by Ira Shapiro
Jimmy Carter might think that the Senate was intruding on his foreign policy because they did not respect him or trust his judgment. And of course, many of them did not respect or trust a neophyte outsider where national security was concerned. But the Senate had reasserted its role in the foreign policy area because of their searing experiences with Johnson and Nixon, the most experienced Washington insiders imaginable. Now, the senators insisted on being partners with the president in shaping the country’s foreign policy. They would get their chance soon enough.
Humphrey was such a large figure in Senate history that his death overshadowed the passing, six weeks earlier, of John McClellan, the dour Arkansas senator who chaired the Appropriations Committee. Twenty years earlier, McClellan had been among the most influential and famous senators in the country, having chaired the remarkable hearings into labor racketeering and organized crime that became for many Americans their first memory of the Senate on television.
But by the time of his death, McClellan had become a relatively minor figure in the Senate, despite the powerful committee post. He typified the conservative southerners who had run the Senate in an earlier era, and he was increasingly out of step with the progressive Senate, which he accommodated by allowing the Appropriations Committee to be controlled by subcommittee chairmen and ranking members, who were much more progressive than he. He had endured a tragic personal life, dealing with the deaths of his wife and three sons. In 1973, McClellan would meet Joe Biden, just elected to the Senate and trying to cope with the loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident. Bury yourself in work, the old man told the new senator—it’s the only antidote.
The new appropriations chairman would be Warren Magnuson of Washington, serving his sixth term at the age of seventy-two. “Maggie,” as he was universally known, walked slowly, with a painful shuffle, perpetually hampered by a weakened foot resulting from diabetes. He was not a forceful speaker, and he sometimes appeared shy. But in this case, appearances were deceptive; Maggie was one of the most accomplished and powerful senators in history. A prodigious worker in what he called the “legislative kitchen,” Maggie had done large things for his state, bringing military contracts for Boeing in Seattle, protecting Puget Sound, and spearheading the electrification of the Pacific Northwest. But he had also done large things for the country, negotiating the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act, reorganizing the nation’s railroad system, and spearheading the creation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Unlike McClellan, Maggie had been perfectly in tune with the progressive, activist Senate of the previous fifteen years; in fact, he epitomized it. Under his leadership, starting in 1963, the Senate Commerce Committee had spearheaded the nation’s growing commitment to protect consumers. Maggie hired and empowered a brilliant and entrepreneurial staff led by Michael Pertschuk; they worked in close harmony with Ralph Nader and “Nader’s Raiders” and investigative reporters, led by Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson, to spotlight corporate abuses and enact remedial legislation. Maggie and Pertschuk had become a legendary combination, protecting consumers and changing the relationship between government and business in the United States. In 1977, Jimmy Carter had nominated Pertschuk to chair the Federal Trade Commission, to implement the many laws that he had helped put on the books. Pertschuk would find himself at the pinnacle of the government’s consumer protection effort at precisely the moment when the tide was shifting against it. The Republicans and the business community had already succeeded in scuttling the proposed Consumer Protection Agency, the consumer movement’s highest legislative priority.
Magnuson had already been de facto chairman of the Appropriations Committee as McClellan’s health had declined, so his new chairmanship would not change the Senate significantly. But two of the best-known senators had kept a relatively low profile in 1977, and that was about to end. The Senate needed more intellectual and political firepower to deal with the second session’s overwhelming agenda, and two of the Senate’s leading liberals were ready to provide it: Frank Church and Ted Kennedy.
FRANK CHURCH, ONE OF the most admired and reviled men in the Senate, spent the opening weeks of 1978 preparing for the battle that was likely to end his career.
Church was the second-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and John Sparkman of Alabama, the committee’s chairman, aging and in poor health, could not handle the enormous burden of bringing the controversial Panama Canal treaties to Senate ratification. The Carter administration had asked Church to take the lead on the treaties, which were absolutely hated in Idaho, arguably the most conservative state in the nation. His staff implored him to let this dubious honor pass, and keep a low profile. But Church had spoken for twenty years about changing U.S. foreign policy toward the developing world. It was at the core of all that he stood for. Frank Church could no more walk away from leadership on the Panama Canal treaties than Hubert Humphrey could have walked away from leadership on civil rights. He would take on the challenge, even if it was likely to cause him to lose his Senate seat in 1980.
Church had risen to fame as a youthful debater, known as the “boy orator of the Snake River.” Cancer almost took his life in his twenties, but Church beat the disease. That brush with death fired his ambition and pushed him to take risks. He was elected to the Senate in 1956 at the age of thirty-two, one of the youngest senators in American history.
Church quickly established himself as an independent mind capable of forging tough compromises. Within a few months of entering the Senate, he helped smooth passage of the 1957 Voting Rights Act by brokering a compromise on how voting rights violations would be prosecuted. Impressed, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson gave Church a coveted seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and in 1960, Church made the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention when John Kennedy was nominated for president.
Church had been an intelligence officer in the China-Burma theatre during World War II and came away deeply opposed to the imperialism of Great Britain and France. He feared Cold War paranoia was driving the United States on its own imperial course: one that was overly reliant on military force, ambivalent about the hopes of developing nations for self-determination, and dangerously detached from American ideals.
He became one of the earliest and most eloquent critics of the Vietnam War. In a December 1964 magazine interview, he argued the increasing U.S. commitment in Vietnam was “fighting the tides of history.” Asians will quickly forget our honorable motives, he said, and see nothing more than “another white, western nation using force to get its way.” In February 1965, as the Johnson administration intensified air attacks on North Vietnam, Church’s article, “We Are in Too Deep in Africa and Asia,” appeared in the New York Times Magazine. That same week, on the Senate floor, he said: “we have plunged into these former colonial regions as though we had been designated on high to act as trustee in bankruptcy for the broken empires.”
On June 24, 1965, Church was traveling with Johnson on Air Force One when a young lieutenant reported that a plastic bomb had killed several soldiers and two American women in Saigon. Johnson turned to Church and challenged him: “What would you do? Turn the other cheek?”
Incensed, Church shot back: “We’re the ones who sent them there. And we did so knowing the dangers, the risk. Plastic bombs are terrible things, but that’s all the Vietnamese have to fight back with. They don’t have big bombers to drop napalm on villages from 35,000 feet.” Johnson stormed off in a rage.
Church deepened his critique of the war in late 1965 and 1966 through articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. Americans could not understand the transformation that was sweeping the postcolonial world, he argued, because of our obsession with communism and because we were such a wealthy nation. “Sober and satisfied and comfortable and rich,” the United States was close to being “the most un-revolutionary nation on earth.”
On February 21, 1968, Chu
rch went to the Senate floor to deliver a speech entitled “Torment of the Land.” He argued that “the nation’s marathon dance with war” was taking a terrible toll. The conflict in Vietnam “pervades and brutalizes our culture,” he said, and is circling back to our own streets, as returning veterans “transferred the arts of guerilla war” to the festering slums. He quoted a returning veteran looking at the streets of Detroit in flames: “It’s here, man, that the real war is.”
In the early years of the war, Church’s liberal views caused a harsh reaction in Idaho. He might have been defeated for reelection if forced to run in 1965 or 1966. But by 1968, when he sought his third term, the public was turning against Vietnam. Church’s earlier criticism seemed prescient. After he was reelected, ending the war in Vietnam became Church’s principal focus in the Senate. With Republican John Sherman Cooper, he offered legislation to prevent Nixon from expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia and supported legislation to cut off funding for the war entirely.
When the U.S. involvement in Vietnam finally came to an end in January 1973, most Senate doves took a much lower profile, but Church became even more prominent. In 1972, he successfully urged the Foreign Relations Committee to undertake an in-depth study of the role of multinational corporations and their relationship to U.S. foreign policy. The investigation was spurred by accusations that the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) had offered the Nixon administration a contribution of “up to seven figures” in exchange for a CIA plan to undermine Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, at the polls after Allende had threatened to nationalize ITT’s 60 percent interest in the Chilean telephone company.
Church had always distrusted big corporations, which he equated with the lumber and mining companies that came into Idaho to extract its natural resources. By 1972, Church had been a critic of U.S. multinationals’ activities in the developing world for almost two decades and as subcommittee chairman, he pursued the investigation aggressively, despite intense pushback from the Nixon administration, the U.S. business community, and the CIA.
The ITT-CIA investigation showed Church at his best, relentlessly exposing government abuse and corporate greed. A major U.S. corporation had tried to rig an election in a friendly country and enlisted the CIA in its efforts. The CIA, in turn, had encouraged ITT to damage Allende by creating economic chaos in Chile. Church ridiculed the argument that Allende’s election posed a threat to U.S. national security, joking that Chile was “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.”
Church’s subcommittee tackled an even more explosive issue when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel of Arab oil exporters, cut off U.S. oil shipments in retaliation for U.S. aid to Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the months that followed, oil prices tripled, gas shortages were common, and long lines at the pump became part of daily life. Meanwhile, oil company profits soared by 50 to 70 percent above the previous year. Economists said these profits simply reflected higher prices caused by a shortage of supply, but Church spoke for many Americans when he attacked the oil companies for “profiteer(ing) upon the present adversity.” He announced his subcommittee would investigate and expose the complex relationships between the Arab governments and U.S. oil companies. “We Americans,” Church declared, “must uncover the trail that led the United States into dependency on the Arab sheikdoms.”
Church’s subcommittee staff, led by its crusading chief counsel Jerry Levinson, made public thousands of previously classified documents that drew a picture of increasing U.S. dependence on oil companies, and oil companies’ increasing reliance on Middle East crude. The U.S. government had given oil companies credit for taxes paid to Arab governments. More importantly, the CIA had aided the companies by sponsoring the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s government after he nationalized the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian oil company.
Church was reelected to a fourth term in 1974. Spurred on by public outrage over Watergate and other government abuses, his subcommittee plunged into an investigation of bribes offered to foreign governments to obtain defense contracts, focusing particularly on Northrop and Lockheed Martin. The subcommittee found evidence of bribes paid by Northrop to Price Bernhard of the Netherlands and by Lockheed to top government officials in Japan and West Germany. The report ultimately found that officials in more than thirty countries had received payoffs from Lockheed, Northrop, and other corporations. In response to the subcommittee findings, the Netherlands and Italy opened their own investigations. “Lockheedo,” as the Japanese press referred to the scandal, led to the arrest of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, and Robert Waters, Lockheed’s fifty-four-year-old vice president, committed suicide with a hunting rifle as a result of the revelations.
In late 1974, a series of articles by New York Times reporter Seymour M. Hersh accusing the CIA of illegal intelligence operations against antiwar activists and other dissidents had captured the attention of a country already made distrustful by the excesses of Watergate. On January 27, 1975, just one month after Hersh’s first bombshell story, the Senate created a Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, by an 82–4 vote, charged with investigating the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies.
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had long been concerned about the lack of congressional oversight of the intelligence community. When Phil Hart turned down the select committee’s chairmanship, Mansfield offered the job to Church. As a former intelligence officer, Church recognized the need for the United States to gather intelligence abroad, but his investigation of the CIA role in overthrowing Allende had helped convince him such activities often proved counterproductive and were contrary to American ideals.
Church had a daunting and delicate assignment. His committee was charged with investigating, and perhaps making public, decades of previously secret intelligence activities that could have a profound effect on U.S. foreign policy and U.S. standing in the world. There was a fundamental divide on the committee between senators like Church who believed the United States would be better served by airing these abuses, and those, like Republicans John Tower and Barry Goldwater, who believed publicizing previous covert operations would damage the intelligence agencies going forward.
The Church Committee doggedly pursued CIA attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, notably Fidel Castro, and battled the Ford administration to increase what could be disclosed. The committee held 21 public hearings and 250 closed ones and gathered over 110,000 pages of documentation. The committee issued an extensive report on the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO), which had focused on civil rights groups, antiwar activists, and Native Americans. The committee also revealed a special unit within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that had “politically harassed” thousands of activists and disclosed that, for thirty years, companies such as ITT and RCA had routinely provided the CIA with telegrams Americans sent abroad.
Church’s critics believed he was using the committee as a springboard for a presidential run, and there was some truth to that. However, he vowed to Mansfield he would finish the committee’s work before announcing his candidacy. Consequently, he did not enter the race until March 18, 1976, by which time Jimmy Carter had been campaigning for more than a year and was close to locking up the nomination. Although Church won several late primaries, he was too late to derail Carter’s march.
Almost every candidate who loses an election comes away thinking he could have won had he done certain things differently. In Church’s case, those “what ifs” were well justified. Church had been ideologically well positioned to seize the nomination. He was a true dove, at a time when anti-Vietnam fervor still mattered. More important, four years of high-visibility investigations had given him enormous public exposure. He was fifty-two years old, still telegenic, and, after twenty years in the Senate, a masterful orator. When Jimmy Carter spoke of the need for “a government as good as the American people,” he was sending a message that
Church had been using for years. He had become the Senate’s foremost moralist in a post-Watergate period when the country was troubled by the lack of morality in its government and business leaders. He compared himself to an evangelist, preaching Justice Brandeis’s admonition that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” He had reason to think it was his moment to be president, and reason to be disappointed, even bitter, that he had missed it.
So Church was subdued, even depressed, for much of 1977. But his energy and enthusiasm returned in August when he made a remarkable trip to Cuba, at the invitation of Fidel Castro. Acting as an emissary for the Carter administration, Church won concessions from Castro allowing the families of U.S. citizens to leave Cuba with their savings and personal possessions. Castro also agreed to review the cases of Americans imprisoned in Cuba. Church subsequently recommended to the Foreign Relations Committee that the United States should respond to Castro’s gestures by easing the trade embargo against Cuba, stopping U.S. anti-terrorist activities against the Castro regime, and increasing cultural and other exchanges with Cuba.
The trip was vintage Church: walking his own path, inspiring his admirers, and enraging his opponents. The year 1978 found him reinvigorated, with a renewed commitment to putting U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere on a higher moral plane. Soon he would have an historic opportunity to do so.
