Journeys to War and Peace: A Congressional Memoir

Preface

preface • If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? The Ethics of Our Fathers “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” Samuel Johnson said. I can testify to the enduring truth of this observation. For several years after my involuntary departure from Congress in 1992, I thought about writing a memoir describing my experiences as a member of the House of Representatives . But for a variety of reasons, some good and some bad, I never quite got around to it. It wasn’t until the summer of 2006, when I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer—a particularly virulent form of this disease—that I realized it might soon be too late to embark on such a project. So, like Ulysses S. Grant, who undertook to write a memoir about his experiences in the Civil War after receiving a cancer diagnosis, I resolved that the time had come to write mine. My purpose here is to describe how an individual member of Congress can have an impact on American foreign policy and even on developments in faraway countries. Most people assume that foreign policy is primarily, if not exclusively, the prerogative of the executive branch. Yet as the great constitutional scholar Edward Corwin wrote, the Constitution “is an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.” For much of American history, Congress tended to defer to the president on matters involving foreign policy. There were exceptions, of course, such as the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I and the passage of neutrality legislation before World War II. But after the debacle in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the assumption that the president always knew best how to handle foreign policy was no longer politically tenable. xvi preface I was elected to Congress at precisely the moment in American history when Congress decided it would no longer abdicate its constitutional authority for foreign policy to an executive branch that had lost its claim to presidential infallibility. Congress has the ability to shape America ’s response to events abroad through hearings, speeches, legislation, resolutions, appropriations, confirmations, and ratifications. This book illustrates how such legislative mechanisms can be used to promote our national values and protect our national interests. It also describes how a third-generation American, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn for whom a trip into Manhattan was a daring venture,became known as the Marco Polo of Congress, traveling to over a hundred countries around the world. Above all it tells of my encounters with some of the world’s greatest statesmen and most terrible tyrants.Among the former wereAnwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, Indira Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norodom Sihanouk, Menachem Begin, and Oscar Arias. Among the latter: Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Robert Mugabe. Here too are detailed descriptions of the role I played in facilitating the triumph of people power in the Philippines, the establishment of democracy in South Korea and Taiwan, the peace agreement in Cambodia,the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, and the adoption of the resolution authorizing the use of force in the first Gulf War. The fabled American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said:“It is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” During my eighteen years in Congress , I was indeed privileged to participate in the“passion and action” of my time.But I would like to think that I was also fortunate enough to have influenced some of its events as well. Stephen J. Solarz August 31, 2010 journeys· to · war & peace • ...