Gumming Up the Works

By Kevin Fedarko

The pounding was relentless. As the latest Clinton Administration nominee sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Senators took their turns delivering the blows. First, South Carolina's nonagenarian Strom Thurmond took up the cudgel, blustering about what he called "a compelling prima facie case that ((Morton Halperin)) is unsuited for any position in the Pentagon" and calling him a man of "deeply flawed judgment" who has failed "to create an impression of reliability or trustworthiness." Then John McCain of Arizona spoke of "profoundly disturbing questions about Halperin's judgment, his credibility, and his suitability to hold a position of responsibility.

How did Halperin manage to get himself caught between the cross hairs of a confirmation hearing so savage it resembled a drive-by shooting? True, Halperin is a liberal icon whose career stretches from the Nixon Administration -- he resigned in 1970 over the White House's policy on Cambodia -- to Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union. But it is his nomination to the Pentagon's newly created position in charge of peacekeeping operations abroad that has turned him into an object lesson in the way a band of conservative Congressmen, bureaucrats and ideological crusaders are using the Senate's confirmation process to wreak havoc with President Clinton's effort to create a new policymaking vanguard.

Among the patchwork of right-wing alliances and interest groups currently yearning to take jabs at the Democrats, few stand in a better position to deliver a knockout punch than the Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And in Halperin, they have a target so enticing that Republican staff members privately refer to him as "the real, red meat."

Over the years, Halperin's liberal views have achieved their most ardent expression in defense policy, a piece of hallowed conservative turf. Yet he used his position as a director of the A.C.L.U. to espouse such profoundly nonliberal campaigns as defending the constitutional rights of Oliver North, Lyn Nofziger and the conservative student writers at the Dartmouth Review.

Despite such ideological balance, Halperin has suffered from a hit-and-run campaign by conservative ideologues, most notably Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan Pentagon official who has been firing off tirades at him since last June. From his berth at the right-wing Center for Security Policy, a private Washington research unit, Gaffney has sent streams of faxes showcasing a highly selective sampling of Halperin's writings to a list of 1,200 leading people in Washington.

Last week, after months of enforced silence (nominees are prohibited from defending themselves until their hearings), Halperin was finally allowed to respond. He introduced his family (including his grandson, who promptly fell asleep) and then declared, "Charges have been made about my beliefs and activities which are simply false. They are, in some cases, made up out of whole cloth; in others, they result from wrenching sentences out of context and building tales around them."

True or not, the tales have been effective. In the likely event that the committee will fail to vote before Congress recesses for the holidays, Clinton will be forced to decide whether to resubmit Halperin's name in January and risk yet another bruising battle. If previous White House behavior offers any guide, his nomination may be headed for the dustbin.

Halperin is only the latest in a line of liberal Clinton nominees who have either been dumped outright or forced to sit on their hands while right-wing lawmakers fulminate and filibuster against their views. Roberta Achtenberg, Clinton's assistant secretary for fair housing, was kept from her job for months while North Carolina's Jesse Helms denounced her as a "showpiece of the homosexual movement." Meanwhile, Walter Dellinger, now an assistant Attorney General, was in limbo for six months because Helms and Lauch Faircloth, also of North Carolina, took offense at Dellinger's record of reasoned -- though pointedly liberal -- arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.

For all the disgust that Democrats express over the witch-hunt, the shoe could just as easily be on the other foot. Previous nominees Douglas Ginsburg and Robert Bork, who suffered equally vituperative attacks from the left, can attest to that. But the current campaign has been remarkably effective in preventing the Clinton Administration from getting policy initiatives off the ground.

The implications for Halperin are ominous. "Is a small cabal of neoconservatives operating in the fashion of Joe McCarthy going to be allowed to scuttle the nomination of a truly first-rate and honorable candidate?" asks Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American scientists. In this case, the answer may be yes.

With reporting by Julie Johnson, Elaine Shannon and Bruce van Voorst/Washington