The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“REPORT OF FACTFINDING TRIP” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H8714-H8720 on Sept. 8, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
REPORT OF FACTFINDING TRIP
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, we have had a fast 3 days. Started late on Wednesday, finishing early today. Pressure is building up here for a major budgetary struggle between the two major, only major parties in the world's only superpower, on all of these budgetary issues.
We have come back from a long, what we sometimes euphemistically call a district work period. We are supposed to cram in a vacation and work hard. For some of us, it is hard work.
I took one of the more difficult and fast-moving factfinding trips of my career, now that I am one of only two double chairmen out of all 435 Members of this Chamber. I chair a Subcommittee on Intelligence, the Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, and I chair the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, which becomes the most important of all 5 military subcommittees under the Committee on National Security, what used to be called Armed Services, and is still called Armed Services in the House of Lords or the other Chamber, the Senate.
On this trip, in discussing the issues with new young enlisted men, senior sergeants, petty officers, and the officer corps at all levels, up to and including four-star admirals, at Naples, at the major air base that is in command of all the bombing missions going on as we speak over poor torn ripped Bosnia-Herzegovina. And at Brendezy, down at the coast at the very heel of the Italian peninsula.
That is where we have our Navy Seals, where we have what was a major listening post base. In all the world, there are only five listening to everything, San Vito Air Station, using the international airport at Brendezy where we keep our AC-130 Hercules special mission Spectre gun ships.
I met with all the crews there. It is still classified whether or not they are going in at night over Bosnia. These were the aircraft that if we had them in Somalia over Mogadishu, we would have saved a dozen or more lives of our best trained Army special forces and Delta Force, Rangers and 160th Aviation Regiment, special armed squadrons.
Then I traveled with Congressman Greg Laughlin, the highest ranking active reservist in the House or the Senate, of Galveston, TX, and we went to Slovenia. A fascinating, brand-new country in the world. It never had nation status, let alone a seat in the United Nations since the dissolution of the Communist country of the former Yugoslavia.
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Then we went down to Croatia, met with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's special representative to all of the problems in former Yugoslavia, Mr., that is his formal title, Mr. Sasushi Akashi, met with him at the U.N. headquarters, the blue helmet home plate in Zagreb, then went down along the Dalmatian coast, drove slowly through all of the destruction wreaked upon one of the world's most beautiful coastlines, looks for all the world like the California coastline between Santa Barbara and Monterey--just torn apart. The international airport in Zadar utterly destroyed except for the runways, all of the international terminal buildings, hollow shells of aluminum, like a nuclear explosion went off, the tower, all the windows shot out with AK-47's by the retreating Bosnian soldiers. They almost cut Croatia in half at that point, Zadar.
Then we went down to Macedonia, met with all of our American tripwire forces out in the front outposts along the border, flew on white helicopters, UH-60 Blackhawks that, of course, called themselves the Whitehawks, with the United Nations stenciled on the sides, went out to these American outposts, studied this poor city of Skopje, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1963. It has never really made it back to a stable, functioning city, still great pockets of poverty from that horrible earthquake in 1963.
Then we flew over to Albania, one of the most godforsaken but still physically beautiful countries in the world, and met with the president there, Sali Berisha, Mr. Berisha; he is a European renowned heart surgeon. His wife is a renowned doctor of pediatrics, a child doctor. What a lucky country to go from the depths of communism with a paranoidal maniac, Enver Hoxna, one of the last psychotic, paranoid Communist dictators in the world, who literally took this beautiful country of Albania, a brand new country created after World War I, not a traditional nation on the face of the Earth, and just drove it into the ground, more than a half-century of locked-up paranoia and total Communist psychotic oppression, and now they have a wonderful president who said to me and to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Laughlin], although he wants to be in the United Nations and would like to be accepted into NATO, he does not care what happens in the world if he just has the friendship of the United States, just one on one, unilateral friendship, and he thinks Albania will make it into the 21st century.
That is the identical message we got north of there in another one of the eight parts of Yugoslavia that have spun off in Solvenia, same message: ``U.S. friendship is what we want.''
In Albania, we looked at what was supposed to be a top-secret program and is now written about in all newspapers, the Predator, unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] program. The pilots at that base, both Albanian and our U.S. Forces there, took us in a cave that the Chinese carved out of a mountain, a cave as long as several football fields, and there I looked at 24 or 25 MiG aircraft from the vintage of when I flew almost 40 years ago. There were MiG-19, ``Farmer'' was our NATO codeword, jets that they still fly, that were Russia's response to my F-100 Supersabre, and older jets from Korea, MiG Alley, early 1950's, MiG-15's and MiG-17's, the kind of airplane my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham], shot down in North Vietnam. At least of his five victories, three are MiG-17's, all of this in this giant tunnel. And the landscape of the country is scarred, marred
with 700,000 to 1 million concrete bunkers, pillboxes, machine gun posts, some of them as big as the entire rostrum of this House, others as big as from here to the other lectern, a million of them, maybe, making the whole landscape look ugly, and there is no money to remove them or drag them out to the sea and make a breakwater for a small boat harbor on this beautiful Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic.
On that trip, at every stop I would take off my chairman's hat from intelligence and put on my chairman's hat from military personnel and ask our men and women at all levels of command what it will take to keep them in the military, to keep that expensive training that they were given to melt down the evil empire of the Soviet Union and stand guard over freedom and be part of the world's only superpower, and everywhere they talked about family, and quality of life; they spoke of what it would take them to earn a proper living with groceries, their compensation.
So, all around that hot area of the world, I saw again that America is so lucky, as Ronald Reagan used to quote James Michener's great fictitious, but more fact than fiction, novel from the Korean war,
``The Bridges of Toko-Ri,'' ``Where do we get such men,'' and now we can say women, ``Where do we get such men and women?'' How are we so lucky as to have them serve us?
The sad thing about this break, Mr. Speaker, is that we went through some of the greatest anniversaries with the House adjourned. The 50th anniversary of the end of the greatest crusade for freedom against tyranny in all of recorded history during our break, the 50th anniversary endings. We had adjourned by the time Sunday came up for the 50th anniversary of the bombing at Hiroshima; 3 days later Nagasaki, August 9.
On August 15 in the Pacific, on the other side of the dateline, August 14 here, the end of shooting in the Second World War; not really so; Japanese imperial warload staff beheaded prisoners, shot them, killed all the prisoners at Unit 371 in Pingfan, outside of Mukden, Manchuria. They called these godforsaken human beings ``logs,'' to depersonalize them. They had shot them, amputated all four of their limbs, one at a time, let them recover from each amputation, training over a thousand doctors to go out to all the tentacles of the imperial octopus that was so abusing the whole eastern perimeter, western perimeter of the Pacific around Asia. They had boiled them to death to see what it was like. They had frozen them to death. They had tied them to trees and hit them with bombs and shrapnel and grenades. They had put flamethrowers on them. They had infected them with anthrax, all forms of biological warfare, and none of these people that I know of were brought to justice.
That is why everybody is so grateful to the current Prime Minister of Japan, that he offered an apology that we cannot get out of their congress, their ``diet,'' but there were men killed after August 15 over there, and August 14 here. Many prisoners died.
My friend, Jack Singlaub, was parachuted in with a small OSS team to the Chinese island of Hainan, under Japanese warload control. Notice I say ``warlord,'' to distinguish ourselves from the free democracy of Japan today, and it was mostly, it was all Australian and New Zealand prisoners, no Americans there. He loaded them on trains from this prison camp on the western side of Hainan island and took them over to the biggest port on the eastern side, and five or six Australian and New Zealand prisoners died on that train, but at least they died as free men. That was a very rough 2-week period. All of the prisoners were
under death orders. If the United States invasion forces of Operation Olympic had set foot on the Japanese home islands, all prisoners were to be executed. Many were beheaded and beaten to death in the streets of Japanese cities if they were unfortunate enough to bail out over their target. Many of them miraculously survived.
War crimes trials in Japan, but far less than those that were brought to the bar of justice, Hitler's war criminals.
So we passed through all of those anniversaries without a word on this House floor, because we were out. Then came V-J Day. I decided I would spend V-J Day at our airbases encircling tortured Bosnia rather than be in Hawaii, where I planned to be and was invited to go with a World War II veteran, a young-looking gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Stump. I wanted to be on that trip, but I was so offended by the photo opportunities of the White House at the Normandy beaches to the exclusion of some of our heroes when they should have been the focus, that I did not want to subject myself to that, and I would have been pained to hear Mr. Clinton call the U.S.S. Missouri, the battleship upon which the Japanese surrender terms were unconditionally signed on September 2, 1945, I would have been pained to hear Mr. Clinton call it a carrier, an aircraft carrier. I would have been pained to hear him refer to the front of the ship, the bow, as the bow, as in a bow in your hair, and I guess he would call the stern the back side of the ship. If that had been Vice President Dan Quayle making verbal mistakes like that, you would all know about it. It would be headlines. But people are probably listening to C-SPAN today, 1,300,000 who think I am making that up. No, Mr. Clinton actually said those things, aircraft carrier Missouri, bow of it, as in bow and arrow, the bow of the ship. He got away with it. I preferred to be out with the troops in the field rather than at those wonderful closing ceremonies.
But now a word here on the floor, Mr. Speaker. Here is what has been painful to me over the last 4 years: Except for the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery], two-star general, retired in the Army, of the Montgomery GI bill fame, and the aforementioned gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Stump], Navy retiree, except for one 1-hour special order that they did on Iwo Jima, there has not been a single memorial on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives or the United States Senate for any single 50-year anniversary of anything that happened all during World War II, not Pearl Harbor, not the fall of Bataan, or the Bataan death march, not Corredigor, not the comeback at Guadalcanal, not the landings in Tarawa, not the Dieppe raid along the coast of Hitler's fortress Europe, not Al Alamein, not the battles at Tobruk, not the Kasserine Pass, not the landings at Sicily in July 9, 1943; we have heard here in July 1993, not Salerno, not Anzio, not Operation Overlord on D-Day, not Operation Dragon down on the southern coast of France, nothing about Okinawa, which came after Iwo Jima or the Gilbert Islands or Marshall Islands or the Battle of the Coral Sea or the Battle of Midway or the Battle of the Solomon Islands or the Santa Cruz Islands, nothing for 4 years in the Senate or the House floor pausing for a series of 1-minute speeches or 1-minute special orders. I am not saying this to pat myself on the back; except for about 10 of my 1-hour special orders, nothing, nothing on this House floor.
I remember an Oklahoma Congressman shut this place down. I remember it because he lost his primary a few months later. I wondered if there was a connection. I think his name was Congressman Risenhoover. He shut this place down. We filled it with potted palms, and on Flag Day, June 14 in some late year in the late 1970's, I forget the year, we had the great western singers, June Carter and Johnny Cash, standing up there. We sang patriotic hymns, and we did Flag Day, and there was nothing special. It was not the 50th anniversary of Flag Day, or silver anniversary. It was just Flag Day, any June 14. The whole place shut down, palms, potted plants all over at every entrance.
I have never seen the like of it, potted plants all around the front here. We do not do that for a State of the Union with the Commander in Chief standing up there. We did not do that for Douglas MacArthur or Winston Churchill the two times he stood up there.
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I thought, ``Wow, we are going to do this, I guess, all during World War II. Am I lucky to be here.''
And, when George Bush got elected, because I went with President Bush to Pearl Harbor's 50th anniversary, and we stood there on that memorial across the midships of the U.S.S. Arizona, still a ship of the line, with the flag run up at reveille every morning. I thought, ``This is going to be great, go through all these 50-year anniversaries with a 58 combat mission Navy attack carrier pilot in the White House.''
And instead we ended up with someone who had avoided the draft three times, has insulted the military over, and over, and over with photo opportunities, using them to try to up his ratings, and thank God it fails every time, and here we are, past September 2, 1995, 50 years gone by. No memorials.
Today I have an editorial, a counter-editorial, in the USA Today. They always put in the left-right views.
They called my office at 2 o'clock yesterday, said, ``Give us something quick. Senator Warner is not responding fast enough, the No. 2 man on Armed Services Committee in the other body.'' They said,
``Give us something on why the military should be built up.''
We pumped out something quickly. I sent a corrected copy on a fax to USA Today at 3:30, and I said, ``Well, this will be in next week,'' and it is in this morning, a turnaround of about 15 hours before it hit the streets, and I would like to read it, Mr. Speaker.
It says, ``Military Needs Buildup.'' It is what every one of these young, not-so-young, people all around the Mediterranean told me.
``Robert K. Dornan, opposing view: The military budget has been hit year after year. Security demands that we spend more.''
Now I have not read the USA Today house editorial that says we must gut defense even more, but here is my response on September 8:
``After 11 straight years of defense spending cuts, Republicans are providing the national security leadership not found in the current administration.
``Indeed, President Clinton's draconian defense budget would produce another Carter-era ``hollow force'' reportedly underfunded by as much as $150 billion. Congress, therefore, is not squandering money when it votes to increase the Pentagon's budget by $7 billion more than requested. Instead, it is restoring national security funding to necessary levels.
``How soon we forget what is required to quickly and decisively win on the modern battlefield.
``Today's military modernization is tomorrow's combat readiness. Systems such as the F-117 `Nighthawk' stealth fighter and the Patriot missile were not developed overnight. They were the culmination of years of research and development. These revolutionary systems drastically reduced our casualties'' killed in acting and wounded in action) ``in Desert Storm.'' more than any other conflict in history given the level of lethality, and violence, and speed, and maneuverability.
``Today we can improve upon these systems with new weapons that will further reduce the risk to American troops.
``The B-2 `Spirit' Stealth bomber,'' I helped to name that, so of course I want to get the name in, ``carries eight times the payload of the F-117, with greater range and crew survivability.''
Keep in mind, listening audience, Mr. Speaker, and my colleagues who may be packing up their bags in their offices to head back to their districts, that the B-2 survived in this Chamber by 3 votes, 213 to 210, to defeat an amendment, mostly by people who have never served in the military, to kill and shut down the world's only bomber production line, the B-2 ``Spirit.''
``New missile defense programs, such as the upgraded Navy Aegis (A-e-
g-i-s) system, provide greater range, accuracy, and coverage than Patriot missiles.''
We call that upper-tier Navy defense. Put two ships off Israel, two ships off Korea, just two ships, and the footprint from both those ships can keep Israel free from being struck with a nuclear weapon or, as we now find out from the defecting son-in-law of dictator, mad-dog killer Saddam Hussein; we now find out that, yes, they were driving to completion of a nuclear weapon and were playing around with the most deadly biological, and chemical, and nerve gas weapons since World War II and would have used them, and may have used them; the jury is out on that. So we need this Navy upper-tier Aegis system antimissile defense.
``Does the Pentagon need these expensive new programs? Ask the Air Force pilots who will not have to attack highly defended enemy targets in vulnerable, unstealthy aircraft because they will have the B-2. Ask the Marines and Army troops who will not have to worry about Scud ballistic missile attacks because of the Navy's new ballistic missile defense.''
All of this, of course, predicated upon the conference between the House and the Senate, the conference process that we are entering, that we entered this afternoon. My R&D Subcommittee is meeting as I speak. I decided that letting America know what we are doing was more important than participating in that meeting because I am not the chairman of that subcommittee; the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] is.
My close in today's USA Today:
``These and other Republican initiatives in areas such as personnel and training will not just maintain, but will enhance, the combat capability that has so quickly deteriorated under Clinton's leadership.
``Those of us who visit,'' as I did in the Balkans over this break our troops, ``and listen to our front-line troops are giving them what they need,'' what they deserve, ``including equipment that will drastically reduce loss of'' precious, ``life.''
``The Reagan revolution of the 1980's laid the foundation for'' the victory in, ``Desert Storm. The Republican revolution'' that started on November 8, ``of 1994 is laying the foundation for any future victories, if that is our fate, and the survival of U.S. combat troops well into the 21st century.''
Now, Mr. Speaker, I had intended to spend the better part of this hour special order on defense on some of the votes that we won this week. We won them all on the conservative side with the help of many conservative members of the former majority party, the oldest political party in America, the Democrats, but last night I kept a promise that I made to a Navy Seal at Brandezy, Italy. I do not want to identify him by rank, but let us put it this way. All the Seal's in the Mediterranean depend on this fine young officer and Annapolis graduate from decades ago.
He said to me, ``Congressman Dornan, I appreciate you being in the Presidential race, although it appears you don't have much chance of victory, as I appreciate Mr. Keyes, Alan Keyes, of Maryland, because you discuss the moral issues which I believe are the critical issues of our time.''
Now keep in mind this is a senior naval officer trained to the peak of physical and mental performance for his country. He said,
``Congressman, I believe as a naval officer that the military culture is the last stable part of American life from which we can begin the rebuilding of our Nation's moral fiber, from which we can begin to defend the moral and cultural ethos
that is collapsing around us.''
Now I would like to think there is a pocket of us on both sides of the aisle in the House and the Senate that also believe that we are in an advanced state of moral decline in our country.
He said to me, this naval officer, ``Did you see the cover story of Newsweek in July on bissexuality?''
I said, ``No, captain, I did not.''
He said, ``Well, I canceled my subscription with a long letter to the New York publisher and senior editors saying that this was the most vile and corrupt article I've ever seen in my life.''
And I said, ``Well, every week in my office I get 10 magazines and about 10 newspapers,'' and I said, ``I try to read as much as any human being in the House or Senate. With all due immodesty, I've never seen anybody that reads more.''
And I said, ``I did not see this particular Newsweek. I can go weeks without even catching a cover story in Time, or Newsweek, or U.S. News and World Report, or all the other magazines that we get. Then there is all the great conservative publications, the moderate ones like New Republic I try to stay up with, and Crisis, and First Things, and cutting edge of Catholic and Protestant, conservative, magazines, and of course Bill Buckley, my old pal, with National Review--awful lot to read. We have tremendous responsibility here to stay informed on what our Speaker Gingrich calls the ``information highway'' to be an alert, informed man or woman in this place. It is an overwhelming job if you're trying to inform yourself of all aspects of the popular culture and try to cover the economic front, the foreign affairs front, the human rights front, the defense front, all the social issues at home, gang warfare, the O.J. Simpson trial, not as a gawking ``Lookie Lou,'' but as someone aware that this trial, as the Menendez trial has done, can put our whole jury system in jeopardy.''
And I promised this Navy SEAL that I would get the Newsweek article out of my huge piles of reading material in my office and take a look at it. I have only been home since the first of September. I got it out last night and read it. Here it is, Mr. Speaker. It is the Newsweek issue of July 17, so it hit the newsstands on Monday, July 10. I read it last night, and I agree with this naval officer, assigned at a forward base in Italy, a kind of a man who will go in and put his life on the line if another Captain Scott O'Grady gets shot down along the coast. The Navy SEAL's will have the job to go in and rescue them under fire, and I agree with this naval officer. This is the most corrupt article, let alone a cover story, that I have ever read in an American magazine in my life--Newsweek.
The Washington bureau chief, and we are having our problems right now over another issue that personally involves my honor, and I will do a 1-hour special order or a personal privilege in the middle of the day--
no, I would not do that in September, budget month--to defend my honor from an attack by a reporter who has only been--who was not even hired when this issue came out, who attacked my honor and said I crashed four aircraft in the Air Force. I have not crashed one. Ejected twice from totally out-of-control aircraft, but he doubled that to four and said I crashed them and said I was a black ace, one kind of black ace. The only black aces I know were an F-14 squadron called the ``Black Aces'' in the unheralded until the HBO special in the last few weeks, the 99th fighter squadron, and then the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee airmen, our young fighter pilots in the Italian theatre of African-
American
heritage who are finally getting their recognition 52 years after they entered combat. That is the only ``Black Aces'' I know about.
But I am having my problems with Evan Thomas, who I think is one of the better talking heads. He will be on television tomorrow, on a program called ``Inside U.S.A.,'' a handsome young man, and we are having out problems on this, but I have not talked to him about this issue, and I will. I am going to fly up to New York. I am going to go see Donald and Katharine Graham. She is chairman emeritus and has discussed this issue.
I almost wonder if I can read this in the Chamber, but listen to this. I wish you folks were not leaving up there because--well, get the Congressional Record tomorrow and read this.
Here is the article on bisexuality. It is under ``Lifestyle,'' of course.
``Bisexuality is the wild card of our erotic life. Now it is coming out in the open, in pop culture, in cyberspace, and on campus. But can you really have it both ways?'' They asked rhetorically, question mark, by John Leland. The answer is Newsweek thinks you can because in this article, one of America's great magazines--when I was a little kid coming out of St. Patrick's, I used to look at their beautiful headquarters building right there on Fifth Avenue across from Tiffany somewhere. Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post, one of America's three major newspapers, all of them liberal: L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post. They own this, so it is under Katharine and Donald Graham.
Here is what Newsweek says about this issue. Brace yourself for culture shock if you are still shockable.
They show here Theresa, and Ronelle, all these couples, Stephen and Linda. Of course, she's 47 and he's 30. They all have multiple partners, they all switch-hit, they are all AC/DC, they are dual-
gaited. I remember all the cute words in New York, and, after all, I grew up in Manhattan and then west to Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, so I know all the flippant dialog.
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Here is a woman, 48, with a young Hispanic guy, it looks like he is about 17, 18, 19; he is in his early 20's. Freud said we are all bisexual. He thought that exclusive heterosexuality was a problem. In the copy it says that he thought homosexuality was a problem, and he never got around to that, because he died and met God before he had a chance to get into that.
But the article goes on, and by its commentary, approving of this fifth gender. Bella Abzug stands up in Beijing, China, in the middle of the world's most oppressive human rights, communistic dictatorship and mentions homophobia and gets a standing ovation from all of the assembled feminists of the world. if Ms. Hillary was in the room, she would have given her a standing ovation.
So here in the picture of this blue-eyed, red-headed guy, Tim, 24, with Ellen, 30 years of age. She has done it all, it is always older women and younger guys in these bisexual things. Listen to this. ``The bisexual blip of the 1970's was an offshoot of the sexual revolution.''
Of course, Newsweek's position is the sexual revolution was just grand. Tell that to 200,000 people dead of AIDS, another million infected in this country, and 10 to 20 million affected all around the world. Make love, casual sex like alley cats, not war. So they refer to the sexual revolution in an approving way.
``The bisexual blip was an offshoot of that revolution. It was straight with a twist. By contrast, the current bisexual movement rises from the gay and feminists movements.'' Notice it did not say lesbian wing of the feminist movement, just the feminist movement. ``For a generation that came of age during the gay rights movement, same-sex relationships or experiments no longer carry the stigma they once did.'' Stigma. What would that mean? Would that mean sin? Right and wrong, evil, banal sin, mortal sin?
Newsweek magazine, with this article, Mr. Speaker, and anybody listening, make no mistake about it, Newsweek magazine, with this July 17 cover story, is a direct frontal attack on everything that I was ever taught by my parents, by every teacher I had in grade school, high school, and college. It is a direct frontal assault on Mother Theresa, on Pope John Paul II, on Billy Graham, or every Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish theologian in this Nation. It is a frontal assault on Moses, right before my eyes, on the Jewish rabbi and great lawgiver Mimones over here; it is a frontal assault on the justice code of almost all of the 23 men whose medallions you see up in this Chamber: The Pope, Pope Innocent, Pope Gregory, St. Louis, Pope Alphonse. It is an assault upon every moral code in this country, but it says, there is no more stigma to promiscuity and groping around like alley cats, and any drug-
infested party you can go to, and it gets worse. No longer a stigma.
Get this next line. I hope you are watching, Evan Thomas. If my office is listening, Mr. Speaker, I hope they call Newsweek because he is in his office this afternoon, and ask Evan Thomas to please turn on the television and listen to this. This is not in quotes, this is Newsweek writing, this is John Leland writing, with the help, and I am going to mention him right now, of Steve Rhodes, contributing in Chicago, Peter Katel in Miami, Claudia Kalb and Marc Peyser in New York, Nadine Joseph in San Francisco, and Martha Brant in Washington, in the Washington office and bureau reports.
Get this next line, after there is no stigma: ``More and more of us--
at work * * *'' Is this Newsweek
people at work?--at school, in our families, and in our entertainments--``move comfortably between gay and straight worlds.''
``Most of us in our work move comfortably between gay and straight worlds and in our schools?'' Then they go to a quote: ``Those of us who are younger,'' says Rebecca Kaplan, 24, a psychology major at Massachusetts Institute of Technology--what are your SAT scores to get into MIT? She says, ``those of us who are younger owe a great deal to gays, lesbians and bisexuals who came before us.''
Who came before us? That is a line for George Washington in his inaugural speech, April 30, 1789. We owe this to Benjamin Franklin and to George Mason up here, we owe it to them, Thomas Payne and those who came before us, those who died at Lexington and Concord, those who suffered during the six and a half years of the Revolutionary War. Any African-American can say, we owe this to those who died in the conflict, to the terrorist John Brown and his sons, we owe it to everybody who came before us, our freedom.
What was the greatest scene in the wonderful movie, ``Glory,'' when Morgan Freeman says to the young rebel Denzel Washington, he says, white boys have anted up and died for our freedom; now it is our time to ante up, and he rallies the 4th regiment to go against Fort Wagner, and they gave their lives in the fight for freedom to keep this country. As it says here, tolerance, liberty and union on the other side, those who went before us.
``The bisexuals, lesbians who went before us, we owe it to them.'' She is going to make a great psychologist. Still in school at age 24. She says, ``because of them,'' Rebecca continues, ``I was able to come out as a bisexual and not hate myself.'' Here is this word feminism again, not the lesbian branch of feminism. Feminism has also made romantic attachments between two women--either provisional or lasting--
more acceptable, even privileged.
Do you know that I had to be a Congressman approaching my sixties before a young graduate of Holyoke told me that the majority of women at that college would say they were lesbians? That she had to form on campus a heterosexual club to defend themselves. They were not just defending virginity, they were defending normal heterosexuality. And she said, of course, most of the women are 4-year lesbians, or more accurately a 3-year, 9-month lesbian. Peer pressure, sexual lesbian experimentation, and then as, some radical lesbians have said, dripping bile from their lips, they have said, and then the sisters betray us, not in this order necessarily, and go out and get themselves a dog, a station wagon, children and a husband.
Is that what Newsweek means by provisional lesbians? Just while they were in college, at a school of higher learning, one of the privileged of the world, to get advanced education beyond high school?
Then it says, after privileged, ``as president of the National Organization for Women, Patricia Ireland sets a quiet example.'' She is a big mouth, so what does quiet mean? ``She has both a husband and a female companion.'' What kind of a wimp is her husband down there in Miami that he lets her keep a lesbian roommate up there in Washington, DC. where she does the work of NOW, preparing to send Bella Abzug to rant on in Beijing, China about homophobia? Incredible. And there were some people at NOW that voted against the Nation's most famous lesbian becoming head of NOW.
Now, this in Newsweek, and this is in quotes, ``Namely every college or university in the country
and some high schools now have gay and lesbian student centers; sex with one's own gender, for anyone who is curious,'' that is you, Mr. Speaker, that is everybody in the gallery, that is these two staffers sitting here, that is our pages, that is me, ``for anyone who is curious, section with one's own gender is now a visible and protected part of campus culture.''
And protected by Newsweek, ladies and gentlemen. Queer studies. I thought queer was a politically incorrect word. ``Queer studies and gender studies are now part of the national curriculum. A popular T-
shirt spotted recently in a Connecticut high school puts it this way: Do not assume I am straight.'' That is a high school kid.
``As one 17 year old bi says,'' we do not know if it is a boy or girl, 17 year old, someone over 18 rapes a 17-year-old young lady on a date, that is a statutory rape. This is a minor child that Newsweek is writing about. ``A 17-year-old minor bi says `It is not us versus them anymore. There is just more and more of us.' '' Tim Horing, but there is an umlaut--I did not know Newsweek's typewriters had umlauts over the 0--21, a sophomore--why is he a sophomore at 21? He should be a senior or junior--at City College in San Francisco, describes himself as ``typical of bisexual youth. We just refuse to label ourselves as any of the five food groups.'' That is male heterosexual, female heterosexual, male homosexual, female homosexual, and the bi's. ``We do not want to be any part of the five. We revel in the fuzziness, in the blurred images. Working class, Roman Catholic,'' and, oh, does the New York Times and the networks as CBS did in their CBS reports last night, do they love to attack Cardinal John Joseph O'Connor and the Roman Catholic Church, if they get a Catholic or practicing Baptist family or an orthodox Jewish family, oh, to get somebody from a traditional Jewish or Roman Catholic to switch over and talk about how they are a recovering Catholic or a recovering Jewish person, because of all that terrible confirmation and Holy Communion and bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, oh, they love to get one of this.
And get this, Tom's father is a retired New York narcotics cop. A narco guy taking away another one of their flesh privileges, to get high and then grope out boy for all the warm flesh.
``Horing had his first sexual fantasies about the Bionic Woman, and then in his teens he admitted to himself in a series of difficult steps that he was also attracted to men. He came out to a few friends in school, and at his graduation when his name was called, Timothy Horing, six rows in the auditorium mischievously,'' no, not mischievously,
``yelled out `The bisexual; Tim Horing, the bisexual.' A surprise to his parents.''
No, a gut-ripping heart seizure for his New York retired narcotics cop and his Roman Catholic mother.
``For the most part, he has been in monogamous relationships.'' You like that, ``for the most part?'' ``Usually with men.''
Oh, I see. I always said for my entire life that bisexuality was basically a cover story for homosexuality. That when they captured the adjective ``gay'' to say that they were happier than your average pair, more cheerful, more mirthful, that then, if they said they were bisexual, they could say ``Well, I date the whole base. I can date anybody on Capitol Hill. I am a switch-hitter. I am AC-DC, I am bi. I can go for anything. You are missing out on half the world.'' But we find out he basically dates men.
As we go all the way through this, most of it is male homosexuality, not bisexuality. Though he is now dating two gay men and a bisexual woman. I see. He is spreading himself around. Two homosexual men and one half-homosexual woman. What would that give him in the rating of chess pieces? What would that make him, 87.75 homosexual?
He says, young Tom, ``I never wanted a white picket fence, but I do want someone I can settle down with and raise my Benetton kids.'' Benetton. Is that the Benetton Colors out of Italy that put Ronald Reagan in major news magazines with cancer, sarcoma, AIDS sores all over his face? Is this Benetton that pushes homosexual money into every corner of America and everywhere else their clothing is marketed?
I notice that the Justice Department today under Janet Reno is investigating Calvin Klein jeans to see if they used underaged children in their soft core pornography, latest wave of disgusting ads, and Klein, unless he gets taken to court, is laughing all the way to the bank again, because negative soft- or hard-core pornography sells in modern America.
They just had an adult bookstore convention in the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, and I am reading in one of my Los Angeles Times clippings that the business, in spite of the January 17 earthquake 2 years ago, has rebounded and doubled. You do not see porno theaters in your markets anymore, because it is in all the hotels for traveling businessmen to demean somebody else's sister, wife, somebody else's daughter, who did not have the love of a father, and it is in all the video stores, including Blockbuster. The ripping apart of these young gals from these transitional neighborhoods who never new the loving touch, the moral touch, of a father, to hug them and kiss them and guide them through school.
They are out there as the young whores of our society being used by the porno industry. And no matter how many commit suicide like Karen Applegate from a beautiful little town in Wisconsin.--I have spoken to her mother. No matter how many kill themselves. Six playmates have killed themselves over the years. When I asked Hugh Hefner that once to his face, he turned red and did not want to discuss it and said it was a lie. I knew them each by name, starting with Marilyn Monroe, his first playmate.
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But this guy says he wants to raise his Benetton kids in a swinging orgy household. His partner may be a man or woman, he says. I don't feel forced to choose. I don't have to make any tough choices.
Then it shows this very pathetic human being with his baby. He has gone through every orgy situation available to the humankind. And when people ask him what his little baby is, man or woman, he says ask the baby. He has a little boy or girl and he says, ask the baby. Smart aleck. Pray for him. He is 42 and he has three or four people on the hook. It goes on and on as it gets worse.
Softening tensions. Softening tensions. This is Newsweek. That is a paragraph title. For many bisexuals, it has not been easy. When I came out in '88, says Melissa Merry, 31, energetic Chicagoan who calls herself Mel: I was told by people from local lesbian support groups not to come out as a bisexual or I would be asked to leave.
They did not want the fence straddling. Well, when I got to some of these paragraphs about high schools, the first thing that flashed in my mind, as an Irish-American, was William B. Yeats poem read when Hitler started World War II. And he died that year, Yeats. It is called ``The Second Coming,'' about the beast being born, the Antichrist and slouching off to Bethlehem to be born. Those are the last lines, but it begins turning and turning in the widening gyre, as in gyrations, falcons, circle. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon no longer hears the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Everywhere the blood din tide is loosed. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned by Newsweek. The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. There is an intensity to this article and it is evil and it is the worst.
When I saw in here they are claiming James Dean, the actor who died at age 24 after only three movies, when I see they are claiming Marlene Dietrich as a bisexual lesbian, and Cary Grant, my favorite actor as a young man because of everybody's favorite movie quote-unquote ``Gunga Din,'' when I saw that, I went to the end to see how many women participated in--what is the author's name again, with John Leland in this disgusting, vile piece--and while I was back at the tail end of the article reading all the violence--by the way, if this were in Time we would not know who contributed to this. I could not call any of these people and say have you lost your moral compass totally at this magazine? Does Donald Graham read this, this cover story of this corruption, this drowning of innocence? And as I was reading, I decided I would look before I finished the story at the last line.
Now, let me tell you a story about myself personally. When I was a young man in Beverly Hills, just out of high school, and I heard these rumors, because my uncle is the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, Jack Haley, I grew up in that community. I knew who dodged the draft. I knew the heroes who went off to combat, like James Stewart and Tyrone Power. We know who all the ones that were rumored to be homosexuals. I knew about Rock Hudson 10 years before it came out in the press.
I had a small bit part in a movie ``Gathering of Eagles,'' and he minced across the set and the director said cut. And Rock turned around and said was I mincing too much? And the director said, just do it again, Rock. I witnessed that, and everybody talks behind the scenes. Just as in fashion design, in ice skating, in supernumeraries, on Broadway stage, in ballet, and now in some parts of government there is a larger percentage than the 1 percent of homosexuals out there across America. And when I worked on the sets of Hollywood trying to feed my five children and dreaming about running for Congress someday, I had long philosophical discussions with a lot of young homosexual men in their 20's, and they would tell me about Rock and all the stars that they just were dying to get with some night; wanted them, and then to see them up there 50 feet high up on the silver screen and know that you had sexually been with them. What a trip.
And how did I rationalize Cary Grant when I was in high school? I remember working out a rationale that when God gives you a lot of talent and you make a lot of money in your 20's or 30's--what did Robin Williams say after he came off cocaine and watched his friend John Belushi die? He said cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money.
It was the same way in Hollywood. Always has been. Or in any profession where money flows fast into the hands of the young. Look at all our rock stars. Look at Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out.
Look at Jerry Garcia. Look at Marilyn Monroe. Look at Elvis. Look at Jimi Hendrix. Look at Jim Morrison. Look at Janis Joplin. Whether it is booze or heroin or drugs, and orgies for all of them.
I watched Elvis Presley using his staff to pimp for him. I thought what a tragedy for this polite young man from Tupelo, MI. I am trying to sell him a script called the 101st American, about Vietnam, because he had served honorably in the Army, and I am watching his staff hit on young pretty extra girls for him. They rented a big mansion up in Beverly Hills below the head of the owner of the L.A. Rams, who is now dead, and you could hear the orgies going on all night long.
He died naked, on drugs at 42 years of age, and now you can get a postage stamp and lick Elvis and stick him on your letter and say there went the most talented man in rock singing in our lifetime dead at 42. And in that suite of stamps you can get Marilyn Monroe. Do we forget how old she was in August of 1962 when she died? 36 years old. 36 years old! At my age, that is a kid. We are celebrating these two deaths with their most glamorous picture.
Remember the debate in the Post Office department: Do we want the fat, older drug besotted Elvis or the younger Elvis in his prime? We picked the younger one. And he was a polite young man. What a tragedy!
So I watched all these people corrupting themselves, and I watched others, like Jimmy Stewart and my Uncle Jack and others. I remember Danny Thomas telling me I have never told a dirty joke in my life, Bob. Do not ever forget that. My uncle told me, never stoop to dirty humor on the stage. It is too easy to get laughs. Today I watch all these comedians. It is a category with the medical word for male organ. That is all they do, are jokes on genitalia.
It is sickening what is going on in Hollywood. But what was my rationale for Cary Grant? Here it was, I remember it vividly, I was in my teens. I said when you have too much money, and you can have any beautiful woman in the world, and you start going to wild Hollywood parties and drinking too much--we did not know about drugs much in those days--and you start drinking too much, and you are at an orgy, whatever moves, I guess. It is all a mortal sin. It is all promiscuity. It is all flesh. Flesh is flesh, so you experiment with everything.
So I do not think Cary Grant was a homosexual or a bisexual. He just got carried away at those orgies. That was my rationale so I could like Sergeant McChesney of Gunga Din with McLaglen and with Sergeant Ballentine Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Years later, in a debate running for the Senate seat that Pete Wilson eventually won, I am debating one of the candidates back in the pack, because I am still back in the pack in the Presidential race, he was a State senator, he was raised as a German-American Roman Catholic, he was a colonel in the Marine Reserve, and I pointed out to him in a radio debate in 1982 at a station in Pasadena, KRLA--
how is that for a memory--I said, you know something my State Senate friend, reaching out and grabbing any kind of flesh, whether heterosexual or homosexual, lust is lust. It is one of the seven deadly sins. It is all a mortal sin whether normal or abnormal.
He went ballistic. Would not accept that. Then I found out he had a scandal brewing. He had two college students where he taught as a professor, a marine officer, who were pregnant with children out of wedlock. He bragged, quite properly, at least he was
pro-life. I could not understand why he took such exception to saying that God is not going to judge a promiscuous homosexual any more harshly than he will judge a promiscuous heterosexual. It is all lust. It is all the ceremony of innocence being drowned as we do this to our children.
So there it is, when I am a teenager rationalizing Cary Grant and arguing on a radio show in a California Senate race in 1982. Here is my point for telling those two little tangential tales. My eyes jump above all the bylines of these people, Steve and Peter and Claudia and Mark and Nadine and Martha, and here is the last line of this disgusting, vile, decadent piece from the Graham empire of the Washington Post Newsweek magazine and other small newspapers.
It says in the last paragraph, in San Francisco recently Tim Horing--
remember him, Roman Catholic, parents retired New York narco cop father--he was telling his friends about how he changed his approach to picking up boys. How old was Horing? 21. Hey, Newsweek, did you slip here in your investigative reporting? Telling his friends how he had changed his approach to pick up boys? Is he a 21-year-old chicken hawk hitting on runaway young men on the street who also, in most cases, until recently, when peer pressure overwhelms even good attentive Jewish Christian mothers and fathers. In the old days, last year, last decade, it was young boys who never knew a father's masculine touch, a mother's hug, a mom or dad taking them to a baseball game or fishing. It was young men who ran away from inattentive alcoholic families that ended up on the street of once glamorous Hollywood Boulevard to be preyed upon, P-R-E-Y-E-D upon, to be taken off for porno films and turned into midnight cowboy male street whores all along Selma Boulevard behind beautiful Jesuit Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood.
I drove down that street when I did Michael Reagan's show a month ago, and there they are, still huddling in the driveways with less business because now most of them are infected with AIDS. So Tim Horing--I have to check if he was 21. Yes, he is 21. He says the boys that I pick up now--he has changed his approach. ``I used to say are you queer? Then I switched to, do you like boys? Now his favorite line is, do you like me?''
As he sees it, ``I have gone from the political to the historical attraction to the very personal. All that matters is if they like me.'' This is the new bisexual moment, Newsweek says. This is their close in a nutshell.
And I close with this line, Mr. Speaker. ``Hard fought, hard thought, and distinctively individual. It is a thorny narrative, fraught with questions of identity and belonging. And in the end, it is really about the simple, mysterious pull between warm human bodies when the lights go out.''
My teenage rationale for Cary Grant. We are in advanced moral decay, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to stay in the Presidential race as long as I can, because there is not anyone in the race like Congressman Robert K. Dornan at age 62.
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