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· 1 · congressional travel Boon or Boondoggle? • How’s this for an understatement? Foreign travel by members of Congress doesn’t have a very good reputation. The media tend to portray such trips as junkets and boondoggles—essentially vacations at taxpayers’ expense by legislators more interested in sightseeing and shopping than in fulfilling their oversight responsibilities regarding foreign policy, foreign aid, and other government programs. Many members shy away from foreign travel specifically to avoid adverse media coverage that could jeopardize their reelection campaigns. By contrast, I acquired a reputation as the “Marco Polo” of Congress. Perhaps the best account of how I came by that moniker is a story told by Joe Moakley, a genial, portly colleague from Massachusetts who was chairman of the Rules Committee. Early one Monday in the 1980s, Joe arrived at the gate for a flight from Boston to Washington with barely a minute to spare. As he searched for an available seat, his glance fell on me, just as the flight attendant slammed the door shut. Unable to get off the plane, Joe reported, he had a panic attack, thinking that if I was on it he must have gotten on an international flight by mistake. Overall, I traveled to 140 countries, and based on this extensive experience , I would like to dissent from the conventional view. I certainly understood my colleagues’ reluctance to go abroad. They were well aware of the fates of Senator Dee Huddleston of Kentucky and Congressman Lester Wolff of New York. Huddleston was the subject of a hilarious television ad showing someone with a pack of hunting dogs searching all over Washington but unable to find him because he was (presumably) not in the country. Another tv spot featured Congressman Wolff getting off an Air Force plane in some distant country as a group of bare-breasted African women welcomed him on the tarmac with a native dance. I was branded with the scarlet“J”(for junket) on several occasions myself.In January 1981, for example,as the war in El Salvador was heating up and it looked like the 28 journeys to war & peace Reagan administration was going to provide significant military assistance to the government, I decided to go there to get a better sense of the implications for American foreign policy. Since the Foreign Affairs Committee would be deeply involved in shaping the congressional response to the challenge posed by the fmln guerrilla movement, I thought it important to see the situation at first hand. When I arrived in San Salvador, the capital, to make the rounds of government officials, opposition leaders, human rights activists, and foreign diplomats, our embassy gave me a security detail that included a dozen armed guards, each with a bulletproof vest and an Uzi.A story in the New York Post, however, was headlined “Solarz Abandons New York for the Sunnier Climes of the Caribbean.” It focused not on the dangerous and deteriorating conditions in the country, nor on my investigation into the escalating violence and its implications for the United States, but on my supposed vacation at the taxpayers’ expense. Certainly some members of Congress do treat foreign travel as a paid vacation. And there was a time, long since gone, when traveling Congressmen could use“counterpart” funds—money owed the United States that could only be spent in the countries that owed it—to purchase luxury items such as artwork and furniture. But just because some members have abused the privilege doesn’t mean that those who really do want to inform themselves about the complexities and challenges that face us abroad should not travel on legitimate missions. Whatever people may have thought about my own trips, they weren’t paid vacations. Most journalists who called about my travels were more interested in portraying a given trip as a junket than in finding out why I went or what I learned. I used to tell them that if they were going to write about congressional travel, they ought to do a story about the Foreign Affairs Committee members who never went on fact-finding missions. I also pointed out that journalists rarely question or write negative stories about Health Committee members who visit hospitals, Education Committee members who visit schools, or Agriculture Committee members who visit farms. But foreign travel is portrayed as junketeering and deplored. Unfortunately , this tendency has not changed since I left Congress in 1993. The truth is that there is no better way to get an understanding...

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