Reagan Administration’s Elliott Abrams: A Lightning Rod for Wrath

Elliott Abrams is Ronald Reagan’s point man in the one area where the President’s vaunted good luck seems to have deserted him.

On no issue have Reagan’s policies come under more sustained assault than in Central America--Abrams’ turf--but Abrams’ campaigns against cocaine smugglers and what he considers Cuban-style communism there haven’t gone very far.

In the process, he has become a lightning rod for policy opponents’ wrath, and he has often found himself the target of corrosive taunts on Capitol Hill and in the bureaucracy as well.

Efforts Misfired

Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, looks with pride on the democratic gains made through much of the hemisphere, but his efforts to dislodge two determined adversaries--Panama’s Gen. Manuel A. Noriega and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government--seem to have misfired.

The policies Abrams has pursued are no less controversial than his style. Although he is only 40, few have seen more intellectual combat than he has.

Few neutrals emerge when Abrams is the subject of conversation. A sampling of opinions: He’s arrogant. He’s brilliant. He’s untrustworthy. He’s courageous. He’s unscrupulous. He’s principled.

“I don’t like the man,” says former Ambassador Frank McNeil, using a stronger noun.

“I wish him a long life,” says Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill).

Abrams has never been accused of obsequiousness in dealing with people who disagree with him.

“This is a political battlefield,” he says. “The opposition fights with every weapon available and we need to fight equally hard.”

Glower Disappears

Off duty, the Abrams glower so familiar to opponents disappears, as does the mantle of the no-apologies crusader.

Dawn finds him toasting frozen waffles for his three small children (on weekends he makes French toast). Late at night, he can be found curled up with a novel. But, during working hours, it’s the combat zone.

The combat zone was livelier than usual during the Iran-Contra hearings last year. It developed that Abrams had earlier misled Congressional committees about fund solicitations for the Contras and U.S. involvement in an ill-fated resupply flight for the Nicaraguan rebels.

From the Democratic camp came predictable cries for Abrams’ resignation. He didn’t oblige.

Some blame him for the Administration’s more recent policy setbacks, accusing him of flawed tactics and an abrasive style that alienates potential allies. His supporters fault Congress as balky and shortsighted, “irresolute” friends in Latin America, hostile media, bureaucratic infighting and the intractable nature of the problems he inherited.

Worked for 2 Democrats

Abrams is a “neo-conservative.” He worked for two Democratic senators--Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and the late Henry Jackson of Washington state--and, in the 1980 campaign, for the election of Ronald Reagan. He is a native of New York City and a product of Harvard.

Abrams’ wife, Rachel, is the daughter of Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a champion of conservative causes.

After defecting to the Republican Party, he joined the Administration in 1981, becoming, at age 33, the youngest person ever with the rank of assistant secretary of state. He has had that title as head of three bureaus--international organizations, human rights and, since 1985, Latin America.

American aid to the anti-Sandinista cause has been an article of faith with Abrams. When Congress last February rejected further military shipments to the Contras, Abrams thought it would undermine them in negotiations with their foes--perhaps fatally.

The next blow came in May, with the collapse of Abrams’ negotiating efforts to induce Noriega’s departure. It was especially painful since Abrams had seen there a chance to further democracy in the hemisphere while ridding Panama of a leader who was under indictment in the United States on drug-dealing charges.

Noriega Still in Charge

According to Abrams’ script, American diplomatic and economic pressure, coupled with discontent among the Panamanian people, would be enough to topple Noriega. It didn’t happen. Panama is left with a wounded economy and Noriega firmly in charge.

“Abrams misread Noriega very badly,” says McNeil, former ambassador to Costa Rica and one of his more persistent critics. Abrams’ approach regarded Panamanians as “little brown brothers” to be pushed around with a little muscle-flexing, he says--”incredible ineptitude.”

Abrams’ backers contend that his hand was weakened by a campaign of leaks from the Justice Department and the Pentagon to undercut his grand design. McNeil’s suggestion that Noriega’s abdication could best be achieved by a Latin American-led negotiating team is dismissed as “balderdash” by Hyde, one of Abrams’ staunchest supporters.

Abrams assumed his duties three years ago, determined to try to overcome what he saw as a decline in American political will and leverage in Central America. Like Reagan, he was convinced that the Nicaraguan government, left unchecked, would spread its revolution and ultimately present national security dangers to the United States.

In pursuing his objectives, Abrams was never tongue-tied in responding to his critics. One congressman’s suggestion that the Administration was unconcerned over the murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador he called “not only false, but I would say malicious and bordering on the vicious.”

‘Blame America’

He upbraided another: “Blame America. Blame America. Never blame the Communists.”

Talking with a reporter in his sixth-floor State Department office, Abrams insists that he doesn’t seek confrontation for its own sake.

But, he says, “I have never understood that my function here was to take the President’s views and water them down sufficiently so that they’d be more popular in Congress.”

He’d be delighted to solicit bipartisanship, he says, but the Democratic Party leadership had decided, “before I got here,” that this was impossible on Central America.

It’s not just the Democrats, though. He’s critical of colleagues in the Administration who, he claims, fail to toe the line in support of Reagan’s policies but tend to accommodate the President’s ideological opponents because they have a personal agenda stretching beyond the President’s tenure: Lucrative jobs in private business after their government service ends.

Not Why People Worked

“I don’t think that is why tens of thousands of people worked their fingers to the bone getting Ronald Reagan elected, so that guys like me could come to Washington and meet lots of people and get a good law firm job,” he says.

“We’re supposed to pursue policies and if there are people in the press or in Congress or in so-called human rights groups who don’t like it, too bad.”

The people who don’t like Abrams almost succeeded in dislodging him from his office.

“They had a good shot in June ‘87,” Abrams says. “They almost got me. They’ve only had one shot since then, in April when everybody was blaming me for Panama.”

June ’87 refers to his testimony before the committees investigating the Iran-Contra affair. In October 1986, Abrams had denied U.S. government involvement in a Contra resupply flight that was shot down over Nicaragua, leading to the capture of an American soldier of fortune.

Not Informed, He Said

Abrams said later he had not been informed that the flight was part of the Contra aid network created by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the former National Security Council aide.

In June 1987, he testified before the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra affair and called his misstatements “completely honest and completely wrong.”

In November, 1986, Abrams told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the United States had not asked third countries for money for the Contras. In fact, as the June hearings brought out, Abrams himself solicited a $10-million contribution from Brunei, a tiny, oil-rich sultanate in Southeast Asia.

He apologized to the committee, explaining that he had promised Brunei confidentiality, and he admitted that his handling of the matter had been foolish.

One Democratic representative who is unmollified is George Crockett of Detroit, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs. He won’t allow Abrams to testify without swearing him in first, “so we can at least go through the motions of trying to believe what he’s testifying to.”

‘Willing to Lie’

Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. diplomatic mission to Cuba, calls Abrams a man “willing to lie and misrepresent the facts about anything.”

Robert Kagan, a former deputy to Abrams, puts such attacks down to political and ideological differences. “The liberal intelligentsia hates Elliott Abrams because he is the most articulate spokesman for Administration policy,” he says. “He is a person of unique personal strength and strength of conviction.”

Nevertheless there are some people at the White House, too, who would like to see him replaced, Abrams believes. But enjoying the full support of Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, he says he will stay on board until the President’s term is up.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.