Reed Irvine - Editor
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After Dr. Ernest W. Lefever asked that his nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs be withdrawn, he was afforded an opportunity to tell the public what had happened on ABC's "Nightline" on June 5. Lefever told Ted Koppel: "I was saddened that so many good and thoughtful people were taken in by a barrage of misinformation, a barrage of innuendo and outright falsehood put out by people who have opposed U.S. foreign policy for the last 10 or 15 years."
What was the misinformation? Who was responsible for its dissemination? What role did the media play?
The Washington Post played an important role in the Lefever matter, doing what it has become notorious for: printing statements that were never made and using unidentified sources. Since the editors who were responsible for the "Jimmygate" fiasco are still in place and have won a ringing endorsement from the owners of the paper, it is not surprising that this newspaper continues to practice shoddy journalism.
On May 22. The Post ran a lengthy story that began on the front page under the headline: "State Reviewing Lefever's Role in Policy on Formula Sales." The story was by Scott Armstrong. Who was co-author with Robert Woodward of The Brethren, a book about the Supreme Court. Their book tells a lot about Armstrong and Woodward, their sloppy reporting and their creative use of confidential sources.
Let's digress from Lefever for a moment to note what The Brethren reveals about Armstrong and Woodward. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis reviewed this book for The New York Review of Books on February 7, 1980. Lewis tested the credibility of the authors by investigating a tale they told that reflected badly on Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. They had alleged, on the basis of confidential sources, that Brennan had sought to curry favor with Justice Harry A. Blackmun by voting with Blackmun on a case where his was the deciding vote, even though he thought Blackmun's opinion was wrong. Here is the passage from the book:
"One of Brennan's clerks thought that if Brennan had seen the facts as [Justice) Marshall presented them, he would not have voted the other way. He went to talk to Brennan and. thirty minutes later, returned shaken. Brennan understood that Marshall's position was correct, but he was not going to switch sides now, the clerk said. This was no just a run-of-the-mill case for Blackmun. Blackmun had spent a lot of time on it. Giving the trial record a close reading. He prided himself on his objectivity. If Brennan switched, Blackmun would be personally offended. That would be unfortunate. Because Blackmun had lately seemed more assertive, more independent of the Chief. Brennan felt that if he voted against Blackmun now, it might make it more difficult to reach him in the abortion cases or even the obscenity cases."
Armstrong and Woodward said that the Supreme Court law clerks were "shocked" at Brennan's attitude; as well they might have been, if the story were true. Tony Lewis located the former law clerk who had approached Brennan to see if he would switch his vote on this case. His name is Paul R. Hoeber, Acting Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. Hoeber told Lewis that he had gone to Brennan to see if he would switch his vote at the request of Justice Marshall's law clerks. He told Brennan that the view of the clerks was that Marshall was right. He said Brennan's reply was, "No, I've read the opinions. It's a factual case, and Blackmun is right. As far as the law goes, there is nothing inconsistent with Brady' Hoebet said the conversation took only two or three minutes and that he wasn't "shaken." He told the other clerks what Brennan had said, and that was all that happened.
Hoeber told Lewis that he had checked with the three other men who had clerked for Brennan during that term and that they all agreed that no conversation such as the one described by Armstrong and Woodward had taken place. When Hoeber told that to Bob Woodward, he replied that the book didn't attribute all the information to Hoeber. He said they had other sources. So Hoeber and the three other former Brennan clerks proceeded to try to track down every one of the clerks who were at the Supreme Court that year. They talked to 29 out of the 30. Not one of them supported the Armstrong-Woodward story. None knew anything about the clerks having been "shaken" or 'shocked" by Brennan's attitude. Only one of the clerks had even been asked by Woodward or Armstrong about this matter, and be told them that he had never heard of such a thing. So much for those other sources.
Anthony Lewis also notes that in describing this case, Armstrong and Woodward made two factual errors and failed to put the case in proper perspective. It was a minor case in comparison with several others that the court was deciding in the last hectic days of the term. Hoebor described it as "a pebble in the stream."
Scott Armstrong focused on another "pebble in the stream" in the Lefever case and used it to give him the same treatment that he and Woodward had given to Justice Brennan.
That five-column headline on the front page of The Washington Post on May 22 concerned a charge that Ernest Lefever may have played a role in the U.S. decision to vote against the WHO code governing the marketing of infant formula throughout the world. This was perceived as a possible conflict of interest since Lefever's think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center had received contributions from companies that manufacture the formula.
Lefever and Kirkpatrick both agree that they never had a discussion of this matter. Lefever says that in early January, before Kirkpatrick assumed office and before Lefever was even mentioned as a possible nominee for the State Department post, Kirkpatrick, a long-time friend, had mentioned to him that she recalled that his center had published something on the infant formula controversy. Lefever said they had, and he sent her a copy of their reprint of an article that had been published in Fortune magazine. Giving pebbles five- column front-page headlines is supposed to make them into boulders. To help the process along, Armstrong added: "A well misinformed source at the U.N. had said previously that Lefever discussed the issue with Kirkpatrick on several occasions in the last three months. However, after consulting with Kirkpatrick the source gave Kirkpatrick's version."
With that introduction, Armstrong made the following charges about Lefever and his center's relations with the Nestle Corporation, a large manufacturer of infant formula, based on an interview with Henry Ciocca, former director for corporate responsibility for Nestle. He said:
1. Ciocca had contradicted Lefever's testimony, including Lefever's assertions that Nestle contributions had nothing to do with the center's decision to sponsor a study of the infant formula controversy and distribute an article about it.
2. Ciocca had charged that Lefever had discussed donations for at least three separate projects of direct financial interest to Nestle.
3. Lefever's center had accepted funds from Nestle to reprint and distribute the Fortune article about the controversy, according to Ciocca.
4. Ciocca had told him that Lefever had met with his boss, Douglas Groner, in October 1979, at least a month before Fortune senior editor Herman Nickel had agreed to do the study on the infant formula controversy for the center.
5. That after Herman Nickel had published an article on the infant formula controversy in Fortune magazine, Nestle decided to have the center reprint the article and circulate it rather than doing it themselves because of the company's low credibility, according to Ciocca.
6. That Ciocca had told him that Lefever had asked whether Nestle "could fund specific studies on specific subjects other than Nestlé's position on the infant formula question," and that these were projects in which Nestle had a financial interest.
Henry Ciocca, who is now practicing law in Rye. N.Y., was as shocked and outraged when he read Armstrong's article as Paul Hoeber had been when he read The Brethren. He fired off a letter to Ben Bradlee at The Post the following day. He said that Armstrong had seriously misquoted him. He said a friend who had listened to the conversation had confirmed his own recollection of what he had told Armstrong in a telephone interview. He said, "We are both astonished at Mr. Armstrong's apparent lack of concern for accuracy. It is a pity that Mr. Armstrong had to resort to fiction in his coverage of Dr. Lefever's confirmation hearings." Here is Ciocca's refutation of Armstrong's story.
1. "I did not 'contradict Dr. Lefever's testimony that Nestle contributions had nothing to do with the center's decision to sponsor a study of the infant formula controversy.' I informed Mr. Armstrong that Dr. Lefever's decision to have the center examine that issue predated any discussion with Nestle officials about a contribution to his center and predated any Nestle contribution to his center." (Lefever says the idea for the study came from his wife in January 1979, after statements made at a church meeting about infant feeding formulas had outraged her. He says that he started to gather material on the subject soon after that. The decision to undertake the study antedated his first meeting with Nestle officials in September 1979, when he informed them that the center was going to undertake the study).
2. "I did not tell Mr. Armstrong that Dr. Lefever 'discussed donations with Nestle for at least three separate projects that were of direct financial interest to Nestle.' I never stated it because Dr. Lefever never discussed it. What I told Mr. Armstrong was that I asked Dr. Lefever for his opinion about three possible projects that could help inform and educate the public about the positive activities of multinational corporations, e.g., technology transfer, local employment, improved nutrition. That discussion took place during a brainstorming session in July 1980, long after the center commissioned the formula study and after the publication of the Fortune article. At no time did Dr. Lefever ask for donations for any of those projects. To the contrary, Dr. Lefever advised me that his center could not earmark donations for any particular project.
3. "I did not tell Mr. Armstrong that Douglas Groner was my 'boss' (he wasn't) or that Mr. Groner met with Dr. Lefever 'at least a month before Mr. Nickel agreed to do the project.' I had and have no idea when Mr. Nickel agreed to do the project. What I told Mr. Armstrong was that Mr. Groner had met Dr. Lefever in October or November 1979 and had recommended that the company consider becoming a supporting member of the center. There was no follow-up on Mr. Groner's recommendation until after January 1980. Neither Mr. Groner nor myself had authority to make any corporate contribution to the center.
4. "I specifically did not tell Mr. Armstrong that the company 'decided to have the center circulate the reprint because of the company's low credibility.' I told Mr. Armstrong that any significant distribution of the reprint occurred after I left the company so that I could not comment on it.
5. (From a subsequent letter from Ciocca) "From the manner in which the article was written, I didn't realize until I received your letter that Armstrong attributed the quote: 'He asked if we could fund specific studies on specific subjects other than Nestlé's position..." to me. Now that I know it, I can tell you that it's misquote 5, because I did not say it."
A copy of Mr. Ciocca's letter was received by AIM on May 26. We hand-delivered a copy of it to Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of The Post, the same day when we ascertained that Mr. Bradlee had not shared his copy with her. We also obtained Ciocca's permission to give it to The Washington Inquirer for publication the following day, suspecting that The Post would not rush to print it.
We were right in that suspicion. The letter did not appear in The Post despite repeated calls from us and from Mr. Ciocca until June 5, two weeks after the Armstrong article had run and on the very day the Foreign Relations Committee was going to vote on the Lefever nomination. It was accompanied by a 5- paragraph reply from Scott Armstrong in which he claimed that Mr. Ciocca "does not dispute any of the direct quotations attributed to him in my story." Mr. Armstrong didn't bother to note that every charge that he made based on the interview with Ciocca, except one, was based on indirect, not direct quotes. Ciocca denied making those statements, as well as the one direct quote when he received a letter from The Post, which indicated that it had been attributed to him.
Armstrong's defense was virtually non-existent. For example, he had claimed that Ciocca had contradicted Lefever's claim that Nestle contributions had nothing to do with the center's decision to undertake the infant formula study. When Ciocca denied saying that, Armstrong switched from "decision" to having the project "underway." He produced dates to show that Lefever asked Nestle for a contribution before the project got underway, implying that asking for a contribution is the same thing as getting one and that getting a project underway and deciding to do it are identical.
Armstrong's response to Ciocca's denial that he said Nestle had decided to have Lefever's center circulate the reprints of the Fortune article because the company's credibility was low is revealing. Armstrong said it was irrelevant that Ciocca had left the company by that time. Ciocca had evidently said in some other context that Nestle preferred to use third parties to speak on the infant formula issue because its credibility was low. Armstrong felt free to apply this general statement to the decision to leave the distribution of the Nickel article to the center, attributing it to Ciocca. Ciocca quite naturally resented this phony attribution.
It appears that The Washington Post deliberately delayed running Ciocca's devastating criticism of Armstrong's article until the day of the Foreign Relations Committee vote on the nomination. That way they could run Armstrong's reply without any rebuttal from Ciocca. They told Ciocca they were holding up publication of his letter until he could respond to their reply to him. That was false.
Britt Hume on ABC's "Nightline" on June 5 said of the Lefever case: "Policy disagreements are not ground for refusing to confirm a presidential nominee. It takes a scandal. And Lefever's critics thought they had one involving Lefever's Washington research group." The fact is, there was no scandal, but reporter like Scott Armstrong eagerly went along with those who wanted to defeat Lefever for policy reasons and made a mountain out of a molehill. Not content with this slander, they tried to portray him as a defender of torture, as anti-Israeli, and even a racist.Lefever's opponents used Jacobo Timmerman, who had been imprisoned and allegedly tortured in Argentina, effectively. It was left to Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal to point out that Timmerman himself was not being totally candid. He created the impression that he had been arrested simply because he was Jewish, when in fact he had come under suspicion because David Gravier, who had been the banker for the terrorist Montoneros, had owned a 50% interest in Timmerman's paper. We saw no pick-up in the press of the remarks of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal about Timmerman that were-published in El Pals of Montevideo on April 26, 1981. Wiesenthal said:
"I know that in Argentina there are a lot of Peronist sympathizers and that some of them are also Jews. And I also know that many of these people went to jail, accused of being in favor of terrorism, with nothing to do with whether or not they might have been Jews. One of them is Timmerman, and the people who wanted to help him converted the case into an anti-Semitic persecution. I can understand that since Timmerman is a leftist, he is against any government, against any movement that might be rightist, but in any fight you have to stick to the truth."
But those who don't, as Dr. Ernest Lefever discovered when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted against his nomination by a vote of 13 to 4, frequently do those who stick to the truth in.
The Ad Hoc Committee of the Human Rights Community, which was formed for this purpose, led the fight against Lefever's confirmation. The news media accepted at face value the claims made by this group and failed to inform the public who was behind it and why.
A careful look at the groups which constitute this committee and their record of foreign policy positions, reveals that their opposition to Lefever is based not upon any shortcomings of his but, rather, upon their desire to thwart the will of the voters in the last election and impose upon the country the discredited human rights policies of the past. Here are some of the groups prominent in the coalition:
INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES--One of the founders and present leaders of the IPS is Marcus Raskin. He has, in addition, been a member of the Advisory Committee for the Fifth Estate, perhaps best known as the publisher of Counterspy, the anti- intelligence community publication that printed the names and addresses of several employees of the CIA. Shortly after this publicity Richard Welch, CIA station chief in Athens, Greece, was murdered. Saul Landau, a long-time pro-Castro and pro-Allende propagandist is a prominent IPS fellow.
IPS fellows are enthusiastic about Third World terrorist and revolutionary movements. Rael lean Isaac in an article published in Midstream and reprinted by Ernest Lefever's Ethics and Public Policy Center says that the IPS publications portray the U.S. as evil and our democratic institutions as worthless. She says, "The U.S. is consistently portrayed as the aggressor in U.S. Soviet relations... In the perspective of IPS fello, vs, they are oppressed by a brutal, criminal and senseless empire, the United States of America."
The blueprint for the Carter administration's human rights policy for Latin America came from the IPS, which aims to destabilize anti-communist governments friendly to the U.S. while at the same time normalizing relations with Cuba. Patricia Dertan, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Carter Administration, has recently become an IPS lecturer.
COUNCIL ON HEMISPHERIC AFFAIRS (COHA)-- This group was started in 1976 by Laurence R. Birns, an associate of the Chilean Marxist martyr, Orlando Letelier, who was discovered upon his assassination to be getting $1,000 a month from Cuba. Birns has described COHA's purpose as "to manipulate the sophisticated political and academic communities." He was involved with the North American Congress on Latin America, which was described by the House Internal Security Committee in its 1971 annual report as "an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society." NACLA held The Guevara in high esteem, dedicating their October 1967 newsletter to him.
WASHINGTON OFFICE ON LATIN AMERICA (WOLA)--Vaguely connected with a number of activist church groups, WOLA has served as a conduit through which pro-Castro personalities from Latin America have been brought to testify in Washington before congressional committees and other forums. WOLA worked for the overthrow of Somoza in Nicaragua, and then brought to this country Ernesto Cardenal, a self- proclaimed Marxist in the present government of Nicaragua, who is also a Catholic priest. They have also sponsored Miguel D'Escoto, who is now foreign minister in the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The AFL- CIO has taken note of the pro-Castro bias of WOLA, saying: "Seldom does it address itself to the Cuban question... Cuba seems somehow to escape the scrutiny of the most vocal defenders of human rights..."
THE BOARD OF MINISTRIES OF THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH--This group contributed funds to the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLAI. that was formed as the research arm of the Students for a Democratic Society. The Methodist Board sponsors tours to Cuba and participates in Cuban-sponsored international conferences, which. Accordance to one Methodist report. "Deal with the liberation of people from oppressive, political, economic and social systems." Dr. Paul McClearv. Formerly an executive, of the board, referred to the forcible transfer of thousands of children as young as seven from Africa to Cuba as a program that will produce "highly trained and disciplined leaders who will be a decisive force in the future directions of their nations." Pat Paterson of the Methodist Board visited Hanoi in May 1977 and at a press conference told how the Vietnamese had taught her that their re-education process was "a way to make people ready for a new society." Mrs. Patterson added: "As a Christian I was particularly moved by this. I have never seen nor heard people taking reconciliation so seriously."
NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES--The NCC has for many years been a supporter of terrorism in behalf of "social change." In January 1969, the General Board adopted a resolution, which justified, if it did not advocate, violence and terror as legitimate tactics of political protest. The President of the NCC, the Rev. M. William Howard, who testified against Dr. Lefever's nomination, said in February, 1979 that the solution to the disparity between the rich and poor in the U.S. and the world is the redistribution of wealth. A conference sponsored by the NCC in 1975 declared: "A basic contradiction exists between the capitalist system and Biblical justice." Capitalism, it declared, "is basically unjust."
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
OUR AIM CONFERENCE ON CONFRONTATION PR WILL BE HELD ON JUNE 29-30 AT THE DULLES Marriott Hotel at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, D.C. Confrontation PR is a term that we invented several years ago to describe a new approach to public relations necessitated by the growth of adversarial attitudes within the media. One of the reasons we started AIM back in 1969 was because we noted reluctance on the part of many people in business and government to demand that the media correct serious inaccuracies that affected them adversely. The fear was that if they confronted the editors and reporters with such demands, they would offend them and make it more difficult to get favorable treatment from them in the future. AIM offered to make the demands for corrections on behalf of those who didn't want to get involved directly.
WE BECAME INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT THOSE WHO WERE SUFFERING ABUSE AT THE hands of the media were making a serious mistake in not directly challenging the sources of that abuse. It was clear to us that in many cases the inaccuracies and misstatements were not simply inadvertent errors on the part of well-intentioned reporters. They were a reflection of deep-seated attitudes that could not be changed by invitations to lunch or tickets to the football game. They could only be changed if the victims would fight back--engage in confrontation PR.
THE IDEA IS TAKING HOLD AND MORE AND MORE BUSINESSES ARE TRYING OUT THIS NEW approach. However, there is still a lot of timidity out there. We thought it would be a good idea to use this conference to bring together those who have tried some new approaches and those who are just interested in learning about them. We hope to attract a fair number of corporate representatives, but all AIM members are cordially invited to attend. The registration fee for individual AIM members will be $65, which will include a banquet, two luncheons and a breakfast, as well as refreshment breaks. We will make reservations at the hotel for you, but we ask that those attending be responsible for their own hotel bills. The charges at the Dulles Marriott are $62 per night single and $72 double. Dulles is about 45 minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. and it is easily accessible from any point on the Beltway by car. From National Airport, it takes 45 minutes to an hour to get to Dulles. A limo service runs every hour between the two airports and costs $7.75.
WE WILL HOLD OUR AWARDS BANQUET ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 29, MONDAY, AND WE WILL be honoring Arnaud de Borchgrave and Dr. Ernest W. Lefever, among others. Both de Borchgrave and Lefever will attend and will speak. Those who wish to attend the banquet only can do so at a cost of $30 per person. But be sure to make a reservation. The entire conference program will be found on the other side of this page.
AIM RECEIVED SEVERAL COMPLAINTS ABOUT THIS PHOTO OF Dr. Ernest Lefever, which was sent out by the Associated Press on May 25 to its member newspapers. Mary Lee Hester in a letter to the Sherman (Texas) Democrat described this as "the most cruel piece of bias via photo that I have ever observed." She said, "The photo, deliberately shot from a purposeful view, showed a man who looked like a monstrous, 'wild-eyed, right-wing radical' as a liberal media faction has depicted him." Another complaint said it appeared that the AP was trying to make Lefever look like Mussolini. I agree. If you want to object, write to Louis Boccardi, Executive Editor, Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y., N.Y. 10020