[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 4 (Wednesday, January 8, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S129-S130]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING DICK CLARK
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, on December 5, the world lost one of the
greatest leaders of our era, and of any era, when Nelson Mandela died
at the age of 95. His capacity for forgiveness was rivaled only by his
courage. His actions serve as an example for the entire world. Having
led South Africa out of its darkest period of history, Mandela focused
on achieving national reconciliation to transition his government from
minority rule and apartheid, to a multicultural democracy. He was
successful in this endeavor because he believed in the importance of
bringing people together, breaking down the barriers that defined, and
imprisoned, many South Africans. For Nelson Mandela, the opportunity to
lead meant the possibility of painting South African society on a blank
canvas. It meant the possibility of creating a unified and free South
Africa, rather than perpetuating a fractured mosaic defined by
inequality.
We are fortunate to have leaders among us who share many of Nelson
Mandela's qualities of leadership and a focus on human rights. Having
served for nearly four decades in the Senate, I have had the privilege
to serve with some of them. Dick Clark, a Senator from Iowa who was in
the Senate when I was first elected, is one such individual, and his
story is connected to Nelson Mandela's legacy. I not only served with
Senator Clark but I travelled with him to Vermont and elsewhere. His
sense of commitment and his conscience set a Senate standard that is
rarely matched.
He was a fierce opponent of apartheid, and a recent POLITICO article
recalls Dick Clark's efforts to raise awareness in Congress on the
importance of the issue, and to push legislation that would distance
the United States from the South African government's activities in the
region. His efforts eventually contributed to his electoral loss at the
end of his term, but that did not keep him from pursing his goals. I am
pleased that during this important period of reflection, Dick Clark's
contributions continue to be recognized.
I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the recent POLITICO article, A
Nelson Mandela backstory: Iowa's Dick Clark, be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record as follows:
[POLITICO, Dec. 26, 2013]
A Nelson Mandela Backstory: Iowa's Dick Clark
(By David Rogers)
Dick Clark was Mandela when Mandela wasn't cool.
A one-term Democratic senator from Iowa and for years
afterward a leader of congressional discussions on apartheid,
Clark is now 85 and long gone from the public scene. But the
ups and downs of his career are an intriguing back story--and
counterpoint--to the outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela,
the black liberation leader and former president of South
Africa who died Dec. 5.
It wasn't always that way in Washington.
Indeed, Mandela turned 60 in South Africa's Robben Island
prison in the summer of 1978 even as Clark--chairman of the
African Affairs panel on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee--was fighting for his own re-election in Iowa.
It was a time when Republican challenger Roger Jepsen felt
free to taunt the Democrat as ``the senator from Africa.''
Tensions were such that the State Department called in a
South African Embassy official in May for making disparaging
remarks about Clark in Iowa. And after Clark lost, South
Africa's ousted information secretary, Eschel Rhoodie, said
his government invested $250,000 to defeat Clark, who had
become a thorn in the side of the white regime.
Jepsen denied any knowledge of South Africa's alleged role.
Nor does Clark accuse him of such. But 35 years after, Clark
has no doubt that the apartheid government led by Prime
Minister B. J. Vorster wanted him out--and had a hand in his
defeat.
Clark's liberal record and support of the Panama Canal
Treaty, which narrowly cleared the Senate in the spring of
1978, also hurt his chances in Iowa. But the fatal blow was a
fierce wave of late-breaking ground attacks from anti-
abortion forces--something even conservative writers like
Robert Novak had not anticipated in a published column weeks
before.
``Abortion was the issue, and how much effect this apparent
$250,000 had to do with promoting it more, I have no way of
evaluating it,'' Clark said in a recent interview at his home
in Washington. ``No question that they did it. They said they
did, and I think they did.''
Clark had made himself a target for South Africa with his
high-profile chairmanship of the Africa subcommittee. In
Washington as well, he was not without critics who accused
him of being too puritanical, too quick to fault U.S. policy.
But like no senator before him, Clark used the panel to raise
the visibility of human rights issues in the southern regions
of the continent. The roster of prior Africa subcommittee
chairs reads like a Who's Who of national Democrats: John
Kennedy in the late 1950s; Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore, father
of the future vice president; future Senate Majority Leader
Mike Mansfield; and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey
after his return to the Senate. But all stayed for just one
Congress before moving on. Clark stuck, challenging Cold War
policies that he believed hurt the larger struggle against
apartheid that Mandela symbolized.
``He was the icebreaker here,'' says his friend Rep. George
Miller (D-Cal.). ``He was out breaking ice on Africa issues
for the country and certainly for the Senate.'' What's more,
after losing his Senate seat, Clark didn't stop. Instead, he
found a new classroom via the Aspen Institute, where the
former professor began what amounted to his own graduate
program in 1983 to educate members of Congress about
different policy issues.
Russia had been Clark's early academic interest and was as
well in his first years at Aspen. But Africa tugged and he
set out ``to try to get a get a cadre of Congress who would
know about South Africa and what was going on in South
Africa.''
These typically were nearly weeklong seminars--held at
choice locales overseas to lure members of Congress but also
to provide neutral ground for the warring parties inside
South Africa.
Bermuda, for example, served as a meeting place in 1989.
The island allowed officials from the South African
government to shuttle in and out before the arrival of
outlawed representatives for Mandela's African National
Congress, which was operating then from outside South Africa.
``All of them were there, making their pitches,'' Clark
said. And once Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the
venue shifted to South Africa itself. ``We got Mandela, who
had just gotten out of jail not long before, to come,'' Clark
recalls of an April 1991 session in Cape Town--a seminar that
also included F. W. de Klerk, South Africa's white president.
Most striking here was Clark's impact on Republicans--the
party that helped to throw him out of the Senate.
``He is a wonder,'' says former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.).
``I had been told he was a lefty, the stereotype, but he just
drew out people. He never showed bitterness toward the right
or promoting one side.''
Just as ``Mandela made a difference, Dick Clark made a
difference in awareness'' at home in Congress, Simpson adds.
Former Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.) remembers an Aspen meeting
in Cape Town at which Clark surprised the participants on the
last day by sending them out to walk through the
neighborhoods of a black township to meet with families.
``Dick Clark would do things like that,'' Porter said.
``This was before all the big changes in South Africa when
we were debating sanctions,'' said former Sen. John Danforth
(R-Mo.). ``He was just so dedicated to it and knew all the
players.'' In fact, Clark says he knew very little about
Africa before coming to the Senate after the 1972 elections.
But when a seat opened up on Foreign Relations in 1975, he
grabbed it and fell into the Africa post--just ahead of his
classmate Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the future vice
president. Timing is everything in Congress and it was
Clark's good fortune in this case. The legendary but very
controlling Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William
Fulbright (D-Ark.) had just left the Senate at the end of
1974 and this allowed subcommittee chairs like Clark to act
more on their own.
``Fulbright's attitude was the subcommittees couldn't do
anything. Everything ought to be done by the full
committee,'' Clark said. ``I was next to last on seniority.
When it got down to me, the only thing left was Africa about
which I knew very little. Some would say none. So I just
figured: Here's a chance to learn something and I spent a lot
of time doing hearings and learning about Africa.''
He also traveled--venturing into southern, sub-Saharan
Africa which was then unfamiliar to many on the Senate
committee.
``Humphrey told me that he got as far south as Ethiopia,''
Clark said. ``It was new territory and interesting and of
course we were putting a lot of covert money in Africa, as
were the Russians.'' In the summer of 1975, Clark and two
aides left Washington for what was to be a trip to just
Tanzania, Zambia and Zaire. But that itinerary quickly
expanded to include the two former Portuguese colonies,
Mozambique and Angola.
The Angola detour was pivotal and included face-to-face
meetings with Central Intelligence Agency personnel on the
ground as
[[Page S130]]
well as the leaders of the three rival factions in Angola's
post-colonial civil war. The Soviet Union and Cuba were then
actively backing the new leftist government under Agostinho
Neto. The CIA and South Africa had begun a covert partnership
assisting rebel factions: chiefly Jonas Savimbi in the south,
but also Holden Roberto, whose base was more in the north and
Zaire.
Soon after Clark returned, the debate broke into the open
after news reports detailing the U.S. and South African
operations. Congress cut off new funding in a December 1975
appropriations fight. It then quickly enacted a more
permanent ban--the so-called Clark amendment--prohibiting
future covert assistance for paramilitary operations in
Angola.
Signed into law in February 1976, the Clark amendment was
repealed under President Ronald Reagan in 1985. Conservatives
long argued that it was always an overreach by Congress,
reacting to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's handling of
the Vietnam War.
``The danger now is the pendulum will swing too far the
other way,'' Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned
Clark's panel in a January 1976 hearing. But for all the
echoes of Vietnam, Clark says he saw his amendment more as a
way to separate the U.S. from South Africa's apartheid
regime.
``The reason the amendment passed so easily in both houses
was because of Vietnam, so I certainly related the two,''
Clark said. ``But my interest was really in Africa and South
Africa. We were aligning ourselves with apartheid forces. The
reason for my amendment was to disassociate us from apartheid
and from South Africa.''
``Kissinger had really no feeling for human rights that I
could ever discern and certainly not in South Africa,'' Clark
said. ``His association with South Africa was obviously very
close.'' A year later, visiting South Africa, Clark got a
taste of how closely the white government under Vorster had
been watching him.
That trip included an important meeting in Port Elizabeth
with the young black leader, Steve Biko, who had just been
released from jail and would die 10 months later after a
brutal interrogation in the summer of 1977. Clark said he
became a courier of sorts, taking back a Biko memorandum to
Jimmy Carter's incoming administration. But while in South
Africa, Vorster himself wanted to see Clark and spent much of
an hour quizzing the senator on his past public comments--
even down to small college appearances in the U.S. ``He spent
an hour with me,'' Clark said. ``They obviously had followed
me to each of these, much to my surprise.''
``He would quote me. And then he would say, Did you say
that on such and such a date and such and such a place?' ``We
went through this for an hour. He just wanted the opportunity
to tell me how wrong I was about everything I was saying.''
``He was the last great Afrikaner president,'' Clark said.
``In fact, he ultimately resigned over the embarrassment of
the Muldergate thing years later.'' The Muldergate thing--as
Clark calls it--was a major scandal inside South Africa in
the late 1970s when it was revealed that government funds had
been used by the ruling National Party to mount a far-
reaching propaganda campaign in defense of apartheid.
This went well beyond placing favorable articles or opinion
pieces in the press. Tens of millions of dollars were
invested to try to undermine independent South African
papers. There was even a failed attempt in the U.S. to buy
the Washington Star in hopes of influencing American policy.
Muldergate got its name from Connie Mulder, South Africa's
information minister at the time. But just as Watergate had
its John Dean, Rhoodie--a top deputy to Mulder--proved the
top witness: a suave propagandist who later gave detailed
interviews and wrote his own book on the subject filling 900-
plus pages.
Rhoodie, who was prosecuted for fraud but cleared by an
appeals court in South Africa, ultimately relocated to the
U.S., where he died in Atlanta in 1993. But by his account,
the Vorster government had used its contacts with a Madison
Avenue public relations firm, Sydney S. Baron & Co. Inc., to
undermine Clark's reelection.
Rhoodie describes a meeting early in 1978 in South Africa
attended by Mulder, Vorster and Baron at which Clark's
election was specifically discussed, and the $250,000 was
later moved into one of Baron's accounts ``to make sure that
Clark was defeated.'' As South Africa's information
secretary, Rhoodie was in fact the signatory of contracts
with Baron, according to filings with the Justice Department.
These show the New York firm initially received about
$365,000 annually under a contract signed in April 1976. This
was increased to $650,000 a year later. In August 1977, the
same arrangement was extended through January 1979, including
a $250,000 payment in April 1978.
Whether this $250,000 is a coincidence or what Rhoodie was
speaking on is not clear. At this stage, most of the major
players are dead and New York state corporate records show
Baron's firm was dissolved in 1993--the year that Rhoodie
died.
Watching it all is Clark's friend, old boss in the House
and later Senate colleague, John Culver. The two met in 1964,
when Clark signed on to help Culver win his first House
election and then worked with Culver in Washington until
1972, when Clark went back to Iowa to run for the Senate. A
Harvard-educated Marine Corps veteran, Culver said he had his
own fascination with Africa as a young man in the 1960s. But
he remembered that era as a time of greater optimism, as new
countries across the continent were emerging from colonial
rule.
``Dick came to it when there was less political reward,''
Culver said. ``But he stuck to it.''
____________________