Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

He thinks he could have won in 1972 with a running mate called ‘the most trusted man in America’—Walter Cronkite.

By George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:01 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

The former bomber pilot’s spry walk belies his 85 years, he dresses like a boulevardier—gray slacks, blue blazer, shirt with bright-red stripes and white collar—and tucks into a robust breakfast. Long ago, he began shaping the Democrats’ presidential nomination process into the one that has his party’s two contenders locked in a long march to Pennsylvania’s April primary. He has seen important aspects of American politics move in his direction in the 36 years since he lost 49 states to Richard Nixon.

The belittling of George McGovern, especially by Democrats, only waned as memory of him faded after he lost his bid for a fourth Senate term in the 1980 Reagan landslide. But his story is fascinating, and pertinent to current events.

This minister’s son was raised on South Dakota’s parched prairies during the Depression. He remembers hiking home to the town of Mitchell by following the railroad tracks in a blinding dust storm. He was only the second major-party nominee with a Ph.D. (Woodrow Wilson was the first), which he earned at Northwestern University under Arthur Link, Wilson’s foremost biographer.

Like Wilson, a minister’s son, McGovern was a political moralist. He also was a tenacious politician, who, inspired by the untenacious Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign the year before, went to work for the South Dakota Democratic Party in 1953, when it held only two of 110 seats in the state legislature. Just four years later McGovern was in Congress, where his first roll-call vote was in opposition to granting President Eisenhower broad authority for military intervention in the Middle East.

In tumultuous 1968, with the Tet Offensive and two assassinations (of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy) in five months, two insurgent candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, sought the Democratic nomination. It was won by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who competed in no primaries. More than one third of the delegates to the riotous convention in Chicago had been selected in 1967, months before President Lyndon Johnson decided to retire.

McGovern was named chairman of a commission to reform the nomination process, which put the party on a path to the proliferation of caucuses and primaries allocating delegates proportionally rather than winner-take-all—the long, winding path Obama and Clinton are on. In 1972, McGovern became the first winner under the democratized process. Then he was buried by the demos, Nixon vs. McGovern.

Nixon was, McGovern notes, running nationally for the fifth time (only FDR had done that) and was at his pre-Watergate apogee, fresh from the opening to China and a strategic-arms agreement with Moscow. McGovern was bitterly opposed all the way to the Miami convention by the Democratic constituencies he was displacing. He says Barry Goldwater had warned him, “Don’t get fatigued,” but he reached Miami exhausted, lost control of the convention (he delivered his acceptance speech at 2:30 a.m.) and disastrously selected a running mate, Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton, who did not disclose previous psychiatric problems and was forced off the ticket.

Still, McGovern thinks he could have won with a running mate then called “the most trusted man in America”—Walter Cronkite. Before choosing Eagleton, McGovern considered asking Cronkite, who recently indicated he would have accepted.

Bruce Miroff, a political scientist and admirer of McGovern, argues in his new book, “The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party,” that although McGovern’s domestic proposals featured redistributions of wealth, this was Ivy League, not prairie, populism. Branded the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion” (the Democrats’ platform, adopted six months before the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade legislated a liberal abortion policy, did not mention abortion), McGovern became the first candidate since the New Deal to lose the Catholic and labor union vote. So 1972, more than 1968, was the hinge of the party’s history. In 1972, Miroff writes, “college-educated issue activists” supplanted the “labor/urban machine coalition.”

George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, had dropped out of high school at age 14. Speaking about McGovern’s 1972 convention, where 39 percent of the delegates had advanced degrees, he said: “We heard from people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odor of Johns about them.” The Reagan Democrats of 1980 were incubated eight years earlier.

McGovern won only 14 percent of Southern white Protestants. This, Miroff notes, made Democrats susceptible four years later to the appeal of a pious Southerner. Thus did a disaster compound itself.

In September 1963, McGovern became the only senator who opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration. He came by his horror of war honorably in 35 B-24 missions over Germany, where half the B-24 crews did not survive—they suffered a higher rate of fatalities than did Marines storming Pacific islands. McGovern was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak-leaf clusters. In his 70s he lost a 45-year-old daughter to alcoholism. Losing a presidential election, he says softly, “was not the saddest thing in my life.” Time confers a comforting perspective, giving consolations to old age, which needs them.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112767

Agency spent millions setting up agents with non-official cover

Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON – The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as part of a constellation of “black stations” for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.

The closures were a blow to two of the CIA’s most pressing priorities after Sept. 11 – expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.

The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as “non-official cover,” meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concern that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don’t ordinarily come into contact with al-Qaida or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover did not work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, “They were built on the theory of the ‘Field of Dreams’: Build them, and the targets will come.”

Officials said the experience reflects an ongoing struggle at the CIA to adapt to a new environment in espionage. The agency has sought to regroup by designing covers that would provide pretexts for spies to get close to radical Muslim groups, nuclear equipment manufacturers and other high-priority targets.

But current and former officials said progress has been painfully slow, and that the agency’s efforts to alter its use of personal and corporate disguises have yet to produce a significant penetration of a terrorist or weapons proliferation network.

“I don’t believe the intelligence community has made the fundamental shift in how it operates to adapt to the different targets that are out there,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. The cover arrangements most commonly employed by the CIA “don’t get you near radical Islam,” Hoekstra said, adding that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, “We don’t have nearly the kind of penetrations I would have expected against hard targets.”

Whatever their cover, the CIA’s spies are unlikely to single-handedly penetrate terrorist or proliferation groups, officials said. Instead, the agency stalks informants around the edges of such quarry – moderate Muslims troubled by the radical message at their mosques, mercenary shipping companies that might accept illicit nuclear components as cargo; chemists whose colleagues have suspicious contacts with extremist groups.

Agency officials declined to respond to questions about the front companies. “Cover is designed to protect the officers and operations that protect America,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “The CIA does not, for that very compelling reason, publicly discuss cover in detail.”

But senior CIA officials publicly have acknowledged that the agency has devoted considerable energy to creating new ways for its case officers – the CIA’s term for its overseas spies – to operate under false identities.

The vast majority of the CIA’s spies traditionally have operated under what is known as official cover, meaning they pose as U.S. diplomats or employees of another government agency.

The approach has advantages, including diplomatic immunity, which means that an operative under official cover might be kicked out of a country if he is caught spying, but won’t be imprisoned or executed.

Official cover is also cheaper and easier. Front companies can take a year or more to set up. They require renting office space, having staff to answer phones and paying for cars and other props. They also involve creating fictitious client lists and resumes that can withstand sustained scrutiny.

One of the CIA’s commercial cover platforms was exposed in 2003 when undercover officer Valerie Plame was outed in a newspaper column. Public records quickly led to the unraveling of the company that served as her cover during overseas trips, a fictitious CIA firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts are not useful against a new breed of adversaries. “Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren’t going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit,” said one government official familiar with the CIA’s cover operations.

After the terrorist strikes, the Bush administration ordered the agency to expand its overseas operation by 50 percent. The agency came under pressure from Congress to alter its approach and got a major boost in funding to expand the non-official cover program.