Isn’t it wonderful! Newt Gingrich is back. I have missed him so much, haven’t you? Many years ago, when my now grown sons were children, one of them would have put his hands on his hips and said, You’re being starcastic. And the answer, of course, is yes, I am being sarcastic.
You do remember Newt, don’t you? Mr. Gingrich was the exceptionally talented young conservative congressman from Marietta, Georgia who, more than any other, in 1994 engineered the Republican victories that put the House of Representatives under Republican control for the first time in a generation and furthermore installed him, Gingrich, as speaker of the House. His star was so much in the ascendancy that it seemed that he as speaker had eclipsed the presidency in importance. During the early months of 1995 one would have thought that Newt Gingrich ran America.
And then, bit by bit, Bill Clinton began to outmaneuver Gingrich and his arch-conservative colleagues, which is one of the reasons they came to hate Clinton so much and why so many of them became passionately devoted to bringing him down. It later turned out that Gingrich, who was among those leading the charge to impeach Clinton, was at the same time himself involved in an extramarital affair with his secretary. Gingrich subsequently faded from the political spotlight almost as quickly as he had previously seized it.
A few days ago Mr. Gingrich delivered himself of a diatribe at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, in which he aggressively attacked the Department of State and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Gingrich began with this: The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success. He attacked the State Department for having a world view which he described as one of process, politeness and accommodation, which he contrasted with that of the Pentagon, which he said was devoted to facts, values and outcomes.
There was more, much more, but all in the same vein and tone. He basically said that Secretary of State Powell has been ill advised by people who do not comprehend what the president wants, in effect saying that Powell has been duped and misled by his own staff, especially by those in the Near East Bureau. Soon thereafter, the White House disavowed the views expressed by Gingrich, and Donald Rumsfeld’s handlers piously said that neither they nor their boss had known anything about what Gingrich was going to do. If you believe that, dear friends, I will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
Of course they knew. And they could have stopped it if they had wished to do so; but this is all a part of the internal wars going on within the Bush administration right now. What this is all about is an attempt to establish Donald Rumsfeld rather than Colin Powell as the dominant voice in U.S. foreign policy. The neo-conservatives are glad to have Gingrich out front as long as they themselves, namely the Rumsfeld-Cheney crowd, can maintain plausible deniability.
The State Department has long been a favorite target of the political right in America. There is a long and sorry history of all this, with the dreadful mess created by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy being the worst – and that was way back in the 1950’s. My own hope is that Gingrich and company will again overdo it, as they have so often done in the past.
This is Olin Robison.
Olin Robison is president of the Salzburg Seminar, located in Middlebury, Vermont and Salzburg, Austria.