Sep
26
2008
For now the courts are siding with the National Archive, historians, and a watchdog group in a legal case to compel Vice President Dick Cheney to publicly preserve his papers for the sake of research. It is more important in Cheney’s case to preserve his records for posterity because his influence within the Bush White House has been greater (far greater?) than the influence of any other vice presidents over their respective administrations. At least, so I am told. But I have to plead quilty to ignorance of the potency, or in most cases even the names, of most vice presidents in history.
A lawsuit was filed this month by many historians and a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington out of fear that Cheney would destroy his papers rather than follow a 1978 law (spawn of Watergate) compelling documents of a presidency to be preserved. I can see grounds for this fear, since this vice president has spurned access and shown contempt for the spirit of openness during his tenure. The deliberations he presided over regarded energy policy in the first Bush term is an example of this, because Cheney fought to the end to keep those deliberations, involving energy industry leaders, secret. Cheney’s staff has also begun to assert that he is legally a part of the legislative branch (presiding over the Senate) rather than executive branch, suggesting that they would claim the presidential records law of 1978 shouldn’t apply to Cheney.
A U.S. District Judge agreed enough with the merit of the suit this week to issue a temporary injunction against destroying any Cheney papers.
Sep
13
2008
Presidential palace in Santiago burns on the day of the coup
Sept. 11 has not been just any ol’ date in Chile either. That’s because in 1973 a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet attacked the government of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende on that date. Allende died during the attack for reasons that are still disputed. Pinochet ruled as dictator for the next 17 years.
The case of 1973 is a good lesson in historical probity. I have been told more than once by people or in print that the U.S. overthrew Allende. Whatever your politics might lead you to want to believe, the U.S. in this case helped the cause of overthrowing Pinochet but did not lead it. If you want a case where the CIA piloted the overthrow of a left-leaning but democratically elected Latin American president, look instead at Guatemala in 1954.
More detail about CIA actions in Chile, and the active role of Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has emerged recently. They might be justified in some minds by the perceived need at the time to fight any whiff of communism. But they hardly seem noble in hindsight.
The CIA subsequently acknowledged it had supported the 1970 kidnapping of Chile’s top general, Rene Schneider, for refusing to use the army to prevent the country’s congress from confirming Allende’s election. The kidnapping failed, but Schneider was killed in the attempt — and Allende’s election was confirmed. . . The subsequent coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government on Sept. 11, 1973.
As dark as this chapter is in Chile’s history — and even most supporters of Pinochet’s coup found his rule too oppressive over the long haul – it is heartening to realize that the current president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was once a political prisoner under the Allende regime.
Sep
13
2008
The concept of a public memory is an intriguing one, if slippery. Russia scholar Stephen Cohen wrote recently about the polarizing effect of Stalin’s memory, especially while the Soviet era lumbered on after Stalin’s death in 1953. There were millions of survivors of the gulags called zeks, and they were obviously bitter, and some made their way back into government, and this explains the sincerity of Nikita Khrushchev –a repentent enabler of Stalin’s purges, especially in Ukraine — when he sought to “destalinize” the U.S.
S.R.
It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn and other victims concluded, which had been influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal, at a Party congress in 1961, to build a national memorial to Stalin’s victims?
