Vernon Walters, Colin Powell, Bea Arthur, &c.

February 18, 2002 8:55 a.m.

loved Vernon Walters. He first came into my life when I was a senior in high school. For some reason, the dinky library in my dinky school in the northwest of Michigan had his book, Silent Missions. It is one of the most enthralling diplomatic-intelligence-military memoirs in the literature. It tells the story of a real-life, American James Bond, though a Bond more scholarly, more reflective, and probably more principled than Ian Fleming’s creation.

The book was not only enthralling, but extremely influential, on me. This influence began with the dedication (and I am going from memory): “To the men and women who have died on the invisible battlefield [meaning in the intelligence war] so that the rest of us might live free.” That jarred me. I had been taught that the CIA was essentially a malign entity, bent on wreaking havoc around the world for reprehensible purposes: frustrating the hopes of darker-skinned people, keeping the Communist bloc and the non-Communist bloc from living in harmony, etc.

In his many years of service, Walters was everywhere, had a hand in everything — sort of like a brilliant Forrest Gump, present in every frame. This career began during the war, with Mark Clark. This young man basically went up to the general and said, “I’m a bright young man. You could really use me. You should take me on.” This was a terribly American thing to do: Alexander Hamilton — a bastard child from a small Caribbean island — did it with Gen. Washington during the Revolution. Same deal. In both cases, the general said, “Okay,” and that was that.

From that time, Walters became the indispensable translator for, and aide to, pretty much everybody. He was with Truman on the tarmac when the president fired MacArthur. He was steadily at Eisenhower’s side. He carried out delicate (non-criminal) tasks for Nixon. He was — again — everywhere. From 1972 to 1976, he was deputy director of the CIA. When Carter came in, it seemed that this magnificent career was over.

The book, Silent Missions, was published in 1978, and it contains enough, not only for one lifetime, but for many. Yet its author would go on to be President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large, undertaking a number of extremely difficult assignments, and then ambassador to the United Nations, and then ambassador to Germany, at the time of its reunification. Everything he did, he did sharply. Chief among his virtues were moral clarity, wide and deep knowledge, and spirit. The one-two punch of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Vernon Walters at the U.N. was thrilling, and it will never be equaled. The two of them proved that words can matter. They both constantly sought teaching opportunities — or maybe the opportunities came to them, unbidden — and they made the most of them. I, for one, following on television and in the newspapers, learned.

I first saw Walters in person at Harvard, when he came to give a speech. The introduction of him, by Graham Allison, I believe — head of the Kennedy School of Government — was one of the most interesting and memorable I have heard. He said to the assembled students, “It may interest you to know that Gen. Walters doesn’t have a graduate degree. It may further interest you to know that Gen. Walters doesn’t have a college degree. It may further interest you to know that he doesn’t have a high-school degree. Ladies and gentlemen, Gen. Vernon Walters.”

The talk was terrific, of course, but what was most memorable was his handling of the students’ questions — masterly.

He was one of the great guests on Firing Line. I remember when Buckley asked him once, “Here’s a question you must get bored of answering, and a question I know I get bored of asking: What is the attraction of socialism to political elites in the Third World?” (Again, I’m going from memory.) Walters answered — quickly and confidently, as always — “Socialism allows mediocrities to rise to the top, to run things. A third-rate economics student can become finance minister. A two-bit and unprofessional soldier can become head of the army. A doltish, untalented academic can be an official, important intellectual.” And so on.

I never imagined that I would come to know Walters a little. I would call him for comment on certain matters. Doing a piece on the American neglect of Cuban dissidence and Cuban suffering, I found him at his Florida home. I asked why our media ignored political prisoners down there. “Oh, that’s absolutely normal,” he responded. The media “would go to the death searching out Franco’s or Pinochet’s prisoners. But the attitude towards Castro’s is, ‘They probably deserve to be there anyway.’ Anti-Communist prisoners are of no interest to anybody. A prisoner of a left-wing government is highly suspect, probably a fascist.”

Some months after that, he was a guest star of ours on a National Review cruise. When I introduced him at a forum, I said that, after reading Silent Missions, I wanted to be Vernon Walters — and the best I could manage was to be on the same ship as he. He was extremely kind and generous.

I remember one of the questions I posed to him, at that forum, because it was a question in the air: “What do we owe the dead [meaning, the dead of Sept. 11]?” He said, “That it never happen again,” with all that that entails.

Later, at lunches and on strolls — he in his wheelchair, pushed by his faithful nephew, Peter — I talked with him. Pumped him with a million questions, about history, presidents, kings, prime ministers, spies, nations, events, languages. He spoke freely and fascinatingly. About springing tortured prisoners from various hellholes, including Mengistu’s Ethiopia (he negotiated with Mengistu personally, over five hours). About hearing (via an intercept) Yasser Arafat personally order the murder of an American ambassador, among others: That was Cleo Noel, in Khartoum. About talking back to Castro. He spoke with my wife, who is a food writer, about Swiss fondue, on which he was an authority. I introduced him to a high-school girl on the trip who was studying Russian, and the two had a merry chat in that language (one of Walters’s many).

Look, I was in seventh heaven.

Vernon Walters died last week, in case you didn’t hear. To know him, just a little, toward the end, was one of my lucky breaks in life. He was a great man. That statement used to mean a lot, until we devalued it. But let’s take it in the older sense: He was a great man. If you wanted a hero, you could do worse.

I have one word for President Bush: Veto. Strike down that campaign-finance law, which is an intolerable restriction on our speech. Don’t wait for the courts to do it. You’re president: Be a check and balance yourself. You know this law is wrong — you need not give in to it, and you can explain your position to the public.

As we used to say on the fields of play, Come on, baby: Show some sac.

There’s a cleric in Yemen named Abdel Meguid al-Zindani. He’s a bin Ladenite, which says about all that needs to be said. He is also wildly popular, his tapes circulated all over the country. (This is the country, bear in mind, in which al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole — to no response from our government.) According to the New York Times account, Zindani said, in a sermon recorded last month, “Who is the terrorist, and what is terrorism? I think it applies to anyone who is against Western or American policy.”

You know? I agree. Well defined, Abdel Meguid al-Zindani. Gold star for you.

I’d like to quote from a perfectly typical column by a perfectly typical columnist. A name and other details are of no importance: This could be virtually anyone, anywhere:

The violence has reached the point that Israel now is talking seriously of reoccupying swaths of the West Bank and Gaza Strip; that would set back not just peacemaking in general but American diplomacy in particular, and by roughly a decade.

There is what you might call the Oslo mentality — and the Oslo mentality can mean death, particularly for Israeli citizens. Think: Why would Israel reoccupy those areas? To frustrate diplomacy? To anger Washington? Could it possibly be to prevent more Israelis from being killed, wantonly?

Think further: Why did Israel occupy the territories in the first place, back in ’67? Because it loves occupation? Because it wanted to expand — needed a little Lebensraum, huh? (Journalists love to use Nazi terms when writing of Israel. Anthony Lewis spoke of the Israeli desire to “exterminate Palestinian nationalism.” Gee, wonder how those words came to him.)

Let’s return for a moment to the ABCs: Modern Israel has been forced to be a warrior nation, a military nation. Before ’67, Israel was loved by all the respectable people, admired as “the Athens of the Middle East.” What a sweet little democracy! But then, as George Will once wrote, Sparta stood up. And it did so out of necessity. The Jews of Israel would love to be free to pursue letters, music, art, scholarship, commerce, and all the other things that Jews have traditionally pursued. But that nasty imperative of survival won’t let them.

People are always lecturing Israel as though it didn’t know its own situation. Even the great and discerning Margaret Thatcher went there to admonish the people that it wasn’t in their “interest” to be an “occupying power.” You don’t say, lady? Why didn’t we think of that! Will you next go to Houston to inform Houstonians that it is hot and humid in their city?

For Israelis — almost all of them now, except for the foreign minister — the end of policy is not “the peace process” or diplomacy but: not to die. To survive. For right now, certainly, survival is enough.

And any time Israel’s enemies want peace, they can have it. All they have to do is permit Israel to live — which, obviously, is way, way too much for them.

In his MTV interview — which had several sterling moments — Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of “the white power structure.” I have heard about the white power structure all my life. Have you ever been invited into it? Did someone teach you a secret handshake or something?

“White power structure” is a lazy, loaded locution that serious people should avoid.

A little item in the sports pages popped out at me. It concerned the longtime basketball coach at West Virginia University. The coach, one Gale Catlett, just up and quit. He quit “for cause,” so to speak. After a particularly dismaying game — the game that broke the camel’s back — he said, “It is obvious that our players did not play with any understanding of basketball. It is obvious that our players did not play with spirit and they did not care what shirt they wore. It is perplexing to me. There is no pride.”

What an amazing statement, and story, in a thousand different ways.

A quick word about the Olympic pairs-skating controversy: Where is the Russian pair (whining, I know, about having to share, but I’m talking about something else)? Where is their conscience and pride? Why don’t they step forward and say, “No: We don’t want this kind of gold medal. There was obviously a fix — this is plain to the entire skating world. We didn’t skate as strong a routine as the Canadian pair. The tapes make that clear. We are fiercely competitive, and we came for the gold, but we don’t want these medals under these circumstances.”

This would be one of the great sportsmanlike moments of all time, and the two would be heroes worldwide.

Finally, I’d like to say that I saw Bea Arthur’s one-woman show on Broadway. The missus was doing a piece concerning it, so we went. Bea Arthur is obviously a talented woman: She has an arresting (speaking) voice, a superb sense of comedic timing, and virtually a patent on the slow burn. She talks and shouts her way through songs, sometimes effectively. She’s a big and outspoken left-liberal, and I couldn’t care less.

And yet: She engaged in endless posing, spouted endless platitudes. She really thinks she’s something special. She’ll die in her own arms.

She says all the dirty words, and tell many dirty jokes — reveling. She and Norman Lear blazed trails together. How daring they were! She adored Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, those wretched Stalinists, who cheered mass murder. She was always butting up against the censor — “Oh, the mail we got!” She hails abortion (though she doesn’t call it that: The famously blunt Bea Arthur says “a woman’s right to choose,” like everyone else). She bellows for gay marriage — Vermont’s the best state in the Union! We’ve come a long way, baby — in no small part because of Bea Arthur, is the unspoken feeling — but “there is still fear, and hatred, and ignorance” (in other words, there’s still conservatism).

Fine, fine. I think ideological posturing is a bit of a drag in a Broadway show, but to each his own. The annoying thing, however, is that she thinks she’s some kind of hero: a brave, risk-taking, taboo-breaking, far-sighted, sort of martyrish, unique woman.

But she’s pretty much like everyone else, at least in her world. And she’s won! The culture has gone her way — Maude’s way, Norman Lear’s way — entirely.

My special problem is that I had just come from interviewing Maritza Lugo, the great Cuban oppositionist and political prisoner who has recently emigrated to the United States. She has had the hell beaten out of her by a brutal Communist regime (with all of its U.S. entertainment-world supporters) for many years. She has endured punishment cells, rats, beatings, endless harassment. Her husband, a fellow democrat and oppositionist, is still in prison. She had to flee to save her daughters. Her family has been fractured. She has little hope of a normal life. She’s in exile. She has put herself on the line for conscience, Christianity, and freedom — and for others.

She is an inarguably great woman, and a heroic one. It seems too obvious to say that she has come through real privations. Her concerns happen to be bigger than whether you could say “son-of-a-bitch” on television in 1975, or whatever.

I know: It’s not Bea Arthur’s fault that I happened to catch her act only a few hours after spending time with an extraordinary woman, in a shattering interview. But that act nauseated me.