Local Politics, Global Power

Hart and Mondale make America’s world role the key issue

To fathers and sons who argued the Viet Nam War over the kitchen table, the scene was thoroughly familiar. The stern elder, graying hair neatly cropped and parted, lectures on the global responsibilities of a world power. The skeptical younger man, thick hair curling over ears, demands to know why American boys must be sent off to die in vain. Each loses his temper and falls to impugning the integrity of the other.

The table in this scene, however, was not in a kitchen but in the rotunda of Columbia University’s Low Library in New York City. The older generation was played by Walter Mondale, the younger (nine years younger, anyway) by Gary Hart. The issue was not Viet Nam but its lessons and how they should be applied today in Central America and the Persian Gulf. The family was the Democratic Party, once again bitterly divided over the limits of intervention.

It was the most heated, intense, close-in debate of the Democratic campaign. At stake was this week’s New York primary, with its 252 delegates and high media profile. Hart, buoyed by a solid 53%-to-29% victory in Connecticut last week, hoped to re-establish himself as the man to beat with an upset win. Mondale could not afford to lose a state so heavily stocked with his favorite constituencies: union households (36% of the registered Democrats expected to vote), Jews (33%) and the elderly (20% of New York Democrats are over 60). With 200 spectators and 15 million TV viewers looking on, Moderator Dan Rather of CBS began to deal questions around the small round table, like cards in a high-stakes game. Hart glared stonily at Mondale; the former Vice President scowled back. The attacks between them grew increasingly personal. Finally Mondale lashed out.

“Why do you run those ads that suggest that I’m out trying to kill kids, when you know better?”

Hart shot back, “Why have you questioned my commitment to arms control and civil rights, when you know that I have just as much commitment to both of those as you do? The ads illustrate a point. This country cannot deploy young Americans in every trouble spot in the Third World and expect to solve that problem.”

The two men locked in an angry “yes-I-did, no-you-didn’t” clinch until Jesse Jackson, who had skillfully been playing both spoiler and referee, stepped in. He clucked that the quarrel would be called so much “rat-a-tat-tat” and dismissed it as a “kinship struggle” between two men “going in the same direction.”

But the Hart-Mondale clash was more than a family feud between like-minded rivals. Their differences have reopened a debate that has flared periodically since America assumed the mantle of global leadership after World War II, namely, the degree to which the U.S. should intervene abroad when its interests or those of its allies are affected. With most domestic issues too complex or gray to rouse voters, concerns about the U.S. role abroad have come to dominate the Democrats’ race. Says Mondale Press Secretary Maxine Isaacs: “The campaign has boiled down to foreign policy.”

Hart and Mondale come out of opposing foreign policy schools within the Democratic Party. Mondale was shaped by the cold war, as first waged by Harry Truman (whose 1947 Truman Doctrine sweepingly extended U.S. protection to “free peoples” everywhere) and later taught by Mondale’s mentor, Hubert Humphrey. The enemy was global Communism, which had to be contained by the threat or use of force from Europe to Korea. Under President Jimmy Carter, Mondale joined in a foreign policy that stressed human rights over anti-Communist ideology. The former Vice President says he is now a “mature internationalist” who would use power as a “last resort” but recognizes, as he put it during last week’s debate, that there is still “a proper role for American power in the world.”

Hart’s formative experience was the Viet Nam War; as George McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager, Hart was a prominent opponent of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. The real enemy, says Hart, is not Communism but “poverty, hunger and disease.” In most internal disputes in foreign countries, he contends, the U.S. not only backs the wrong side—”repression and corruption and privilege”—but “inevitably the losing side.” Hart charges that Mondale was slow to turn against the Viet Nam War and has yet to learn its lessons. A leader, said Hart, must know “not only where to commit your forces but where not to commit your forces.”

Hart and Mondale offer very different prescriptions for world trouble spots:

Central America. Hart’s policy can basically be summed up by an antiwar slogan from the 1960s: “Out Now.” He calls for the “immediate withdrawal” of all troops from the region, and he would simply cu off U.S. military aid to El Salvador unti all death-squad activity ceased. Mondale would link U.S. aid to El Salvador to progress on land reform and an end to the death squads. He would continue the U.S. efforts to interdict the flow of arms from Nicaragua to the Salvadoran rebels, but unlike President Reagan, he would not back the contras against the Nicaraguan regime. Mondale would leave troops in Honduras while he attempted to negotiate the withdrawal of some 2,000 Cuban soldiers from Nicaragua. He would, however, “substantially reduce” American force levels there (from 1,750 to 200 or fewer). But, as he said during the debate, he “wouldn’t pull the plug” on Honduras, “a democracy that deserves that help.”

Middle East. With an eye to New York’s large Jewish vote, each candidate has been trying to outdo the other in proclaiming undying fealty to Israel. Hart was quicker to demand the withdrawal of Marines from Lebanon, although how much quicker remains a matter of dispute. Their greatest and most revealing differences in the Middle East come over Persian Gulf oil. Mondale says he would be willing to commit U.S. ground troops to keep it flowing; Hart says he would not. At the debate, Mondale said that the U.S. must “make certain that the American interest in stability and keeping the area out of the reach of the Soviet Union is kept in mind by the world.” Hart allowed that he would help Europe and Japan, both heavily dependent on Middle East oil, only with naval and air power. But he scoffed, “I can’t believe that Vice President Mondale is prepared to send American people—young people—in there to fight for oil for West Germany.”

Arms Control. Both badly want to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table by reviving the spirit of detente. With that attitude in mind, Reagan gibed last week, “Good will and sincerity will get them a smile and a glass of vodka. And you can guess why the Soviets will be smiling.” At the debate, Mondale tried to tag Hart with flip-flopping perilously on arms control and only slowly perceiving the true virtue of freezing nuclear arms, but his attack missed the point. The truth is that Hart first explored more sophisticated approaches to arms control, like the “build down” that would allow the superpowers to build new weapons only if they destroyed a greater number of old ones. It was later that he succumbed to political temptation and supported the simplistic freeze, which Mondale melodramatically calls “the most important grass-roots initiative of our time.”

The conflict between Hart and Mondale over foreign and defense questions is in the tradition of Democratic primaries. In 1968, for instance, Antiwar Candidate Eugene McCarthy helped persuade President Lyndon Johnson not to run again by nearly upsetting him in New Hampshire. Because foreign affairs are more exclusively the province of the Executive Branch than are domestic matters, campaign promises are taken more seriously by voters—and by America’s allies. A British diplomat has traveled on the Hart plane to observe the candidate on the stump. On an eight-day tour of the U.S. (see following story), French President François Mitterrand had a 15-minute face-to-face meeting with Hart and also telephoned Mondale.

Hart intensified his attacks on Mondale after polls of New York voters found that fewer than one in five favored military aid to Central America. A Hart ad showed a slowly burning fuse and asked, “Remember Viet Nam?”; his speeches warned that either “Reagan’s or Mondale’s” policies would lead to dead G.I.s.

Mondale was infuriated. “O.K., we’re going to let him have it,” he snapped to aides. A campaign staffer appeared on the Mondale plane with two briefcases stuffed with photocopies of old Congressional Records supposedly documenting Hart’s inconsistencies. They show, for instance, that three weeks before last October’s bombing of the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, when Hart claims he was calling for an American withdrawal from Lebanon, he actually voted to extend their mission for another six months. By feeding these examples to the press, Mondale aides hope to depict Hart as a feckless McGovernite who has learned the “wrong lesson” from Viet Nam. Aides portray Mondale, by contrast, as a steady hand who knows what it is like to have the nuclear-weapons-code briefcase at the ready. A Mondale ad shows a red phone ringing in the night and asks the voters who should answer it.

Hart is hardly an old-fashioned isolationist, yearning to retreat into a Fortress America. At the debate he was careful to place himself in the “moderate mainstream” of past U.S. Presidents. He insisted that he would fulfill NATO commitments (although he has urged the European nations to foot more of the bill) and honor existing treaty obligations (although he vaguely added that some “may or may not deserve our continued support”). His plan to restructure the military to make it more “maneuverable” by, for instance, building a larger number of smaller aircraft carriers might increase America’s ability to project power.

What is less clear from Hart’s public statements is where, if anywhere, the U.S. might use that power. A believer in a strong Navy, he talks about keeping sea lanes open to protect international commerce. But what would he do if a prime supplier of raw materials faced a Soviet-backed revolution? His real mistake so far has been to say too clearly what he would not do, such as not keeping troops in Central America and not committing them to protect the Persian Gulf. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of the original cold warriors, learned this lesson when he put South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter in January 1950. Six months later, North Korea attacked, and the U.S. was forced to step in.

As politics, Hart’s anti-interventionism may appeal to New York voters. But as policy, his positions would make European allies nervous and reduce U.S. leverage with Arab nations. If he stays in contention, Candidate Hart might consider trying to keep more options open for President Hart. —By Evan Thomas. Reported by David Beckwith with Hart and Jack E. White with Mondale