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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 113 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 28

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Anatomy of a Smear


By JOHN GREENWALD -- With reporting by Dan Goodgame and Jay
Peterzell/Washington and Priscilla Painton/Little Rock


    In the late 1930s a Harvard student traveled to Europe to
see its brutal dictatorships firsthand. He visited Mussolini's
Italy, Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Writing in
his diary, the young man confided that he had come "to the
decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy,
Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England." But
when he ran for President in 1960, John F. Kennedy never had to
explain that isolationist view. Nor would raising the issue have
made much sense, because the mature Kennedy had long since
outgrown the jottings of his impressionable youth.

    Bill Clinton has had a harder time exorcising the ghosts of
his past. Earlier in the campaign, those phantoms popped up in
the form of Gennifer Flowers, marijuana use and questions about
the draft. Last week the poltergeists were back on center stage,
as an increasingly desperate George Bush attacked Clinton for
protesting the Vietnam War while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in
1969 and for visiting Moscow in early 1970 during a school
break. In terms that recalled the red-baiting tactics of the
McCarthy era, Bush told CNN talk-show host Larry King that
Clinton should "level with the American people on the draft, on
whether he went to Moscow, how many demonstrations he led
against his country from a foreign soil.''

    Describing his Moscow trip and antiwar activities a day
later, Clinton charged that the campaign had "sunk to a new
level." Clinton has never denied his opposition to the fighting
in Vietnam. While in England, he said, he "helped to put
together a teach-in at the University of London" and also joined
a group of American antiwar protesters outside the U.S. embassy
in London.

    As for Clinton's trip to Moscow, he said he paid his own
way and "was mostly just a tourist." Clinton had plenty of
company: 40,000 Americans visited the Soviet Union in 1970 as
detente was becoming a popular word.

    Bush's comments marked the crescendo of a well-orchestrated
campaign of rumors, leaks and innuendos. They ranged from wild
suggestions of KGB links, to reports that Clinton had held
multiple passports under different names while at Oxford, to
dark hints that the young Arkansan may even have been planning
to renounce his citizenship to avoid the draft. If Bush did have
evidence for such charges that Clinton could not explain away,
the results could be devastating. But so far no shadow of proof
was forthcoming.

    Amid the furious swirl of rumors, State Department staffers
suspected that someone may have tampered with Clinton's
passport records. They informed the FBI, which launched a
hurried investigation of the file. Meanwhile, a Bush
Administration official leaked word of the investigation to the
press. The FBI investigators, however, ended the probe without
finding anything amiss.

    The red-baiting gambit had been launched by Robert Dornan,
the flamboyant right-wing Congressman who is co-chairman of the
Bush campaign in California. Dornan last month got hold of a
1989 front-page article in the Arkansas Gazette that discussed
Clinton's Moscow trip. He then began railing against Clinton in
late-night House speeches, often delivered to an empty chamber,
but nonetheless carried on C-SPAN. Besides suggesting that
Clinton may have been a dupe of the KGB, Dornan heatedly
attacked the Democrat's draft record and antiwar views.

    Few people were paying attention -- except George Bush. In
daily meetings with his top political advisers, the President
pushed staffers to find ways to exploit Dornan's charges. Most
of his advisers, deterred by Dornan's loose-cannon reputation
and lack of proof, at first shied away from the allegations. But
Bush just "wouldn't let go," says a top adviser, adding that
the charges played on the President's aversion to anything he
considers unpatriotic -- "like the flag-burning thing."

    Thus when Dornan and three other right-wing Congressmen
called on Bush and Baker in the White House at 8 a.m. last
Tuesday, they found a most attentive listener in the President.
One of the Congressmen claimed the Moscow and antiwar issues
could "kill Clinton." The very next day Bush was on the King
show demanding that his opponent come clean about his trip to
the U.S.S.R. In a phrase heavy with innuendo, the President
added, "I don't want to tell you what I really think, because
I don't have the facts . . . but to go to Moscow one year after
Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, not remember who you saw . . .
I really think the answer is, level with the American people."

    Sharply criticized in the press, and even by some prominent
Republicans, Bush promptly backed off his unsubstantiated
criticisms of the Moscow trip. But he redoubled his attacks on
the Democrat's antiwar record. Coming on the eve of the crucial
first debate, the apparent aim of the Bush strategy was to sow
new doubts about Clinton's trustworthiness and rattle the
Democrat into making fresh gaffes. But the ploy, smacking as it
does of dirty tricks, could well backfire. "This kind of attack
makes Bush look more strident and less presidential," says Ed
Rollins, a former Republican strategist. "Unless Bush does
something that suddenly convinces voters he would be a different
President in his second term, Clinton could win with a
landslide."