Journeys to War and Peace: A Congressional Memoir

Foreword

foreword • Norman Ornstein In 1986, as a Fulbright Fortieth Anniversary Scholar, I embarked on a lecture tour in Southeast Asia, including a stop in the Philippines. In Manila , I visited Malacanang Palace, the posh home of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos when they ran the country with an iron hand. After their overthrow , it had been turned into a museum of sorts where the couple’s greed and high living were on display, including room after room devoted to Imelda’s shoe collection and other jaw-dropping extravagances (including several five-gallon containers of Chanel No. 5 perfume, which sells for roughly $400 an ounce; each container would be enough for a battalion of women). I spoke both to Philippine government officials and to Filipino graduates of the Fulbright program, who made up a major share of the elite in the country. Nearly everyone, it seemed had the same question for a Washington insider: did I actually know Steve Solarz, who had been instrumental in saving the country from the authoritarian, dictatorial Marcoses and their excesses? It was not just members of the elite who were curious. One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2010, when my wife and I were going to visit Steve and Nina Solarz, we mentioned our plans to my father-in-law—and his caregiver, a woman from the Philippines, said, “You mean the Congressman Solarz who helped save my country?” In 2007, I traveled to Cambodia for a conference of the Asia Society that brought together a number of Americans and Asians from various countries.At a banquet in Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat and other mesmerizing ancient Hindu temples, I was seated next to a deputy foreign minister of Cambodia. He had one question for a Washington insider: did I know Steve Solarz, who had been instrumental in saving Cambodia from the murderous excesses of the Khmer Rouge? To a reader of this remarkable book who is not an insider,it might seem as if Steve Solarz is exaggerating his role—portraying himself as a kind x foreword of Zelig who happened to be in multiple places in the world at key times when dictatorial governments fell or were toppled, or when human rights abuses were confronted, and taking credit for events that were well beyond the reach of more visible figures like secretaries of state or chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. My personal experience suggests the opposite. In his eighteen years in the House of Representatives, Solarz had a profound impact on many countries and many movements, as well as on the foreign policy of the United States. His influence was unique for a single member of the House. As a student of Congress for more than four decades, I have often marveled myself at the sweep and depth of the role Solarz was able to play. A part of the reason was timing. As he notes in the book, he came to Congress at a time of dramatic upheaval, after the 1974 “Watergate” election that brought in a huge class of seventy-five freshman Democrats who acted en bloc to precipitate major reforms in the House, decentralizing power from a coterie of senior committee chairs to a much larger group of subcommittee leaders as well as rank-and-file members. The Class of ’74 had many remarkable members, including Henry Waxman, who still exerts enormous power over policy as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; George Miller, powerful chair of the Education and Labor Committee; and current senators Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, and Max Baucus,chairs of three of the most influential committees in the Senate . It also included the late John Murtha, a longtime powerhouse, and Tom Downey, a New York colleague of Solarz’s who was the youngest member of the class. But in a group that had dozens of accomplished politicians and policy wonks, Solarz stood out because of his intellect, drive, and mesmerizing, articulate way of speaking. He also stood out because of his area of interest and his work ethic. To be sure, many members of the Watergate class were interested in the world—theirs was the era of the Vietnam War,not just of Nixonian scandals —but most turned their focus and time to domestic policy and to devising innovative ways of connecting with constituents back home to ensure that they could also be lawmakers after the 1976 elections. As Solarz says in this book, he decided for practical political...