Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 24, 1992 TAG: 9203240427
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sometimes the wisdom is not his own but the uncredited views of others, as was the case when he listed criteria justifying U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.
Other times he imputes to others unworthy political attitudes of his own, as in his current brief for increased financial and political support for Boris Yeltsin as insurance against emergence of a "new des-pot-ism" in Russia.
If George Bush doesn't break cover and go to bat for Yeltsin, says Nixon, the question of "Who Lost Russia?" may haunt Republicans just as "Who Lost China?" was made to harry the Democrats after World War II.
Nixon, in this fashion, wraps a good cause in a twisted context. The latter question was never more than a malicious invention by Nixon and others.
The United States never had custody of China. As Leslie Gelb writes in The New York Times, China was lost to communism by the corrupt and incompetent regime of Chiang Kai-shek, which could not have been "saved with billions of dollars or bombs."
Finally, it's hard to stomach Nixon's maundering suggestion that he and John Kennedy once were two musketeers defying constituent opposition to help Harry Truman get millions in U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey in an effort to prevent communist subversion.
Truman couldn't stand the sight of Nixon. Moreover, the implied parallel between those times and these is fictitious.
In Truman's time, communism was expanding. Its threat to a ravaged Europe was vivid in daily headlines. There was party discipline in Congress and among leaders in both parties with the ability to marshal votes and money to rebuild Europe.
Moreover, the United States was coming out of a great depression and into world supremacy: Its friends in Europe had only to reconstruct industrial democracies and free markets - not to invent them without benefit of a helpful tradition, culture or mind-set, which is the challenge facing Russia and the other fragments of the Soviet Union.
It would have been better had Nixon come forthrightly to his case and to the questions that surround it. The hardest question regarding aid for Russia is:
Where is the money coming from, and what is it going for?
Sentiment against foreign aid, always ample, has hardened as the American work force has found itself running harder just to stay in place. The mere idea of aid is resented.
George Bush put most of his energies into foreign affairs only to find himself whipsawed by isolationists on the Democratic left and the Republican right.
"It's time to take care of our own" was the theme of Democrat Harris Woodford, who won the Pennsylvania Senate seat over Richard Thornburg, Bush's attorney general who thought he was going home to a coronation.
Bush has been retreating ever since. In addition to his fear of the nasty nativism of Patrick Buchanan, the president knows how vulnerable he would be if he pushed aid for Yeltsin and a Democratic opponent asked the question posed by Leslie Gelb. To wit: Who is losing America?
Who, that is, wants to throw billions of borrowed American dollars against 1,000 years of Russian backwardness while saying there's nothing more to be done about homeless, uneducated and unemployed Americans?
The senior Russian expert on the National Security Council staff is already on record as saying the West provided Russia with $44 billion in aid over the past two years "and no one is quite sure where it went."
It's all very well, perhaps commendable, for Nixon to flog Bush for a "pathetically inadequate response" to Russia's first post-communist government. Plenty of able Democrats in safe and appointed seats agree with him - including Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.
But there will be no significant money for Russia until the rat holes are nailed shut, the economy recovers and a new context stressing self-interest and burden-sharing is brought forward persuasively by a newly elected president.
Which fact will surprise least of all Richard Nixon, whose career - rooted in reaction - was marked even more than Bush's by a lack of vision.
Perry Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk.
by CNB