There was a political interlude during the reunion festivities at Bowdoin, one that made me rather proud of my Alma Mater. On Saturday we attended a forum given by Tom Allen ’67, Laurence Everett Pope, ’67 and Dunbar Lockwood ’82 on Resolving Conflict: Three Approaches to Peace. Allen is presently a Congressman from Maine’s First District, and has just announced his (Ned Lamont endorsed) candidacy to run against Lieberman’s best (girl) ((She takes second place to his best buddy John McCain on the male side))friend, Susan Collins. Tom has voted right from the start on the Iraq War (you can donate here). He gave Pope a lot of credit for his vote. Pope is former Ambassador to Chad, and has held a number of posts in the State Department, most of them involved with Mid-East policy. Pope has the high honor of having had an ambassadorial nomination blocked by Jesse Helms. Allen consulted with Pope prior to the vote, and Pope told him the war would be a disaster. Lockwood is an expert on nuclear proliferation, who talked about Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
That’s Allen below, with Pope below him.
Fred Hill ’62, another State Department veteran, was on hand in the audience, and he added to the conversation. What made me proud was the fact that all of these guys are on the side of the angels. To them, we Bowdoinites can add George Mitchell and former Congressman and anti-war activist Tom Andrews. A few more such and we will have done full penance for Franklin Pierce.
Unfortunately I couldn’t take notes (eerily like my entire college career), so this is rather impressionistic. In many ways Pope was the most interesting. The subtext of what he had to say was that the State Department has been ruined by the same sort of politicization that we’ve been hearing about at Justice, and that it’s not going to be easy to put it back together again. Nothing earth shaking there I know, but it was interesting to hear it coming from someone with inside information, so to speak. Everything we’ve heard about an Administration that acts solely on the basis of ideology appears to be true.
At one point, someone asked Allen what the Democrats would do if they managed to get enough Republicans to sign on to a veto-proof end the war measure and Bush tried to nullify it with a signing statement. Allen’s answer disappointed me, because he seemed to say that Bush wouldn’t do it, because signing statements only work when no one notices them. I talked to him afterwards, and told him that I thought his answer was illustrative of a problem the Democrats have-that they still don’t quite understand how lawless and arrogant Bush is. I told him I think Bush would do it if it suited his purposes, and that if they didn’t plan for it, they would be caught back on their heels yet again. It’s right in character for a guy who has claimed the right to break the law, and has gotten a supine Congress to legitimize his criminality. Allen told me that he probably should have said that if Bush did it there’d be a political storm, and that I was probably right.
Maybe it’s because they were self selected, but there didn’t seem to be any Bush fans in the audience, and believe me, Bowdoin grads are not necessarily rabid left wingers.
All in all the consensus of all three (Lockwood still works for the feds, so he was a bit muted) plus Hill was that the Bush administration has been a foreign policy disaster. Again, nothing new there, but all very interesting.
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