“Who is Mort Halperin?” the conservative Washington Times asked in an editorial last summer, a fair question considering the name was not a household word.
In the next few weeks, however, Mort Halperin-like Zoe Baird and Lani Guinier-may well become a familiar name. Conservative Republicans have decided that Halperin is an opportune target, a chance to challenge the president and discredit his defense policy as the attack on Guinier wounded his civil rights program.
“We hope,” said one Republican congressional aide, “to Bork him,” taking Halperin’s extensive writings on foreign policy and, as in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, use it to block his nomination.
Halperin is the president’s nominee for assistant secretary of defense for democracy and peacekeeping, a new directorate at the Pentagon and one that, by its title, defines the president’s philosophy of what the post-Cold War armed forces should be doing.
This office would provide the civilian planning for units in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and later Bosnia if the U.S. sends troops there.
It would be the source of rules for U.S. forces when part of multinational peacekeeping operations and for relations between the U.S. and the UN military.
Halperin worked in the Defense Department once before, 27 years ago, as deputy assistant secretary of defense in international security affairs. He was one of the brilliant young academics-the “whiz kids”-brought into the Pentagon by Robert McNamara.
It was during this tour that Halperin, who holds a doctorate from Yale, met another smart young Yale graduate, Les Aspin, serving his time as an Army officer by working in the Pentagon. And it is Aspin, now secretary of defense, who got Halperin’s nomination.
This may be part of Halperin’s problem. Aspin is criticized for bringing in friends and academics instead of administrators. “He has put together a coalition of intellectuals with whom he likes to discuss options,” says one Democratic foreign policy expert privately.
During the Nixon administration, the FBI tapped Halperin’s telephone for allegedly leaking a story about bombing Cambodia to The New York Times. Despite 17 months of eavesdropping, no evidence of leaks was found. Later Halperin won a civil suit and an apology from Henry Kissinger. Yet only last week, Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) said Kissinger had the phone tapped “due to concerns over alleged leaking of classified information.”
Then there’s the fact that Halperin for years headed the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. On behalf of the ACLU, he opposed criminal sanctions for private citizens who reveal the identity of CIA agents and covert actions abroad when they set out to influence a foreign government. He was also part of the legal team that defended the right of the Progressive magazine to publish how to make a hydrogen bomb.
But Republican attacks on Halperin may be motivated, at least in part, by a desire to attack the Clinton-Aspin defense policy.
The criticism heated up as the Somalia mission ran into trouble. When it was revealed that the Defense Department had turned down a request from the U.S. commander in Somalia for tanks and plows that might have helped rescue U.S. Rangers last month, the Washington Times reported that Halperin was among the Aspin aides who had opposed sending the equipment.
On Oct. 7, Sen. Strom Thurmond, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, attacked Halperin on the floor of the Senate, linking him with the deaths of American soldiers.
Conservatives complain that Clinton is blurring the role of the military, using it for dubious social experiments such as gay rights, international aid missions and world armies, and Halperin may be a way to win points in that debate.
Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) charged recently that the Clinton-Aspin policy envisions “the creation of a new world army whose singular purpose is to enforce the whims of the arcane United Nations Security Council.” Under that policy, he said, the U.S. would become “the trainer and bill payer of an effort to create a military command structure for the (UN) secretary general. . . .”
Defense, in Halperin’s section, is also studying training peacekeeping forces from other nations at bases in the U.S. and Europe, and the president has said he would allow U.S. forces to serve under foreign command in some multinational operations.
From the beginning the Clinton White House was chary of Halperin’s nomination.
“We knew, of course,” says one Aspin confidant, “that Mort would be a lightening rod.”
Though the president selected him for the job in February, the nomination was not formally sent to the Senate until August and no hearings have yet been scheduled.
