LOS ANGELES TIMES / INTERVIEW : Ronald Dellums : After Years of Seeking Military Cuts, Now It’s the Official House Mandate

When he was first elected to Congress 23 years ago, Ronald V. Dellums was charged by his constituents in Berkeley and Oakland to speak out against the Vietnam War, to attempt to cut the military budget and to push a strong civil-rights agenda. He did not fail them. Dellums, a 57-year-old former Marine, has been a strong but often lonely voice cautioning against foreign military adventure and the ultimate costs of dependency on ever larger defense budgets.

Now, in one of those sweet ironies of history, he is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, charged with presiding over the dismantling of the military-industrial economy he warned against.

Few on the powerful committee would agree with all of Dellums’ programs for America, but when seniority presented him as the logical candidate for the chair, there was nothing but praise from his colleagues of all political persuasions. “He always listens and lets you know where he stands. He is not a back-stabber,” says Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-San Diego), who served on a subcommittee that Dellums chaired. And conservative Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) praised him as “gentlemanly and fair.”

It is not that Dellums has mellowed on policy matters, and he and Dornan have been on opposite sides of virtually every military-related issue. But he has proved highly effective at raising his issues within the restraints of congressional manners. Dellums is as amazed by this turn of events as anyone. “When I first started down this road, if someone had told me that I would be here 23 years later,” he said during a recent conversation, “I would have said, ‘you’re crazy.’ Eventually, I learned patience, I’ve demonstrated that I have endurance and here’s my opportunity to make a difference.”

What he wants to make a difference on is the thorny issue of converting the military economy to peacetime purposes. Last week, the Speaker of the House appointed Dellums as the co-chair of the economic conversion task force.

Dellums feels strongly that the media has trivialized his views and those of other black members of Congress. As he told a meeting of newspaper editors recently, “You don’t understand the pain of being a black elected official, carrying progressive ideas, when people in the media could render you invisible with a flick of a pen. What’s welled up inside me is 20 years of pain, and if you ask any Black Caucus member, they feel exactly the same way.”

Question: How much of a mind bend is it to suddenly assume one of the most powerful posts in Congress?

Answer: That power stuff is what you guys write about in the paper, but for those who have to do it, it’s hard work. Anybody that goes on an ego trip in this job has got to be insane. I get up every day really humbled by the fact that there is so much that I don’t know. I enjoy the challenge of it. I read two or three hours every night, I’ve got a good staff.

Q: But you have been described by the media as a radical in the context of Congress.

A: The ideas that I walked in here with, 22 years ago, were ideas that were born in the streets in the peace and civil-rights movements. The reason that people protest is because they feel their point of view is not being effectively expressed. The deal was that I take these ideas inside the system, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. When the media wanted to make me the Afro-top, bell-bottomed, radical dude, I had to live with that image all this time.

Q: What did the media miss?

A: I’ve been offering an alternative military budget with plans for conversion to peacetime for 12 years. But when the Black Caucus would call a press conference on that, not one member of the established press would dignify it by showing up.

Robert Scheer is a contributing editor to The Times.

Q: You have military bases in your district, as is the case throughout California, and they represent the most serious job-training program for disadvantaged youth. What will come in its place?

A: The military budget is not a jobs bill. The military budget ought to represent our definition of national security based on a rational assessment of threats and what we perceive to be our appropriate role in the world. Seventy percent of that budget--$200 billion--was directed to fighting a protracted war in Europe with the Warsaw Pact, a threat that no longer exists. But as you start coming down, the impact is a human impact, because there are people in communities adversely affected and economically dislocated, and that’s real.

Q: How do you resolve that dilemma?

A: We must develop a structural conversion effort to address as much of that misery as possible and in the long term. I can understand the pressure on the military budget to be a jobs bill because, absent the reality of economic conversion generating real employment and real opportunities for people and real alternative uses for these bases, then economic conversion is just a throwaway line. It has to be a reality. What I’ve proposed to the Administration is to fashion a solution to the pain.

Q: Is conversion feasible? Will this be anything more than rhetoric?

A: There are some brilliant people out there who have got some thoughts; but, for the most part, we don’t have one iota of an idea of how to really convert. We have no idea how you go from B-2 bombers to mass-transit systems or how you go from a community built around a military facility to a community built around enhancing the quality of life in a civilian environment. We talk about it, but how to do it, without hurting a lot of people? We don’t have a clue.

Q: Any ideas?

A: In L.A., people went through the roof when the City Council gave the Japanese company the contract to build transit cars. Here we are in California--with incredible technology, aerospace industry--and we couldn’t find a place to build efficient transit cars. And these guys are building planes that will travel several thousand miles an hour. The question is: How do you make that transfer? I think that there is a government role in that.

How do you bring the troops back from overseas? We ought to have a progressive GI Bill, and we ought to have housing allowances for them.

Q: Specific examples of what can be done?

A: Like in the Bay Area, if we’re going to move from Alameda Naval Air, or Oakland Naval Supply, does this mean that we can now take this land and make the Oakland Port the largest port in the world, being able to compete with other major ports? What about the long list of families who are trying to get into public housing, when there’s all this military housing, built to a higher standard than public housing?

Q: Where do you differ with President Clinton on these issues?

A: What I’m saying to the Administration is: Let’s figure out a way to expeditiously transfer land. The community doesn’t want all that filthy contamination left behind for the next 10 or 15 years, a big pink elephant sitting in the middle of the community, too contaminated to use. So if you’re committed to economic conversion, then show the community that you can clean up this stuff quickly and rapidly transfer the property over to the community so that they can get on with their economic lives. And train local people in this growth industry of environmental cleanup.

Why not use the dollars of the federal government, while we clean up military bases, to develop an environmental cleanup corps? Then the corps could be used to maintain the integrity of our environment across a whole range of pollution problems--city pollution, sewage disposal, etc.

Q: How come there has been so much attention on the Senate side and not on your committee on the issue of gays in the military?

A: The first press conference I had as chair of Armed Services, the first question was, “What’s your position on the President lifting the ban on gays?” And I said, “Unequivocal total support.” I said, “This is a tempest in a teapot.” America needs to get beyond its ignorance, its fear, its bigotry and its oppression and get on with it as a mature society.

If you look at the leadership of the Armed Services committees, on either side of the House, I’m the only guy standing there unequivocally in support of lifting the ban. But if you read the paper, I’m not even there.

Q: Have you talked to Sen. Nunn about the hearings you have scheduled for your committee on this issue?

A: Yes. We talked about it and I told him I wasn’t interested in being in competition. I told him we have different politics--at the end of the day we are going to be in different places--but, institutionally, we have a responsibility to handle this issue with as much dignity and integrity as possible.

Q: When will you hold hearings?

A: Probably in May. This is a very serious issue. But I am very clear about where I am on it; I don’t know where the committee is going to come down, I don’t know where the Congress is going to come down. But at the end of the day, apart from all the discussion about military morale or whatever, it is a fundamental civil-rights issue. And as a black man, I approach that as a matter of principle.

The parallels of arguments about black people just leap out at you in a very powerful and profound way. This is not an issue of whether there are going to be gays in the military; there are gays in the military and have always been gays in the military. The question is whether people are dealt with with dignity and respect and their rights as human beings are preserved.

When you think about a young person, man or woman, gay or straight, and they say, “I swear to defend the United States,” what they are saying is that, “I am willing to die for my country.” That is an incredible thing for a young person to step forward and say, “I am willing to put my life on the line to defend the interests of my country and go wherever you send me for x amount of years, even in harms way.” And then we’re going to turn around and say, “But if you’re gay, you can’t do it?” That’s bizarre. Our society has got to get way beyond all that.

Q: When your colleagues on the committee from both parties elected you chairman, they were quoted as giving you high marks for being fair, a good listener and studious. That surprised some in the media who portray you as wilder.

A: The press really messed me around for so many years with that Berserkley/Berkeley caricature and other bull, that it really turned me off. So I said, “Forget the press, I’m going to just do my job.” Recently, they’ve been after me to speak on this program and to attend that one, and wondering why I’m not making myself available. I said, “Listen folks, you guys attacked me. When I first walked in here as a serious human being, you tried to make me a caricature. Then, when some of you realized that I wasn’t your noble savage, you walked away, and I couldn’t buy a press person to help me tell my story.”

Now, suddenly, you guys want to rediscover me, now that I’ve become chair of the Armed Services Committee, so they ran out to try and find controversy. They found that even right-wing members say, “I don’t agree with him, but he’s a competent guy and he’s a stand-up person.” I told the press that I didn’t get here playing the media game. I got here continuing to press my struggle and keeping my commitment to my people by doing my job.

If you want to know what makes Ron Dellums tick, then come inside and deal with me on the issues, because I don’t want to deal with you on my personality. I’ve got my warts, kinks, strengths and weaknesses like anyone else. I didn’t come here to become a controversial personality, I came here to confront these people with controversial ideas.