[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.''

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