No Such Thing As Too Much Bernie Aronson

If you're still curious about Bernie Aronson (previously examined here and here) below is a 1990 New York Times article about him.

I particularly was impressed by the fact he doesn't speak Spanish. Such people make the best Latin American diplomats.

April 24, 1990

Washington at Work; An Unlikely Diplomat Seizes the Opportunity To Shape Latin Policy

The day the Senate confirmed the nomination of Bernard W. Aronson as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs a year ago, lightning struck two century-old oak trees on his lawn, toppling one into his dining room.

A neighbor called Mr. Aronson at the State Department, but the new Assistant Secretary was too preoccupied with Panama and Nicaragua to inspect the damage until later that night. ''When I got home,'' he recalled, ''I wondered: Was this a bad omen?'' At the time, the question did not seem irrational.

Mr. Aronson, who does not speak Spanish, was suddenly responsible for a region that had long produced trouble for more experienced diplomats. Then there was his personality, which could not necessarily be called diplomatic. Mr. Aronson can sometimes be thin-skinned, socially clumsy and prone to losing his temper. ''He's not the foursquare button-down bureaucrat,'' said Robert Leiken, a Harvard University researcher who is a longtime friend. ''He's got all the hang-ups and virtues of a character out of a Saul Bellow novel.''

What's more, the 43-year-old Assistant Secretary is a Democrat -- the highest-ranking Democrat in the Bush Administration. Mr. Aronson's background as a speech writer for Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale made him suspect to many Republicans; his nomination by President Bush made him a turncoat to some Democrats. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, ''told me I was nuts to take the job,'' Mr. Aronson said. Many predicted that the Administration was setting him up to use as a scapegoat when Daniel Ortega Saavedra won re-election as President of Nicaragua.

'A Great Year for Bernie'

Instead, Mr. Aronson is enjoying the benefits of that potent political force good luck. Mr. Ortega was defeated, and on Wednesday, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro is to be inaugurated in his place. Of course, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs is not directly responsible for the Sandinistas' electoral defeat. But leading Democrats and Republicans alike give him credit for a strong role in forging a bipartisan policy with Congress on Nicaragua, for handling relations with Latin America after the invasion of Panama and for helping avert a right-wing coup in Guatemala.

In a region of revolutions, debt, drugs and earthquakes, the tide could easily reverse. Indeed, despite Mr. Aronson's jawboning in Managua last week, Mrs. Chamorro is reportedly planning to keep a Sandinista as head of the army, throwing into question the demobilization of the contras. but for the time being things are going his way.

''It's been a great year for Bernie,'' said Robert G. Beckel, a political aide in the Carter White House who was manager of Mr. Mondale's 1984 Presidential campaign. ''He may well be the bipartisan prototype for the future.''

Mr. Mondale agreed. ''The Bush Administration could use several Bernie Aronsons,'' he said.

Does Mr. Aronson represent a new post-ideological Washington creature? Or is he simply an opportunist?

''As far as the notion of jumping ships or jumping parties, I didn't do either,'' Mr. Aronson explained. ''There is a long tradition in this country, and one I strongly respect, of bipartisan foreign policy. Where our foreign policy has been most creative and productive, it has been bipartisan, whether that has involved NATO or the Marshall Plan or deployment of the cruise and Pershing missiles or the Alliance for Progress.''

What is consistent in his career, Mr. Aronson said, is the belief that ''freedom and justice go hand in hand.''

''I've always tried to be on the side of the underdog,'' he said, ''and defend the democratic center from enemies, whether they be from the left or the right.''

Guitar, Civil Rights and Yeats

Mr. Aronson said that as a Democrat he was more in the mold of Hubert H. Humphrey than George S. McGovern. But he is a product of the 60's who still plays guitar and sings folk music, is nostalgic about the civil rights movement and talks of ''doing the right thing.'' With his wife, Carol L. Corillon, director of the Committee on Human Rights at the National Academy of Sciences, and their newly adopted infant daughter, he lives in Takoma Park, Md., a Washington suburb so identified with liberal causes that some call it the People's Republic of Takoma Park.

A discussion with Mr. Aronson can feel like a college rap session. Over a bowl of his wife's homemade vegetable soup, he recently talked about the poetry of William Butler Yeats. ''Yeats embodies both the passion and the tragedy of life,'' he said, adding that he drew this lesson from the poet's example: ''You can't be casual in a job like this. You don't have a right to do it halfway, or fail to seize an opportunity, because people's lives are in the balance.''

The lessons Mr. Aronson has learned come out of an eclectic life. The son of the founder of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Mr. Aronson grew up in Rye, N.Y., and after graduating from the University of Chicago, served as a Vista volunteer in Appalachia.

''Working with very poor people in Appalachia reinforced my views about a lot of things,'' he said. ''There is a certain kind of ideology that is applied to poor people in Latin America, that somehow poor people don't care about freedom and dignity, that all they want is a health clinic and a job, and they don't care if they have to keep their mouths shut. That's total bull.''

A Wrenching Contrast

After a stint as a reporter at The Raleigh Register in West Virginia, he joined the movement to change the leadership of the United Mine Workers. His work caught the eye of Vice President Mondale, who brought him to the White House as a speech writer.

Mr. Aronson first went to Central America in 1983 with a human rights delegation investigating Salvadoran death squads. ''In El Salvador you could taste the death in the air,'' he recalled. Soon after, he went to a friend's wedding in Washington. ''The contrast totally demolished me,'' he said.

It led Mr. Aronson into his first venture at crossing party lines. As a speech writer in the 1984 Presidential campaign, he counseled Mr. Mondale to take a tough stand against the Sandinistas' treatment of the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua. After that campaign, he moved toward the Republican position, supporting the contras as the only way to challenge what he viewed as the Sandinistas' ''repressive Leninist'' regime.

That position angered many liberals. It also attracted the attention of Oliver L. North, then a National Security Council aide, who sought Mr. Aronson's advice on persuading moderates to support the Reagan Administration's Nicaragua policy.

Mr. Aronson and three other Democrats known together as ''The Gang of Four'' urged the Administration to install liberal Nicaraguans in contra leadership positions. (His colleagues were Mr. Leiken, the lobbyist Bruce P. Cameron, and Penn Kemble of the human rights group Freedom House.) In 1986 he wrote a speech for President Reagan on the eve of a crucial House vote on contra aid, seeking to appease Congressional Democrats by promising to improve the contras' performance on human rights.

A Turn in the Tide

That speech, along with recommendations from two conservative Republicans, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois and Senator John McCain of Arizona, won him his current job. ''I called Jim Baker,'' Mr. Hyde recalled, ''and I said, 'He's a liberal Democrat, but he thinks like you and I do about Central America.' Being a liberal Democrat, and with the Democrats dominating Congress, he could pull off the compromises.''

Even before Mr. Aronson's nomination was confirmed, he worked closely with Secretary of State Baker to forge a bipartisan agreement on Nicaragua, in which the Bush Administration dropped its insistence on military aid for the contras and Congress agreed to nonmilitary aid.

It was a radical change from the days of Mr. Aronson's predecessor, Elliott Abrams, who so angered Democrats in Congress that they once refused to let him testify at a subcommittee hearing. And it demonstrated the kind of skill Mr. Aronson will need to persuade Congress to pass the Administration's $800 million aid package for Panama and Nicaragua.

For all his seeming luck, Mr. Aronson's unconventional personality still comes through from time to time. Under heated questioning at a recent House subcommittee hearing on United States backing for the Salvadoran army, he showed his unease by chewing ice into a live microphone, producing a resounding crunch.

On a recent Latin American tour with Vice President Dan Quayle, he annoyed the Vice President's press staff by seeming to turn up every time a camera pointed at Mr. Quayle with a head of state. In Asuncion, Paraguay, Quayle aides watched with dismay as Mr. Aronson came up behind Mr. Quayle and President Andres Rodriguez, posing for television cameras on the presidential yacht. Mr. Aronson, grinning, stood between the two and put his arm around Mr. Rodriguez. Quayle aides watched helplessly from shore as the yacht pulled away, carrying the two politicians and Mr. Aronson.

Mr. Aronson called the awkward moment ''a small and unimportant metaphor for what we should do more of.''

''I don't think we go wrong,'' he said, ''by showing some friendship and affection for the new democratic leadership of this hemisphere.''