European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 21, 1988, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 10 columns James Reston the stars and stripes Choice of a running mate could be decisive when Howard Baker resigned As while House chief of staff he said he did t want to be nominated Tor he vice presidency and did t expect to beaked. He should t be so sure. Both parties in Choos ing their vice presidential candidates face a sinous problem. The nest president it going to need All the help he can gel. His most important task will be to negotiate peace or at least a Mcc in the guerrilla War Tate can the while House and the Congress. This should be about As easy As arranging a cease fire in the Middle East or Northern Ireland but if anybody can do it for the republicans Baker is probably the Best designated Hitler in the Field. As former Republican Leader in the Senate Howard Baker knows the main players on Capitol Hill and i hair uncles and their aunts. If you polled members of the House and Senate on who is Best qualified not on y to be vice president but president the guess Here is that Baker would top the list. He has the respect and Trust of the leaders in both parties and knows thai you can Compromise almost anything in Washington if you Don t take credit for it. This is one reason Why he has been such a successful majority Leader and chief of staff. He has the gift of making the antagonists think his successful moves were i hair idea. It was typical of him to say he did l want inc vice presidential nomination but not to say he would t take it. You Don t turn Down requests like that he said. The Leader of both parties agree thai the present gridlock Between inc executive and legislative branches cannot continue. There is endless talk about the necessity of restoring a non partisan foreign an defense policy bul i talc attention has been paid to inc role of the next vice president in bringing such a policy into practice. The present tendency As usual is for the presidential candidates to choose running mates Pri Marily for their contributions in winning inc election. Bul the main question is which vice presidential Candi Date can help govern inc country after the election and replace inc president if necessary. The Case for Baker is that he meets both tests Dur ing and after the election. He is Good on the platform and on to. He has a sense of history and a sense of humor both now in Short Supply and he s from in South which May be the decisive Battlefield of the Campaign. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas is another Strong Republican contender now thai he has come into the temper ate font. Hut he irritated Bush during the primaries Anthony Lewis t1oe1snoremep1lthe Char recognizes sennok5 Smon w Kennet jf1mwwthuect someihm6,Mike, sufi top the Union and his fastball is still better than his control. Governor Dukakis has a More awkward vice presidential decision. One of his problems is thai he Knowli talc about Washington in general and Congress in particular and he is Short on experience in the melds of foreign policy and defense. He has however a wide Choice of men who know something of these mysteries particularly Tom Foley the democratic majority Leader in the House who is almost As popular on the Hill As Baker also Sens. Lloyd bunt san of Texas John Glenn of Ohio Sam Nunn of Georgia and Bill Bradley of new Jersey and rep. Be Hamilton of Indiana. Those democrats who arc urging Dukakis to choose Jesse Jackson As vice presidential candidate arc doing no favor to either Man. Certainly nol if he were expected to help Dukakis gel a consensus in Congress on foreign or Domestic policy. Jackson has never held a political executive Job in his life and his views on foreign and budgetary prob lems arc certainly not calculated to encourage Unity or non partisanship. Assigning him to preside quietly Over the sen ate and argue a Licelly in the cloakroom for policies he does t like would be equivalent to nominating Jesse Helms 10 be Secretary of stale. For Jackson the Media and the message his personal message Are the breath of life and to exp Cal him to go along and shut up is ridiculous. What Bush and Durakas do then with hit first decision on the vice presidency will Lell us something Aboul their judgment for we have to know not Only where they re going bul who s going with them which is probably As important As the presidency itself. He scr Atmaa new Sarvria the reshaping of history in the soviet Union pics frying history is a Basic lactic of the modern totalitarian state. Stalin not Only Defeated Trotsky exiled him and finally killed him Trotsky s name and face were expunged from soviet history. The aim is to Blank out National Mem Ory so the society can be reshaped More easily on the Model of tyranny. Orwell made the Point powerfully in "1984." his hero. Winslon Smith worked at inc ministry of truth Rcw riling old newspapers. He dropped inc evidence of real history into inc memory Hole where it was sucked into giant furnaces. For those reasons no development of the Gorbachev Era in the soviet Union is More fascinating or More important than the movement toward historical truth. Names and facts Long buried under mountains of lies arc re emerging and the value of genuine history is being celebrated. The soviet government cancelled All final history examinations for Elemen tary and High school students because the textbooks from which they were taught were so full of what Uvellia called the books treated the forced collectivization of agriculture for example As a Happy Triumph. The cruelties of that and other episodes were omitted. The history exam can be cancelled inv Celia wrote bul no one has a right 10 cancel history in self no Mailer How pain Ful. It continues and everyone now Liv ing Musl Lake part in its creation. Today we arc reaping the bitter fruit of our own moral compromises and Are paying for those things thai we mutely accepted and supported and now do nol know How to explain to our Orwell could hardly have put it belter if he had been optimistic enough to imagine in fid Ion such a dra Matic reversal of the totalitarian corruption of history. One by one also the disgraced individuals of the Stal in years Are being rehabilitated. In february it was Nikolai Bukharin. Last week it was lev Kama nov and Grigory Zinoviev Karl rack and Grigory Piatakov. All four were Vic Tims of inc purge trials in the 1930s, those parodies of Justice in which the innocent accused confessed their guilt. Kamenev and Zinoviev were particularly important figures. They confessed to trying to murder statin on the orders of Trotsky and to playing a part in in murder of Sergei kirov the Leningrad party chief. The kirov murder no suspected of being Stalin s work was used by Stalin As inc excuse for massive purges and killings. The restoration of history is taking place nol Only in politics but in Litera Ture. Poems and novels Long banned Are appearing in a flood. A soviet literary critic l Ann Insky writes in the times literary supple ment of London that the result has been inc recovery and reinstatement of key works of modern russian among others Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak Are returning Inlo being from non being in All this there is reassurance about he human spirit. After 70 years of sup pression and expunging. Soviet society yearns for historical Rulh. People want to know what happened and want to read what was written even people who grew up entirely within the constraints of the stalinist system. The spirit of Rulh has survived. The movement toward honest history also has profound implications for the present struggle in the soviet Union. And in is a ferocious struggle we increasingly realize Between the Gorbachev re formers and their bureaucratic and ideological open the terrible closed pages of history is necessarily to open who understands hat official accounts of the past arc open to question will be More inclined to accept question ing of today s policies to accept the Radical notion thai governments work belter when their decisions Are subject to debate. Mikhail Gorbachev must have understood exactly that when he called for a fresh look at soviet history. He not to be mistaken for a Liberal reformer in our sense for a Democrat. But he i prepared logo much further in the Effort to Rescue his country from immobilise in than we suspected Al communist party conference starts on june 28. More will be at slake there than at any political meeting any where in a Long Lime. What Ann Insky said of the literary world Musl be True for others Loo for the time being we Are living in a slate of enchantment the resurrected and the newly rising touch one another in wonderment half expecting this new Elysium to vanish As miraculously As it now Yoth Slaidi Nat
