State Department: yes, it's true.

State Department: Yes, It's True

IMAGINE WHAT would happen if Attorney General Edwin Meese, after taking yet another barrage of criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, instructed one of his aides to write to several ACLU trustees asking them to resign in protest because the ACLU was embarassing President Reagan. There would be, quite properly, national outrage at such an attempt to use the power and prestige of government to torpedo a private, nonprofit organization over a policy disagreement. The House Democrats would look into Meese's finances again, the media would shout censorhip, Sam Donaldson might actually lose his mind.

Yet that, it seems, is pretty much what Secretary of State George Shultz, or one of his subordinates, has done to the Heritage Foundation. In late February, Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, using official stationery, wrote several Heritage trustees (without sending copies to any Heritage executives) asking them either to persuade Heritage to stop criticizing Shultz and State, or to resign.

The proximate cause of Whitehead's letter was the release in January of a Heritage paper titled "Rhetoric v. Reality: How the State Department Betrays the Reagan Vision," summing up what many anti-Communist observers have been saving for months: The most stubborn resistance to Ronald Reagan's decision to make aid to anti-Communist guerrillas a principal weapon of American foreign policy comes not from Congress but from the State Department. Whitehead charged that the paper was filled with "inaccuracies and false innuendoes," without specifying any. The paper's main points--that in Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, State has resisted helping the rebels--have been made repeatedly by the rebel organizations themselves, their American supporters, and numerous journalists. As any Washington-based reporter who has covered these issues can testify, to listen to a State Department briefing on Africa or Afghanistan is to see bureaucratic deceit and pusillanimity raised to an art form. Even on Nicaragua and El Salvador, State is less useful than it could be; before presidential attention was fully focused on the Central American problem, State was a hindrance there as well. Thus we have two scandals: bureaucrats actively resisting settled American foreign policy to the objective benefit of our most dangerous enemies; and the highest-ranking member of the Cabinet (or at least his trusted deputy) officially sabotaging organizations that support the President's policy. Will the White House react to either?