Cranston v. Gregg - Alan Cranston, crusade against confirmation of Donald Gregg as ambassador to South Korea

NOTHING IS PLAINER than that the crusade against the confirmation of Donald Gregg as ambassador to South Korea is the heated enterprise of one man, Senator Alan Cranston. It is a pity that his abusive treatment of Mr. Gregg has not received the derision and contempt it deserves. On the contrary, ostensibly, and no doubt intentionally, seeking to be fair-minded, even the New York Times registers, on its editorial page, its doubts about the credibility of Mr. Gregg.

"Donald Gregg . . . can't explain how the words 'resupply of the Contras' appeared in two memos about a White House meeting he and Mr. Bush attended in the spring of 1986. . . . So what explanation does Mr. Gregg give the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its hearing on his nomination? He says there must have been a misunderstanding. It wasn't Contras at all. Those words must be 'a garbled reference to something like resupply of the copters' in El Salvador. . . . That's hardly credible," the Times opines.

The two memos in question had never been seen by Mr. Gregg before he brought them to the attention of the Iran-Contra committee. They were documents prepared by his secretary from dictation by his deputy, who was the only other person present at the meeting with Vice President Bush. The secretary has sworn under oath that she, not Mr. Gregg, signed his initials to the documents, and anyone who believes this is incredible has never worked with a trusted secretary. The deputy has sworn, under oath, that he made absolutely no reference to the "Contras," and that the Contras were not even mentioned in the meeting with George Bush. Mr. Bush has several times said he had no idea of the resupply operation until the following December.

It was at his meeting with the Senate panel a fortnight ago that Mr. Gregg first advanced his hypothesis. One of the items that was on the agenda that day was the shortage, in El Salvador, of functioning helicopters necessary to combat the counterinsurgency movement, a shortage owing to the absence ofhelicopter parts. Mr. Gregg advanced as "speculation" that perhaps his deputy had dictated the word"copter parts" and his secretary had written down "Contra parts." This sounds to us plausible-and irrelevant, given the record of Donald Gregg over a period of 38 years, and the trust shown in him by the President for whom he served as principal security advisor for six and one-half years.

Full-disclosurewise, as they would say in the Pentagon, I record that I have the honor to be the fatherin-law of Mr. Gregg's beautiful creation, Lucy Gregg Buckley.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group