon found Rhodesia was not what it seemed to the rest of the world.
I had arranged an interview with Prime Minister Ian Smith. He was maligned as an anachronism dedicated to a whites-only government in a black country, and the photos depicted a sour, crabbed reactionary at war with reality. But I took a liking to him and have kept in touch with him over three decades, long after he had relinquished power. A photo of us together at the prime minister’s office in Salisbury still hangs in my office.
In contrast to the verkrampte Afrikaaner John Vorster, Ian Smith was polite, almost courtly. It was just the two of us seated in his modest governmental office as he answered my questions on the record, thoughtfully and logically. He saw himself as a lifelong patriot, first for the British Empire (as an RAF pilot in World War II) and then for little, beleaguered Rhodesia.
Smith knew the time had come for a black-led government in Salisbury. All he wanted was free elections and guaranteed property rights for white Rhodesians. That was too high a price for the Soviet-supported and supplied guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe. And if the black opposition did not agree, neither did the British government or the Carter administration.
There was a shooting war in the Rhodesian bush, and I wanted to get a feel of it beyond briefings in Salisbury. The Rhodesian military agreed to my request to interview officers on the Mozambique frontier where the war was in progress. “How am I going to get there?” I asked the Rhodesian colonel handling press relations, assuming that I would be driven overland by an escort officer (perhaps accompanied by an armed trooper). “Well, Mr. Novak,” the colonel responded, “there are several reputable auto rental companies here in Salisbury. But I would advise you travel strictly by day. The roads are much safer by daylight.”
I was being told to travel, alone and unarmed, through the Rhodesian countryside in the midst of a guerrilla war. I thought of begging off but decided not to generate stories about the cowardly American journalist. I did not disclose to Geraldine how dangerous I thought this was but arranged for her to fly to Victoria Falls for sightseeing on the day I set off in a rented Land Rover in search of war. (In two days on the frontier interviewing white farmers and military officers, I did not hear a shot fired in anger. But guerrillas blew up railroad tracks not far from Victoria Falls, where Geraldine was sightseeing.)
In an Evans & Novak column datelined Umtali Regional Military Headquarters, I was gloomy about saving this rich and beautiful country from “economic and political anarchy leading to oppression and possible Communist control.” That latter fate was avoided only because the Soviet Union collapsed, which saved the African continent from coming under the Kremlin’s domination. But Rhodesia did not avoid Mugabe’s corrupt dictatorship. Ian Smith, suffering intense persecution, never left his homeland despite unrelenting pressure from the country’s new rulers to do so.
MY LAST AFRICAN stop would be the annual summit of Africa’s black leaders, held this year in Libreville, Gabon, on the continent’s west coast. I was worn down after nearly a month in Africa. In Zaire’s capital of Kinshasa I had foolishly removed my blazer and put it on the back of my chair in the hotel cocktail lounge. My wallet was soon lifted from the jacket’s inside pocket, causing a fellow journalist to comment: “WAWA”—West Africa Wins Again. Arriving in Gabon, I learned my luggage was missing, meaning that now I not only was without credit cards and extra cash but also toiletries and all clothing except what I was wearing.
The State Department had informed our office that immigration controls had been relaxed in Gabon for the once-in-a-lifetime diplomatic conference there, and I would be admitted without a visa. In fact, Gabonese immigration officers were ready to jail me for the night because I had no documents. I was saved when, just before midnight, a young U.S. embassy official arrived for a routine airport check. He quickly cleared me through customs, let me spend the night at his apartment, gave me a change of underwear and socks, and told me what a rotten little dictatorship Gabon was under its petty tyrant, Omar Bongo.
As the FSO walked me to the embassy the next morning, I noticed Gabonese watching an excavation for a new presidential palace. “That’s all they have to do,” my guide told me. The laborers were all Caucasian—imported from Yugoslavia. Gabon produced enough oil to be a member of OPEC and earned enough foreign capital to hire whites to do manual labor that the Gabonese disdained.
The hero of the summit was Uganda’s murderous Idi Amin, who swaggered around the floor of the conference in full military regalia, wearing a sidearm and surrounded by bodyguards. I wrote in a column (“The Face of Black Africa”) from Libreville:
Not only was Amin cheered whenever he set foot into the conference center, but his comic-opera allegation of a Western plot to kill him and other African leaders drew sustained applause. Amin’s colleagues said nothing about mass murder in Uganda. Nor would they say a word against him privately to reporters….
Therefore, a controlling principle in Africa: Human rights are violated only if a white man abuses a black man; a black man repressing or imprisoning another black man is worthy of no attention.
I left Africa with the premonition of tragedy ahead.
IN AUGUST, John Carbaugh had something he said was much better than the Letelier material. But he did not want to be seen entering our Pennsylvania Avenue building (where the neighbors included Newsweek, the Boston Globe, the Newhouse newspapers, and the Johnson publications). Instead, he would meet me in front of our building, driving one of the eight red convertibles he owned (this one a Triumph TR-6). I took an unmarked envelope from him, and he sped away.
Once upstairs, I closed the door of my inner office and ripped open the envelope. It was a copy of an extract from a top secret document: PRM-10 (Presidential Review Memorandum), the Carter administration’s strategic study. In three single-spaced pages it conceded one-third of the territory of West Germany in the event of a Soviet invasion. The invaders would be stopped at a line formed by the Weser and Lech rivers, only after the surrender of Saxony and most of Bavaria. The planning document continued: “If the Soviets persist in their attack, a U.S.-NATO conventional defeat in Central Europe is likely.” This defeatism, of course, was to be kept secret from our NATO allies—especially West Germany.
PRM-10, prepared by liberal civilians brought into the Pentagon by Carter, said increased U.S. defense spending needed to forestall the bleak scenario would not be acceptable to the American public. Even if military outlays increased, the document said, it “may provoke adverse Soviet and allied reactions” and “might provoke a similar Soviet counter-buildup or even a preemptive attack” and therefore “might actually undermine deterrence.” PRM-10’s alternative:
The U.S. might pursue arms-control initiatives more vigorously to obtain reductions in threats and opposing force level, thereby minimizing the risks of unilateral U.S. reductions. With respect to the Soviet Union, the U.S. might undertake a broad program of assistance to the U.S.S.R. on trade, credits, food, and technology, thereby “lowering political tensions and reducing the risks of war.”
When the Evans & Novak column revealed PRM-10’s outlook on August 3, 1977 (“Conceding Defeat in Europe”), the Carter team the same day amended the document to promise “ultimately to restore prewar boundaries”—without saying how. At the August 3 White House press briefing, Jody Powell derided “another in a series of ‘Oh, my God, they’re caving in to the Commies columns’ by Evans and Novak.”
Carter’s German strategy was not the only stunning policy shift contained in PRM-10. A month later, Carbaugh gave me another extract from the document. It conceded the loss of Seoul in an invasion from North Korea, granting the communists their principal war goal. The top secret document stripped bare the consequences of Carter’s decision (later reversed) to remove the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division from Korea. Another Evans & Novak column, on September 7, 1977, contained stunning news for the Republic of Korea:
“Once the U.S. land forces are out of Korea,” says PRM-10, “the U.S. has transformed its presence in Asia from a land-based posture to an off-shore position. This…provides the U.S. flexibility to determine at the time whether it should or should not get involved in a local war.”
The document goes on to reveal an unpublicized reason for removing the 2nd Division: to give Washington the choice of whether or not to intervene. With the troops gone, says PRM-10, “the risk of automatic involvement [which was a major factor in removing land forces from Korea] is minimized.”…
Like many reporters, I have enjoyed letting the public know about things nobody else knows without worrying whether I have influenced policy. Nevertheless, my exposure of PRM-10 did change policy—in a direction I favored. It inhibited Jimmy Carter from adopting a strategy to write off one-third of West Germany and the capital of South Korea. It helped convince Carter that withdrawal of U.S. ground troops was a bad idea. That’s a good couple of days work for one columnist.
Using his many autos, Carbaugh delivered to me highly classified defense documents for more than a year. Carbaugh, the cutoff man in intelligence lingo, never told me from whom he obtained these documents. Whoever he was, I believe he not only gave me great stories but also provided valuable service to the nation.