Nation’s Elite Adhering to Silence on Scandal

WASHINGTON —  Like much of America, the nation’s power elite are watching the congressional impeachment process closely--with breathtaking silence.

While the impeachment issue is Topic A in Washington, the nation’s elders, from ex-presidents to retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell and financier George Soros, have uttered little about the showdown in Washington and clearly aren’t eager to be drawn out.

Former President Carter, never shy about providing advice on a wide range of issues, shared his thoughts during an earlier book tour. But lately he “has been turning down interviews” like crazy and doesn’t want to discuss the impeachment issue, said his spokeswoman, Carrie Harmon.

Retired Army Col. William Smullen, a longtime Powell aide, said the general “is not touching” the impeachment issue “under any circumstances.” It’s “not that he doesn’t care about it, but it’s just not something he wants to get dragged into,” Smullen said.

The major exception has been academics. Recently, 400 historians issued a statement arguing that President Clinton’s offenses are not impeachable. A bevy of professors testified on Capitol Hill. Conservative professors wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that urged lawmakers to press ahead.

But the bulk of the U.S. elite--from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to evangelist Billy Graham, and from corporate executives and bankers to physicians--has remained conspicuously quiet.

Former President Bush “has a long-standing policy of not commenting on the current events of the day,” said Michael Dannenhaur, a Bush spokesman in Houston.

By some reckoning, the decisions by such influential Americans to keep their counsel may be a serious lapse in the impeachment debate. Their voices, on either side, could be influential. Their distance leaves the debate largely to lawmakers and “talking heads” on TV shows.

What makes their absence more important is that, no matter what ultimately results from the impeachment process, the stakes could be enormous.

Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.) raised the possibility that an impeachment could set off a tit-for-tat mentality in which the controlling party in Congress will regularly seek to impeach a president of the opposing party for any reason, no matter how trivial.

If the Senate ends up removing Clinton from office, Delahunt said, it “could alter the balance” between the White House and Congress--a major upheaval in a country founded upon three equal branches of government.

Others warn that impeachment of the president also could have more immediate effects, hobbling the government and leaving the United States more vulnerable to setbacks in foreign policy or the global financial markets.

The silence of the nation’s elite stands in sharp contrast to the traditions of earlier generations, when the country’s elder statesmen felt obliged, even compelled, to speak out on major public issues.

Russell Jacoby, a social historian, points out that as late as the 1950s, America still harbored a coterie of “public intellectuals”: writers and thinkers who sought to address a general but educated audience about key issues of the day. They had broad influence back then.

In 1947, for example, a prominent group of liberals formed Americans for Democratic Action, designed to keep communism from preempting liberalism in America and to keep the Democratic Party itself from drifting further to the right. The group included Hubert H. Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, labor leader Walter P. Reuther, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., economist John Kenneth Galbraith and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

And liberals and conservatives weighed in unhesitatingly--and often--on issues such as the U.S. entry into World War II, the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

But that input has been on the decline, and scholars who watch the nation’s rich and powerful now say they are not surprised at the dearth of commentary on impeachment.

G. William Domhoff, the UC Santa Cruz professor who wrote “Who Rules America?” which chronicles the country’s powerful, said they tend to get up in arms only about issues that seem likely to have a long-term effect, such as free trade or restraint of labor unions.

With the Senate unlikely to remove Clinton from office, most people are viewing the impeachment battle as just another--presumably short-lived--display of partisan wrangling. “This isn’t a power-elite issue,” Domhoff said.

Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar, agreed. “I didn’t expect them to weigh in in the first place. It’s hard to see how any of them would see any advantage in saying anything.”

To be sure, not all of the nation’s power elite have been silent.

In September, for example, former President Ford proposed in an op-ed piece that Congress publicly rebuke Clinton, instead of impeaching him, in a Capitol Hill session in which the president also would accept full responsibility for his actions. Ford was among the first to suggest censure as an alternative to impeachment.

“At 85, I have no personal or political agenda,” Ford wrote. “. . . But I do care, passionately, about rescuing the country I love from further turmoil or uncertainty.”

And last month’s ad signed by the 400 historians declared that Clinton’s peccadilloes do not add up to the high crimes or misdemeanors that merit impeachment. Conservative professors, writing in the Wall Street Journal, disagreed.

All of that could change, of course. Now that the House Republican leadership has ruled out any possibility of voting for censure as an alternative, the prospect of impeachment may become all the more real for Americans, and more of the nation’s elite may break their silence.

Until now, however, the elite, and most ordinary Americans, have seemed surprisingly uninterested in what is going on here. “No one anticipated that this would come even this far,” Jacoby said. “Maybe it’ll galvanize” interest nationwide.