Who Let the Dogs In? (52 page)

With awe and reverence, I report that Timerman at one time or another ticked off practically everybody. He was of the Saul Alinsky school when it came to popularity—Alinsky, the great Chicago radical, was once given some award and afterward said to his organizers, “Don’t worry, boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever.”

I would call Timerman a fearless man, but he wasn’t fearless. He was brave.

His book
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number
—the account of his thirty-month imprisonment and torture by the Argentine military in the late 1970s—is one of the most poignant testimonies ever written by a political prisoner and will remain a classic of world literature. In it, he never poses as a hero but instead writes frankly about the terror and loneliness he experienced, weeping silently in his cell as his captors passed and spat the word
Jew!
at him.

His memoirs, on which he was working at the end of his life, reportedly deal extensively with his fears. But courage is not the absence of fear—it is the ability to fight despite fear. And Timerman always did.

Jacobo Timerman was born in 1923 in Bar, Ukraine, in a Jewish family that fled the pogroms when he was five and settled in the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires. He grew up in poverty and all his life fought for powerless people. He was a radical in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Jack London, Erich Maria Remarque, and Henri Barbusse.

As a teenager, he became a passionate Zionist, but he was never a man of party. He had studied engineering, but in 1950 he joined a Buenos Aires newspaper and soon became a respected political reporter.

He and some other young journalists started a weekly newsmagazine in the manner of
Time.
He later sold it and started the newspaper
La Opinion,
another successful progressive publication.

In 1976, a military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón and began the infamous “dirty war” against the leftist terrorists called Montoneros and anyone else who opposed the junta. Timerman often received death threats from both the right and the left; he sometimes published defiant responses on his front page. The Montoneros bombed his home; the junta finally had him arrested.

The military charged Timerman with being part of an alleged conspiracy to set up a Jewish state in southern Argentina; Jews make up 1 percent of the population of Argentina but accounted for 10 percent of the victims of the “dirty war.” Officially Argentina now claims that more than nine thousand people “disappeared” during that war, but most human-rights groups place the figure closer to thirty thousand.

After two and a half years of torture, during which three judicial proceedings found no evidence against Timerman, the Argentine Supreme Court ordered his release. An international human-rights campaign helped to free him; Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Vatican, and many human rights organizations all helped. The junta finally illegally stripped Timerman of his citizenship, took all his property, and deported him to Israel.

Timerman arrived shortly before Israel’s war against Lebanon, which culminated in the hideous massacres of civilians at Sabra and Shatila. Of course, Timerman spoke out against the atrocities and wrote a scathing book,
The Longest War.
He also wrote, with his usual piercing vigor, against the Israeli torture of Palestinians.

Naturally, this made Timerman, the lifelong Zionist, highly unpopular in Israel. He left the country.

Timerman also had a cameo role in American politics. The pro-Israeli magazine
The New Republic
attacked him for
The Longest War,
and even before he went to Israel, the neoconservative intellectuals, in a most despicable episode, tried to destroy his reputation.

Christopher Hitchens of
The Nation
once heard Irving Kristol, editor of the right-wing
Commentary
, say that Timerman had made up the entire story of his imprisonment and torture—that it had never happened. This was after Timerman’s testimony had destroyed the nomination of Ernest Lefever to be President Reagan’s point man on human rights. Lefever so patently did not care about human rights that the nomination was offensive to the point of being obscene.

At the time, the Reaganites, who disliked Carter’s policy of emphasizing human rights, were advancing a peculiar theory that torture and oppression by left-wing or “totalitarian” regimes were evil but that torture and oppression by right-wing or “authoritarian” regimes were somehow forgivable. It was not known at the time, but the Argentine junta had a contract to train the Nicaraguan contras being supported by the Reagan administration. In a memorable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Timerman quietly noted that when you are being tortured, it really doesn’t make much difference to you what the politics of your torturers are.

Timerman’s devotion to human rights, unlike that of some Americans, was never swayed by his political perspective. He often attacked the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. His book
Cuba: A Journey
contains, among other things, a brilliant attack on Gabriel García Márquez, the respected left-wing writer who has been notably uncritical of Castro.

What a record, what a life. Go with God, brave fighter.

November 1999

Tom DeLay I

A
FTER
KENNETH STARR,
the man most responsible for the impeachment of President Clinton was House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a Texan best known for campaign fund-raising techniques that smack of extortion and political judgments based exclusively on radical right-wing passions.

Were it not for DeLay, Clinton almost surely would have been censured late last year and the case would have been closed. But DeLay wanted nothing less than Clinton’s expulsion, to say nothing of prolonging Washington’s tawdry morality play. After all, in terms of political advancement and consolidation of personal power, the former bug exterminator is probably the biggest winner in Washington.

No matter what the fallout from the impeachment process, most observers think there is little chance that the power DeLay had before it started will be diminished, at least in the immediate future. And chances are he will never stop trying to triumph over the president.

He knew how to win during the impeachment debate last fall. In public, DeLay said GOP congressmen were free to vote their consciences. But his colleagues had no doubt about how he wanted them to behave, nor of the punishment that awaited them if they did otherwise. They knew that the man who wants to restore DDT to the American landscape, and who treats the Constitution like a bug, has the power to cut off their political funding.

For his part, DeLay talked about “secret evidence,” which turned out to be a rumor that Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances to a woman twenty years ago. The woman in question has told conflicting versions of the episode. In mid-February she recanted her earlier denials that Clinton had misbehaved.

After the impeachment vote, DeLay issued a statement saying a censure vote could never have succeeded because “the White House will never negotiate in good faith.” Then he went back to his discredited secret evidence and urged senators to examine what he called the “reams of evidence that have not been publicly aired and are available only to members.”

DeLay, fifty-two, is a somewhat beefy-faced fellow with a helmet of perfectly groomed dark hair. He’s normally genial, with the air of a small-town car dealer experienced at being professionally affable. He and his wife of thirty-one years, Christine, have a daughter, Danielle, and two foster children. When DeLay is not angry, he comes across not as a nut but as a man given to ill-advised enthusiasms—such as bringing back DDT. Nothing, however, in his manner or conversation would lead you to think he is a natural leader.

The son of an oil field–drilling contractor, he grew up in Texas and spent part of his childhood in Venezuela. He graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and went to work for a pesticide company. Several years later DeLay bought his own outfit, Albo Pest Control, which he boasts was the “Cadillac of exterminators” in Houston.

He ran for the Texas Legislature in 1978 because he was upset about government regulation of pesticides and how much it was costing him. “Dereg” has been his slogan ever since. One colleague has said DeLay wasn’t “a player” in the Legislature and was neither a Goody Two-shoes nor a raving ideologue.

In 1984 he ran for Congress from a district on the Gulf Coast, part of a region that boasts more than half of the nation’s petrochemical production and one fourth its oil-refining capacity.

In his early years in Congress, DeLay tended to keep his bizarre views out of the headlines. But in 1988 one of his barmier moments occurred in public. According to the
Houston Press,
DeLay gave an impassioned defense of Dan Quayle, who was then under fire for using family ties to get into a National Guard unit and out of serving in Vietnam. DeLay explained to reporters a theretofore little-noted phenomenon. DeLay claimed there was no room in the army for people like himself and Quayle because so many minority youths had gone into uniform to escape poverty and the ghetto. This remarkable explanation left his audience dumbfounded. After DeLay left the microphone, a television reporter asked, “Who was that idiot?”

In 1994 DeLay started his own political action committee, called Americans for a Republican Majority, and a “corporate alliance” called Project Relief, composed mostly of lobbyists who wanted relief from government regulations. According to the Federal Election Commission, DeLay received more contributions from PACs than any Republican other than Newt Gingrich in the 1996 campaign. The money lobbyists give to Armpac is in turn distributed to Republican candidates, who then owe DeLay both votes and loyalty. His contributions to the famous class of Republican freshmen in 1994 enabled him to win his race for majority whip by three votes.

During the 1995 budget crisis, DeLay was instrumental in getting Gingrich to close the government. “Screw the Senate. It’s time for all-out war,” he said. Then, when Gingrich decided to cut a deal with Clinton, DeLay led an unsuccessful rebellion against Gingrich. Republicans, including DeLay, contended that Clinton had blindsided them by going on television to attack the party minutes after they thought they had a deal. DeLay never trusted him again: “I don’t believe a word he says.” Despite the hideous drubbing that Republicans took in the polls, DeLay still says, “Our biggest mistake was backing off from the government shutdown. We should have stuck it out.”

In 1996 DeLay reacted to Clinton’s State of the Union address with rage. Asked by a reporter if he had liked any part of the speech, DeLay bellowed, “Are you kidding! I was so shocked I couldn’t even boo. I’ve never seen such a performance. I got knots in my stomach watching the president of the United States look straight into the eyes of the American people and lie. I have already counted twenty-one lies, and I didn’t even have an advance copy of the speech.” Eventually, DeLay claimed to have found forty-seven lies but the State of the Union address faded from the news.

TOM DELAY’S
power may continue to grow, but there is no question that his ludicrous political judgments have made him vulnerable. He is, after all, seen as the man largely responsible for giving the Republican revolution its image as mean, radically extreme, and in bed with corporate special interests. He not only favored the folly of shutting down the federal government in 1995 but is almost solely responsible for the widespread impression that Republicans are out to gut every environmental protection law ever passed.

On the House floor DeLay described the Environmental Protection Agency as “the Gestapo of government, purely and simply . . . one of the major claw hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents.” He introduced bills to destroy both the Clean Air and the Clean Water acts, and let lobbyists help him draft legislation calling for a moratorium on federal regulations. According to their own pollsters, this anti-environmental image has cost the party dearly.