DAVID IFSHIN’S JOURNEY

David Ifshin’s biography, though, is far from a saga of might-have-beens. In his 47 years, he has popped up all over recent American political history – – as the National Student Association president who made an infamous radio broadcast in North Vietnam, as an official of the National Welfare Rights Organization, then a convert to Henry Jackson’s neoconservative foreign policy, staunch defender of Israel, counsel to both the Mondale and Clinton presidential campaigns, and passionate foe of leftist influence in the Democratic party. I am writing about him now because David Ifshin is wasting away with cancer that was diagnosed only five months ago, and it seems proper to recount his fascinating career while he is still with us.

Ifshin grew up middle class in the Washington suburbs, the son of a liquor- store owner, and went off to Syracuse University in 1966 as a supporter of the Vietnam war. Gradually, he got caught up in campus protest, turned against the war, and watched friends get clubbed by police — for no good reason, he says — at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

He went back to Syracuse, was elected student-body president, and carefully worked to keep anti-war rallies he was involved in peaceful — indeed, he organized just such a rally and was horrified 22 years later to find it portrayed as a violent uprising in Oliver Stone’s movie Born on the Fourth of July. He was elected president of the National Student Association because he ran against demands for special budget assistance to a black student group on the basis of race.

And then he committed his appalling act in North Vietnam during a 1970 visit. He was shown bomb damage and burn victims, after which two European ” peace” doctors taunted him, a Jew, for doing as little to stop the “genocide” as a German who knew the Holocaust was underway and merely muttered his dissent Ifshin said into a tape recorder that the United States was in Vietnam “to aggressively threaten other countries” and that if the South Vietnamese could pursue their own destiny, they would “not support the investment of private capital.” Those words, like Jane Fonda’s, became a North Vietnamese propaganda coup. Ifshin has apologized many times for his actions, though he still believes that the war was unwinnable from the outset and a vast waste of human life.

In spite of his conduct in Hanoi, he was never pro-Communist. And shortly after his trip to Vietnam, he became a convert to anti-communism when he visited Salvador Allende’s Chile and saw the Left arming its supporters to convert an electoral plurality into a permanent dictatorship.

He says he had a kindred experience in domestic policy over welfare rights. In 1972, he helped push a destructive guaranteed-income proposal at Democratic platform hearings — “$ 5,500 or fight” — but he bailed out of the National Welfare Rights Organization when its leader, George Wiley, insisted on staging a protest demonstration at the Democratic convention in spite of an agreement with the McGovern campaign to avoid one. Ifshin worked in that campaign as a get-out-the-vote organizer but now considers the candidate’s foreign-policy and defense views “naive.”

He went to Irael in 1973 and found his center of gravity working on a kibbutz. “It was as transforming an experience for me as the Chicago convention,” he says. His political epiphany came during the Yom Kippur War, when he helped unload the C5As that the United States was sending, in wave after wave, to resupply Israel with military equipment at a time when no other nation would. “The desolation I felt about Vietnam, when we dropped so much ordnance in a huge mistake,” he says, “was turned around for me by the demonstration of what good American power could do.”

Ifshin returned home to go to law school and in early 1976 met up with Sen. Henry Jackson, who persuaded him not to abandon politics. Jackson told him, ” All my good friends were Communists once. It’s not unusual for people your age to be enamored of the Left. God knows how many lives have been messed up by Vietnam, but you’ve got a good sense now of what you believe, and don’t let anyone ridicule you for where you’ve been. Stick with it.”

Ifshin became one of the nation’s foremost experts on campaign finance law. He moved to Washington and got involved in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the neocon rump group inspired by Scoop Jackson to toughen Democratic foreign policy. In 1984, as chief lawyer for the Mondale presidential campaign, he earned the enmity of party left-wingers by leading the resistance to demands from Jesse Jackson–who’d hugged Yasser Arafat and called New York “Hymietown” — for concessions at the Democratic convention and a prominent role in the campaign. Some enemies Ifshin made then would later clobber him in the Clinton campaign.

Ifshin first met Bill Clinton in 1970, when Ifshin was NSA president and Clinton a Yale law student. They met up again during the McGovern campaign, but got to know each other well after Clinton became Arkansas governor in 1979. They golfed and schmoozed together at Renaissance Weekends and as activists in the Democratic Leadership Council, the 1980s successor to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. “I believed that he was one of the few Democrats who could really persuade old Democrats that the only way we could win was to make cuts in entitlements and so on,” Ifshin says. “! always thought he was a mix of New Democrat and old Democrat, but I thought he was going to be a tough guy. I thought he’d do the opposite of what he did on health care, welfare, and the minumum wage. The Left has too much center of gravity in the party, though.”

Before his eyes were opened about Clinton, Ifshin signed on as general counsel to Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He organized a huge bank loan to keep the campaign going after the Gennifer Flowers eruption — and warned, when New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth started looking into Whitewater, against repeating the Mondale campaign’s pattern when Geraldine Ferraro’s finances got questioned: “Put it all out, and in the next news cycle.”

Instead, as James Stewart recounts in Blood Sport, the Whitewater matter was seized by New York lawyer Susan Thomases, best buddy of Hillary Clinton and political ally of Harold Ickes, once manager of Jesse Jackson’s campaign and Ifshin’s longtime nemesis. Ifshin was shoved out of the way because, campaign chairman Mickey Kantor told him, “the candidates” (note the plural) didn’t agree with his advice. Ifshin told Kantor, “If you don’t level” and Clinton gets elected, “you’ll wind up with a special prosecutor.”

Ifshin remained general counsel, but on the fringe of the main campaign action — until the New York primary, where Clinton was in a must-win situation against Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas. Ifshin says that Kantor called him in desperations because, Kantor said, New York was falling apart. Ifshin discovered that Ickes, Clinton’s New York manager, had organized the campaign around the coalition of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and liberals that had elected his friend David Dinkins mayor of New York and that Dinkins was counting on to reelect him in 1993. Jews were relegated to finance positions despite the importance of the Jewish vote in New York. Polls showed that Clinton was running roughly even with Brown and Tsongas among Jews, despite the fact that Brown had promised to make Jesse Jackson his running mate.

To rescue the situation, Ifshin — with credibility based on his Mondale connection and his service as chief counsel for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Israel lobby in Washington — organized top figures in the Jewish community to listen to and vouch for Clinton. Ifshin put together one crucial event at which Clinton delivered a boffo line first suggested by Ifshin’s friend Tom Tisch: “If all you knew about Israel came from what you saw on TV and the newspapers, you’d have a pretty negative impression. The same is true of me.”

When Ifshin told Ickes at campaign headquarters that the primary campaign was now “all worked out,” Ickes became enraged and began shoving him. “You don’t realize,” Ifshin recalls Ickes yelling, “we’re going to get rid of you right after the New York primary.” When Clinton won the primary with 41 percent, to 29 percent for Paul Tsongas and 26 percent for Brown — and with Clinton carrying the Jewish vote by 55 percent to 34 percent over Tsongas — Clinton came to his hotel room to say thanks. “Standing out in the hall were Hillary and Susan Thomases,” Ifshin recalls. “I’ve never seen such hatred in people’s eyes.”

Ifshin was warned again that Ickes and Thomases planned to get him fired, and when I wrote a column in Roll Call about the way Clinton won New York, Kantor called Ifshin in a rage and delivered the axe on grounds of disloy alty. After Clinton won the presidency, Ifshin was shut out of any policy job (few DLC types got such jobs), and when he was considered for ambassador to Indonesia, even that got torpedoed.

Ifshin still likes Clinton: “He’s warm. He’s gracious. He’s good-hearted.” Indeed, Clinton invited Ifshin, his wife, and their three kids to spend a night in the Lincoln David Ifshin rooms of the White House recently and bounced Ifshin’s 6-year-old on his knee. But the two have never discussed 1992. “He’d just say that crazy things happen in campaigns,” Ifshin says.

To go along with Clinton’s positives, though, Ifshin says there is “a dark side, almost like Nixon. He has to win at all costs, and he doesn’t have the confidence to do it without people like Harold. I think he could do it.” (Neither Ickes nor Clinton responded to interview requests.)

Ifshin has concluded that, ideologically, Clinton is more a McGovernite than a New Democrat and thinks it’s probable that in a second term, Ickes and Hillary Clinton would dominate administration policy, acing out Vice President A1 Gore’s staff. Even so, Ifshin says, if he’s alive in November, he’ll still vote for Clinton. David Ifshin is loyal to his friends, even those who disappoint him.

Morton M. Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call.