Biden
and Trump
1989
Where Were They?
I picked up a
free give away book in the library recently (my favorite book source). The library discards allow me to read at my
pace without worrying about renewing or paying some minimal fine. The book I’m into now is “The Year That Changed The World, The Untold
Story Behind The Fall of the Berlin Wall", by Michael Myer. Myer was bureau chief for Newsweek in 1989 assigned to cover
Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans from 1988 to 1992. He was able to travel quite freely though
Eastern Europe and interview leaders and
the up and comers of the day. He
gives us a great eyewitness account of the demise of Communism in Eastern
Europe in that period, how quickly it came starting in Poland and Hungary under
the watchful eye of Mikael Gorbachev then head of the Soviet Union and the
misconception of what was happening on the part of a new regime in Washington
under George H.W. Bush whose team had just taken over in January, 1989. That misconception was portrayed by the Bush
administration on advice from Dick Cheney to upgrade nuclear weapons in Europe
at a time when the Soviets were in a lot of economic difficulty and looking for
a better way to deal with the West in non military ways. Once Bush caught on, Cheney was kicked to the
sidelines in the new administration. Of
course he would make a comeback in Bush Junior’s gang.
What is
especially intriguing to me in reading this book is realizing how much I had
forgotten and what the world seems to have forgotten about events of
thirty-five years ago. We get so focused
on current events we forget what brought
us to our modern concepts of politics and international relations. When you think of 1989 of course the Berlin
Wall and the Tiananmen Square come quickly into focus. But the depth of field of that focus in
reality is very shallow. Yet we watched
TV or read the papers probably everyday that year. Our memories are faint and selective as to
what affected each of us, and for the most part we went on living our lives,
doing our jobs, paying our bills, and looking forward to our next vacation, or
watching our children grow.
As Lincoln said
at Gettysburg, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war......etc.” Today do we remember why we are engaged in
this great uncivil dislike for each other?
Where did it come from? Who are
the real protagonists? What side should
I be on?
Let’s look at a couple of things Michael Myer talks about in
this book written in 2009 about events that were already thirty years in the
past when he wrote it.
Remember the
Solidarity movement that started with workers in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, Poland led by Lech Walesa? It was put down by the Polish Communist
regime under Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski recognizable by his sunglasses and
‘ramrod stiff bearing’ Myer recounts.
Martial law was declared in
December, 1981. Walesa was
imprisoned and won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1983. Yet by June, 1989 the times had changed and
Walesa and Solidarity were running in open elections against the Communists. At the same time a reversal of fortune was
under way in Hungary under another new up and comer Miklos Nemeth. Hungary decided they would no longer need an
electric fence and watch towers along their border with Austria. It was a subtle invite to East Germans who
came in droves to Hungary in the summer to continue their vacations and cross into the west via the
Austro-Hungarian border and on into West
Germany. It was causing Erich Honnecker
the head of the regime in East Germany to have conniption fits. Everyone was looking over their shoulders to
see what Gorbachev would do. At first
reluctant and threatening, Gorby quickly gave in and did nothing; he let it
happen.
Myer relates on page 61. Others in the (US) administration were no less
wary. Never mind that, in April, George
Kennan, dean of American Sovietologists and the original author of America’s
bedrock strategy of containment, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
that the Soviet Union no longer posd a threat.
Never mind that Margaret Thatcher declared the Cold War to be over,
James Baker would suggest that “Gorbachev’s strategy was premised on splitting
the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe.’ Hardliners in the Defense Department, led by
Cheney and a phalanx of aides who would become famous in a later Bush
administration –among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby – argued against more moderate State Department officials who saw the
changes gathering force in the East bloc as an opportunity for closer
engagement. Cheney was especially
virulent in his suspicions, all but calling Gorbachev an imposter and a
fraud. .....giving too much credence
to Gorbachev’s “new thinking”he told CNN
in late April, exposed the United States to the risk, indeed the likelihood,
that he would fail and be replaced by someone “far more hostile” to the United
States.
Boy was Cheney
right on that last statement looking at today’s world and knowing that the wall
coming down in 1989 was indeed the catalyst to Putin’s career. ‘Puty’ at the time was an intel officer in
the KGB office in East Berlin. GB
June 4, 1989 What
Happened on that day?
If you asked me
I would say, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, because I was in Beijing with my
family at the time. But there was more. It was the day of that first free election in
Poland between the Communists and Solidarity and others. And there was another event long
forgotten. Can you remember that
one? Here is Myer’s description from
Page 83
The carnival that was the Polish election should have been a spectacle
that commanded world attention, especially in America. Here was democracy, bursting forth with
tremendous vitality in a communist nation that was a linchpin of the Soviet
bloc. America had championed Solidarity
for more than a decade. Lech Walesa was
a household name. How was it, then that
these dramatic events failed to spark a realization that change was on the
march in Eastern Europe, that the Cold War was profoundly and quickly changing?
The
answer was Tiananmen Square. The
massacre of demonstrating students in China – with its dramatic TV footage of
rumbling tanks, riot police firing tear gas,
screams, shots and bodies in the streets – occurred on the same day as
the Polish election. June 4 also brought
news of the death, at eighty-nine, of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, the
father of the Iranian Revolution. The
imagery from China, coupled with the fanatical turmoil of Khomeini’s funeral,
thrust Poland’s political transformation to the background of the news. “After that,” one Bush aide later told me,
“it was almost impossible to focus on anything else. It was Tiananmen, Tiananmen, Tiananmen. And then Iran. Eastern Europe? Yes, it was on the radar. But not really.”
July
19, 2024
In light of
current events which I find disturbing in their own right, I asked what some of
the main players today were doing in 1989.
Let’s take a look. I googled
Donald Trump and 1989 and the following article from The New York Times came
up. Here are some excerpts. Basically Trump is being called out for an ad
he placed in four NYC newspapers calling for the death penalty to be brought
back after the conviction of five teenagers in the rape of a Central Park
jogger. The boys were later acquitted,
but when asked about it in 2019, Trump refused to acknowledge his mistake. The rest of this is probably a bit long but I
thought I would add it for the benefit of those who wish to do the
reading. One interesting quote in the
second article about Biden is that he
was soliciting advice from his son Hunter even back then. Hunter must have been
a teenager or early twenties. So soon we
forget. Oh yes and how about Victor
Orban of Hungary? What was he up
to? G.B.
Meanwhile back at the ranch in good old
Budapest, things were getting hot in the goulash. The new Hungarian leaders hoping to revive
their nation after the 1956 intervention by the Soviet Union that resulted in
the death of Imre Nagy, had set up a memorial service to honor Nagy and his
associates who were summarily executed in 1956.
Myer explains and turns on another lightbulb.
Page 87 from “The Year that Changed the World” Michael Myer
So
it was on June 16 (1989) that Nemeth and Pozsgay stood beside the caskets,
shoulder to shoulder with families of the victims and leaders of the political
opposition that they helped create.
Nemeth would later confide that he had been deeply worried for their
safety.
I got quite interesting phone calls, some threteninng my life,” he subsequely
told an interviewer.. “ ‘If you go there
, we will kill you.’ “ Neither man
spoke, that was for the organizers, who one by one called for tolerance and
democracy. The crowd applauded
politely. Then the last speaker , a
young man, just twenty-six years old ,
stepped forward. Guess Who?
He was Victor Orban, the charismatic,
wild-haired and outspoken leader of Fidesz, the League of Young Democrats, the
new political party of Hungary’s youth.
Enough of allusive symbolism. He
said directly what everyone else was merely thinking. “In the sixth casket we bury communism!” he shouted.
“If we have learned anything over the past four decades, it is that
communism and democracy do not mix!”.....”We must see to it that the ruling
party can never use force against us again.”
Victor Orban today that bastion of suppression and Russian ass
kissing. My MY. GB
Trump Will Not Apologize for Calling for Death Penalty Over Central Park Five
By Jan
Ransom, NYT
“You
have people on both sides of that,” the president said when asked about the
wrongly convicted defendants.
Hey, that sounds like what he said after the Charlottesville riots. GB
•
President
Trump refused on Tuesday to apologize for his harsh comments in 1989 about the
Central Park Five, the men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of a rape in
New York City.
“Mr.
President, will you apologize to the Central Park Five? They’ve been
exonerated, there have been videos and movies shown about the case, and you
came out with a full-page ad saying that they should die, that they should have
the death penalty. Do you — ” “Why do you bring that question up now? It’s an
interesting time to bring it up. You have people on both sides of that. They
admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of
the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case.
So we’ll leave it at that.”
00:00
0:3
“I want to hate
these murderers and I always will,” Mr. Trump wrote in the May 1989 ad. “I am
not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
He wrote in all
caps: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!”
|
At the time, Mr.
Trump was an up-and-coming real estate developer, but the advertisements
attracted widespread attention.
The five teenagers
were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to prison for gang-raping and nearly
killing Ms. Meili.
They said the
police had coerced them into confessing to a crime they did not commit. Their
convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city paid $41 million in 2014 to
settle their civil rights lawsuit.
Barry Scheck, a
founder of the nonprofit Innocence Project who was part of a team of lawyers
who worked with prosecutors to reinvestigate the Central Park Five case, called
Mr. Trump’s response disturbing.
“It’s shocking and
deeply troubling that after all of these years, he would not have
recognized that by calling for the reinstitution of the death penalty, it
contributed to an atmosphere that deprived these men of a fair trial,” Mr.
Scheck said.
The Manhattan
district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in a statement on Tuesday that the
men “were wrongfully convicted and what happened to them was an injustice.”
A Netflix
mini-series, “When They See Us,” which premiered this month, renewed focus on
the case and generated public outrage.
Much of that outrage targeted Ms.
Fairstein,
the former prosecutor. She has resigned from a number of prominent boards,
including that of Vassar College, her alma mater.
The lead prosecutor
on the 1989 case, Elizabeth Lederer, resigned this month as a
lecturer at
Columbia Law School.
The Netflix series
is a dramatized account based on the experiences of the men — Korey Wise, Kevin
Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam — who spent years in prison before being
cleared of the charges.
The district
attorney’s office determined that the attack on Ms. Meili was an assault committed by a man named
Matias Reyes,
who surfaced in 2002 and confessed to the crime, an admission confirmed by DNA
evidence.
He had been accused
of raping, maiming and murdering on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Ms. Meili was
the second woman he raped and beat in the park that week.
The five boys were
elsewhere in the park at the time, an investigation by the district attorney’s
office found in 2002.
Jan
Ransom is a reporter
covering New York City. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered law
enforcement and crime for The Boston Globe. She is a native New Yorker. More
about Jan Ransom
Hmm.
What does this say about our boy’s willingness to admit he might have
rushed to judgment, that he might have made a mistake?
Biden
in 1987-88
Now let’s look at what Joe Biden was up to
back in 1988.
From Time Magazine
UPDATED: AUGUST 2, 2019 1:20 PM EDT | ORIGINALLY
PUBLISHED: JULY 30, 2019 4:05 PM EDT
“Then, as now in fact,
Biden is not as fast on his feet as a successful candidate usually is,” argues
Laurence I. Barrett, a former TIME national political correspondent who
profiled Biden during his three-month-long presidential bid in the run-up to
the 1988 election.
Biden had been on
presidential watch-lists for years by that point. When he was elected to the
Senate in 1972, he was already seen as White House
material. TIME’s walk-up of Election Day that year noted the
extraordinary enthusiasm surrounding his Senate campaign, pointing out that he
would be old enough to run for president in 1976, if only by 61 days.
He mulled the
idea in the years that followed. By the time he did declare his candidacy for
the presidency, on June 9, 1987, he had been in the Senate for more than a
decade, though his age — now seen by some as a weakness —
was still one of his strengths.
His age? Oh, yes that was 1988, he was only 44
then. GB
“What people don’t
remember today about Biden in the 1980s is that he was considered by quite a
few people as a bright new hope, different from other Democrats,” says Barrett.
President Ronald Reagan
had won two presidential elections, and the Democratic field faced a pretty
wide-open race. The seven major contenders were nicknamed the Seven Dwarfs.
(Biden joked they
should be called the seven deadly sins, saying after Gary Hart backed out
amid a scandal
over an affair that,
“We’ve got an opening for lust.”) The lack of a front runner seemed like a
great opportunity for Biden.
“The Democrats had taken
two shellackings at the hands of Reagan, and there was this thought, not really
based on a lot of facts, that the Democrats were too soft, too feminine, too
much into interest
politics, and Biden was seen by his own people as an antidote to
that — good looking and athletic — who would come across as stronger,” Barrett
says.
Not that the candidate was
without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his
greatest liability,” Barrett wrote shortly
after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly
prescient.
The then-44-year-old
Senator was great at giving inspiring speeches and people were attracted to his
youthful energy, but he could also come off like a “hothead,” as he did in his
“angry”
questioning of Secretary of State George Shultz when the Senate heard testimony
about South Africa in 1986. His position in the Senate offered him a chance to
show his skill. In particular, as Biden chaired the Judiciary Committee, he
hoped to gained more national attention during the uproar over polarizing
conservative Supreme Court
nominee Robert Bork. Biden, in charge of the confirmation
hearings, oversaw what was seen as potentially “the culminating ideological
showdown of the Reagan era,” as TIME put it back
then. “For Chairman Biden, the hearings could provide a spark for his
presidential campaign by giving him a chance to show his mettle in front of a
national television audience.”
But Biden didn’t get a
chance to shine during the Bork hearings in the way he had hoped.
A few days before
they began, video surfaced that spliced together footage of U.K. Labour Party
leader Neil Kinnock giving a speech and Biden clearly quoting Kinnock at the
Iowa State Fair without attribution. More examples of misattribution came to
light, and the plagiarism scandal became
more memorable than his leadership during the Bork confirmation hearing. His
mouth — or rather, what he failed to say — got him in trouble again.
Here’s how TIME described why
the fallout was so intense:
[T]he Biden brouhaha illustrates the
six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.
1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. “The basic
rap against Biden,” explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a
candidate of style, not substance.”
2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock
kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior
concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.
3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom
Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know
what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”
4) The Press Piles On. Once textual
fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had
failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves
these transgressions would not have been worth noting.
5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During
his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a
course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published
law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden
was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only
because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.
6) An Overwrought Press Conference.
With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the
benefits of public confession, even though he called himself “stupid” and his
actions “a mistake.” Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by
also insisting that it was “ludicrous” to attribute every political idea.
The “final blow”
for the campaign came when Newsweek unearthed C-SPAN
footage of Biden rattling off his academic accomplishments, including saying
that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th
out of 85. My highlights GB
Biden announced he was
dropping out of the race on Sept. 24, 1987. (To make things even, Biden later
jokingly gave Kinnock
some of his speeches to use “with or without attribution” during a January 1988
trip to Europe.) About twenty years later, in his 2008 memoir Promises
to Keep: On Life and Politics, he wrote that the plagiarism scandal
was his own fault. “When I stopped trying to explain to everybody and thought
it through, the blame fell totally on me,” he wrote.
“Maybe the reporters traveling with me had seen me credit Kinnock over and
over, but it was Joe Biden who forgot to credit Kinnock at the State Fair
debate.” At least he is admitting
some fault. GB
Barrett helped break
the news that
the Kinnock attack video had come from the campaign of one of Biden’s main
opponents, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Paul Tully, a top aide to
Dukakis, denied, on the record, that the video had come from the campaign, and
Barrett says Tully expressed disbelief that the story would run anyway when
they saw each other in Iowa. “I told you we were doing this story,” Barrett
recalls telling Tully. “He looked at me as if I had done something awful.”
Dukakis at first denied the story when the magazine hit newsstands, but hours
later took back his denial. It was a particular embarrassment for the man known
as the “straight
arrow” candidate because of his “positive
campaigning” tactics. Two of his aides stepped down: John
Sasso, who leaked the video, and Tully, for
lying to TIME.
The public was equally
outraged.
Letters to the
editor published in
TIME offer a glimpse at the public reaction, finding neither Biden nor Dukakis
to be honest or trustworthy. “Biden lied in situations in which it was not
necessary or relevant,” wrote a Los Angeles reader. “I am alarmed that neither
candidate viewed these acts as immoral and representative of his character.”
Another reader was alarmed about
a year later when Dukakis rehired Sasso after his campaign started to “tank,”
literally — a goofy photo of him posing in a military tank was turned into
an ad that
painted Dukakis as not taking national security issues seriously enough. When
the election rolled around, Republican George H.W. Bush won. “Dukakis might
have been spared some of [his] mistakes had Sasso been at his elbow,” Barrett
recalls many thinking.
Biden’s short-lived 1988
campaign would end up having long-lasting effect on future political campaigns
and political journalism, with Walter Shapiro arguing in
a December 1987 TIME essay that it had helped turn political reporters into
“character cops” who trade in “paparazzi politics and pop psychology.”
And for Biden, there was a
silver lining to being driven out of the race: It saved his life. In February
of 1988, he had a headache that turned out to be a brain aneurysm. He had
surgery, and he had to have surgery again in the spring when a second smaller
aneurysm formed. “There is no doubt — the doctors have no doubt — that had I
remained in the race, I’d be dead,” he told TIME later that
fall, at his first event since the aneurysms. He also joked that “The good news
is that I can do anything I did before. The bad news is that I can’t do
anything better.”
When he’d had announced
his candidacy back in 1987, TIME reported that he had asked his then-teenage
son Hunter if he should run. “You should,” Hunter said. “If you don’t do it
now, I couldn’t see you doing it some other time.” My highlights. GB
Hunter Biden, of course,
was wrong.
Biden ran for the
Democratic nomination again in 2008. He didn’t secure the nomination, but went
on to serve as Vice President of the United States under Barack Obama. In his
eight years in the office, he built up a foreign policy portfolio that included
the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal. Now he hopes his policy
portfolios and his high poll numbers, not his past runs for the White House,
will define his candidacy.
“The huge difference
between now and 1988 is that Biden has much more of a cause now,” says Barrett.
“In ’88 he couldn’t really formulate why he was running. He didn’t have an
ideological cause the way Reagan had a cause. Now we know why he’s running. He
thinks he’s the guy who can defeat Trump.”
This is the way the system works. GB
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