[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 124 (Wednesday, September 11, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1562-E1564]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICA'S VETERANS DESERVE BETTER THAN THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
______
HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON
of new york
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, September 11, 1996
Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, 4 years ago, then Governor Clinton
campaigned as if he would be a great defender and proponent of
America's veterans, their benefits and their role in his
administration. Now, as is the case with many other campaign promises
and claims he has levied, his record says differently.
From the constitutional amendment to prohibit the physical
desecration of the American Flag, to the employment of veterans at the
White House and in his administration, President Clinton has repeatedly
proven himself to be a disappointment to so many veterans who believed
he was on their side in 1992. Even when it comes to financing the VA
hospitals that provide critical health care to service-disabled
veterans, President Clinton cannot compare to the record this Congress
has shown. In fact, the congressional budget would spend $10.6 billion
more than the President over the next 6 years and the House has
proposed spending $60 million more on veterans health care than the
President in 1997 alone.
The following article which appeared in the August 26, 1996 edition
of Insight magazine outlines perfectly the feeling of abandonment many
of America's courageous veterans feel as a result of this President's
actions, or inactions. Clearly, President Clinton's record on veterans
issues says more than his rhetoric.
Last Line of Defense
(By David Wagner)
Many Vietnam-era veterans rallied around Bill Clinton
during his campaign for the White House. Now some are
wondering if the president is a deserter in their battle for
those who served.
In 1992, Lewis B. Puller, Jr., a severely wounded Vietnam
veteran and son of legendary Marine Gen. ``Chesty'' Puller,
won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography Fortunate
Son: The healing of a Vietnam Vet. On May 11, 1994, he
committed suicide.
At the time, Puller had been working with John Wheeler--
president of the Vietnam Children's Fund, chairman of the
committee that raised funds to build the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial and author of Touched With Fire: The Future of the
Vietnam Generation. The two were trying to obtain from the
Clinton White House an accounting of its records of hiring
veterans for senior positions.
Puller and Wheeler had supported Bill Clinton in 1992 and
had helped rally vets to the militarily challenged Democrat's
candidacy. For instance, Wheeler wrote an op-ed that appeared
in USA Today during the 1992 Democratic primaries rebuking
then-candidate Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska for exploiting his
Vietnam experience in the race against Clinton.
Puller and Wheeler had expected that once the new
administration was in office it
[[Page E1563]]
would reciprocate by hiring vets for senior positions in
rough proportion to their numbers in the workforce. But they
received no hiring data--just a part-time appointment for
Puller to the Battle Monuments Commission.
Further evidence about the attitude of the new
administration toward the military unsettled Puller and
Wheeler. There was, for instance, the incident in which a
general officer, greeting a new White House staffer, was told
insultingly, ``We don't talk to people in the military around
here.''
Wheeler points out that Puller had many personal problems
at the time of his suicide, so the perceived stonewalling by
the White House was unlikely to have been the sole source of
Puller's final depressive episode. But, says Wheeler, it took
its toll. ``One of the last things Lew ever said to me was,
`I feel used by Clinton.' ''
According to figures that Wheeler since wrung from the
White House, 4 percent of the political appointees in the
Clinton White House are veterans. He notes for comparison
that 59 percent of senators, 40 percent of representatives
and 37 percent of men over age 35 in the nationwide workforce
are vets.
Furthermore, there were 132 male veterans and one female
veteran in Senate-confirmed positions in December 1994 under
Clinton. In December 1992--while President Bush still was in
office but after many of his appointees already had left for
greener pastures--there still were 189 male veterans in
Senate-confirmed positions.
``Using Bush levels as a baseline,'' says Wheeler,
``Clinton cut total vets by 57 and added 76 women and 64
nonvet men. For the Vietnam generation, Clinton cut vets by
12 and added 75 women and 105 nonvet men. Room for the
increases in women and nonvet men was made by cutting out
only vets.''
Obtaining even such limited numbers, says Wheeler, was an
ordeal that began with polite letters and escalated into a
Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request. This led to a
White House meeting and was followed by more stonewalling.
Leading veterans' organizations do not see the problem in
the same terms. Bill Smith, a spokesman for the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, or VFW, told Insight: ``This administration is
not antiveteran at all. Jesse Brown, secretary of Veterans
Affairs is earnestly working in the interests of vets. In an
age of budget cutbacks, VA has fared well.''
On the question of whether customary numbers of veterans
are being hired for senior positions, Smith says that though
he has seen no surveys, he is not aware of any
discrimination. ``Compare the administration with the
Congress: There are fewer vets there too.''
``I'm not surprised he's seen no surveys,'' says Wheeler.
``I still haven't gotten the information I've been promised,
and I've been at it for almost three years. Look, the VFW is
a venerable organization, but its job is to look after
veterans' benefits, not veterans' values. There are about 26
million American veterans altogether. About 4 million of them
are primarily interested in benefits, and the mainline vet
organizations represent them very well. But the rest of us
are more interested in the values represented by military
service: sacrifice, country, freedom, the reality of things
beyond your immediate circle that are worth dying for. These
values are traditional . . . and they are the antithesis of
the life the Clintons live.''
Those values issues could have an electoral spillover.
``These guys helped put Clinton over the top in 1992,'' says
Wheeler. ``If they desert him in '96, he could yet lose this
election. Strange, but no one has done any polling of vets on
their presidential preferences. The mainstream vet
organizations are scared of what they'd find.''
The VFW's Smith says his organization hasn't conducted any
veteran polling. ``We're nonpartisan, not a PAC--but I
haven't heard of any of the veteran PACs having any poll
numbers either.''
For Wheeler, the Clinton administration's good record on
veterans' benefits supports, rather than contradicts, his
overall theory: ``The Clintons want their vets to be victims,
not partners. They want to be photographed in attitudes of
pitying kindness toward veterans, but they don't want them as
colleagues in the Executive Office of the President. They've
done some good for vets on the benefits side of things, but
when it comes to recognizing vets as anything more than just
another victim class, this administration shows its
antiveteran face.''
On April 17, 1994, in a letter to then-White House counsel
Lloyd Cutler, Wheeler filed a FOIA request for the vet hiring
data. This request led to a White House meeting on June 22,
1994, attended by Clinton administration officials Jody
Greenstone and Steve Hilton, representing Cutler, and Bob
Bell, of the National Security Council staff. At this
meeting, as a settlement of Wheeler's FOIA request, the White
House agreed to supply him with requested information.
Some information has, in fact, been rolling into Wheeler's
mailbox. He now receives quarterly reports on the hiring of
veterans for the approximately 850 Senate-confirmed slots. As
per Wheeler's request, this information is broken down by
gender and age. But Wheeler still is awaiting information on
vet hiring in the Executive Office of the President, despite
agreement at the June 1994 meeting that this information is
public and despite the fact that the White House's promise to
provide it was offered as part of a settlement of the FOIA
request.
Besides the question of hiring, three Vietnam vets whose
sons were killed in Somalia still are waiting for an adequate
accounting of the decisions that may have placed their sons
in unnecessary danger, such as the decision to exclude tanks
from the Somalia mission.
Army Ranger Cpl. Jamie Smith bled to death during a battle
in Mogadishu, Sgt. Casey Joyce and Cpl. Dominic Phila, both
soldiers, also died there on the same day: Oct. 3, 1993.
Thereafter, the Smith and Pila families worked together with
retired Lt. Col. Larry Joyce, Casey's father, to learn what
led to those tragic events.
Joyce tapped his Pentagon contacts and reports that the
field commanders in Somalia had requested tank support, that
the request had been approved up the chain of command through
the Pentagon--and that it had been denied at the White House
level for reasons that were political rather than military:
The administration wanted to avoid the appearance of
escalating the Somalia mission.
Joyce composed a handwritten letter to Clinton and had it
delivered through a White House contact. On Nov. 19, Joyce
recalls, the president called him and said a meeting would be
arranged for the following week--but no further calls came.
On Dec. 15, 1993, the day Defense Secretary Les Aspin
resigned, about a half-hour before the resignation
announcement, Joyce received a call from presidential
assistant Betty Currie assuring him that the president still
wanted to meet with him. Joyce says he suspects this call was
made to forestall his potential criticisms of military
decisions taken on Aspin's watch, including the fatal
mistakes in Somalia, for which some say Aspin had been made
to take the fall.
Currie tells Insight that she cannot remember calling Joyce
on that particular day. ``But if he said so,'' she adds,
``it's probably true.''
In March 1994, Joyce, retired Capt. Jim Smith and retired
Sgt. Ben Phila met with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia,
at that time the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee. Nunn scheduled a hearing, with Joyce and Smith as
witnesses, for May 12, 1994. on May 11, as Capitol Hill
committee procedure requires, they faxed their written
testimony to Nunn's committee--and within an hour of sending
the fax they received a call from the National Security
Council asking them to meet with the president the next day.
By this time, testifying before Nunn's committee was a
higher priority for the bereaved fathers than meeting with
the president. But on the morning of the hearing, the
schedule was juggled so Joyce and Smith would testify after
lunch. Then, during the hearing's luncheon break, they were
taken to a limo, whisked off to the White House and deposited
in the Oval Office with Clinton, National Security Adviser
Anthony Lake and senior White House aide George
Stephanopoulos.
Joyce says that during the meeting he found Clinton
arrogant, insensitive and anxious to retain control of the
conversation. Stephanopoulos hung back near the door, looking
annoyed, according to Joyce, and frequently checked his
watch.
The line the president took was that he had relied upon his
military commanders and had not wanted to make former
President Johnson's mistake of trying to micromanage military
operations from the Oval Office.
Joyce seized on a pause in the president's word flow to ask
if it were true that at the time that Casey Joyce, Jamie
Smith and Dominic Phila were killed, Clinton already was
working on a diplomatic solution brokered by former President
Carter, using Carter's contacts with Somalian ``warlord''
Gen. Mohamed Farah Aideed, and that Clinton had accepted
Carter's opinion that a military solution in Somalia would
not work?
Joyce says Clinton acknowledged all this.
Joyce then asked why a raid aimed at capturing Aideed had
been carried out on Oct. 3. ``He was stunned at the
question,'' Joyce tells Insight. ``He then said: `On Oct. 3,
I asked Tony Lake the same question.' But later, after that
meeting, I asked Gen. Colin Powell whether the military had
been told of any change in the Somalia strategy, and he said
no, it had not.''
Joyce says that, publicly and privately, the Clinton
administration ``is sticking to a canned response that says
the operation in Somalia saved lives and therefore our boys
did not die in vain. But the lifesaving part of the mission
was the humanitarian part, which ended in March of `93. The
rest--the part our sons died in--was just President Clinton's
participation in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's personal vendetta
against Aideed.''
Throughout the 45-minute meeting, says Caroline Smith,
Jamie's mother, ``the president never acknowledged any
responsibility whatsoever. He was sorry, of course, but as
far as taking responsibility, he diffused it all over the
place.''
The White House referred calls on all these matters to the
VA. VA spokesman Jim Holly tells Insight that the Clinton
administration's record on veterans' benefits and veteran
hiring makes this ``the most pro-vet administration since FDR
signed the GI Bill.''
On July 28 the president told a Disabled American Veterans
conference in New Orleans: ``We're still around because of
you.''
But others besides Wheeler are alarmed at the plight of
veterans. On July 31, Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican,
shepherded the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1996
through the House. The bill would strengthen veteran
preferences in federal
[[Page E1564]]
hiring and allow vets in federal employment to appeal adverse
actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
``Right now,'' Mica tells Insight, ``veterans are the last
hired, first fired.''
But for Wheeler the issue is not filling quotas, but
showing respect. ``I'm not trying to obtain a given number of
senior White House jobs for veterans,'' Wheeler says, ``I'm
trying to confirm or disprove a growing impression that this
White House doesn't want veterans in its face.''
In a National Public Radio interview on March 14, 1994,
Puller observed: ``Clinton came in with a lot of baggage. His
draft record back in the sixties; he went to Yale Law School,
where virtually no one served; so, I sense sort of a `we-
they' mentality there.''
``I know a number of years ago,'' Puller continued,
``somebody said there's an unbridgeable gulf between those
who served and those who didn't serve in the Vietnam War. I
don't believe that any more, but I feel like veterans have
made more of an effort to be accessible to Clinton, and to
his administration, than his administration has to be
accessible to them.''
Instead of accepting Puller's outreach, Wheeler says, this
White House has comported itself toward veterans as though
inspired by a remark of Shakespeare's great villain, Iago:
``He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.''
____________________