Onetime Mayor of Cleveland and Governor of Ohio George Voinovich may very well be remembered as the senator who, briefly but memorably so, lost his composure during a long May 25th speech proscribing the sight of a United Nations General Assembly seat occupied by a hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassador from the United States joining the other one hundred ninety hard-nosed, impolite, narrowly focused ambassadors. This ambassador, one John Bolton, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, would stray from the politics of Turtle Bay's international brotherhood — he would instead bring the politics of President Bush, the "forward strategy of freedom," defending freedom by defeating tyranny, and Senator Voinovich indeed argued that the president staffed departments to follow his delegation. Voinovich insisted on a "proclivity to support the president's nominee." But he made an exception for John Bolton.
The weeping took place six weeks ago and all the attendant guffaws and clever burlesque have receded to a low chuckle heard from the right, but matters encircling Voinovich's aria are yet locked on course. John Bolton's floor vote remains overdue, undone business in the Senate; the position on foreign policy held by about two-fifths of the Senate, as expressed by Voinovich, resolute. The present filibuster may be thwarted through procedure but with no political excurrent, Voinovich's late-May speech is something we will definitely hear again — even if Bolton goes to Secretariat — so worth scrutiny now.
George Voinovich drew generously from the testimony of other men he had as Senator nominated who should have, by the senator's own expectations, served President Bush's executive agenda — yet when in appointed office failed to do so, while Bolton did. And Voinovich never explained exactly why the White House would accept of Bolton what he could not, nor why Bush would reward failure, nor how subordinates could be more trustworthy in judgment of a peer than their mutual boss. Still, it was their word against Bolton's, and for Voinovich Bolton's lost.
Voinovich offered the Senate floor transcripts, among others, from Thomas Hubbard and Larry Wilkerson. Former Ambassador to South Korea Hubbard was summoned to explain why he believed a speech on North Korea, delivered by Bolton in July 2003, damaged the "six-party talks" that convened in Beijing one month later. Like every dictator before him, Kim Jong Il has assigned most of Pyongyang's resources to the acquisition of a better bastinado than obliterative artillery batteries aimed south at Seoul — the atomic bomb — and has abided commitments from the 1994 Agreed Framework to piecemeal bargains with all the diligence of a philanderer. The August 2003 talks were fruitless and Hubbard was willing to place blame on Bolton's "derogatory terms." Voinovich claimed that Bolton's sins — which included referring to North Korea as, spare us, a "dictatorship" and Kim Jong Il an "extortionist" — had violated administration orders by, in Hubbard's opinion, refusing to geld his script. Yes, Foggy Bottom sensibilities were pricked. But Bolton served the president, as did the department, and in January of 2005 Bolton was still in employment when then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called out Pyongyang as one of seven "outposts of tyranny."
Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, was selected by Voinovich for his public estimate of Bolton's mettle. The estimate was low. Bolton was for Wilkerson "a lousy leader," "an abysmal ambassador," and, most important to the Ohio senator, "incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views." Oh? Wilkerson, a subordinate to the White House with Bolton, hailed President Bush's stance on Fidel Castro's Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth." Voinovich left that GQ magazine quote out.
The senator's speech was coherent while it was literal — while George Voinovich was telling the Senate chambers what somebody else said. When Voinovich concluded, his thesis unraveled. Though the senator was soon besotted with tears he must have seen to drafting his speech beforehand, and so the last passage — beginning with contradictions and ending with gibberish — can only reflect George Voinovich's soberest judgments on America's diplomatic prosecution of the war, and the strength of his defense of a vote for reform and against Bolton.
It was over President Theodore Roosevelt's favorite and memorable saying that the senator stumbled first. According to Roosevelt, one should speak — not walk, in Voinovich's words — softly and carry a big stick. Said big stick was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion, exertion and foreign intervention of American armed forces. President Bush has taken this conviction and expanded its province far beyond the nation's material interests, and in his January inaugural address submitted it as the nation's cardinal moral obligation. Voinovich suggested Roosevelt encouraged a light tread, failing to describe an inch of Roosevelt's character or a moment of his political and professional careers; a misreading that would have angered the man had he been alive to overhear.
From his political entrance by way of the New York legislature in 1881 — at age twenty-three — to his Long Island procession onward four decades later, Theodore Roosevelt was not one for complaisance. His ambition was reform, his method one of confrontation; disliked by those who preferred he stay put and mind his situation, Roosevelt won respect from others who recognized integrity in brusque action.
Did it occur to the senator that Roosevelt's impassioned, fortified nationalism was known as "jingo doctrines" to his political opponents? That as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an office from where fighting words could be made with steel authority, he exclaimed that "no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war"? That Roosevelt's cavalry charge up San Juan Hill was "the great day" of his life? The man Voinovich thought to have "walked" softly was the man who nearly occupied anthracite mines with the United States Army. True enough, contemporary William Roscoe Thayer lamented in an effusive 1919 biography of the late president that "many of us dismissed Roosevelt's warnings then as the outpourings of a jingo," wrongly, Thayer concluded, as "we misjudged him." But Roosevelt was vastly more pugilistic than John Bolton will ever be, and consequent to public record — as opposed to hearsay on Bolton — did not encounter such a fussy jury. Sometimes ignorance is ironic and sometimes it is painful; in Voinovich's absent-minded grab for an unexamined phrase, it was both.
Having confused Theodore Roosevelt with William McKinley, whose spine Roosevelt colorfully likened to "chocolate eclair," Voinovich went forth and asked the White House for "an ambassador who is interested in encouraging other people's points of view."
Full stop. What is he talking about? By definition, to negotiate one complies only with as many opposing demands as is necessary to score marked concessions or defend critical assets. Able practicing diplomats are stern stuff; they dicker but they do not acquiesce, and they certainly do not encourage other points of view. That much can be gleaned even from the likes of Larry Wilkerson. Unfortunately for him, and for Voinovich's working definition, diplomats are employed to follow executive policy; if their own "point of view" conflicts baldly enough, the "encouragement" they receive is towards the door.
Voinovich's request runs particularly counter to recent Near East overtures made by the United States' lead diplomat, Secretary of State Rice. In Cairo and Riyadh, the secretary challenged competing "points of view" that consisted of two brands of autocracy and the West's obsolete and morally diffident penchant for an unstable "balance of power." Qualification ran through Rice's speeches and the Bush administration's demands on behalf of Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's respective populations but the impulse was strong, an unmistakable repudiation of authoritarian societies than can violently circumvent otherwise constrained despot states — irrespective of the practice of liberalizing, which, however eventual, will prove in progress to be complicated and uneven.
George Voinovich ended with an intonation of hollow phrases, talking of "consensus builders" and "symbiotic relationships," as if extricating the free world from its fifty years of alternate placation and capitalization of tyrants were biological, or to be accomplished in a sit-down PTA meeting over lemonade and shortbread cookies. Or that John Bolton would become the only American envoy; he was nominated as Ambassador to the United Nations, not sole inheritor of the State Department. Why was Voinovich crying for the sake of an international body that has increasingly alleged its own sovereignty while falling to bureaucratic incompetence and dictatorial subversion? Oil-for-Food is tawdry enough to consider Bolton's quip that ten floors ought to be chucked from Secretariat. What about the Security Council's shoulder-shrug on genocide, be it Rwandan, Sudanese, Tibetan or Balkan? Blue-helmeted prostitution and rape in at least half a dozen countries has not been committed by a handful of criminal rogues, it has been systematic. What cut of man will the senator see put to work in Turtle Bay?
Incomprehensibly, George Voinovich devoted several sentences to diplomatic victories that were clearly hard-won by John Bolton: Article 98 agreements to protect against the para-state International Criminal Court, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the 1991 repeal of the anti-semitic Resolution 3379. Not enough. Voinovich held highest a man who would "promote diplomacy." Again — what?
On this, Teddy Roosevelt, the Commander-in-Chief Voinovich should have known better than to have invoked, warned that "the diplomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier." It is hard to explain how the deposition of Saddam Hussein has not given the Bush administration the big stick keeping Syria out of Beirut and democratists active in every other Near East capital. Yet the senator from Ohio wants reform without dispute, policy success without discord, his language matching what comes chiefly from the left placing enormous weight on the opinions of the unhelpful and the adversarial. His May 25th speech betrayed a greater trust in the Washington bureacracy that has lost a succession of battles both political and ideological. While Voinovich remains one of the forty-odd in blockage, the nomination of John Bolton languishes.
What does George Voinovich believe? He professed faith in the work of John Bolton, if not the man himself. That will be a point of reference, as the senator's sympathy for traditionalist foreign policy was on May 26th stronger than any personal disaffection. Voinovich should understand that Bolton shares with President Bush a certain estrangement from the capital establishment, and that if Bolton does not go to the United Nations, someone very like him will.