Chiaroscuro -- Sandy Berger and The Pope

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Chiaroscuro: In painting, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark.
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Few weeks in history are rendered in such strong contrasts between light and dark than the one just past. For few personalities contrast as vividly as two pivotal characters who swept across our view this week: one who exited our sight with regrettable finality and the other who did so with regrettable fleetingness.

It is painful to see two men as representative of their era’s light and dark as Karol Józef Wojtya and Samuel R. Berger sharing the same page. Through his works and through his spiritual leadership, Wojtya stands with the giants of all millennia. One of the two most consequential world leaders of the past half-century, Pope John Paul II grew from a witness to the horrors of National Socialism to play an essential role in the conquering of Marxist tyranny throughout Europe. His brave pilgrimage to Poland in 1979 exposed the corroded scaffolding of Soviet communism, rocking the evil empire off-balance for the first time and making it vulnerable to the perceptive Ronald Reagan’s timely application of sheer muscle to topple it. Never before have so many millions been freed of such awful oppression; since then, only in the past three year’s successive liberations have we seen anything approaching that dawning of freedom, in a process more arduous than the catalytic and cataclysmic collapse of the Soviet Union somehow seems in retrospect. Yet a full decade passed between The Pope’s epic journey in 1979 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Soviets recognized his essentialness early on, ordering his assassination in 1981. His steadfastness--rooted as it was in bedrock principles, another trait he shared with Reagan--served the world well during this era of unparalleled turbulence and danger.

Karol Wojtya changed the world.

It remains to be seen if the world will remain changed, if we are up to the task of keeping the forces of darkness at bay. Communism is on the march in South America; Russia is sliding back to totalitarianism; and by the classical Gramscian script of freeing law “from every remnant of transcendence and absoluteness, practically from all moralist fanaticism”, Europe finds itself sinking again into collectivism and depression like a mammoth in a tar-pit. Truly Europe is off-balance today, and perhaps the forceful vector of radical Islamism is poised to rend it from its foundations in the next decade if amorality and creeping Marxism don’t do it first.

In that way, Sandy Berger’s accomplishments appear more permanent than Karol Wojtya’s. The former National Security Advisor’s record paints him as either fantastically inept or grimly malfeasant. Which interpretation one accepts depends on one’s optimism regarding human nature ...or one’s blindness. Certainly Berger’s election-year admissions that he had "accidentally" taken and “inadvertently misplaced” revealing mark-up drafts of top-secret antiterrorism documents from the National Archives play to a benign image of a rumpled, scatterbrained intellectual. However, this week’s revelations paint a different picture:

• His previous excuses, both before and after his exit as John Kerry’s top national security advisor, were, he now admits, bald lies.
  
• Actually, he had purposefully purloined those troublesome drafts, with their
  damning handwritten commentary from himself and possibly both Clintons, Al Gore,
  Jamie Gorelick, Louis Freeh, John Deutsch, Janet Reno et al.
  
• And rather than “inadvertently misplacing” the mark-ups, he’d meticulously cut them to small pieces with scissors in his office late at night.

These admissions endorse the more jaundiced view of Berger’s character. Unfortunately it is one which meshes with a thesis of malfeasance supported by his record.

No less than former FBI Director Louis Freeh subscribed to the harmless rumpled-intellectual image of Berger, dismissing him as merely “a public-relations hack”. This grossly understates Berger’s effectiveness at abetting the enemies of freedom. Berger entered his role as NSA as a successful lobbyist for Communist Chinese interests. He presided as top national-security cop in an Administration which accepted campaign contributions from China and funneled key defense technology back to China, and which instituted legal firewalls to prevent intelligence agencies from detecting such treason. Meanwhile, Berger “seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror” per top Administration pollster Dick Morris [8], arranging vetoes of efforts to cripple Iranian terror funding and working to block antiterror sanctions. Alarmingly, Berger personally allowed bloodthirsty global jihad to flower by repeatedly rebuffing Sudanese offers to hand Osama bin Laden to the United States in a deal brokered by a major contributor to Democrat campaigns. Then Berger allowed bin Laden and his top lieutenants to escape to Afghanistan and roadblocked opportunities to eliminate them [US News & World Report, Paul Bedard, 15 Mar 2003]. Berger was even singled-out by former UN Inspector Scott Ritter for the collapse of UN inspections efforts in Iraq.

Sandy Berger changed the world, too.

It is our great loss that Karol Wojtya has passed from the stage. His steadfast leadership and adherence to timeless principle will be sorely missed. He was truly a force for change, of the good kind.

By contrast, Sandy Berger is still with us, his plea-bargained deal amounting to pocket change for a man of his wealth, and his temporary loss of security clearance ensures he will be a force for his brand of change again in the 2008 election cycle.