The Week

■ Tsongas, Wilder, Harkin—phooey. The Democrats should nominate Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, whose surname compresses their entire program into a single syllable.

■ Robert Gates’s nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence faces two challenges. The first is the ever-lengthening Iran-Contra investigation. What interests the conspiracy buffs is no longer who did what, but who knew about it. Of course, the notion that the entire CIA, including Gates, was clued into the covert Contra supply operation undermines the conspiracy theorists’ image of Oliver North and/or Bill Casey as megalomaniac al cowboys. But who ever let contradictions get in the way of a little fun? The more serious challenge concerns Gates’s ability to interpret unfolding events in the Soviet Union. Gates, who is a Soviet specialist, warned that Gorbachev was not the Jeffersonian that his Western adulators made him out to be, but a Communist dedicated to salvaging his system—an assessment amply confirmed by Gorbachev’s behavior before and immediately after the coup. But since so many of Gates’s tormentors made the wrong assessment, being right might be a disadvantage.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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■ Tsongas, Wilder, Harkin—phooey. The Democrats should nominate Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, whose surname compresses their entire program into a single syllable.

■ Robert Gates’s nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence faces two challenges. The first is the ever-lengthening Iran-Contra investigation. What interests the conspiracy buffs is no longer who did what, but who knew about it. Of course, the notion that the entire CIA, including Gates, was clued into the covert Contra supply operation undermines the conspiracy theorists’ image of Oliver North and/or Bill Casey as megalomaniac al cowboys. But who ever let contradictions get in the way of a little fun? The more serious challenge concerns Gates’s ability to interpret unfolding events in the Soviet Union. Gates, who is a Soviet specialist, warned that Gorbachev was not the Jeffersonian that his Western adulators made him out to be, but a Communist dedicated to salvaging his system—an assessment amply confirmed by Gorbachev’s behavior before and immediately after the coup. But since so many of Gates’s tormentors made the wrong assessment, being right might be a disadvantage.