JOHN GLENN

Glenn, set to retire at the end of his term next year, is the ranking minority member of the Governmental Affairs Committee. Under its chairman, Sen. Fred Thompson, the committee is the appointed venue for investigating and ventilating the fund-raising abuses of the 1996 presidential campaign — preeminently the allegations of foreign influence and breaches of national security in exchange for political payoffs. Convened at the beginning of the year, the investigation has quickly disintegrated into partisan disputes, with charges of foot-dragging, obstruction, favoritism, and bad faith tossed about in press conferences and rancorous public meetings. Glenn and Thompson themselves are barely on speaking terms. Under Democratic pressure, the committee was given a deadline of December 31 to issue its report — a deadline that appears increasingly unworkable given the partisan delays. Once slated to begin in March, official hearings will now open on July 8.

For politicos with fond memories of whiling away hot Washington summers absorbed in titillating spectacles like the Iran-contra and Watergate hearings, nothing could be more frustrating than the possibility that the Thompson committee will put on a second-rate show. But that’s now more than likely. In accounting for this disappointing turn, Dean David Broder of the Washington Post issued a recent bull that placed blame equally on Thompson and Glenn. “Two proud, stubborn men,” Broder wrote in a column June 22, “they are on the verge of blowing it.”

Broder’s equivalence has the virtue of symmetry but the weakness of being not exactly true. If the Thompson investigation fails in its “duty to sort out truth from exaggeration,” as Broder put it, blame should be placed squarely on Glenn and the Democratic subordinates he has failed to control.

The rancor arose early on. In setting up the investigation, Republicans banked on Glenn’s reputation for rectitude; surely the astronaut that Tom Wolfe described, in The Right Stuff, as “serious about God, country, home and hearth” would likewise be serious about influence-peddling among Indonesian thugs, Chinese Communists, and American political operatives, even if the political operatives were Democrats. Thompson took as his model the close relationship established in past major investigations — between, most famously, Republican Howard Baker and chairman Sam Ervin in the Watergate hearings, and, more recently, Warren Rudman and Dan Inouye in Iran-contra. (Thompson was Baker’s counsel during Watergate.) In both partnerships the ranking minority members — Republicans — pursued the charges without regard to the possible damage to their party.

Glenn apparently had other ideas. As soon as Thompson’s committee was chosen as the venue for the investigation in early January, Glenn and the Democrats set potentially crippling conditions on the hearings. First they demanded that the investigation’s budget be capped at $ 1.8 million — a figure they said was comparable to the Senate’s Whitewater probe. But the amount was unrealistic on its face. By the time the Whitewater committee began its work, Republicans pointed out, many of the facts had already been gathered by government agencies. Republicans insisted, further, that the travel entailed in the Thompson committee’s foreign investigation would require a far larger budget than that needed for a few months in Little Rock.

But Democrats held firm and followed up with a demand that the committee set a strict termination date for the end of this year. Thompson argued that a date certain would only invite dilatory tactics from the investigation’s targets: avoidance of subpoenas, delay in producing documents, and so on. His fear was well-grounded. The White House, true to form, has produced requested documents in “dribs and drabs” (Thompson’s phrase) and in heavily redacted form. Meanwhile, several of the most sensational witnesses, including the Democratic fund-raisers Charlie Trie and Pauline Kanchanalak, have fled the country.

Finally, Democrats insisted that the scope of the investigation be broadened to include a probe of “soft money” expenditures — that is, campaign funds raised for “party-building activities” by both parties. This would have the effect of entangling several Republican-allied organizations in the committee’s investigation — as well as obscuring the fact that the investigation was begun in response to news reports of potentially criminal foreign contributions to Democrats.

The wrangling over these and other issues dragged on into March, as the hoped-for date for hearings was continually pushed deeper into the calendar. At last Republicans struck a Republican-style compromise, which is to say they mostly gave in. The committee’s budget was set at $ 4.3 million rather than the $ 6 million Thompson originally requested, and the investigation’s broadened scope and termination date were agreed to. The investigation would now proceed in two phases, the first devoted to foreign money and national security violations, the second to “soft money” abuses. By the time both sides reached agreement, however, crucial months had been lost and the investigation had yet to formally begin.

But the delaying tactics continued. In April, for example, committee Republicans sought to issue a subpoena for bank records from the Bank of China, where Trie and other scandal figures had accounts. Committee Democrats refused to agree to the subpoena request until after the spring recess, causing a delay of two weeks for a subpoena that could have been approved in two days. And the tactics expanded outward from Capitol Hill: Committee investigators planned a June trip to Asia but complained that the State Department refused to gave routine assistance in setting up interviews of potential witnesses abroad. Finally Thompson asked Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to intervene, and some assistance was offered. But Glenn asked Thompson to cancel the trip anyway — too few interviews had been arranged to warrant the expense, he said.

Much of this tactical maneuvering took place behind the scenes. It went undeniably public on June 12, when the committee voted on granting immunity to 15 Buddhist monks and nuns involved in Al Gore’s famous fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple in 1996. News accounts suggest the Buddhists were used as conduits for money-laundering. The Justice Department had assured the committee’s Republican counsel that the nuns and monks were not targets of prosecution and so could testify with impunity. On the morning of the vote, however, the committee’s Democratic counsel, Alan Baron, phoned the Justice Department, which quickly reversed its position. A two-thirds majority is required to grant immunity, but the Democrats voted along party lines against allowing the Buddhists to testify.

For Republicans, Baron has become a symbol of the partisan duels. The original Democratic counsel, a veteran Capitol Hill lawyer named Mike Davidson, was effectively fired not long after the probe began. He had proved “insufficiently confrontational,” in the words of one Democrat, and was replaced by Baron, who seems more than sufficiently confrontational. In this he is assisted by Glenn’s chief aide, Leonard Weiss, and, curiously, by an aide to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle named Glenn Ivey. Ivey has no formal role on the committee, but he can be seen at its public meetings passing notes to staff, whispering in senators’ ears, and keeping a close eye on every development. Once a staffer for the left-wing congressman John Conyers, Ivey performed similar duties for Daschle on the Whitewater investigation — which also, coincidentally, threatened to collapse in party- line bitterness.

Ivey’s presence confirms the Democratic leadership’s intense interest in the investigation — a controlling interest, Republicans allege. Ivey was instrumental in the obstinate negotiations over the investigation ‘s scope and schedule. And Republicans, always warmed by notions of elaborate conspiracies, see behind the Democratic leadership the firm hand of the White House. They’re almost certainly correct. Accounts published in the Post, Roll Call, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere say that deputy chief of staff John Podesta convenes a group in the White House each morning to monitor the investigation. Their wishes are conveyed to Daschle and, through Ivey, to Glenn and the committee. Sometimes communication is even more direct. Daschle himself has received late-night phone calls from President Clinton complaining that Hill Democrats have too readily accommodated Republicans on the scandals.

Only Glenn, as ranking member, has the authority to rein in his party’s dilatory maneuvers. He has shown no inclination to do so. At a recent press conference he stood by as his colleague Robert Torricelli attacked Thompson’s “personal integrity” — an unusual charge, since personal integrity has not previously been considered Torricelli’s area of expertise. When a reporter from Roll Call asked how the investigation could proceed when so many witnesses were either on the lam or, like the infamous John Huang, invoking the Fifth Amendment, Glenn replied, “That’s their problem.” Meaning Republicans.

One would think it was the committee’s problem, given that the committee as a whole, and not just its Republican majority, is charged with exposing the scandal. Glenn’s partisan obstructionism may jar those who know him only as the ticker-tape hero of the early 1960s, but it’s less surprising to those familiar with his political career.

Glenn plausibly ran as a moderate in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries — and got trounced in the party of Walter Mondale — but he has moved steadily leftward since his election to the Senate in 1974. His partisanship has always been reliable when needed. And more personal considerations may be entering in as well. Glenn still carries a large debt from the ’84 campaign of at least $ 3 million that he has been unable to pay down. To finally retire it will require the aid of the White House and the Democratic National Committee, two entities most vulnerable to an unfettered investigation. Moreover, friends say, Glenn has been “offended” by Thompson’s lack of deference toward him — a charge that mystifies Thompson. But heroes can be touchy.

Whatever its motivation, Glenn’s obstructionism is sound strategy. The House of Representatives is undertaking its own fund-raising investigation, and of the two, Thompson’s is by far the more potentially credible and hence threatening to Democrats. The House probe is led by Dan Burton, a volatile ideologue from Indiana who may have fund-raising troubles of his own and who, perhaps more important, will prove less presentable to a national television audience. Thompson, by contrast, is a senator from central casting — almost literally, since much of his pre-senatorial career was given over to acting in such deathless Hollywood shoot-’em-ups as Die Hard 2. Six-foot-six, deep-voiced, and handsome in a well-worn sort of way, he exudes a no-nonsense, and highly telegenic, air of authority.

But first he needs a script, a compelling story to tell, and it is this possibility that Glenn, as a shill for the White House and his leadership, apparently means to forestall at all costs. And the costs could be heavy — not least to Glenn’s popular reputation as a great American hero, willing to put the public interest above political calculation.

Senior editor Andrew Ferguson’s cover story on John Kasich appeared three weeks ago.