On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Devine, James wrote: > So Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith were once leftists of a sort (social dems > who sided with the US in the Cold War) who worked for Scoop Jackson?
I don't think they were ever leftists of any sort (although I'd be interested to learn otherwise). I think they were centrist cold war democrats who by that time had become neoconservatives. The majority of neocons at that point were still Democrats. It was only under Reagan that the majority migrated over to the Republicans. Scoop attracted a whole bunch of them in the early 70s because he already prided himself on their two main foreign policy points: toughness on the Soviets and stalwart support for our newly acquired and embattled little brother ally Israel. For him of course the Jackson-Vanik amendment was a twofer. BTW, in the context of current debates, it's good to keep in mind that these guys were relative pipsqueaks at the time, and that the founders of neoconservative foreign policy (and Israel's privileged place within it) were all goyim: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Robert Tucker and Samuel P. Huntington. Scoop of course was a Presbyterian. It all started out as way of revivifying the cold war consensus in the aftermath of Vietnam. Michael
