She’s tried everything — shmoozing at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gala; standing shoulder to shoulder with Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, one of the city’s top Puerto Rican officials, to denounce the GOP’s tax bill; and working into her speeches her long-ago efforts to help register Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley.

Even as she’s tried to repair the damage from the clemency debacle, Clinton has faced another Puerto Rican political issue that is set to explode on the national stage this week: the status of the U.S. Navy’s bombing range on a tiny island called Vieques.

At a New York press conference last week, the crowd burst into laughter
when Hillary tried to avoid answering a question concerning Vieques.
“One thing I want to do is consult with a number of people,” she said
with a nervous titter, referring to the lack of time she spent talking
to Latino leaders before coming out against the clemency offer. “I am
heavy into consultations right now.”

She better be. On Wednesday, the House and Senate Armed Forces
Committees will hold the first of a number of hearings that will no doubt
keep the questions coming. Already, a number of U.S. politicians of various stripes are on the record as wanting to force the Navy from the island.

“What is unfortunate, I find, is that while we are focused on whether
or not [the prisoners] should be released, the real issue here is
Vieques,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson recently said in a television appearance. “Should the U.S. own Vieques? If Indonesia should not own East Timor and if the U.S. should not own the Panama Canal, we should not own Vieques … The real issue today is our Navy should leave Vieques as an occupying force. We should not be a colonial power in Puerto Rico in 1999.”

In August, Jackson visited the island and held a press conference about the issue with Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rosello. Jackson pledged to rally Hispanic voters across the country and make Vieques a major campaign 2000 issue.

Why now?

The pearl-white sands and turquoise waters of Vieques, a tiny inhabited strip
just off the coast of Puerto Rico, may seem a bizarre place for campaign
2000 electioneering. From a distance the island looks like just another
bucolic Caribbean getaway.

But for five decades, the U.S. military has occupied more than two-thirds of
the 22-mile island, bombing and shelling the western tip around 190 days a
year. It’s the only place where the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines all
conduct live-fire training exercises within close range of a significant
civilian population.

In April, the Navy stopped all bombing after a pilot mistakenly dropped two 500-pound bombs on an observation tower, killing civilian security guard David Sanes. It is the only reported civilian death linked to the exercises in the history of the Navy’s presence here, but it was enough for the vast majority of Puerto Ricans — those for statehood and those for independence alike — to unite in their efforts to push the Navy out.

Demands that the Navy leave have resonated all the way to Washington. The White House has appointed a Pentagon panel to evaluate the controversy and a decision is expected any day now. If the panel finds for the Navy, the Puerto Rican attorney general has threatened to sue the federal government.

As Democrats court the influential Hispanic vote this election cycle,
Vieques is poised to become a cause célèbre.

“I can assure you that once we leave this place and take our case to
the people of New York in great numbers, and Illinois and Texas and
California and Florida, this issue will be a critical matter on the
agenda for 2000,” Jackson said during the press conference he held with
Gov. Rosello.

Although Republicans in Washington generally support the Navy remaining
on the island, the issue has attracted a whole host of strange
bedfellows. Democratic Sen. Chuck Shumer and Republican Sen. Frank
Murkowski, as well as Democratic Reps. Luis Gutierrez, Robert Menendez
and Nydia Velasquez and GOP Reps. Don Young and Dan Burton, have all
called for the Navy to leave.

Last week Murkowski, R-Alaska, introduced a bill that would give the Puerto Rican government control of the Navy-owned land used for bombing exercises on the island. “It’s time to return this tiny island to its people,” Murkowski said in a speech on the Senate floor.

But fellow Republican James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Armed
Forces Committee’s panel on military readiness, threatened to shut down
a major Navy base in Puerto Rico unless political leaders back off and
allow resumption of target practice on Vieques. The base, Roosevelt
Roads, pumps $300 million a year into the local economy, and the loss
would be a painful one for Puerto Rico.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee links Clinton’s
clemency offer to threats of violence over the Vieques issue, noting
that a self-proclaimed leader of the Puerto Rican group Boricua Popular
Army came out of hiding recently to threaten that if the U.S. Navy
resumes exercises in Vieques, it will “face the consequences.”

“Bill Clinton’s misguided act of ethnic pandering on behalf of his
wife’s New York political ambitions is having precisely the effect that
every law enforcement agency said it would,” charged RNC Chairman Jim
Nicholson. “It’s reawakening a tiny, but violent terrorist movement.”

In standard form, presidential contenders have yet to trudge into the
debate in any real way. In late August the Associated Press reported
that Vice President Al Gore pledged to support the efforts to force the Navy to leave
in a telephone call with Gov. Rosello. But when
asked about it, Gore’s spokesman said the vice president does not
discuss personal telephone conversations.

Some members of the George W. Bush camp have also met with Puerto Rican officials about the matter, but he hasn’t ventured an opinion yet.

Although Hillary Clinton has desperately tried to avoid coming down one
way or the other on the matter, her would-be opponent, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani waded cautiously into the turbulent waters last week. He urged New York Democrats to stop pressuring President Clinton for a quick decision on whether the Navy should leave Vieques after nearly six decades there.

“I think the president of the United States should come to a decision
on it after he gets his report back,” Giuliani urged, referring to
recommendations expected from the Pentagon task force. The
panels is expected to recommend keeping Vieques open for only five more
years.

As the mayor urged patience, a New York City Council committee began pushing for a resolution demanding that the Navy leave. Fifteen New York politicians of
Puerto Rican descent, including U.S. Reps. Jose Serrano and Velasquez,
were busy drumming up support for the House and Senate hearings.

“We believe your present hearings on the president’s clemency toward
the Puerto Rican political prisoners focuses on the symptom rather than
the fundamental problem that this Senate has failed to address: the
ultimate status of Puerto Rico,” the legislators wrote to Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott.

The Vieques issue, they argue, is directly linked to the unresolved
nature of Puerto Rico’s status after nearly 100 years as a U.S.
territory. For the past 47 years it’s been a commonwealth. Puerto Ricans
are U.S. citizens and subject to military service, but they pay no
federal taxes, cannot vote in presidential elections and are represented
in Congress by a delegate with no floor-voting powers.

If they composed a state with real congressional representation, they’d have more power to protect their citizens and force the Navy to behave more responsibly or leave.

For years, Puerto Ricans’ anger over the Navy’s occupation of Vieques
and their status as a commonwealth in general has simmered under the
surface. But since Sanes’ accidental death, Puerto Ricans of every political stripe
have united to demand that the Navy either leave or stop their target
practice altogether.

Since days after the death, hundreds of protesters have illegally camped out on the western tip of the island designated for dropping live fire, precluding the Navy from resuming bombing. Elaborate murals and spray-painted signs proclaiming “Fuera Marina Vieques” — Navy out of Vieques — now dot the island.

One protester, Puerto Rican Sen. Ruben Berrios, leader of the Puerto
Rican Independence Party, has camped out on the ordnance-strewn beaches
of the live-fire zone for more that to 100 days now. He vows to remain
until the Navy decides to withdraw.

“Mr. Clinton can go into the next millennium as a protector of the
ecology or he can be one of the dictators of his age,” says Berrios, who
like Clinton graduated from Georgetown University and Yale Law School.
“The president cannot extricate himself from this situation — the
pressure is too great in all of Puerto Rico.”

Since the early ’40s, Vieques has served as a training center for U.S. forces based in the North Atlantic. Troops trained here have been
deployed in every conflict since World War II, including Vietnam, the
Persian Gulf War and Kosovo.

Navy spokesman Roberto Nelson worries that unless the Navy can resume
practice, the troops scheduled to train here will not be prepared to
face combat.

“It’s not a game,” warns Nelson, who works at the Roosevelt Roads Naval
Station on Puerto Rico. “In the military the penalty you pay for
improper training is people die.”

But there is another reason that the Navy doesn’t want to close
down operations on Vieques: the money it generates from other countries
who also use it for training their militaries. Up until early August, the Navy advertised the “Atlantic Weapons Training Facility”
on a Navy Web site, promoting the “one-stop shopping” and “scheduled as
requested” advantages of the area and that the “ideal moderate tropical
climate permits year round ops with practically no cancellations.”

When the Puerto Rican government discovered the Web site and raised questions
about it, the Navy shut it down.

Anti-Navy sentiment continues to reverberate throughout Puerto Rico.
Walk down any street in Vieques and you will overhear impassioned
discussions about the latest developments in the ongoing controversy.
Citizens are constantly wondering what the Navy’s next move will be, and
allegations fly about a rumored epidemic of cancer many islanders
believe the constant bombing has caused.

Talk of cancer is nothing new. A study conducted by the government of
Puerto Rico in 1997 found 482 cases of cancer between 1960 and 1989, a
rate that is 27 percent higher than any other municipality in Puerto Rico.

To make matters worse, the Navy has recently admitted to using napalm and uranium-tipped bombs on the island after years of denying it. Investigators from a federal cancer-monitoring agency, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, are now investigating. The inquiry could take six months and
delay any kind of White House action or involvement, which means the
issue could still be playing itself out in the middle of campaign 2000.

In the long run, Vieques may well make the clemency controversy seem like a footnote, but it doesn’t necessarily have to become another political pitfall in the first lady’s quest for the Senate. If Hillary plays her cards right, Vieques and all the thorny issues that go along with it could provide a wonderful opportunity to win back the good graces of her Hispanic brethren in New York.

Of course, that depends on her husband’s next move and the political fallout it causes. Will he or won’t he side with Puerto Rico this time? And what will be her response? Only their pollsters know for sure. Either way, you can bet
Hillary will do a little more consulting this time around.

The timing of the DNC’s announcement was appropriately ironic, in that this appointment tells us volumes about the roots of the nation’s growing security crisis: the dramatic erosion of America’s military credibility in an ill-conceived war, and the theft of its nuclear arsenal by an adversary the administration claims is a “strategic partner.”

Carlottia Scott was for many years the chief aide to Rep. Ron Dellums, a Berkeley radical who, with the approval of the congressional Democratic leadership, was appointed first to the Armed Services Committee and then to the chair of its subcommittee on military installations, which oversees U.S. bases worldwide. The Democratic leadership apparently saw no problem in the fact that every year during the Cold War with the Soviet empire, Dellums introduced a “peace” budget, which would have required a 75 percent reduction in government spending on America’s defenses.

Nor did they have any problem with Dellums’ performance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Jimmy Carter’s watch. As Soviet troops poured across the Afghan border and President Carter called for the resumption of the military draft, Dellums told a “Stop the Draft” rally in Berkeley that “Washington, D.C., is a very evil place,” and the only “arc” of a crisis that he could see was “the one that runs between the basement of the West Wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon.”

Among the government documents retrieved when the Marxist government in Grenada was overthrown were the love letters of Dellums’ chief aide, Carlottia Scott, to its anti-American dictator, Maurice Bishop. Scott wrote: “Ron has become truly committed to Grenada … He’s really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong … The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.”

Bishop and Fidel were not the only communists in the Americas favored by Dellums and his aide. About the time these letters were retrieved, Dellums was opening his congressional office to a Cuban intelligence agent who proceeded to organize support committees in the United States for the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. Yet, when Dellums’ retired, the Clinton administration’s secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, bestowed on him the highest civilian honor the Pentagon can award “for service to his country.”

After Dellums’ retirement, Scott became the chief of staff to his successor, Berkeley leftist Barbara Lee. In the 1970s Lee was a confidential aide to Huey Newton, the “minister of defense” of the Black Panther Party, whose calling card was the “Red Book” of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Among the documents liberated from Grenada were minutes from a politburo meeting attended by Lee and the Marxist junta. The minutes state that “Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes.”

The airport in question was being built by the Cuban military and, according to U.S. intelligence sources, was designed to accommodate Soviet warplanes. The Reagan administration regarded the airport project as part of a larger Soviet plan to establish a military base in this hemisphere, and administration officials invoked its construction as a national security justification for the invasion that followed.

In an effort to forestall such an invasion, and as head of the military installations subcommittee of the House, Dellums made a “fact-finding” trip to Grenada and issued his own report on the airport, concluding that it was being built “for the purpose of economic development, and is not for military use.” Dellums’ report also made the political claim that the Reagan administration’s concerns about national security in regard to the airport were “absurd, patronizing and totally unwarranted.” In other words, the captured minutes of the politburo meeting show that Dellums and his aide Lee colluded with the dictator of a communist state to cover up the fact that the Soviet Union was building a military airport that posed a threat to the security of the United States.

Despite this betrayal, and with the approval of her Democratic colleagues in the House, Lee is now a member of the House International Relations Committee, which deals with issues affecting the security of the United States. With equal disregard for national security, the DNC has now made Scott — an abettor of these treacherous schemes — its political issues director. When I asked a leading Democratic political strategist, who is not a leftist, how it was possible that the leaders of the Democratic Party could appoint someone like Scott to such a post at such a time, he replied: “You have to understand that in the 1960s these people (the party’s leaders) were chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win!”

The left-wing culture that thus pervades both the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration is at the heart of the current national security crisis. These are people who never conceded that the Soviet Union was an evil empire; who never grasped the dimensions of the Soviet military threat; who regarded America’s democracy as an imperialist empire and as morally convergent with the Soviet state; and who insisted (and still insist) that the ferreting out of Soviet loyalists and domestic spies during the early Cold War years was merely an ideological witch-hunt. They opposed the Reagan military buildup and the development of an anti-ballistic missile system in the 1980s and consistently called for unilateral steps to reduce America’s nuclear deterrent.

Given this history, they could hardly be expected to take the post-Cold War threat from the Chinese communist dictatorship seriously. And they have not.

In fact, the current national security crisis may be said to have begun when President Clinton appointed anti-military environmental leftist Hazel O’Leary to be secretary of energy, and therefore in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs. O’Leary promptly surrounded herself with other political leftists (including a “Marxist-Feminist”) and anti-nuclear activists, appointing them as assistant secretaries with responsibility for the nuclear labs.

In one of her first acts, O’Leary declassified 11 million pages of reports, including information on 204 nuclear tests, a move she described as an action to safeguard the environment and as a protest against a “bomb-building” culture. Having made America’s nuclear weapons secrets available to adversary powers, O’Leary then took steps to relax security precautions at the labs under her control. She appointed Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton National Security Council staffer with extreme anti-nuclear views, to be director in charge of national security issues. Gottemoeller had been previously nominated to fill the post — long-vacant in the Clinton administration - of assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. But her appointment was successfully blocked by congressional Republicans because of her radical disarmament views. The Clinton response to her rejection on security grounds was to appoint her to be in charge of security for the nation’s nuclear weapons labs.

The architect of America’s China policy over the course of the current disaster has been Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger. Berger began his political life as a Vietnam War protestor and member of the radical “Peace Now” movement, which regards Israel as the aggressor in the Middle East. Berger first met Clinton as an activist in the McGovern for president camp, the most left-wing Democratic presidential campaign in American history. Berger’s law practice, prior to his appointment, was lobbying for the business arm of China’s communist dictatorship. (The other root cause of the present security crisis is, of course, greed — a major factor in all its aspects, and on both sides of the political aisle.)

It is hardly surprising that a political leftist and business lobbyist for China’s rulers should take steps to lift the security controls that previously protected U.S. military technology. Or that, under his tenure, invitations to the White House should be extended to agents of Chinese intelligence and China’s military. Or, for that matter, that appointments like that of John Huang to posts with top security clearance should be considered perfectly reasonable.

Nor is it surprising, given the politics of the Clinton managers, that the administration should place its faith in arms control agreements that depend on trustworthy partners, while strenuously opposing measures to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses that do not. (Even now, after the revelations of China’s thefts, Berger and the Clinton administration continue to oppose the implementation of anti-ballistic missile defense programs, while pressing to keep China’s most-favored-nation trading status secure.)

After all, this is a Democratic Party whose political culture is so dominated by left-wing illusions and deceits that it has worked assiduously to obstruct the investigations of the debts of the Clinton-Gore campaign to the Chinese dictators. No wonder it remains irresponsibly complacent in the face of the revelations of the Cox Report.

There is perhaps nothing more alarming for the prospects of the two-party system, however, than the wall of denial that has been hastily and irresponsibly erected around these issues by Democratic leaders like Tom Daschle in the wake of the Cox disclosures. To say, as the Senate minority leader has, that there is nothing really new in these revelations is patently absurd. Which previous administrations dismantled vital security procedures; accepted illegal monies from foreign intelligence services and then blocked investigations when the illegalities were revealed; presided over the wholesale evaporation of the nation’s nuclear weapons advantage; abetted the transfer of missile technologies that can strike American cities; and opposed the development of weapons systems that could defend against such attacks?

The honest answer is none.

At the heart of the current crisis is a White House that has loaded its administration with officials deeply disenchanted with, if not actively hostile to, America’s essential character and purposes. Behind that White House and still supporting its coverup is a party that lacks proper pride in America’s national achievement and proper loyalty to America’s national interests. This is a party whose leader has spent enormous political capital apologizing to the world for America’s role in it. This is a party that even in the face of the most massive breach of security in America’s history is still taking the position that, like Monica, “Everybody does it.”

Democrats should think carefully before they proceed any further down this slippery path. Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 by asking voters the question: “Do you feel better off now than you did four years ago?”

The next Republican presidential candidate will surely pose another obvious question: “Do you feel safer now than you did eight years ago?”

Ouch. Aging, beset by competition and insufficiently lascivious, at least in the eyes of the federal government, to give even a lonely GI a stiffie: This is not an enviable position for the putative flagship of the eternal sexual revolution.

Oh, the Playboy empire is still turning profits, enjoying a healthy run-up in its stock price and is one of the few established media ventures succeeding online. But the organization certainly came across as a bit nervous this month when Christie Hefner, Playboy CEO and Hugh’s daughter, told the Wall Street Journal that it plans to end-around the sex-market competition for men by going after … women. Its plan includes merchandising aimed at women and more celebrity pictorials, designed to resemble fashion shoots: The current issue (December), for instance, features ice skater Katarina Witt, and the October issue, featuring Cindy Crawford, was by Playboy’s account a strong seller thanks largely to women readers.

There’s a column and a half worth of cheap yuks in that premise, sure, but the idea of a more-female-positive nude Playboy pictorial is really not that ludicrous. Compared with December’s Playmates, the butterscotch-blond Dahm triplets of Minnesota — pubes shaven, draped in lace and arranged on beds of satin in fuzzy tableaux of entry-ready vulnerability — Witt is practically a feminist icon of powerful womanliness, a lusty, bushy Sheela-na-Gig of the ice. Her photo spread, set outdoors in Hawaii, eschews the veal-calf-like weakness of traditional shoots like the Dahms’, emphasizing her athleticism. She shows off strong biceps, stalks across the rain-forest floor, does a handstand and generally looks like she could KO the average reader in the first round.

It’s an advance at least over the winsome-to-a-fault Dahm triplets (the very phrase makes them sound like a threesome Fonzie would have dated). Still, while the curvy Teuton might appeal to women turned off by the prepubescent aesthetic of contemporary ice skating — just try that move, Tara, you little Pixie Stick! — at the end of the day you’re still looking at a woman with big ta-tas jumping around on a lava rock, which makes it hard to imagine crossover appeal at a $5.95 cover price.

Playboy’s gender-bending ploy may be an extreme example of a bigger long-term question: How well can pitching a big sexual tent still work? Specialized and fetish magazines are hardly new (and Playboy has branched out with newsstand specials like “Women of Color” and “Voluptuous Vixens”), but even within Playboy’s middle-of-the-road pin-up category, its airbrushed examples of idealized, innocent sexuality may seem a little dated to an audience that seems to have a greater appetite for (relative) realism. “Amateur” is the great buzzword of online erotica, and one of the more noteworthy skin magazines to emerge recently was Perfect 10 (“The Connoisseur’s Magazine”), which in its mission statement promises “the world’s most naturally beautiful women. NO IMPLANTS, and almost no retouching!” (Perhaps catching on, Playboy issued “Natural Beauties” in October.)

Playboy is in the classic dilemma of trying to remain an institution without becoming a museum, an effort that isn’t helped by such self-hagiographic features as the tour of the Playboy mansion in the current issue (December), complete with a heavy-on-the-’70s nostalgia photo spread including nods to roller disco and the Village People. A 45-year history gives Playboy a valuable brand and an infinitely resalable back catalog. But it also makes it 45 years old.

Case in point: The magazine announced recently that it would mark its birthday in January with a commemorative issue graced by a photomosaic of its first cover girl, Marilyn Monroe, composed of 500 old Playboy covers (a collage effect that was neat the first few times we saw it but is fast becoming the Magic Eye of the late ’90s). That choice is a natural and timeless one, true, but the selection of a dead woman who would have been 73 today only emphasizes that Playboy can’t seem to decide whether to drop or embrace its smoking-jacket image. Editorially, it has on the one hand opened itself to young, bright journalists and humorists; on the other, it still can’t shake albatrosses like the “party jokes” section and has even resuscitated the mortifying “Little Annie Fanny” cartoon (the old joke notwithstanding, it would be far less embarrassing to cop to buying the magazine for the pictures).

Even Playboy’s pitches to the young are conflicted: In September, it ran an ad sporting a shot from behind of a young man in tight jeans — with a bottle of Viagra in his back pocket. One might think that conjuring the image of Bob and Liddy Dole tryin’ to get the feeling again would be shall-we-say counterproductive in reaffirming one’s vitality (the ad ran in publications like Gear, presumably to draw a young demographic). Playboy vice president Cindy Rakowitz told Brandweek the message was simply, “‘Everybody’s talking about (Viagra) and probably everybody’s using it,’ including younger men” — and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until Page Six is all over the Viagra-fueled sexploits of Leo DiCaprio and Puff Daddy — but the image remains one of the most ill-advised uses of pharmacopeia in a print ad since Esquire likened itself to Rogaine.

The ad’s most telling aspect is not the Viagra joke, however, but its tag line: “The revolution isn’t over, it’s just begun.” This insistent declaration of nonvictory hints at the crisis of an erotic magazine founded in the ’50s: Its original sexual revolution, if not decisively over, is at least at this point reduced to mop-up operations against Bill Bennett and Andrea Dworkin’s deep-jungle hideouts. That’s why the Starr investigation was such a tonic for Woodstock-era lions like Jann Wenner, who seemed positively spry given the chance to let their freak flags fly against The Man’s hang-ups one more time (the December Playboy Forum contains 17 items on the scandal). A general-interest magazine of mainstream erotica depends on a continuing revolution — Hugh Hefner told Bob Guccione Jr., in Gear magazine, “We’ll win the war (against censorship), we’ll win it battle by battle” — because after the revolution comes civil war, which is to say, market fragmentation.

But whereas the legal right of heterosexual men who are not president to get it on with hot heterosexual chicks is more or less conceded in the larger culture, there are other fronts yet, as the Matthew Shepard case shows. And in fact Playboy, at its editorial strongest, is really a magazine of libertarian culture and politics, with mild T&A thrown in for its base. Playboy Online recently ran a feature on gays and the transgendered in rural America, for instance, and the December issue includes discussions of anti-drug hysteria and privacy issues, but the cover plays up “Phil Hartman’s Guide to Office Parties” instead.

To return to the old joke, the articles, not the pictures, are probably where Playboy has the greatest chance to claim the revolutionary position it still seems to covet. Even more aggressively covering America’s big remaining sexual prejudices — rather than hunting down the world’s last accountant jokes and harrying Gloria Steinem to her grave — might at least be more likely than the Dahm girls to rattle the epaulets of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell crowd, to send a message to the Army as it polices its news racks: You want me off that wall! You need me off that wall!

The official line until recently has been that Gulf War Syndrome was purely psychological, the result of stress and trauma. (The government relented somewhat in February, admitting that chemical agents could have played a role.) In his new book, “Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government” (Library of Contemporary Thought), Hersh blasts apart the psychological theory and blames the government — including Gulf War heroes Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell — for exposing the troops to dangerous chemical agents, then abandoning them. In Hersh’s view, the powers that be had so much invested in the Gulf War being seen as a clear-cut victory that admitting negligence was impossible.

Salon recently spoke with Hersh, who is most famous for breaking the story of the My Lai massacre for the New York Times, about the state of journalism, how he would have covered the Monica Lewinsky scandal and why he thinks Gulf War veterans have been cheated.

How would you critique your colleagues who have been covering the Lewinsky scandal?

When I got to Washington in 1964, a middle-aged white man with a little girl on the side was the norm — that was the definition of a House and Senate committee chairman. My issue with the Lewinsky scandal is: big deal. We knew about Gennifer Flowers and we voted him in twice. We’ve got Washington in a real tizzy, in a huff about it, but nobody else cares because they know about this guy.

Yet you investigated John F. Kennedy’s peccadilloes for your book “The Dark Side of Camelot.”

What struck me about Jack Kennedy, and the reason I wrote about it, besides the fact that the Secret Service guys talked to me on the record, was I thought Kennedy’s recklessness, sexually, was matched by his recklessness toward trying to kill Castro. If Monica Lewinsky had been the representative of Haiti and was influencing policy there, or if she was the chief lobbyist for a major telephone company or Microsoft, that’s a different story. If she is just an example of his bad judgment, and it doesn’t show anything more than that he is a sexual desperado, I don’t see it as a big deal.

That said, if you were assigned to this story, wouldn’t you be all over it?

Yes. I’d be covering the story and loving it. It is a great Page 1 story, and that is part of our business. But I’d like to think that I wouldn’t need Steve Brill to know that Starr was leaking. I’d like to think I would have been very, very troubled by Starr’s leaking and the fact that Starr is confirming stories.

I’d also be raising a lot more questions than they have about Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp. I know Lucianne, I ran across her doing the Kennedy book, and I can tell you, her lips are to the gossip columnists’ ears. There is nothing illegal or unethical about her, but she is dangerous. I had a conversation with her, and before I could get back to her, what I said was in the newspaper.

Do you believe there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against the Clintons?

It seems clear that there is some agenda here. I am not talking about a right-wing agenda — it’s maybe a mercenary agenda that should be explored more fully. I’ve said from the beginning: There’s got to be more to Monica Lewinsky. Starr must have more on her, something more than just that she allegedly gave the president oral sex. That would have been what I was looking for. But you could no more get a conviction of Monica Lewinsky in a Washington, D.C., jury, particularly a black jury — I mean, she did a man and she didn’t tell the truth? What is the story?

Sociologically, the Lewinsky thing is unbelievable. For the last two weeks I have been out of Washington and the people I talk to don’t care. Yet they watch the coverage because it is better than the soaps.

There is also sex involved. If it was an arms deal, people wouldn’t be so titillated. Plus, she is provocative-looking.

Physically there is something — you could sort of daydream about her. She is provocative-acting. She’s not Marilyn Monroe, but the same sort of pubescent fantasy can exist. It is titillating.

The media is taking a beating this summer. Retractions and fabrications are all over the place.

We screw things up all the time.

These are pretty huge things — the CNN/TIME nerve gas story for example.

All this doesn’t surprise me. There is such an explosion of fame, fortune and glory in the news business now. Reporters are visible in ways that they have never been, particularly with the 24-hour cable. Let them go. Let them make assholes of themselves, let them fawn all over each other, let them reach for the sun, fabricate, go through this horrible spell of crap because everybody wants to be famous for their two minutes. If I did the My Lai story again, it would all be about me. It would be how I found what I did, what I had for lunch, what I said, what I smoked.

Do you think the Internet helps or hinders journalism?

Journalistically, I say, let the Internet be — I am against censorship. The reason I say let it go is this: One of the reasons the Pentagon was so effective in the briefings during the Gulf War was because at that time you had one 24-hour all-news station, CNN, and you had the networks, and if you got them you were home-free. The Internet is not a problem, it is a salvation. They will never be able to control a war again like they did the Gulf War, because it is exponential. With Matt Drudge, the public will just have to figure him out by itself. The press clearly hasn’t figured him out.

How did you go from writing about John Kennedy’s sex life to writing about Gulf War disease?

I got this series of phone calls from a guy named Tom Donnelly, a dad whose son was a Gulf War vet. I returned the call and I got this man, a Catholic, upper-middle-class guy from Connecticut, and I heard something in his voice that I hadn’t heard since Vietnam; he was radicalized. He had a son who had been in Little League, Boy Scouts and the Marines — officer training school and flight school. By 1991, he was a major flying as an Air Force pilot. He flew in 44 missions during the Gulf War and three or four years later, he got sick. The Pentagon, the military doctors initially told him it was flu. When he kept on insisting that he was ill, that something was wrong, they took him off flight status, discharged him from the military and denied him benefits. Tom Donnelly’s son was dying. And he thought there was a connection between his [Gulf War service] and his son’s illness. [Donnelly] was a guy — I am telling you — if he’d lived in Montana, he would have been in the militia.

So he was patriotic. Not the kind of guy to make waves with the military.

Right. So he mailed me stuff and once I started reading it, I said, “Wait. It can’t be.” For the record, I never looked at this from an epidemiological, from a medical point of view. But whether Gulf War disease is psychological, as the Army has been saying for seven years, or whether it is some horrible complex syndrome we won’t find out about for 20 years, these guys are sick.

Why didn’t the public hear about Gulf War Syndrome immediately after the war was over?

Nobody wanted to pee on the parade. It was our first big victory since World War II. Colin Powell was a hero. They just didn’t want anything to diminish the victory.

In your book you write about what a poor job the press did to illuminate the horrors of it.

Every reporter was put on notice that they couldn’t do any independent interviews — whether you were working in the Pentagon, for a news service or working in the field in Saudi Arabia. And the press accepted the restrictions, with a little grumbling. Why did they accept it? Because we had Colin Powell and Norm Schwarzkopf, we had heroes. We could flood the network news with these wonderful guys who were articulate and bright and decent people. They figured out: Give the press something for the nightly news, and away they go.

You say a good investigative team on a newspaper or magazine should have written about the syndrome.

I am just sorry that Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a Gulf War veteran who was ill. You know what makes those stories work is they are simple. This isn’t a simple story. When I go to journalism schools to speak, kids say, “How do you do what you do?” And I say, “Read before you write.” Well, this guy, a researcher for former Michigan Sen. Don Riegle named Jim Tuitt, read the U.N. reports. After the Gulf War ended, as part of the peace agreement, Saddam Hussein accepted U.N. sovereignty or stewardship over his weapons. They are still doing it — they call it the “unscom.” [The U.N.] put out a report within a year and a half after the war saying, “Oh, man, you Americans screwed up. Where you thought the nerve gas was, it wasn’t. There were 90 different facilities where nerve agents either were stored, manufactured or somewhere in the process that you didn’t know about.” Therefore, as Tuitt and Don Riegle said in reports which were generally ignored, too, the possibility exists that we bombed the hell out of a lot of nerve gas facilities, inadvertently, not deliberately.

How do we know there wasn’t a cover-up?

It would be wonderful to think that we covered it up because that would suggest that we had some brains. Basically, it was much worse than that. Nobody knew anything.

Why didn’t the Pentagon pay heed to what the U.N. was saying?

It is the notion of corrections. What happens in the Pentagon is, you are the head of a defense intelligence agency, or the head of a section or a new general officer, and you replace somebody who has gone on to a bigger job, and a year later, you learn that everything that your predecessor did was full of crap. Are you going to write a report saying that he did everything wrong? Are you going to say that about the man who could possibly be your next boss? There are no lessons learned. It is very sad but it is a bureaucracy.

The Pentagon repeatedly said that Gulf War Syndrome was the result of stress. It seems to me though you don’t need to be an M.D. to know that there are physiological things going on. It seems like the stress explanation was not only insulting to the vets, but it seems so unsound, medically.

They [the government] didn’t want to soil the war. The feeling was, maybe we didn’t do so well in Grenada, Somalia or Panama, but we are back now. By 1994-95 a number of VA doctors were starting to say, “This is not stress. We are seeing chromosomal damage, we’re seeing DNA damage, we’re seeing brain stem damage. There is something else at work here besides stress. Four doctors were told to stop saying those things, but they refused to stop — they either resigned or were fired. In general it was understood among the physicians within the VA that if you decided to criticize the notion of stress, you were jeopardizing your career.

Is it too strong to say that there was a conspiracy at the top levels of government to hide this disease? I know that word is loaded.

The good guys in the military are really ashamed of what happened. Let’s just say there was a shared, political perception. The factual underpinning is this: The first group to complain about symptoms were National Guards and reservists. The fact is, and I quote an assistant secretary of the Army as saying this, reservists and National Guardsmen are basically thought of as the “Christmas help.” The first complaints came from them, so there was much contempt. The attitude was, “Oh, they are just a bunch of cowards. They want a handout.” In the first couple of years, the regular Army guys didn’t come forward for two reasons: One, real men don’t cry. Two, the Army was being cut from a million to under half a million in 1991-92, and reporting symptoms might get you kicked out.

You are very critical of Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf.

My complaint about men like Powell and Schwarzkopf, who I sort of get along with, and who spoke to me on the record, is that after they retired — Powell left in ’93, Schwarzkopf in ’91 — that was it for them. They are not going to start criticizing the lack of treatment for the vets because the people that replaced them would view that as Monday morning quarterbacking and they’d rather just have peace in the family. The vets’ interpretation is that they don’t give a damn.

When I told Powell that the vets were angry he got mad at me. He said, “You tell the vets that once I retired, my obligation was done, as far as I am concerned.” My wife said, “He retired to a bestselling book, and $60,000 speech fees, and these guys retired to a life full of a disease that they were told was in their head.”

You say Gulf War disease is a case of “criminal negligence.” Who do you think is ultimately responsible?

I thought a lot about what I said. The failure of the intelligence community to know what was out there, and to understand it, that is negligence. To send boys into harm’s way, without really knowing everything about [the nerve agents]? As a journalist, I have my one-man crusade. I am going to hold these guys to the highest possible standard, whether it is George Bush or Colin Powell or Henry Kissinger. No mercy for those guys. I don’t care if Colin Powell is everybody’s pin-up hero. I don’t care if he’s retired. He owed those kids. He was out there and was a hero because of what they did, not because of what he did. If the public won’t hold leaders to the highest standard, then the press should. But they aren’t and it is a terrible failing.

In fact, lots of New Leftists collaborated with America’s enemies during the ’60s and ’70s. Why should they have been any different from the Old Leftists who spied for Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and 1940s — like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg?

As I described in my book “Radical Son,” I had my own encounters with a KGB agent in London in the mid-’60s, when I shared the New Left faith. I was wined and dined at London’s fanciest restaurants, my gracious host plying me with questions about my employer, the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell was a leader of Britain’s “peace movement” but something of a thorn in the Soviets’ side, having demanded, in one of his more noteworthy news conferences, that Moscow send MiG fighters to North Vietnam to shoot down American planes. An odd position for a self-described pacifist, but in those days Russell was being guided by an American radical named Ralph Schoenman, who was not about to let such small inconsistencies stand in the way of his revolutionary agenda.

In addition to working for Russell, I was an instructor for the University of Maryland, which held courses on U.S. military bases scattered about England. After a number of Coquilles Saint-Jacques, my dinner companion got around to asking me directly if I would supply information to him about what I saw on the bases. I told him to get lost. But he continued to hang around the New Left in London and treat other people I knew to similarly handsome lunches and dinners. How many of them received his gentle entreaties to spy for mother Russia? How many of them said yes?

Quite a few, I suspect. In fact, the number of New Leftists who actively worked with communist regimes and their intelligence agencies probably runs into the thousands. The Venceremos Brigades, composed of New Leftists who went to Cuba ostensibly to harvest sugar cane, were operated by the DGI, the acronym for Cuban intelligence. How many of them came home with more than a piece of cane as a souvenir? The CISPES committees (Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador), which were very active during the Reagan years, were affiliated with the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. New Left radicals, like Tom Hayden, met in Eastern Europe and Cuba with communist officials from Hanoi and South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front to plot the fall of the “Amerikan” empire.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If one believes, as all “progressives” did (and many still do) that America is the evil empire, then why not cooperate with its socialist enemies and governments of America’s Third World “victims”? The Wisconsin three did it; why not others?

Everybody in leadership positions in the New Left were aware of contacts like the ones I’ve mentioned, but only a handful have ever written about them. Does this mean that the contacts they made with hostile powers led to more than a pleasurable free meal? Not necessarily. On the other hand, if those contacts were on the up-and-up, why the continued reticence? At the very least, the stories would be colorful, and would also contribute to a greater understanding of those tumultuous times.

Come to think of it, what was Bill Clinton doing in Russia during that winter of 1969 but doesn’t want to talk about?