Andrew Ross

The firing of Lebed seemed like a bolt from the blue. Was Yeltsin’s move justified?

It’s been building for quite a long time. From Yeltsin’s perspective, it had to be done, because the power struggle between General Lebed and Gen. [Anatoly] Kulikov [the Interior Minister] was approaching dangerous proportions.

In what way?

Kulikov charged Lebed with plotting a coup. He also brought in more troops and intensified security in Moscow and elsewhere.

Most Western commentators have pooh-poohed the charge. Do you think Lebed was planning a coup?

Possibly. But if he was, he made some mistakes. He waited too long and he let it become public, and therefore he allowed his enemy, Kulikov, to make the necessary preparations. It became much too high risk.

But why would Lebed, who is — or at least was — the most popular man in Russia, feel such a need when he could just wait peacefully for power to fall into his lap?

He’s an impatient man. He feels that the state is rudderless. He hates [Yeltsin's chief of staff
Anatoly] Chubais. He thinks that he is incapable of running the place, and is politically corrupt. I think Lebed found himself isolated and outplayed in the power struggle in the Kremlin.

What happens to Lebed now?

He was wise to accept his dismissal quietly. He doesn’t have a bad second option, which is to run for president. At this point it looks like he could easily win, and Yeltsin could be dead in a couple of weeks. But it’s not clear if the others will leave him alone. They might try and arrest him. If they did, that would make him a popular martyr. On the other hand, this guy Kulikov strikes me as being a pretty authoritarian figure. He might insist on it.

And the war in Chechnya, which Lebed ended, could flare up again.

That’s the big question because Kulikov is a superhawk. Maybe Chubais and [prime minister Viktor] Chernomyrdin can restrain him. It also depends, with Lebed gone, on whether they’ll be able to find a mediator that the Chechen rebel forces trust. They trusted Lebed whereas they hate Kulikov. If the war resumes, that could have devastating consequences in Russia.

In his radio address after being fired, Lebed warned as much when he said that “Russian mothers” would have to be prepared now for more of their sons to die in Chechnya.

I think that’s very, very serious. One only hopes that the powers that be in Russia have enough sense to rein in Kulikov — if they can. It is not clear what kind of controls they have over this man. He’s just gotten rid of his chief rival and he could very well launch a new offensive using devastating artillery strikes, bombing, and all the rest of it. The Chechens could do something in return and the cease-fire would be over. So it’s a kind of worrisome scenario. Everything is worrisome about Russia today.

Quote of the day

Pressing the flesh

“Shaking hands may open a man’s mind. I can get a sense
by shaking hands if a person will vote for me. If I bow, I can’t tell.”

— Yoshitake Masuhara, a parliamentary candidate of the New Frontier Party, running in this Sunday’s Japanese election. (From “Japan Tries Negative Campaigning, Politely,” in Thursday’s

New York Times)

“An election’s not over until the votes have been counted,” said Gore’s chief attorney, David Boies, as he prepared to launch a fresh blitz of lawsuits to overturn the certification. “And you have nine or 10 thousand votes that have never been counted once.”

But whose fault is that? Not Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the Republican woman we love to hate almost as much as Linda Tripp, who observed the letter of the Florida Supreme Court’s order closing off the recount at 5 p.m. Sunday. Nor those congressional aides bused in from Capitol Hill by Rep. Tom DeLay to create havoc outside Miami-Dade County’s ballot counting center last week. It has nothing to do with Republican “fraud,” even if Nassau County’s adoption of a status quo ante tally that just happened to give Bush more votes does look eminently fishy. It is, rather, the fault of the Democrats themselves, whose ad hoc scramble to get their man into the end zone has, after three weeks of trying, quite simply failed. But like small children, they seem not to understand, let alone be able to face, the consequences of their own actions.

It was not a Republican who designed the “butterfly ballot” that confused thousands of would-be Democratic voters in Palm Beach County into voting for Pat Buchanan. It was a Democrat, the sad Theresa LePore. It was the Democrat-controlled canvassing board in Palm Beach County that decided to take Thanksgiving Day off, thereby failing to finish in time the manual recount, which had 200 or so new Gore votes counted. (The same board, to its credit, refused to count all the dimpled chads as votes, now one of the Gore legal team’s causes of action.) It was a similar Democratic-controlled canvassing board in Miami-Dade County that decided it wouldn’t go ahead with a recount at all — not even of the several thousand disputed ballots — because its members believed they did not have enough time.

Well, did they or didn’t they? The Florida Supreme Court, made up of all Democrat appointees, presumably thought it did when it imposed the 5 p.m. Sunday deadline. If the court was animated by the concern that “every vote be counted” — a perfectly sustainable legal stand — why did it not ensure that every vote would be counted, either by demanding Miami-Dade proceed with the recount (which the court in fact refused to do), or by lengthening the recount deadline? Boies did not seem to be bothered by the court’s deadline, even though Miami-Dade officials had expressed concerns last week, before the court ruled. In fact, when asked about those concerns by reporters after the court’s initial ruling upholding a hand recount, the all-knowing Boies brushed them aside, exuding confidence that the count could easily be completed in time. Wrong.

Perhaps only hindsight is 20-20, but one might also ask why Team Gore did not push harder, via the courts, for a statewide hand recount when it had the chance — when Republicans like Sen. Chuck Hagel were calling for the same thing. Not only would this clearly have been the fairest and most accurate method, but the Democrats’ conviction that Gore “won” Florida might well have proven correct, and for all to see. Too late now. All that Team Gore has left is the temptation to litigate itself out of a situation that it created for itself. While it is noble to use the law to address unjust situations, there is little nobility here. Correcting one perceived injustice will inevitably create another — to at least 50 percent of the country, one that is even greater. A Gore victory will be Pyrrhic, with a most poisonous residue. Even that promised consolation prize — a Democratic sweep in 2002 and a one-term Bush presidency — will be spirited away should Gore persist much longer.

Why? Because after that, Republican arguments, cynically motivated as they may be, take on increasing merit. Taking Gore’s statement to its logical conclusion — the presidency, he said, should not be determined by “a few votes cast in error or not counted or misinterpreted” — the recount would indeed never end, as James Baker has suggested. It’s a shame that the bubbes in Palm Beach County punched the wrong hole, or didn’t punch it firmly enough. But the Republicans are again right: It happens all the time. And if, because of such errors, there is to be a wholesale recount in Florida, then why not, as the Republicans argue, in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and other states where the vote was close? For that matter, why not the country as a whole? There must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of similar “errors” out there.

If I’m a Bush voter in California — where Gore won by a mile — shouldn’t I have my vote recounted if I, too, accidentally blew it in the polling booth?

There is also a sense — and I say this as a Gore voter — that the vice president does not deserve to emerge the victor. He had the most successful peacetime economy at his back. He was the most powerful and, by all accounts, accomplished vice president in American history, running against an opponent who doesn’t know the difference between a nationality and a hair-coloring formula. This was Gore’s landslide to lose. Pandering, hectoring, sighing intolerantly, careening from alpha male to pussycat, Gore appears to have tried every way he knew how to lose. If the contrary hand of God does not intervene by Friday, the man should be allowed his wish.

If God sees it my way, He may be doing Gore a great favor. An inept campaign does not bode well for a competent administration at the best of times. And this isn’t one of them. Every president who has emerged from a divided election like this one has been doomed to failure from the start. A Gore administration would not only face a Republican Congress even more thuggish than before (witness Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott’s venomous remarks about Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton), but an economy edging toward the chute even before swearing in. Forget about targeted tax cuts; think about a Middle East war, an oil embargo and lines at the gas pumps, and the word “recession.”

If it’s any comfort to Gore, President George W. Bush may be even worse off. If numbers hold, he will be a president who lost the popular vote, facing a country already doubtful of his ability to handle the affairs of state, and a Democratic opposition (plus Sen. John McCain, who is itching for revenge for the seamy South Carolina primary) with no reason to give him an inch. A one-term presidency looks like a pretty good bet; a Democratic sweep of the 2002 midterm elections a near-certainty.

In defeat, on the other hand, Al Gore, who ran, he constantly reminded us, as his “own man,” may in defeat finally achieve that state. Free from the need to please and unshackled from the demand, monstrously imposed by his parents, to be president of the United States no matter what, Gore may use the time for the benefit of himself, his party and his country. In 2004, he will be only 56 years old; perhaps not tanned — remembering his prophetic early warnings about global warming — but rested, and this time genuinely ready.

As the New York Times gently pointed out, the memorial actually commemorates the 3,400 Tennesseans who died in World War I; and it was the Russians, not the Americans, who liberated Auschwitz. Even more enraging to Finkelstein, no doubt, was this comment from Hadassah Lieberman’s friend, Mindy Weisel, who told the Times: “I think her background as a [Holocaust] survivor’s daughter has given her a humanity that a lot of people don’t have.”

For Finkelstein, such cavalier inaccuracies and holier-than-thou allusions are classic outgrowths of a phenomenon that has transformed the Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe into a largely American-driven myth designed to serve the narrow interests of homegrown Jewish elites. The avalanche of books, movies, Holocaust memorials, university chairs, high school courses — and most recently the “shakedown” of Swiss banks and German insurance companies on the issue of reparations for Jewish wartime victims — is all part of a corrupt “Holocaust industry” that needs to be exposed and put out of business so that the dead of Auschwitz and Treblinka can finally rest in peace.

Finkelstein is not the first to explore this theme. American, British and Israeli scholars and critics have been saying something similar over the past few years, most notably Peter Novick of the University of Chicago, whose highly regarded 1999 book, “The Holocaust in American Life,” is about to be reissued in paperback. But where Novick and others bring substance, reason and some empathy to the discomforting issue, Finkelstein brings rage, dogma and ultimately a deep unpleasantness.

Finkelstein’s argument goes like this: Postwar Americans, including American Jews, appeared to know little and care even less about the Nazi Holocaust. Echoing points made by Novick, Finkelstein argues that Jews were more concerned about integrating fully into American life than about harping on a dreadful historical episode that would set them apart both as an ethnic group outside the mainstream and, worse, as victims.

What changed? According to Finkelstein, U.S. foreign policy interests in the Middle East, beginning in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, made a pronounced tilt toward Israel, a tilt cheered by powerful Jewish lobby groups always on the lookout for fresh fundraising angles. And what better way to lash Jews (and non-Jews) to the mast of a pro-Israel foreign policy — encouraged in the 1970s by right-wing Israeli governments seeking to deflect attention from their own egregious treatment of the Palestinians — than to warn darkly that Arab hostility to Israel threatened to explode into a second Final Solution? And what better way to effect that than with an avalanche of Holocaust propaganda and liberal doses of moral blackmail, foisted upon Jew and non-Jew alike by such Holocaust self-dramatizers as Elie Wiesel, reminding us everywhere of the uniqueness, unforgivability and ever-possible reappearance of the death camps of decades ago?

The Holocaust industry’s latest frontier, says Finkelstein, is cold cash. The drive for reparations, headed up by organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Material Claims Conference, constitutes nothing less than a “double shakedown” under the guise of recovering assets belonging to and otherwise compensating Jewish victims and survivors of the Nazis. Employing the services of politically connected lawyers like former Republican Sen. Alfonse D’Amato and former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, these organizations, charges Finkelstein, have grossly exaggerated the number of Jewish survivors while using outright political threats against European governments and institutions. The money itself has gone not to the victims (who include Finkelstein’s mother, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, who received a paltry $3,500) but to various “institutes,” “memorials” and “Holocaust education” projects and to assist Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe.

The reparations issue is the most detailed and troubling section of Finkelstein’s short book. Recent reports that $400 million has been paid to U.S. accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen, KPMG and Price Waterhouse, which charged sky-high auditing fees in connection with the international investigation of Swiss banks, lend credence to many of his charges.

On a broader level, Finkelstein is justified in questioning the authenticity of the emotional and other claims staked by Holocaust keepers of the flame. The memory of this singular event has too often been soiled by vulgarity, political calculation, hypocrisy and greed. Former Israeli Foreign Secretary Abba Eban long ago observed: “There’s no business like Shoah business.” But Finkelstein’s swings are so wild and his tone so vitriolic as to raise doubts about his agenda, and even about that which may lie deeper in his heart.

On the issue of reparations, he barely acknowledges the wrongs committed by the Swiss and German institutions — the burying of Jewish bank accounts, the use of slave labor — that gave rise to the recent reparations drive. The fear that the reparations will not wind up in the hands of those who need and deserve them most is a legitimate concern. But the idea that survivors have been routinely swindled by Jewish institutions is a gross distortion. The chief reason why survivors have so far seen nothing of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement, reached in 1998, is that U.S. courts have yet to rule on a method of distribution. On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bjte noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone.

Other Finkelstein generalizations are as absurd as they are sweeping, and do a great disservice to the serious and enlightening scholarship that has been produced by Holocaust writers over the past 40 years. Thus Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which explains the extermination of the Jews as an outgrowth of purely German anti-Semitism, Finkelstein asserts, is “standard Holocaust dogma,” when in fact it has been furiously disputed by other Holocaust historians. “Fragments,” the wholly fictitious account of a child survivor by Binjamin Wilkormirski, Finkelstein adds, is “the archetypal Holocaust memoir,” ignoring major contributions from survivors such as Primo Levi (“The Drowned and the Saved”) and German Jewish observers like Victor Klemperer (“I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years”), both published when the so-called Holocaust industry was supposedly in full flourish.

An ideologue of the left, Finkelstein takes predictable swipes at the “criminal policies of the Israeli state,” backed, naturally, by an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. Never mind that U.S. administrations and Jewish interest groups in fact have often been at odds, especially during the Bush administration, Finkelstein insists on seeing “elites” everywhere, notably those of the Jewish persuasion, “marching in lockstep with American power.” These elites, the hidden hand of “organized American Jewry” behind the Holocaust industry, have one goal: not the teaching of history but the furthering of “Jewish aggrandizement.”

Finkelstein employs such sentiments and language, so associated with standard anti-Semitism, quite freely. Not only might historical anti-Semitism be “grounded in a real conflict of interests” (a classic formulation of Stalinesque leftism), but the Jews, in Finkelstein’s view, are often to blame for it. The pursuit of reparations, in another of Finkelstein’s wild and baseless charges, “has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.” His assertions become ever more rancid: Israelis and American Jews are nowadays the great oppressors — “lording it over those least able to defend themselves” — the former over Palestinians, the latter over American blacks. Holocaust denial is also the fault of the Jews. “Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust Industry,” Finkelstein writes, “the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.”

Finkelstein is quick to remind us of his credentials as a child of survivors. Nevertheless his distrust of and distaste for his co-religionists are rather apparent. In a telephone interview with a British publication recently he said: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor.” Particularly irksome are those “arriviste and shtetl-chauvinist Jews of Eastern European descent like New York City mayor Edward Koch and (former) New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal,” whom Finkelstein holds largely responsible for the Holocaust industry and all its foul works.

In the end, Finkelstein acknowledges the “staggering dimensions of Hitler’s Final Solution,” seeking merely to restore the phenomenon “as a rational subject of inquiry.” But what we have here, ultimately, is a rather rancid settling of personal and ideological scores. How that furthers rational inquiry is hard to see. And if truly, as he states at the very end, he wishes for nothing more than for the vanquished to “finally, rest in peace,” he might ask himself how his own rage and dogma will help them achieve that.

As it turns out, “Single & Single” is neither especially jolly nor particularly meaningful. Perhaps that’s because, except for the occasional shimmering passage, there is nothing terribly surprising about the key components of the plot: corrupt British financiers and nasty gangsters from the former Soviet Union who will trade in blood or drugs or anything else available in the new world order’s glorious free-market economy. Le Carri relates the means by which these two forces come together with a peculiar flatness and at tedious length. We learn little about either Single, except that the father is short and greedy and the son is tall, attractive to women and, eventually, troubled by his conscience.

The ex-Soviets, meanwhile, spend a lot of time eating great hunks of meat cooked over an open fire while tiresomely proclaiming eternal devotion to their ethnicity — “Now you are true Mingrelian!” one of them bellows to Oliver after he has drained a hornful of homemade wine from some part of Georgia. The chief villain, Alix Hoban, wears a “ghostly sneer of the hairline lips” as he whispers into his cell phone, which he does incessantly, even when he’s killing people. If he were a dwarf or a hunchback, the picture would be complete.

A sense of familiarity pervades the book. Oliver’s friendship with the son of his landlady echoes the much more touchingly drawn one of the battered agent Jim Prideaux and the schoolboy Roach (“Jumbo”) in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The archness le Carri used to such great effect in the mouth of the oafish Percy Alleline (in “Tinker, Tailor”) is overused here — anachronistically, as if he were imitating Evelyn Waugh. It looks, in fact, as though le Carri’s chief goal here was to sell “Single & Single” to the movies: There are certainly enough set pieces to make any decent director’s job pretty straightforward.

But even Conrad and Greene (to whom le Carri has been compared) had their off days. For all its shortcomings, the book has moments that show what le Carri is still capable of when it comes to exploring the human factor. Near the end, he writes of Oliver’s desire “to magic his father out of here and say sorry to him if he felt it, though he wasn’t sure he did … to set him on his feet, but say, ‘There you are, you’re on your own, we’re quits.’” Le Carri may have fallen and bruised himself on this outing. That’s no reason, however, to call it quits.

Testifying on behalf of the coup’s opponents, historian Sean Wilentz told the House Judiciary Committee that history would “hunt down” those who voted for impeachment. In faint echoes of the civil rights and anti-war days, celebrity teach-ins are springing up and protesters are taking to the streets. A veritable crusade is shaping up on behalf of a president whom writer Mary Gordon, in the pages of Salon, likened to the martyred Billy Budd.

But before we throw on the chain mail of righteousness, let us imagine that it is not President Clinton on whose behalf we are fighting the good fight, but George W. Bush III, who has overcome his own rather colorful past, or Robert Packwood, who instead of being bundled out of the Senate for sexual matters, has acceded to the highest office in the land.

Let us suppose it was President Packwood who had testified under oath in a sexual harassment deposition and in a federal grand jury proceeding, understanding that failure to tell the truth (“the whole truth”) could result in charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Question: Have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?

Packwood: I don’t recall.

We would know that President Packwood, under oath, had told a flat-out lie. Would we — good liberals and feminists who have been in the forefront of virtually criminalizing, under the guise of “sexual harassment,” any sexual contact between men and women in the workplace — have been so easily forgiving of this lie? Would it really have been OK with us had it been President Packwood, rather than President Clinton, who also knew that Lewinsky, an intern young enough to be his daughter, was filing a blatantly false affidavit in which she swore she had no sexual relations with President Clinton. Are we so sure we would have dismissed this president’s callous indifference to Lewinsky’s putting herself in criminal harm’s way as “private behavior” or merely “lying about sex”?

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Then, of course, there would be the evasions and obfuscations in President Packwood’s federal grand jury testimony. What the meaning of “is” is. She aroused me, I didn’t arouse her. What he and Lewinsky did together “did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined.” And how sympathetic to President Packwood would we be after hearing the president’s own counsel say to the House Judiciary Committee: “Reasonable people, and you maybe have reached this conclusion, could determine that he crossed over that line, and that what for him was truthful but misleading or nonresponsive and misleading or evasive, was in fact false.” Or this, from “a longtime advisor” to the president: “For the president of the United States to lie before a grand jury is a big deal. I don’t care if the lie is about a fender-bender or about sex. We always knew that perjury before a grand jury was a dastardly, very serious act that most people would not tolerate.”

Would we be so tolerant of President Packwood’s perjury? And what would we be thinking as members of his own party got up during the House impeachment debate and, one by one, called his behavior “inexcusable,” “deplorable,” “indefensible”? “He broke the law? Probably so.” Would we not be looking increasingly askance as we read the actual text of the censure motion offered by President Packwood’s party, which states that the president “egregiously failed” the obligations implicit in his oath of office, to “set an example of high moral standards and conduct himself in a manner that fosters respect for the truth.” Further, his actions “violated the trust of the American people, lessened their esteem for the office of the President and dishonored the office which they have entrusted to him.” What more would it take to get people marching in the streets with placards demanding, “Packwood must go!”

Would Toni Morrison have risen up to lionize President Packwood had he so “egregiously failed?” Would she and other literary lions have affixed their signatures to various anti-impeachment petitions had it been President Packwood who, according to loyal aide Sidney Blumenthal’s grand jury testimony, compared himself to “a character in the novel ‘Darkness at Noon’ … I feel like a character in an oppressive farce that is creating a lie about me and I can’t get the truth out.” Rather than defending President Packwood, Morrison might have pointed out that the book’s author, Arthur Koestler — not to mention the real victims about whom Koestler so eloquently wrote — would be appalled by the way President Packwood cynically exploited literary truth in the service of the big lie he was telling to all around him.

And before the rest of us get too misty-eyed about ending the politics of character assassination, we might want to take a closer look at our own record in this area. There’s Packwood himself, of course, run out of town by California Sen. Barbara Boxer and assorted feminists in full-throated roar for copping smooches with female staffers. Then there’s former Texas Sen. John Tower, whose crime was that he enjoyed a drink or two, and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, whose video rental receipts were paraded in front of the world. And of course Clarence Thomas, pitted against Anita Hill — the liberals’ equivalent of Paula Jones — with a sex harassment smear every bit as bogus as the one used to bring down Clinton.

As for Clinton, perhaps he meant it when he called, in his post-impeachment Rose Garden speech Saturday afternoon, for an “end to the politics of personal destruction.” But in his own case, that heartfelt call is beside the point. If in the end the forces arrayed in his defense prove insufficient, nobody will have brought down Clinton except himself. Richard Mellon Scaife didn’t tell him to avail himself of Monica Lewinsky’s charms; Kenneth Starr didn’t tell him to lie about it for seven months. Henry Hyde didn’t tell the president to hand a gun to his sworn enemies and suggest they shoot him at point-blank range. In Clinton’s case, a call for an end to the politics of self-destruction might be more apropos. And it would suit the rest of us to apportion responsibility accordingly.