PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : The Presidency, by Any Means

Evidence that the chairman of the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign, William J. Casey, a former member of the wartime intelligence service and later CIA director, met with leading Iranians to foreclose the release of American hostages before the election to ensure President Jimmy Carter’s defeat, fits into a disturbing modern historical pattern.

That Casey was so involved is the startling conclusion by both PBS in its documentary “The Election Held Hostage” and in the New York Times by Gary Sick, my former colleague in the Carter White House and a person of unimpeachable integrity.

As the country is poised to embark on the 1992 presidential campaign season, this alleged incident and its recent progeny underscore the lengths to which campaigns will go to secure the prize of the presidency and give cause for the American people to question the integrity of their most important election.

American political campaigns have always been rough-and-tumble affairs in which there is no room for the fainthearted and few rules of combat. Because of our weak political party structure, which necessitates a high degree of individual entrepreneurialism, and the difficulty of projecting a meaningful political message over a huge continent to an electorate generally uninterested in issues, American political campaigns have historically relied heavily on negative caricatures of opponents.

As long ago as the campaign of 1800, Alexander Hamilton wrote that John Adams had “great and intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate,” while Federalists charged that Thomas Jefferson had behaved in a cowardly fashion as Virginia governor during the Revolution and that he was a “mean spirited, low lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw . . . raised wholly on hoe-cake made of coarse-ground Southern corn, bacon and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bull frog.”

The presidential campaign of 1884 between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland was one of vilest ever waged. Democrats accused Blaine of public corruption while Republicans attacked Cleveland of an illicit affair with the famous ditty, “Ma! Ma! Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!”

More recently, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 television ad of a young girl interrupted in picking flowers by a nuclear explosion, implying that Republican Barry Goldwater would be an irresponsible trustee of the nuclear button, and the 1988 Bush campaign ad on Willie Horton, implying that Michael Dukakis would be soft on crime, are recent examples of the same genre of political exaggeration to make a point.

While such negative attacks are hardly admirable, each was an open charge, rebuttable by the accused candidate and ultimately subject to the court of public opinion. The Johnson ad was pulled quickly because of the effective attack on it by the Goldwater campaign, while the Bush ad had an indelible impact on the electorate only because Dukakis never deigned to demonstrate its untruth until it was too late.

But the contention that Casey sabotaged an early hostage release during the 1980 election fits into a recent pattern of far more insidious presidential campaign excesses, in which laws may be violated and voters are deprived of information on which to make an informed judgment before the election. Each of these instances had a major impact on the presidential election and on the course of American history.

In the 1968 presidential campaign I served as research director for the presidential campaign of Hubert H. Humphrey. There is convincing evidence that the Nixon campaign at a critical stage in the election, following a bombing halt in the Vietnam War that had led to a surge in Humphrey’s support, had Anna Chennault contact South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu. She persuaded him not to participate in Paris peace talks, because he would get a better deal from a Nixon presidency.

While President Johnson learned of this perfidy before the election, he chose never to disclose it. We watched with unknowning dismay as Humphrey’s rising popularity aborted in the concluding days of the campaign when South Vietnam mysteriously and unexpectedly announced its refusal to join the peace talks, despite the entreaties of the President who had committed hundreds of thousands of American troops to that country’s survival. This 1968 episode makes it clear that Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” reelection campaign directed against Edmund Muskie and the subsequent Watergate theft and coverup in 1972 were not aberrations but were part of a clear pattern of Nixon campaign tactics.

The 1980 Iran hostage episode, if true, bears a striking resemblance to the Anna Chennault caper. In each case, there would be a clear interference with the conduct of American diplomacy.

The 1980 Reagan campaign, chaired by Casey, admitted after the election that it had come into the unauthorized possession--whether by theft, a mole in the Carter campaign or a disaffected Carter campaign worker--of the briefing book used to prepare Carter for the penultimate event of the 1980 campaign, the presidential debate with Reagan.

Perhaps the crucial point in the debate occurred when Reagan deftly responded to the President’s charges of his opposition to Medicare by saying, “There you go again.” This was hardly spontaneous, we can now surmise, because the debate book gave him the Carter script to be used in attacking his record. Here there were possible violations of the law in purloining documents. But far more important, nothing came to light in time for the public to form its own judgments of this conduct.

Thus, the 1980 Iran hostage allegations fit into a Casey-directed campaign that had already lowered its standards. It is easy to forget, in Reagan’s landslide victory, that polls showed the election a tossup the weekend before the election, when a hostage deal again seemed possible. We felt helpless as the hostage release and reelection evaded us.

American and world history would certainly have been vastly different if Humphrey and Carter had been elected. The sad message is that the campaigns employing these tactics--far more sordid than mere public attacks on an opponent--got away with it, and may continue to do so in the future. Election results cannot be changed retroactively. The only small satisfaction comes from hoping that the truth will ultimately come out and that it will effect history’s judgment of those who have befouled our political system. In the case of the 1980 Iranian hostage matter, the least that can be done is for Congress, and indeed the Bush Administration, to jointly appoint a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission to get to the truth of the matter.