THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1980
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Highlights of This Page
Osama bin Laden provides help for the Afghan Mujaheddin and the CIA. Abscam. Failed US attempt to rescue hostages. Solidarity trade union founded in Poland. Iran-Iraq War. The GOP's "October Surprise" leads to the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Reagan officials prepare to support Central American death squads.
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Osama bin Laden provides help for the Afghan Mujaheddin and the CIA
- Early in the year, Osama bin Laden begins providing assistance to the Afghan mujaheddin, with the advice and support of the Saudi royal family. He may have been hand-selected by the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal. The Pakistani ISI wanted a member of the Saudi royal family, but bin Laden, with his powerful family connections, satisfied them. During the 1980s, the CIA and the Saudis funnel hundreds of millions through Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to fund the mujahedeen's resistance to the Russian occupation in Afghanistan. Much of this money went to bin Laden and others who will become members of the Taliban and of al-Qaeda. The ISI founds a number of Taliban training camps, and participates in Taliban strikes in Afghanistan and India, often with the two groups sharing leaders and resources. According to US intelligence sources, it is the ISI that transforms the Taliban from a group of religious students into the activist, jihadist movement that will eventually take over Afghanistan. Even as late as the fall of 2006, the ISI will continue training Taliban fighters to oppose both American and British forces. During the Reagan and Bush presidencies, the US will supply over $7 billion to Pakistan. In the 1990s, the ISI will expand its support for the former mujahedeen to operate against Indian forces in the disputed province of Kashmir. (CCR, 9/11 Press for Truth/Daily Kos, Sunday Times)
- Arkansas realtor and land speculator Jim McDougal buys a tiny bank in the hamlet of Kingston, Arkansas, renames it Madison Bank and Trust, and combines it with his real estate business. His wife Susan helps handle the financial paperwork. McDougal leaves Governor Clinton's staff to run his new bank; after this, the McDougals and the Clintons will see very little of each other. (Susan McDougal)
- During his presidential campaign, GOP candidate Ronald Reagan repeatedly insists that most air pollution is caused by trees and plants, an egregrious error that his opponents delight in using against him during his presidency. Reagan's two terms will be marked by a systematic effort to undermine US environmental regulations in favor of corporate polluters. (David Corn)
- Ronald Reagan's strongest primary opponent is George H.W. Bush, whom Reagan eventually names his vice-presidential candidate. During their debates, Bush labels Reagan's supply-side economic policies "voodoo economics." Reagan's sunny, "we-can-have-it-all" proposals appeal to many voters, and once Bush joins the Reagan ticket, he wholeheartedly supports Reagan's economic proposals. During his presidency, Reagan will raise the national debt by more than all of his 39 predecessors combined. During his own presidential campaign of 1988, Bush will continue to support what becomes known as "Reaganomics." (Paul Waldman)
- Future Republican senator John McCain, who will run successfully for Congress in 1982, divorces his wife Carol after she discovers that he has had an affair. His second wife, Cindy, will experience a difficult time with her addiction to prescription drugs, even going so far as to stealing drugs from a medical charity she runs. Again, this kind of story is worth reporting only in light of the Republican attacks on Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, making severe allegations that in large part are not true. (Wikipedia, Real Change)
February 1980
Abscam
- February 2: The media learns of a two-year sting operation by the FBI against a number of Congressmen that it dubs "Abscam." In 1978, the FBI set up a dummy company, "Abdul Enterprises," and FBI agents posing as company officials offered bribes to Congressmen in return for favors from a non-existent Arab sheik. It was the first major operation by the FBI to trap corrupt public officials; up until 1970 only ten members of Congress had ever been convicted of accepting bribes. Of the over thirty targeted Congressmen, one senator, Democrat Harrison Williams, and five representatives -- Democrats John Jenrette, Raymond Lederer, Michael Myers, and Frank Thompson, and Republican Richard Kelly -- were convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges. Another, Democrat John Murphy, was convicted of a lesser charge. Most will resign, but Myers has to be expelled and Williams refuses to resign until the vote on his expulsion is almost due. Five other government officials, including Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, are also convicted. Though questions of prosecutorial entrapment swirl around the operation, videotape of Kelly stuffing $25,000 in bills into his pants and asking "Does it show?" and Williams bragging how he could get a lucrative government contract in return for a bribe worked to inflame the public against the erring officials. Accusations of entrapment taint the sting operation, and Kelly's conviction will be overturned in 1982. Additionally, questions of political motive dog the FBI and the Republican-led Department of Justice. The Abscam model of using a fake front company and concealed recording equipment will serve as the basis for a number of other investigations during the 1980s, however, the government agencies have not since tried a duplicate operation. (Wikipedia, Hilton and Testa)
March 1980
- March 17: Ronald Reagan delivers a foreign policy speech at the Chicago Council for Foreign Relations, a speech written by Reagan himself that will set the tone for his entire foreign policy, particularly towards the Soviet Union, for his upcoming presidency. His speech articulates his view that the USSR can be brought down through economic pressures, and asserts the US's dominant role in world politics. The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy echoes many of the Reagan themes from this speech. (Policy Review, Laura Flanders)
- March 21: President Jimmy Carter announces that the US will boycott the Summer Olympics, to be held in Moscow, since the USSR failed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by February 1980. 64 other nations join the US-led boycott, leading to an Olympics with the lowest national participation since 1956. Carter also embargoes grain sales to the USSR and postpones ratification of the SALT II disarmament treaty. (Wikipedia, Laura Flanders)
April 1980
- April: A junket to Guatemala to visit with government officials and death squad leaders includes top officials and executives from a plethora of right-wing American organizations, including the Young Americans for Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, the Young Republicans' National Federation, the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Digest, and such right-wing activists as Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus and John Laxalt, president of Reagan's campaign organization Citizens for the Republic, and brother of Reagan campaign chair, Senator Paul Laxalt. Another meeting takes place in the spring, in California, between Reagan and Guatemalan hotel magnate Eduardo Carrette, the man whom Guatemals's dictator General Lucas Garcia has asked to be his new ambassador to the US and a leading figure in Amigos del Pais, a pressure group comprised of businessmen and landowners which Guatemala's recently-resigned Vice President Dr. Francisco Villagran has compared to the John Birch Society. The Amigos are paying $11,000 a month in retainer fees to Deaver and Hannaford, a public relations firm headed by Reagan confidante Michael Deaver, which handles advertising for the Republican presidential campaign. Deaver will become Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff. Lobbyists for Republican associates of the Amigos are pressuring Congress to "lend a sympathetic ear" to the Amigos' current lobbying campaign for the restoration of military aid and training for the Guatemalan military. Other Reagan advisors who have recently visited Guatemala include including Roger Fontaine, Reagan's future National Security Council assistant for Latin American affairs, and retired Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, a member of Reagan's defense advisory committee, who will also visit El Salvador for President Reagan. Fontaine, an established hard-liner in regional matters, is the former director of Latin American Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, perhaps the nation's most conservative academic-activists center for Latin American affairs. He will bolster Guatemalan hopes in an interview published in the Miami Herald where he will say, "It's pretty clear that Guatemalans will be given what aid they need in order to defend themselves against an armed minority which is aided and abetted by Cubans." (Covert Action Quarterly)
- April 1: An assassination attempt on Iraq's Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz fails; the pro-Iranian Daweh Party claims responsibility for the attempt. (BBC)
Failed US attempt to rescue hostages
- April 24: An attempt to rescue the American hostages goes awry due to a collision between two Marine helicopters. 8 soldiers die and 5 are injured. Jimmy Carter refuses to heed the advice of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who holds out for further diplomacy, and just minimally heeds the requirements of the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires him to "report" to Congress any dispatch of troops into hostile areas, by consulting only with Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd mere hours before launching the mission. Vance, who had not been informed of the mission, resigns in protest. Like Gerald Ford's handling of the USS Mayaguez in 1975, Carter relies on his "inherent" "executive powers" to order the mission. He later tells the country, "I ordered this rescue mission prepared in order to safeguard American lives and protect America's national interests, and to reduce the tensions in the world that have been caused among many nations as this crisis has continued," and takes full personal responsibility for the operation, and its cancellation, without ruling out another attempt. The attempt to free the hostages begins when six Hercules C130 transport planes set off to rendezvous with a group of nine helicopters at a remote desert airstrip, south-east of Tehran. Two helicopters go down with engine trouble, and a third is diverted to help. Another helicopter is damaged as it landed on the airstrip, leaving only five workable helicopters and making the mission impossible. Carter orders the operation aborted; as the aircraft take off again, another helicopter crashes into one of the C130 aircraft and bursts into flames. Eight soldiers die, and another four men suffer burns. In Tehran, thousands of Iranians celebrate the failure of the mission. Iran's Foreign Minister Sadeq Qotbzadeh condemns the rescue effort as "an act of war." Many European allies express their dismay that the mission took place without advance consultation. The failure of the rescue virtually dooms the Carter presidency. (Decades History Timeline, BBC, Peter Irons)
June 1980
- June 10: United Airlines president Percy Wood is badly injured by a bomb inside a package mailed to his home. This is the fourth known strike of the "Unabomber." (Unabomber Timeline)
July 1980
- July 27: The Shah of Iran dies in exile; the American hostages are not released. (Decades History Timeline)
August 1980
- August: During the GOP convention, a deal is brokered to have Reagan name former President Gerald Ford as his vice-presidential candidate. Such a deal would have divided the party against itself and probably given President Jimmy Carter the election. Even had Reagan won, his administration would have likely been crippled by an unworkable power-sharing agreement. Instead, George H.W. Bush is the compromise choice. Reagan's security advisor Richard Allen will write in 2003, "George Bush was picked at the very last moment and largely by a combination of chance and some behind-the-scenes maneuvering." Allen was one of the prime movers behind Bush's eventual selection as Reagan's running mate when the deal with Ford went sour. As a sidenote, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is sharply disappointed that he was not seriously considered as a vice-presidential candidate. James Mann recalls, "At one point [Rumsfeld] asks his old friend, Richard Allen, 'You know, why didn't they call me?'" Mann recalls Allen jokingly replying, "'Well, I happened to have Bush's number in my phone book and I didn't have yours.'" (Hoover Digest, PBS)
- August 5: Saddam Hussein visits Riyadh for the first state visit by an Iraqi leader to Saudi Arabia. Saddam, who leads a powerful, largely Soviet-supplied military, is viewed as a bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism. He is richly feted; while he is being wined and dined, he is encouraged to "take the fight to Iran," and is told that he has the backing of US President Carter. (Consortium News)
September 1980
Solidarity trade union founded in Poland
- September: The Polish trade union Solidarity is founded at the Gdansk shipyards, led by Lech Walesa. Unlike earlier trade unions that were dispersed forcibly at the hands of the Polish military, Solidarity is allowed to grow, and will eventually become the core of a broad anti-Communist movement, including Roman Catholics and the anti-Communist left among its supporters. Solidarity eventually becomes a federation of like-minded trade unions. By the end of 1981, it holds over 9 million members. (Wikipedia)
- September 4: Iran begins shelling border villages in Iraq; the Ayatollah Khomeini, the radical Islamist leader in exile from his home country of Iran, calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. (Decades History Timeline, FactMonster, MidEast Web)
Iran-Iraq War
- September 22: Iraq invades Iran. The war will last for eight years and claims well over one million lives; both sides still hold thousands of POWs, a chronic issue between the two countries. Saddam claims that the reason for the invasion is a territorial dispute over the Shatt al Arab, a waterway that forms the boundary between Iran and Iraq. Not only does the CIA encourage the invasion, but Hussein is encouraged by both Saudi Arabia and the US, who passes along the message that Hussein has a "green light" from the Carter administration. The USSR and France back Iraq; China and N. Korea back Iran. The US supplies arms to both sides. The CIA regularly sends a team to Hussein to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official. This official says that he had personally signed off on a document that shared US satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate: "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind." (ZNet, Decades History Timeline, FactMonster, FactMonster, MidEast Web)
October 1980
The GOP's "October Surprise" leads to the election of Ronald Reagan as president
- October: American, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian representatives conduct secret negotiations in Paris on the fate of the US hostages. The decision, known in some circles as the "October Surprise," is made to delay release of the hostages until after the American elections, in hopes of ensuring a victory by GOP candidate Ronald Reagan. Among those involved in the negotiations are Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, future CIA director William Casey, Henry Kissinger, and Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother and an intimate friend of King Fahd. Reagan hints at a "secret plan" to free the hostages. Although details of the meeting remain shrouded in secrecy, most expert observers believe that the GOP representatives promise to end the American arms embargo against Iran if that country will free the hostages after the election. The incident is later confirmed by Iranian officials, intelligence officials from several countries, Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat (who later tells Jimmy Carter, "You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections"), and most damningly, by a Russian intelligence report released in 1993 at the request of a US congressional investigating committee headed by Democrat Lee Hamilton. Hamilton, along with co-chairman Henry Hyde, will suppress the report in an attempt to exonerate Bush from any wrongdoing. (Bushwatch, NLP Wessex, Consortium News)
- October 21: Reagan tells the electorate that he has a "secret plan" to free the hostages. Many observers believe that Reagan's announcement ties in with the secret Paris meetings detailed above. (Bushwatch)
November 1980
- November: As the campaign comes to a close, GOP candidate Ronald Reagan makes the amazing claim that trees cause more pollution than automobiles. (Washington Post/Paul Waldman)
- November 4: Ronald Reagan, with George H.W. Bush as his vice-presidential candidate, defeats Jimmy Carter in a narrow victory. Most observers agree that Carter's failure to bring the hostages home cost him re-election, assisted by a possible "October Surprise" orchestrated by the Reagan campaign (see entries in 1981). Bush says to Reagan after the election results are confirmed, "You're in like a burglar." Of his problems with women in his campaign, aide Lyn Nofziger later writes, "I haven't figured out yet why there were no women. Except there never had been, and Reagan probably figured, if he bothered to figure at all, that that's the way it was supposed to be." Reagan only appoints one woman to his cabinet, UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; under his leadership, the number of women appointed to the federal bench, and to positions requiring Senate confirmation, falls for the first time in a decade. One voting organization, Emily's List, characterizes the problems the GOP has with women as a "gender canyon." Over the next decade, the GOP will focus on bringing women into the fold.
- One tactic that Reagan's campaign rides to success is what Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson later characterizes as "brutal exaggerations of the undeserving black and brown poor." One of his most famous speeches, often repeated on the campaign trail, concerned a Chicago "welfare queen" who supposedly collected $150,000 in welfare funds under 80 different names. In reality, the woman in question collected $8000 under either two or four different names -- a series of felonies, certainly, but not nearly as effective as the deliberate lie concocted for the campaign trail. In a Florida campaign stop, Reagan bemoaned how hardworking people wait in line at grocery stores while a "strapping black buck" purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps. The polarizing racial imagery was clear; and as has been repeatedly observed in this and other elections, the mainstream media gave Reagan a free pass by refusing to make an issue of Reagan's clear-cut campaign trail racism. (Even the fact that Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of three of the most brutal and famous racially-related murders in history, is consistently downplayed by the press.) Statements like this were code language in Florida, where Reagan's Republican state campaign manager frowned, "We are wasting our time to get black people registered." Of a housing development in East Harlem, Reagan said incorrectly, "If you are a slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities." Reagan's facts were dramatically wrong. Less than one-sixth of the 656 units had a kitchen or living room with a high ceiling, the rent would have been four times more, and the pool and gym were located in a community center for 200,000 area residents, mostly Latino and African-American. When confronted about one of these lies, Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes will later reply, "Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?" Reagan's lasting imagery will lead to sweeping cutbacks in welfare under Clinton, a Democrat, and in the current budget cuts to the poor by George W. Bush.
- As a side note, one of Reagan's most popular stories on the campaign trail, written by Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, involves Reagan's days on the football field as a varsity receiver in high school. During one game, Reagan says he scored the winning touchdown for his team in the final seconds, but the honest Reagan told the ref that the touchdown shouldn't count because he was offside. "I told the truth, the penalty was ruled, and Dixon [High School] lost the game." Reagan says his teammates admired him for his honesty. Unfortunately, Dixon records show that Reagan only played in one varsity football game, and Dixon lost that game 24-0. (Bushwatch, Decades History Timeline, NLP Wessex, Boston Globe, Washington Post/Paul Waldman, Laura Flanders, Al Franken)
Reagan officials prepare to support Central American death squads
- During the campaign, Reagan's team sends emissaries to Guatemala to meet with that country's military heads and several government officials. The message is that, once Reagan takes office, they will have a freer hand to conduct reprisals and executions against Catholics, Guatamelan unions and peasant groups opposed to the regime of General Lucas Garcia. Under Ford and particularly Carter, the US was not as supportive of the Guatemalan death squads and governmental repression as the Garcia regime would have liked, though Carter approved the sales of military hardware to Garcia by Israel. (The death squads are staffed and directed by the Guatemalan Army and police under the command of President Lucas, Interior Minister Donald Alvarez Ruiz, and a group of top-ranking generals, with the assistance of Lucas's right-hand man, Colonel Hector Montalban, and national Chief of Police, Colonel German Chupina. Private businessmen provide the payrolls for the squads, and often assist in "compiling" the lists of troublesome labor, professional and political leaders as well as other suggested victims. Cotton grower Raul Garcia Granados, a leader of the Guatemalan right, traces the lineage of the current death squads back four administrations to the late 1960s: "Of course when they were organized, they were organized under the patronage and the approval of the government and the army," he says. "They have lists of people that are suspected to be communists of whatever kind, and they kill them. It's a war, you see, a war between the communists and the anti-communists. They [the death squads] have the sympathy of most of the Guatemalan people." According to a Reagan fundraiser, Reagan told ambassador-to-be Eduardo Carrette, "Hang in 'til we get there. We'll get in and then we'll give you help. Don't give up. Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in.") The Guatemalan government is so unhappy with the pressure from the Carter administration to clean up its human rights violations that they term him "Jimmy Castro" and accuse him of being "either totally incapable...or pro-Communist."
- Reagan's chief emissary to Guatemala is Vernon Walters, who meets publicly with Garcia to demonstrate US support for his dictatorship. In 1981, Garcia will be replaced with General Luis Mans in a coup; Mans will shift his focus away from cracking down on unions and Catholics and focus on the Mayan highlands, where poverty and tradition has created a powerful resistance to the Guatemalan government. Under Mans, at least 662 Mayan villages and their citizens will be eradicated. Thousands of villagers will be slaughtered and their bodies thrown into pits. In the midst of the campaign against the Mayans, President Reagan will visit with Mans and tell the world that Guatemala is getting a bum rap on human rights. Reagan pursues a similar policy with neighboring El Salvador, where, as in Guatemala, death squads run rampant since the Kennedy administration and the CIA helped the Salvadoran government set up their terror cadres. Under Reagan, the sweeps become more systematic and efficient. Reagan's chief foreign policy expert, neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, first came to the attention of Reagan and his inner circle with an essay written for the American Enterprise Institute where she explicitly praised the Salvadoran death squads, and opined that the US should be backing authoritarian governments such as in Guatemala and El Salvador. She wrote that the Salvadorans admired the death squads becaused they kept civic order. Kirkpatrick's theory gained the attention of Reagan's inner circle, and she becomes a driving force behind Reagan's foreign policy. Under Reagan, the US will not only give extensive covert backing to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments, but will send in Green Berets and US Army troops who openly assist the military. After one infamous incident where a group of American nuns and church workers are murdered by Salvadoran National Guard troops, Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggests that the nuns died while exchanging fire with the Guard troops, an insane scenario. Kirkpatrick says that the victims were possibly American radicals masquerading as nuns. The chief of US military operations in El Salvador from 1980 to 1984, Colonel James Steel, will resurface in 2004 in Iraq as the chief US trainer of Iraqi security. Elliot Abrams, second only to Kirkpatrick as an ideologue and planner of the Central American massacres, will run the second Bush administration's Middle East policy at the National Security Council. Extensive connections between the Guatemalan government and the American right have also been documented, starting with the sponsorship of Guatemalan junkets by right-wingers by Guatemalan speculator and right-wing activist Roberto Alejos Arzu, who made his plantation available as a training site for participants in the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
- Within weeks of Reagan's victory, death squad assassinations increase dramatically and there is talk in government circles of even harsher measures. As described by Guatemalan and U.S. businessmen and Guatemalan government officials, the bargain with the Reagan forces has four key elements. First, there is an agreement to take the Guatemalan Army off the blacklist -- to restore weapons and ammunition sales, supply badly needed spare parts for the US-built helicopters, and make available fighter and cargo planes to the Guatemalan air force as well as crowd control and counterinsurgency gear to the army and police. Second, a commitment has been made to resume Pentagon training of the army and police. particularly in surveillance, intelligence and interrogation techniques. According to Robert Merrick, an American-born plantation owner who was in close touch with Reagan advisors, Fontaine promised him and a group of Guatemalan businessmen that Reagan "would do everything he could within the law to help train the Guatemalan police." Third and perhaps most importantly, the Reagan supporters have agreed to cut back US criticism of the death squads which the Guatemalan regime feels has so tarnished its international political and financial standing. Finally, although the signals have been less explicit, there is also the expectation in government and business councils that President Reagan would intervene militarily in the event that a popular uprising threatened the Lucas government.
- In anticipation of such support, businessmen who back the death squads gave their all for the Reagan campaign. In addition to the more than $120,000 which Amigos del Pais paid to the Deaver and Hannaford PR firm, other public relations efforts by right wing Guatemalan groups attempted to sway US opinion concerning Central America, in Reagan's favor. American businessmen based in Guatemala gave heavily to the Reagan campaign. Yet a check of the names of more than 200 such individuals -- including several who said specifically that they had contributed -- against the list of Reagan donors disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, showed no public trace of any such contributions. (The sole exception was John Trotter, who through his wife, had given $750 to the Reagan primary campaign.) One businessman who was solicited by the Reagan campaign said explicit instructions were given repeatedly: "Do not give to Mr. Reagan's campaign directly." Monies went instead to an undisclosed committee in California. Last spring, when the Amigos del Pais were making the rounds of Congress asking for restoration of Guatemalan military training appropriation, Nancy Reynolds, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary and the current Vice President for public relations of the Bendix Corporation, called the office of Democratic congressman Don Pease and asked that he "lend a sympathetic ear" to Amigos del Pais members' plea for aid. "It's the first time we ever got a phone call like that," said the congressman's aide. It was Nancy Reynolds who recommended Deaver and Hannaford to Amigos del Pais. (Democracy Now, Covert Action Quarterly)
- November 4: Republican Alfonse D'Amato wins a Senate seat from New York, splitting the Democrats between liberal incumbent Jacob Javits, who suffers from amytrophic lateral sclerosis, and representative Elizabeth Holtzman. D'Amato's campaign, relentlessly negative, is considered one of the great successes of reclusive Republican political guru Arthur Finkelstein (Finkelstein is best known for being a gay man who encourages his Republican candidates to engage in homophobic attacks on their opponents). Although D'Amato is not as conservative as many of his colleagues, he gains a reputation for tactless behavior and corruption. In April 1995 on the Don Imus radio program, he will do an impersonation of Judge Lance Ito, then presiding over the O.J. Simpson murder trial, using an exaggerated Japanese accent to mock Ito's parentage. In October 1998, he insults Democratic representative Jerrald Nadler, who is quite overweight, calling him "Congressman Waddler" and waddling around his office like a duck. Perhaps his most memorable exploit is his 1994 affair with rich socialite Claudia Cohen, which leads him to ask for an annulment from his marriage from his wife of many years. He later marries another woman and, after being defeated in 1999 by Democrat Charles Schumer, goes on to head a computer firm. He is still a force in New York Republican politics. (Wikipedia, Hilton and Testa)
- November 4: South Carolina Republican Floyd Spence defeats civil rights activist Tom Turnipseed for a seat in the US House of Representatives. The otherwise minor race is notable because Spence's campaign is managed by Republican operative Lee Atwater, who smears Turnipseed with a false allegation that he is a psychotic. During a press conference before the election, a "reporter" planted by Atwater asks, "We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment." Officially, Atwater refused to comment, but privately told reporters, "In college I understand he got hooked up to jumper cables." The smear works to help give Spence the election. (New York Times/Neil Rogers)
December 1980
- December 11: As one of his last acts as president, Carter signs into law the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund legislation. The Superfund legislation was inspired by a number of environmental disasters of the late 1970s, particularly the 1976 dumping of 204,000 barrels of crude oil off the coast of Massachusetts and the 1978 discovery of the Love Canal toxic waste dumping site. Superfund enables the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up toxic waste dumping sites and collect recompense from the corporations who are responsible for dumping the waste. The funding for Superfund cleanups comes mainly from a tax on the chemical industry, a tax that is hugely unpopular with corporations and Republicans; the opposition from corporations and GOP lawmakers succeeds in removing victim compensation from the legislation that eventually reaches Carter's desk. (Big oil companies such as Exxon also manage to keep from being taxed to fund the legislation.) Superfund cleanups all but disappear in 1995, defunded as part of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." In 2002, EPA head Christine Todd Whitman decides the best way to preserve the shrinking cleanup fund is to defund 89 Superfund sites, leaving them to poison their environs unchecked. (Mike Plante, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose)
