The Education of Elliott Abrams : An Ideologue in Latin Policy Was Bound to Fail

At 33, Elliott Abrams was the youngest assistant secretary of state in the 20th Century. It was 1981, and his future must have looked big with promise. Franklin D. Roosevelt got launched in national politics in the much less exalted post of assistant secretary of the Navy, and he went on to achieve a larger distinction. Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, George Shultz--all these eventual secretaries of state had started later or on a lower rung of the ladder than Abrams. All Abrams had to do was make a modest name for himself and it was not inconceivable that a future--and not too distantly future--Republican President would make him the nation’s first Jewish secretary of state.

The last seven years have not been good to Elliott Abrams; the glittering prospects of 1981 are dashed. Of all the young men given prominent roles in the Reagan Administration--among them, Richard Darman at Treasury, William Bennett at Education, Richard Perle in the Pentagon and Gary Bauer in the White House--Abrams and former Navy Secretary John Lehman are the only ones it’s hard to imagine in high office serving the next Republican President. They are just too weighted down with that least desirable of Washington legacies, “baggage.”

The trouble began for Abrams, then assistant secretary for human rights, when in 1985 he was appointed assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. As point man for a popular President’s most unpopular policies, he soon became identified with their failure.

This did not happen by accident: Abrams’ boss is that veteran bureaucratic maneuverer, George P. Shultz, who so deftly distanced himself from the arms-for-hostages fiasco. It is Abrams, not Shultz, who was tainted by association with the Iran-Contra affair and left holding the bag for the Administration’s embarrassments in Latin America. And it will be Shultz who will get the credit if the Sandinistas agree to live up to the promises they made under the Arias peace plan. If recent Administration leaks are true, Shultz has taken control of Nicaragua policy from Abrams, his apostle of force, in hopes that that the Administration can revive the diplomatic track and reach an election-eve accommodation with the Sandinistas.

It is Abrams, not Shultz, who is blamed for the shambles of the U.S. campaign to “democratize” Panama by unilaterally dumping its dictator. (“Mr. Abrams,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the Wall Street Journal, “has brilliantly succeeded in transforming this drug-dealing crook, despised by his fellow Latinos, into a champion of Latin American sovereignty . . . “) Forgotten in the wash of recrimination is Abrams’ reported plan to kidnap Noriega, which would have been hailed as genuinely brilliant if the Pentagon had not killed it in its crib by leaking it to the press, and if--a bigger if--the thing had worked.

How did a fellow who boasts of his cleverness wind up as the fall guy of an Administration in which men less clever, less well-educated (Harvard, the London School of Economics, Harvard Law) and less well-connected (Abrams’ father-in-law is Norman Podhoretz, the immensely influential editor of Commentary) managed to avoid the stigmata that now scar him? The rise and fall of Elliott Abrams constitutes a cautionary tale about the intellectual in politics.

Scholars and professors have abounded in government for decades, but it is, I think, not too rash to say that no one of Abrams’ intellectual stripe had ever before been thrust so high in the councils of power. When Henry Kissinger was appointed Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, he had written books on such relevant topics as the diplomacy of Metternich and nuclear strategy, and he had been a tenured professor of government at Harvard for years. No tyro at self-promotion, he was nonetheless hired for his expertise. At the time of Abrams’ appointment, he had written some essays and book reviews, mostly for Commentary and the New Leader. These works are intelligent and trenchantly written, but none that I have seen dealt with foreign policy, much less Latin America. Abrams, in any case, was not made an assistant secretary for his foreign-policy expertise or experience (he had none), but for his neo-conservative connections and views.

Still, though he could not claim the status of either scholar or expert, Abrams was every inch an intellectual--a political intellectual. This is a species more common in Europe, where there are Communist parties that need Marxist intellectuals to instruct them in dogma, than it is in America, where politics is about “who gets what,” not ideology. Neo-conservatism, Abrams’ faith, is an attempt to inject American politics with ideology-- a priori beliefs, held with marked moral intensity, that hang together in a monolithic world view connecting the A to Z of life.

As a reaction to the “new politics” of the ‘60s, neo-conservatism is a relatively new development in our political culture, and in 1981 Elliott Abrams was one of its brightest stars. He had employed the neo-conservative ideology in his occasional writings that focused on the Democratic Party’s losing its anti-communist soul in nominating George McGovern for President. Applying an ideology in a magazine is one thing; trying it out on the world is a different order of challenge, as Abrams soon discovered.

Take such a small piece of the world as Nicaragua. To someone not of the neo-conservative persuasion, it looks like a poor country saddled with a hybrid government--part Marxist, part nationalist, part radical Catholic--in which political intellectuals (rather like Elliott Abrams) hold the important jobs and get to try out their ideologies on the populace. From this perspective, Nicaragua does not look like a threat to the United States or even to its own neighbors, protected as they are by hemispheric agreements; it looks like a basket case. But when a neo-conservative looks at Nicaragua, he does not see a country that is essentially nonfunctioning (ideology is all well and good, but it takes expertise to get water from Point A to Point B); he sees an abstraction, which he put in words soon after occupying the Latin America desk at State. “I want to be the first guy,” he told a colleague, “to reverse a communist revolution.”

Pursuing this grandiose goal, Abrams lived out the hard ideological persona he had created for himself in print. In a sensitive political context--the President of one party, the Congress of another, and the people either opposed or indifferent to the Contra war or opposed to it--this political intellectual displayed no talent whatsoever for politics. His forte was giving vent to the kind of vituperation usually found only in the pages of small magazines with few readers and fewer paid ads. Laudable by the lights of his neo-conservative coterie, Abrams’ slanging of Congressman X, his open contempt for the mind and patriotism of Senator Y, did not help his cause, to put the case mildly. Nor did his deception of the senators on the Intelligence Committee inquiring about his role in securing aid for the Contras from third countries. (“I wouldn’t trust Elliott Abrams any farther than I could throw Ollie North,” said the committee’s chairman at the time, Republican David Durenberger.)

Abrams’ conduct in that affair may have fit the neo-conservative ideal of the political actor dirtying his hands in the transcendent cause of reversing a communist revolution, but it was shameful by the standards governing high officials, and it will stain his resume forever.

It was all so much clearer and easier back in the days when Abrams was confining his ideological intelligence to dim authors and errant Democrats. But then, ironically, he wrote what turned out to be a prescient epitaph on his own conduct in office:

“George McGovern and his supporters committed what, in a two-party system, are capital crimes: they did not compromise, they took hard ideological positions, they alienated a large portion of their party’s traditional supporters, and they lost--very, very badly.”