NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Posted: April 4, 2003 Publication Date: April 21, 2003 A Perle before . . . By David Frum
It's 1974. U.S. presidents are clinking champagne glasses with the masters of the Kremlin--and foreign-policy realists are quietly urging Americans to take whatever deals they can get from the Soviets: Our side is losing the Cold War, and the next deal will be much, much worse. There aren't many people around who still think the United States might actually win the Cold War. One of them is a then-young aide on the staff of Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. The aide's name is Richard Perle--and that very year, he and his boss would astonish just about everyone by passing a law, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, denying access to the U.S. market to Communist countries that prevented their people from emigrating. It's 1979. The world situation seems, if possible, even worse than in 1974. President Jimmy Carter has just sent the Senate a new arms-control treaty that would lock in forever the nuclear advantages the Soviets grabbed during the 1970s. The treaty looks unstoppable: When has a Democratic Senate ever rejected a treaty sent up by a Democratic president? But Jackson and Perle organize the opposition--and early the following year, Carter has to surrender and withdraw the treaty. It's 1983. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans are protesting Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy Pershing missiles. A nervous State Department is desperately trying to placate the protesters by offering the Soviets one deal after another. Perle, now an assistant secretary of defense, scuppers one concession after another. The Soviets, he consistently points out, are already cheating on every existing agreement--there should be no new agreements until the old ones are honored. It's 1986. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland. Gorbachev startles the American delegation by offering up just about everything that U.S. arms controllers had ever wished for in the 1980s--in exchange for Reagan's surrendering on the Strategic Defense Initiative. In a hasty conference, Reagan tallies the opinions of his top defense aides. Almost everyone present urges Reagan to say yes. Perle argues for a no. And no is the answer Reagan gives. These are only four moments from a long career of public service. Over three decades, few Americans have contributed more to the nation's security and the freedom of the world than Richard Perle. He fought to halt the transfer of military technology, first to the Soviets, then later to the Chinese. He spoke up for Communism's victims when they might otherwise have been forgotten. He warned early of the danger of Middle Eastern terrorism. Perle left government service in 1987. He went into business as a consultant and adviser. He was successful in his work and made some money--but nothing like the gigantic fortunes earned by his onetime colleagues, former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci and former secretary of state James Baker, to name just two. Though he had joined the private sector, his deepest concerns still lay with the public; he continued to care much more about national security than about publicly traded securities. In July 2001, he was asked by Secretary Rumsfeld to chair the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--and though the work is unpaid and hugely time-consuming, Perle gladly accepted. You have to understand all of this background to appreciate the full and horrifying injustice of the conflict-of-interest charges hurled at Richard Perle over the past few weeks. For each of those charges there is of course a specific reply. Seymour Hersh, for instance, charged in The New Yorker that Perle had met with two Saudi businessmen late last year with an eye to obtaining an investment in a company he was starting. In fact, Perle and the two Saudis all agree that the only subject discussed at the lunch was a Saudi plan to encourage Saddam Hussein to go into exile to avoid war. But there is a larger point that needs to be made--and it emerges from the basic truth of who Richard Perle is and what he has done. The New York Times followed the Seymour Hersh allegations with two stories of its own. Both involved companies that had hired Perle to help them satisfy the government's security concerns. In one case, a bankrupt telecom company called Global Crossing asked Perle to devise safeguards that would enable it to sell a chunk of itself to a Hong Kong investor without falling foul of technology-transfer rules. In the other, the satellite maker Loral--which had already been caught making such transfers to China--hired Perle to help it propose an appropriate penalty for its misdeeds. In the Global Crossing matter, Perle proposed a battery of safeguards--including the creation of a separate subsidiary with a board of directors entirely made up of U.S. citizens. In the Loral case, Perle helped persuade the company to pay the largest fine in the history of technology-transfer investigations: $20 million. In both cases, Perle was acting--not as the companies' representative in Washington--but really as Washington's representative to the companies. He was not offering them an escape from the rules. He showed Global Crossing how to live within the rules; and Loral, how to atone for the rules it had violated. Perle has now resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, although he will continue as a member. Perle explained that he feared that a controversy over his chairmanship would distract the board and the Pentagon from their work at a time of national emergency. I understand why he did it. But I resent the need for the resignation all the same. At exactly the moment when they will need them most, Americans have been deprived of Perle's full services. That's unfair to Perle--and it is worse for the rest of us. David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.
