Shortly after Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination to become the CIA director, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times wrote an extraordinary column, titled “Again, Scoundrel Time,” in which he accused senators who opposed Lake’s confirmation of McCarthyism. In describing the unraveling of the nomination, Lewis wrote — using the passive voice, though the piece was harshly ad hominem — “Then it was suggested that Mr. Lake was unpatriotic because he had resigned from [Henry] Kissinger’s staff over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.” Who, we wondered, made such a suggestion?
Reached on the telephone, Lewis said that he had in mind Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who had questioned Lake about the resignation, and perhaps the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama. Did we doubt that Lake’s patriotism had been impugned, the columnist asked? Well, yes we did. Lewis responded that a reading of the transcript would confirm the justice of his charge.
It does not. Shelby did not discuss the resignation, and Inhofe brought it up, not to call Lake a traitor, but to probe whether Lake’s “strongly, even passionately held policy views” made him fit to act as a neutral purveyor of intelligence to the president. Inhofe also mentioned that Lake had written that he had joined a demonstration against the war on the day before he resigned; Inhofe added, “I [myself] demonstrated on different things.” The context suggests that Inhofe was accusing Lake, not of treason, but of advocacy.
Oh, by the way, Scoundrel Time was the late Stalinist Lillian Hellman’s deeply dishonest and self-serving memoir of the 1950s.
