Requiem for a "Do-Gooder"

By William A. Henry III.

Reagan's human rights nominee drops out after a Senate setback

The President has got used to winning just about anything he wants, even from Democrats. Last week he suffered his first really embarrassing defeat in choosing policymakers, the rejection of Ernest W. Lefever as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, at the hands of Republicans. After weeks of controversy and days of hearings, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 13 to 4 against confirming him in a job he has been performing since late January.

One of the four supporters, S.I. Hayakawa of California, talked with Lefever, who by then had scant chance of winning on the Senate floor. Lefever quickly withdrew, even as the White House was still lobbying, if halfheartedly, for support.

Lefever's bitter resignation letter to Reagan began: "I am blameless of the charges and innuendoes against my integrity and my compassion. I do not wish any longer to put up with the kind of suspicion and character assassination that some of my adversaries have used to besmirch my name."

In an interview with TIME a few hours after resigning, Lefever said he quit because "my wife and I were getting fed up with the constant reiteration of false allegations--that I am for sale, or for rent, that I lacked compassion, that I did not care about the torture of human beings in certain countries friendly to the U.S. My position has been clear on all of this. A label, once applied, because of the herd instinct in Washington, sticks. The record never caught up. I was done in by my two chief virtues--candor and courage." He denied that either the White House or the State Department nudged him out, and said that both Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig telephoned to suggest other Government posts "in which I could render great service."

From the beginning Lefever was clearly the wrong choice for the job. A self-professed "do-gooder" who has worked for various liberal and humanitarian causes over the years, he became a convert to conservatism and founded his own rightist think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in 1976. He advocates making a distinction between "authoritarian" governments of the right (for example, South Africa, South Korea, Chile), which repress dissent, and putatively worse "totalitarian" governments of the left (notably the Soviet Union), which deny both political and economic freedom. Lefever had written that human rights questions should not interfere with U.S. alliances. In confirmation hearings he refused to criticize specific human rights violations by allies, and seemed to equate protecting human rights with denouncing the Soviet Union. Senators of both parties feared that Lefever could force the Administration into a narrow, extreme position on human rights.

The White House might have quietly dropped the battle, as it did with Warren Richardson, a onetime lobbyist for the stridently anti-Zionist Liberty Lobby, who had been nominated as an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Reagan also might have yielded to compromise after a quick, overwhelming defeat, as he did after the Senate's 96-to-0 rejection of his proposed Social Security cuts. But the President felt pressed to fight for Lefever, senior aides said, because the opposition to him was largely "ideological." Reagan, they added, saw the vote as a referendum on his own beliefs. The White House may have had an additional motive: Lefever was sponsored by powerful Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the Senate's self-appointed enforcer of purist conservatism.

When the hearings began on Lefever's nomination, one Senator said that there were only three votes against him.

After Lefever finished defending himself there were 13. Some Senators had doubts about his ethics, others about his politics, others about his tact and judgment.

Lefever's worst liability was not ideology but his own unsteady regard for the truth. Democratic Whip Alan Cranston, a Foreign Relations Committee member, came out of the final closed hearing last week citing half a dozen instances in which Lefever had stretched the facts. Lefever denied, for instance, having said his opponents were "Communist inspired."

Committee Chairman Charles Percy and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts insisted that he had said that to them. Equally damaging was the claim by two of Lefever's four brothers--none of whom supported his nomination--that he considered blacks genetically inferior to whites in intelligence. Lefever denied it.

Several Senators had been especially troubled by the ethics of Lefever's supposedly independent think tank in accepting money from the Nestle company, one of the world's largest sellers of infant formula, for a study of the use of baby-food supplements, a highly charged Third World issue. The companies making such products were already under fierce attack; last month the World Health Organization's member countries voted 118 to 1 (the U.S.) for a code sharply limiting the advertising and marketing of infant formulas. In his testimony before the committee on May 18, Lefever had said the Nestle contributions, which eventually totaled more than $25,000, had been made only after he commissioned the study.

Last week he admitted that he had approached Nestle beforehand. Said Cranston: "That was a direct contradiction."

As word of the misstatements began to spread, Cranston counted the number of Lefever supporters in the full Senate dropping from 46 to 44, while opponents rose from 39 to 48. That was enough to sustain a filibuster against Lefever on the Senate floor, and probably enough to guarantee the failure of the nomination.

That would have been a crushing setback for the Administration: the Senate infrequently rejects sub-Cabinet appointees (and has not rejected a President's Cabinet choice since Dwight Eisenhower proposed Lewis L. Strauss as Secretary of Commerce in 1959). Even the White House statement of regret, lauding Lefever's "integrity and competence" and lamenting "that the nation will lose the benefit of his services," had a tone of grim inevitability. "The President was prepared to stand behind his nomination," it said, "until final disposition by the Senate.''

--By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/'Washington

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/Washington

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