LATTER DAY LINCOLN BRIGADE:

One Weekend in April, A Long Time Ago . . .: What John Kerry thought about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. (Hugh Hewitt, 09/09/2004, Weekly Standard)

IN THE SPRING of 1985 Ronald Reagan struggled with a Democrat-dominated Congress for authority to ship aide to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the spreading grip of the Sandinistas on their Central American country. There was quite a lot of heated rhetoric and over-the-top theater. The Sandinistas even staged a donation of ambulances to their side from American survivors of the Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War.

On the eve of a major Senate vote on the issue of aid, John Kerry and Tom Harkin jetted off to Managua for a weekend of intensive talks with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The pair departed after holding a press conference to announce a study which listed dozens of supposed lies that the Reagan administration had told Congress and 15 allegations of law breaking (the study was done by the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies). Kerry and Harkin returned with a three page "peace proposal" given to them by Ortega.

Then-secretary of State George Shultz was outraged. "It's presumably not lawful for citizens to appoint themselves as negotiators for the United States," Shultz declared. "Members of Congress have every right to travel to Nicaragua to review the situation, but we cannot have a successful policy when they take trips or write 'Dear Commandante' letters with the aim of negotiating as self-appointed emissaries to the communist regime." Shultz called for the censure of the two senators. Charles Krauthammer, writing at the time, accurately observed that "[a]t their arrival home, only the umbrella was missing." Senator Richard Lugar remarked that "[m]ost Republicans were absolutely enraged with the Kerry-Harkin mission. That was absolutely the last straw." The Los Angeles Times reported anger among moderate Democrats as well, who "complained privately that the Harkin-Kerry trip made their party look pro-Sandinista."

Look? Given the Bolland Amendment they were objectively pro-Sandinista, not to mention anti-constitutional.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 9, 2004 10:06 AM