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
1996
November
- November: David Bossie, the president of the anti-Clinton attack group Citizens United, attempts to smear former Clinton Commerce Department official John Huang by illegally obtaining and releasing Huang's confidential phone logs. (Salon)
Clinton wins re-election
- November 5: Bill Clinton wins a resounding re-election victory against Republican candidate Bob Dole. Dole is a prominent senator and a former vice-presidential candidate who ran with Gerald Ford in 1976 against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Dole is known for his dry wit and his savage campaigning style, though neither are strongly in evidence during the campaign. Dole won out over a crowded field of Republican primary opponents, including financier Steve Forbes and hard-right pundit Pat Buchanan. Dole resisted Republican advice to run a negative campaign focusing on Clinton's character, and instead campaigned on economic issues, adopting a version of Forbes's flat-tax policies and naming supply-side champion Jack Kemp, a Republican congressman, as his running mate. (Kemp's lack of Vietnam service hampered GOP efforts to continue their smear campaign against Clinton's own lack of service, as Kemp used the claim of a knee injury to avoid service, then went on to play eight years in the NFL.) Clinton is successful in running on his economic record as well as portraying the Republican-controlled Congress as ruled by far-right extremists. Billionaire Ross Perot once again runs his own quixotic presidential campaign, but is far less successful than in 1992. After Dole's hefty defeat, he will retire from politics. He and Clinton will forge an awkward but apparently sincere friendship after the election; he and Clinton briefly appear as opponents on a recurring 60 Minutes segment, and in 1997 Clinton will award Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service in World War II and in politics. Dole's second wife Elizabeth will win a US Senate seat from North Carolina in 2002.
- One of the first to drop out of the 1996 Republican primary is Senator Phil Gramm. Gramm is famous for his 1992 statement, "In all the world, only Cuba and North Korea and in the Democratic Party in America do we still have organized political groups who believe that the answer to every problem is more government." The Washington Monthly's David Segal writes that Gramm himself has received almost every benefit in his life from the government: "The government helped bring him into this world (he was born in a military hospital), funded his upbringing (his father was an Army sergeant), paid for him to attend private school (with GI insurance money Gramm's mother received when her husband died), and even picked up the tab for graduate school (thanks to a National Defense Fellowship). After getting his Ph.D, Gramm got a job at Texas A & M, which is state-run, was elected to the House of Representatives, and then to the Senate. In sum, Gramm joined the government rolls the first day of his life, and has never left." Gramm is also embarrassed when his $7500 investment in a soft-core porn movie, Truck Stop Women, is revealed. His former brother-in-law, George Caton, with whom Gramm invested the money in 1974, says, "It really got Phil titillated because their was frontal nudity in it." Rather than fight the story and battle the condemnation of members of the religious right, Gramm dropped out of the presidential race. (Wikipedia, Snopes Urban Legend, Al Franken)
- One of the Republicans' biggest sources of outrage is the fact that the Democrats adopted, and augmented, some of the Reagan-era campaign fundraising tactics that they themselves use to raise more money than Democrats usually garner; the Republicans complain loudly about campaign finance chicanery, ignoring the fact that the Republican-led Congress had worked tirelessly to block real campaign finance reform. However, the evidence shows that not only did the Dole campaign raise hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Clinton campaign, it did so in some cases illegally. One of Dole's finance vice-chairmen was imprisoned for laundering millions of dollars into the Dole coffers, and Republican chairman Haley Barbour raised $2 million in campaign cash by orchestrating a complex scheme to bring in money from Hong Kong sources. Yet the Washington press corps focuses almost solely on stories of Clinton campaign financial misconduct. The Republicans in charge of the various Congressional committees will spend thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars investigating Clinton's campaign finances, and find some questionable behaviors. They also play on racist feelings by insinuating that the presence of Asian and Asian-American donors to the Clinton campaign funds "prove" that Clinton had "sold out" the government to Indonesia or China. However, once again, the public is not gulled; too much information about illegal Republican fund-raising has already entered the public discussion.
- Another source of exasperation among Republicans is Dole's apparent refusal to attack Clinton's character (i.e. attack his sexual history) during the campaign. Apparently they fail to realize that by doing so, they would have opened themselves up, as Dole's own sexual misconduct would have become an issue -- the Washington Post had already agreed not to run a story during the campaign about Dole's well-documented extracurricular affairs, though Vanity Fair did run such a story, which was largely ignored by the rest of the press but could have been used to great effect by the Clinton campaign. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- Interestingly enough, had the Clinton campaign desired, it could have attacked Dole for exaggerating his war record as well, potentially a valuable (if tremendously risky) tactic because of Dole's accepted status as a World War II hero. Dole did indeed serve his country with distinction during 1945 in Italy, and honorably earned his several medals and citations -- these facts are not in dispute (unlike, say, the GOP's vicious and groundless attacks on John Kerry's Vietnam service in 2004). But examination reveals that Dole has puffed his already-honorable wartime service to even greater heights that he legitimately achieved. A campaign fundraising letter has Dole's signature over the statement, "And when I was asked to lead my men up a rocky hill in Italy into the roaring guns and mortar fire of the German Wehrmacht my sense of duty never wavered." True enough. And the Dole for President Web site describes his wartime exploits with thrillingly executed prose. But the truth is a bit more mundane.
- In 1942, at the age of 19, Dole immediately answered his country's call. He joined the Reserves but soon asked to be placed on active duty. This is not quite true. In December 1942, Dole joined the Army Reserves, thus managing to stay in college. He was called for active duty in the summer of 1943, but managed to join the Army Specialized Training Program, which allowed him to continue his studies at Brooklyn College. It was not until the spring of 1944 that he entered active duty training, and, after completing officer training, went overseas in November 1944. He has himself admitted to doing what he could to avoid combat duty, trying in vain to land a post in a sports unit in Rome. But the Army wasn't cooperative; in February 1945, he was named the replacement lieutenant for a combat unit, and went into combat in northern Italy. Seven weeks later, he was severely wounded. David Corn and Paul Schemm write, "The unvarnished record shows that Dole did not rush off to war, as the compressed legend presented by his political allies and lieutenants has it. Taking a hesitant approach to war is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily a character flaw. But apparently in this instance it's a reality unsuitable for inclusion in a campaign bio."
- His unit was constantly under fire. While Dole's company, I Company, was heavily involved in the fierce mountain fighting going on in Italy at the time, his 10th Battalion rarely saw duty for Dole's first six weeks in theater. I Company's various units were rotated in and out of combat, so while each unit saw serious combat at times, they were not exposed to constant enemy fire.
- Dole's company was known as a "suicide squad" because of the unusually heavy casualties it took. Though the 3rd Battalion suffered more than its share of casualties in the April 1945 offensive, several members of that battalion deny that anyone called it, or any other I Company unit, a "suicide squad," or that Dole's battalion took greater risks or saw more combat than other units.
- His men considered him an aggressive, "recklessly brave" leader. At the time, Dole was young and inexperienced. He led two night patrols, both with the objective of capturing enemy prisoners; neither patrol achieved its objectives. (With the second patrol, Dole quite properly withdrew his platoon after fearing that he was about to lead his men into friendly fire.) Dole's platoon's senior sergeant, Stan Kuschick, called Dole "the best combat leader the platoon had." Others remember him as quiet, unassuming, respectful of authority, and popular with the men. He quite properly deferred to others with more combat experience. Dole was objectively a fine leader who valued the lives of his men, but the campaign bio's characterization of him as unusually aggressive and "recklessly brave" is exaggeration.
- Slightly wounded on a night patrol by a grenade, he returned to lead his platoon on a second patrol only two days later. In his 1988 autobiography, Dole is quite straightforward in admitting that his first wound was accidentally self-inflicted, when he threw a grenade poorly and was caught in the blast, suffering a minor wound that was, as he wrote, "the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart." Contrast this to the GOP's slanderous allegations of 2004 against John Kerry, who suffered a similarly minor wound (due to enemy fire) that won him the first of three Purple Hearts; in Kerry's case, he will be falsely accused of faking an injury in order to win a medal. Dole also fails to note that several of his comrades were wounded in his grenade blast. The story of the errant grenade has been rewritten several times, with the latest version, circulated by the Dole campaign, saying that someone's grenade bounced off a tree and rolled back at the platoon.
- In a major offensive on April 14, 1945, Dole's platoon sergeant was ordered by the company commander to lead a rifle squad in an assault on a German machine-gun nest, but Dole ignored the order and led the attack himself. The stories of this incident conflict with one another. Sergeant Frank Carafa, who says he was acting platoon commander for 16 months (an improbably long posting), is the source of the official story. But Kuschick, whom Dole names as his second-in-command, tells the story a bit differently. The essence of the story is the same -- Dole did indeed lead the attack -- but the campaign bio, with its inference that Dole heroically disobeyed orders in order to take more risk upon himself, is somewhat exaggerated. Again, no one is disputing Dole's leadership or his heroism, but the Dole campaign seems to have taken the facts, which show Dole in a perfectly good light as a brave combat leader, and stretched them into a Hollywood storyline.
- He was gravely wounded by enemy shrapnel while trying to drag his wounded radioman into a shell hole. Again, the campaign bio tries to infuse a bit more heroism into an already heroic story. Though details of the particular attack vary, it is clear from Dole's own account that Dole, whose platoon was under heavy fire, threw a grenade into an enemy machine-gun nest, dove for cover into a shell hole, saw his radioman lying nearby, and dragged the (dead) radioman into the shell hole with him. As Dole was scrambling out of the shell hole, he was hit in the back by enemy fire and severely wounded. The campaign bio adds the fillip that Dole was hit while trying to rescue a wounded comrade, a minor but unnecessary embroiderment to the actual events.
- Dole's leadership qualities played a significant role in cracking the Germans' mountain defenses. Unfortunately, this seriously stretches the reality of events. While Dole and his fellow soldiers fought bravely, and died in large numbers, their unit failed to achieve their objective of taking Hill 913. Author Robert Ellis, who served in Dole's 10th Mountain Division, writes, "Dole was put out of action so quickly that his contribution to the 10th Division's smashing of the German Gothic line was tragically brief."
- For his "heroism under fire," he was awarded two Bronze Stars. According to Army records, Dole received one, not two, Bronze Stars, for his valorous service in the assault of April 14, 1945. His campaign has never given any citations for either decoration. If indeed Dole did receive a second Bronze Star, he would have received it under the 1947 policy that awarded the medal to all holders of the Combat Infantryman's Badge. Ellis writes, "In other words, Dole's second award was simply for being in combat -- not, as with Bronze Stars awarded in wartime, for 'heroic' or 'meritorious' conduct." Noting this second Bronze Star without explaining its circumstances adds a layer of puffery to a straightforward wartime record of which Dole, or anyone else, can be proud without the necessity of exaggeration.
- Ellis, who won his own Bronze Star on April 14, writes, "In the April 14 attack Dole did his duty, but his actions were hardly the stuff of heroism. It was his job to lead his platoon, and dragging a wounded (or dead) comrade into one's shell hole was a common occurrence in the heat of battle. Even the friendly chronicler Noel Koch wonders why a war wound invests the bearer with an aura of heroism. 'Heroism,' he says, 'involves choices, and Dole perceived no choice between leading his men and not leading them.' As a member of Dole's platoon, Stanley Jones, put it in a recent interview, Dole 'was a good soldier, but no more a hero than any other soldier.'" Dole's two promotions, to first lieutenant and then to captain, were awarded while he was in the hospital for multiple operations and extensive rehabilitations; Dole himself called the second promotion a "bedpan promotion." Ellis concludes, "And so the truth about Dole's war record is considerably less than awe-inspiring. Yet the myth endures, and with the candidate running on the contrast between his and Clinton's military record, his campaign isn't eager to give a more accurate account. Dole, at the behest of his handlers, is less reticent about his service than in the past, but he mainly speaks about his wound and rehabilitation. He has passed up several opportunities to correct the exaggerated versions in biographies, and in the case of his self-wounding has even approved a sanitized account in which his maladroitly hurled grenade goes unnoted. Journalists continue to portray him as a hero, winner of two Bronze Stars. ...Such attempts to make political capital out of Dole's war service go beyond the respect due him for the role he played as a soldier with the 10th Mountain Division." (Nation/Ted Ellis)
- Bob Dole's advisor on foreign policy is former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has returned to politics from the corporate world. Rumsfeld's and Dole's positions on many foreign policy issues, particularly missile defense and the confrontational relationship with North Korea, will become linchpins of George W. Bush's foreign policy in 2001 and beyond, when Rumsfeld becomes, once again, Secretary of Defense. One of Rumsfeld's key aides in the Dole campaign is Paul Wolfowitz, who will become a top official in the State Department under Bush and the chief architect of the Iraq invasion and occupation. (PBS)
- November 5: In the elections, Republicans retain control of Congress, losing but a few seats. (Wikipedia)
- November 5: One Republican to win office is first-term representative John Peterson from Florida, a conservative who wins on a strong family-values platform. Peterson weathers multiple accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in October, with six women leveling numerous allegations of inappropriate advances and fondling. Katherine Northam says that Peterson fondled her breasts while she was a 16-year old page in 1987, while Peterson was a state senator. Three other women say that they were forced to resign from their jobs in Peterson's office because of his offensive and repeated sexual advances; two others claim that Peterson forcibly kissed them in his state senate office. Peterson says all the women are lying and excuses his actions by calling himself "an excessive hugger and a friendly person." Peterson will become one of the loudest voices calling for Clinton's impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair. (Hilton and Testa)
- November 12: A doctor who provides abortions in Vancouver, Jack Fainman, is shot and wounded by an unknown sniper who fires into the rear of his house. (Washington Post)
