Andy Young Strikes Again

When Cy Vance tells me to shut up, I'll shut up." So said Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young early in 1977, as he embarked on a policy of open-mouth diplomacy that featured a number of ill-timed and poorly conceived outbursts. Last week, following his most incendiary quotations ever, Secretary of State Vance and President Carter finally told Andy Young, in effect, to shut up. Reprimanding Young by telephone, Carter said that he was "very unhappy with [Young's] choice of words ... and several statements." After apologizing, the U.N. Ambassador conceded that he had blundered.

The comments that provoked Young's bosses--as well as the U.S. Congress and many Western leaders--appeared in the French socialist daily Le Matin, just as Jimmy Carter was protesting the trials of Soviet Dissidents Shcharansky and Ginzburg. Asked about the trials, Young said it was difficult to predict the fate of the dissidents, and then added that in U.S. prisons there are "hundreds, maybe thousands of people I would categorize as political prisoners." He said: "Ten years ago, I myself was tried in Atlanta for having organized a [civil rights] protest movement. And three years later, I was a Georgia representative." Almost as if he planned to make as many people furious as quickly as possible, Young went on to suggest (without citing any evidence) that supporters of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, rather than black nationalist guerrillas, had massacred Christian missionaries at Elim last month and that France had intervened in the Katangese invasion of Zaire's Shaba province primarily for economic motives.

Young had a point that he might conceivably argue that jailed U.S. civil rights protesters were political prisoners, in the broadest possible sense. Moreover, he did criticize the Soviet system. But his timing could not have been worse.

News of Young's interview broke in Geneva just as Vance handed a message from Carter to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko concerning Shcharansky. "Shit, shit, shit," screamed one ranking member of the Secretary's party when he learned what Young had said. "That stupid son of a bitch." As for the usually calm Vance, "what he said was unprintable," reported an aide. The Soviet news agency Tass promptly and predictably trumpeted Young's remark as "an official admission that political persecution is widespread in the United States."

In Washington, some legislators called for Young's impeachment. Said Idaho Republican Steve Symms: "His ambassadorship seems more favorable to the Soviet Union than to the United States." In Chicago, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that Young "should learn discipline or should not continue in his post." Lawrence P. McDonald, a Georgia Democrat (and member of the John Birch Society) introduced a motion in the House of Representatives to impeach Young; it failed, 293 to 82.

Meanwhile Vance and Carter agreed that Young would have to issue a statement to try to minimize the damage. "Vance told me," Young recalled afterward, "that the interview seemed to be undercutting what he and the President were trying to do. I said that was not my intention." At a hastily called press conference in Geneva (no questions were permitted), Young read a statement that had been polished by Vance's aides in which he expressed total sympathy for the Administration's human rights campaign. And he added: "I know of no instance in the U.S. where persons have received penalties for monitoring our Government's position on civil or human rights."

Alone in his U.N. office in Geneva, Young told TIME Correspondent Christopher Ogden at week's end that he had not slept much for the past three nights, wondering whether he should resign. Young had decided not to do so, in part because of recent progress in reducing tensions in southern Africa. Young offered no apologies for his comments, maintaining that the context of his long interview (the transcript ran 24 pages) made his remarks--and his intentions--considerably less disturbing than the zingers that leaped from the world's wire-service machines. If he had it to do over again, would he do it the same way? Young smiled and said: "I'd do it the same way, but not at the same time."

If nothing else, Young's gaffe led to a new East-West joke. According to one story circulating in Geneva, Vance was trying to work out a swap with Gromyko: Andy Young for Anatoli Shcharansky.

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