‘Softness’ a Key Issue in South : Democrats and Defense: Who Is Toughest of All?

The “killer question” headed toward Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis across an auditorium stage 10 days ago like a well-thrown fastball: “How can you get elected by being squishy-soft on defense?”

Dukakis, as befits his status as one of the leaders in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, saw it coming.

“I’m not squishy-soft,” he shot back with only a hint of defensiveness. “I’m very tough.”

For Democrats running in the March 8 Super Tuesday primaries in most Southern states, the South has become a battleground where the issue is foreign policy and the war cry is “toughness”--who’s got it and who hasn’t.

Fighting partly on questions of nuclear weapons and partly on the passionate issue of U.S. support for Nicaraguan rebels, the Democrats are again debating the questions that first split their party 20 years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War: How serious is the Soviet threat to the United States, and when should a President use force to defend American interests abroad?

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, bidding for the votes of conservative, defense-minded Southern Democrats, has accused his rivals of “softness” on defense and declared that the United States should not be afraid of using its military power overseas.

Dukakis has responded by striking a more hawkish pose and declaring: “I will not hesitate to use force to defend our territory, our citizens and our vital interests.”

And Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, whose positions fall roughly midway between, has called Dukakis inexperienced (“His experience in foreign policy consists almost entirely of negotiating with the governor of New Hampshire”) and accusing Gore of being only semi-tough, a closet liberal all along.

The only strong contender for Super Tuesday delegates to resist joining the Democrats’ “toughness” debate is the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has stuck with the dovish positions he advocated in 1984. And even Jackson has found himself putting his positions in the framework of strength, announcing, “I believe in a strong defense, but it should always correlate with our needs, not with our imagination.”

Behind the campaign-year charges and countercharges, though, lie two basic truths about the Democrats of 1988.

First, they appear to have learned a lesson from two defeats at the hands of Ronald Reagan, who successfully tarred their party with an image of weakness. The competition in the South is over which born-again Cold Warrior is genuinely “tough.”

Second, however, the Democrats are still struggling with the legacy of Vietnam, still seeking a consensus on foreign policy that can somehow combine the anti-communist steeliness of John F. Kennedy with the anti-war fervor of George S. McGovern.

A Rough Consensus

On the most general level, there is a rough consensus among the Democrats on most issues. All favor nuclear arms control, stronger conventional defenses, more attention to rebuilding U.S. economic strength and an end to military aid to Nicaragua’s Contras (although Gore favors non-military aid for the Contras along with support for peace negotiations).

“Their general philosophies are similar,” said Albert Carnesale of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has advised Dukakis on arms control issues. “The differences are more apparent than real.”

“There is less polarization than before,” agreed Robert E. Hunter, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter, who has advised Gephardt. “Democrats have finally learned that if Republicans outflank them, it’s going to be on the right, not on the left.”

But in a year when even Jackson has proclaimed his willingness to use military force to defend U.S. interests when necessary, “toughness” can mean different things in practice.

Differences Are Clear

None of the candidates have explained their position on the use of military force in much detail--they are, understandably, loath to commit themselves to send troops or not to send troops in hypothetical cases--but some differences are clear.

Gore has self-consciously staked out a position as the most hawkish candidate, declaring that the Democrats may have learned the wrong lesson from the Vietnam War.

“A cat burned on a stove won’t sit on a hot stove again, but won’t sit on a cold stove either,” he says, quoting Mark Twain. “I think it is important to realize that we do have interests in the world that are important enough to defend, to stand up for. And we should not be so burned by the tragedy of Vietnam that we fail to recognize an interest that requires the assertion of force.”

Unlike the other Democrats, Gore supports both the Reagan Administration’s 1983 invasion of Grenada and its naval patrols in the Persian Gulf.

Differences on Nicaragua

The sharpest differences are found in the candidates’ attitudes toward Nicaragua, where the use of the Contras as a proxy force has been heatedly debated across the nation for six years. Gore takes the most hawkish position, supporting non-military aid to the Contras to pressure the leftist Sandinista government to make concessions in peace talks.

Gephardt has consistently opposed aid to the rebels, military or non-military, declaring the Administration’s policy in Nicaragua to be “a dead end.”

And Dukakis has declared his opposition to any aid for the Contras in the most moralistic terms. “What we are doing down there is illegal,” he says, pledging “not one more penny” for the Nicaraguan war.

Campaigning for liberal votes in Iowa last month, Dukakis made several statements that sounded enough like forswearing any U.S. concern over Nicaragua that Gore accused him of agreeing to accept a “Soviet client state” in Central America.

Thrown on Defensive

Dukakis, thrown on the defensive, came back with a hawkish speech declaring: “If Nicaragua or any other government in Central or South America seeks to overthrow or subvert its neighbors, we have the right and the responsibility to stop them.”

Asked by The Times what that would mean if Nicaragua aided leftist guerrillas in El Salvador--as the Sandinista regime has, to varying degrees, since 1980--Dukakis said: “You do what John Kennedy did: Take whatever actions are appropriate under the circumstances, preferably in concert with our democratic neighbors and allies. . . . Impose economic sanctions . . . sealing off borders, putting forces around the country (to) stop them from doing it. Whatever.”

Jackson also has consistently opposed aid to the rebels, deriding the Reagan Administration for “saving us from 3 million Sandinistas with 15,000 Contras.”

In the realm of nuclear arms, the Democrats agree on a desire for new arms control agreements, on a comprehensive nuclear test ban and on opposition to President Reagan’s attempt to develop a total defense against nuclear attack, the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Building New Weapons

But they differ on the question of “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear force--which essentially means building new, more accurate long-range weapons and switching from multiple-warhead missiles to single-warhead missiles, which are less vulnerable to surprise attack.

Here again, Gore, an acknowledged expert on nuclear weapons issues, has favored modernization, supporting the development of the Midgetman single-warhead missile and opposing a proposed ban on flight-testing new missiles for accuracy. Gephardt, too, supports the Midgetman and straddles the fence on the flight-test ban, calling for a ban after the current round of tests is complete.

Dukakis, on the other hand, favors the flight-test ban and has objected to modernizing the nuclear force, largely on the grounds that it would cost money better spent on other needs.

“I don’t see why we should be spending $50 billion on the Midgetman, with the kind of massive nuclear deterrent we have, and cutting deeply into . . . our conventional forces,” he said in a debate in Dallas 10 days ago.

The issues are largely technical, but even some of Dukakis’ own advisers admit privately to some uncertainty about his positions on nuclear weapons. Most arms-control advocates believe that if the United States and the Soviet Union agree to deep cuts in nuclear warheads--as all the Democratic candidates, including Dukakis, espouse--they will need to shift their nuclear forces to a larger number of single-warhead missiles, like the Midgetman.

‘An Expensive System’

“Midgetman is one hell of an expensive system,” Carnesale said. “Dukakis is right to say that it’s not cost-effective. But if you get deep cuts, both sides may want to move toward a single-warhead force.”

Carnesale added that Dukakis’ foreign policy positions would probably become more pragmatic if he became President, just as he turned from an economic liberal into a pragmatist as governor of Massachusetts.

“He’s demonstrated in the domestic sphere a capacity for adjustment to the hard realities of the real world out there, and I have no doubt he would do the same in the foreign policy sphere,” he said.

Behind those differences on specific issues, the Democratic candidates are markedly different men who approach foreign policy questions from varying backgrounds.

Dukakis is an earnest, internationalist liberal whose rhetoric is full of appeals to international law and multinational cooperation. In a speech in New Hampshire last month that aides say represents the heart of his thinking, Dukakis called for a worldwide agreement to halt the sale of advanced weapons to Third World countries--a goal that, in a world where the United States cannot even stop the sale of arms to Iran or Libya, is probably as unworkable as it is laudable.

‘Fancy Military Equipment’

“What’s utopian about it?” Dukakis replies. “What you do is use your authority to try to get nations in this world to stop doing it. You make it clear to the nations and the leaders who are buying it that you’re not going to help them with their economic problems when they’re spending precious resources on fancy military equipment.”

One of Dukakis’ advisers acknowledges that the governor’s call for closer international partnerships may be a tough sell. “He doesn’t believe America should act as a lone cowboy in foreign affairs,” the adviser said. “Unfortunately, America liked that in Ronald Reagan. That’s the problem we have.”

Gephardt is a man of Congress, a pragmatist whose rhetoric steers toward vote-getting and away from specific policy commitments. He has founded his campaign on a call for tough sanctions against trading partners whose markets are not fully open to American exports, and he turns most questions on foreign policy into answers about the need for economic strength.

“It’s really a message of nationalism first and internationalism second,” one adviser said. “The American people were willing to be internationalists when the international system worked for us. But where the system doesn’t work for the average American, Gephardt’s saying we’ve got to change it.”

Something of a Technocrat

Gore is something of a technocrat, a man who spent months mastering the intricacies of arms control and became an acknowledged expert in Congress.

In choosing to cast himself as the hawk in the race, he has had to cast off a legacy of moderate-to-liberal positions in the past. Asked about his 70% rating in 1986 from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, he said: “Those labels don’t mean as much as they once perhaps did.”

Gore won the endorsement last week of Alabama Sen. Howell Heflin, a leading conservative Democrat, but Heflin noted that he still needed “to educate (Gore) a little bit.”

And Jackson, the civil rights organizer from Chicago, is avowedly the most ideological of the four, successfully gathering support from the nuclear freeze and anti-Contra movements into his Rainbow Coalition, despite his central focus on economic and social issues.

Generally Aloof

As Jackson has remained generally aloof, Dukakis, Gephardt and Gore have escalated their attacks on the others’ foreign policy positions over the last two weeks--largely with the aim of showing their opponents to be either inconsistent or incompetent on international issues.

Gore and Gephardt have accused Dukakis of inexperience; Gephardt and Dukakis have charged Gore with distorting their records; Dukakis and Gore have accused Gephardt of “flip-flopping” on issues.

What is notably absent from the race, though, is the kind of ideological passion that has divided Democrats in earlier years and turned selected liberal issues into “litmus tests.”

“In Iowa in 1984, the left made the nuclear freeze the big question--not just whether a candidate supported it, but how soon he had supported it,” Carnesale observed. “That didn’t happen this time. . . . The Democrats seem to be saying, ‘Let’s not commit suicide. Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot.’ ”

Doyle McManus reported from Washington and Bob Drogin reported from the Dukakis campaign in the South. Staff writers Maura Dolan, with the Gephardt campaign, and Ron Harris, with the Gore campaign, also contributed to this story.