MY DINNER WITH PERVEZ
Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, January 27, 2009
ON SUNDAY, I had dinner with ex–Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, in town for a talk at the World Affairs Council, courtesy of Raza and Sabina Bokhari. Raza is a past president of the Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee.
I’ve written many times on my frustration with U.S. policy on Pakistan. We’ve outsourced the hunt for Osama to Pakistan, which lacks the will and motivation to get the job done. I voted for Barack Obama in part because on this issue he promised change.
I was seated at Musharraf’s right and across from Senator Arlen Specter, who explained to Musharraf my media role, including my radio show. Musharraf told me he wasn’t doing interviews. He’d had a contentious interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, but had no intention of doing any more. So I didn’t use my recorder, or take notes, but Musharraf gave me permission to ask whatever I wanted.
I said that many of us wanted to know how the Pakistani government could reach an accord with the leaders of the tribal region in fall 2006, about the time it was revealed that the United States was sending $80 million a month to Pakistan to fight al Qaeda.
Musharraf spoke decent English in a low but audible voice. He didn’t look at me, but interrupted his meal and stared straight ahead while speaking. It was a conversation only between the two of us.
Defiant is probably the best description of his tone. He said many Americans were naïve. People don’t understand Pakistan, he said. There are Pakistani troops in those tribal areas (overlooking my point that they weren’t doing anything) and 1,500 Pakistani soldiers had died in the war on terror. There are important matters of strategy, he said, and, “Don’t tell us what to do in our country.”
I wanted to know what we had to show for the $11 billion the United States had paid the Pakistani government for its counterterror efforts. He said that this was very “frustrating,” that there had been many successes by the Pakistanis in the war against terror and that many leaders of al Qaeda had been killed.
He lamented that in his own country he is perceived as a U.S. “lackey,” and in the United States, he is seen as “double-dealing.”
Incidentally, the buzz in the room is that he’s not well-off. More than one individual surmised over cocktails that for all the money that was paid to Pakistan, you’d think Musharraf wouldn’t need to do the U.S. lecture circuit, which is the reason for this visit.
I told him of my trip to Qatar, and how I had visited CENTCOM headquarters and seen the maps depicting military activity in real time, including how all U.S. troop activity stopped at Pakistan. I told him that soldiers told me of frustration at not being able to pursue al Qaeda when it retreats into Pakistan.
He said that wasn’t true. Soldiers had crossed the border, but it’s foolish for them to do so. Because of the terrain and the nature of life in the tribal areas, they could get sucked in and killed in great numbers. According to Musharraf, crossing from the Afghanistan border was not an option for American troops. He also said that terrorism was created in Afghanistan and imported to Pakistan, not vice versa.
With some reluctance because I was sure he’d heard it thousands of times, I asked where bin Laden was. In the Swat valley? He laughed and said no. In Waziristan? More grimly, he said, “I don’t know.”
I asked what he thought when Barack Obama said in August 2007 that if Musharraf didn’t act on intelligence regarding high-level al Qaeda targets, the United States would. Musharraf said they are doing that. He said we mix up strategy and tactics. Tactics, he said, are how to deal with al Qaeda. There is disagreement there, he said, but overall, strategically, we agree.
I expected him to say that Obama was wrong to make that assertion. He did not, but did offer that personality changes don’t change policy, only changes in policy do. He said that the aims he had pursued with President Bush were the best policy. He also said that through last March, things in his country were “pretty good,” which I found to be odd. (He left office in August.)
I asked if Pakistani condemnation of U.S. Predator strikes are simply to save face. Musharraf took this as an opportunity to tell me how angry Pakistani people are with the Americans. He said the man on the street doesn’t like the United States, but the United States needs Pakistan and vice versa.
When I asked what we Americans don’t understand about the situation in Pakistan, he said that the Mumbai coverage had been all about the Pakistani role, with very little said of the Indian role.
He said that Americans didn’t appreciate the danger posed by India, which had sided with the Soviets during the cold war, and that for more than 40 years, we’d been allies of the Pakistanis, and people were too quick to question Pakistan’s loyalty to the United States. He repeatedly made a case for continued U.S. economic aid to Pakistan.
Taking former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf along as I voted in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on November 2, 2010. Photo by Raza Bokhari.
By then, others had taken their places at the table. I felt I was monopolizing the conversation. Switching to a lighter topic, I asked him how he relaxed. He mentioned reading and tennis, describing himself as a good defensive player. He also sang the praises of bridge.
So what were my other impressions?
He was most anxious to defend his policies. From my first words, he was very forceful. Measured, never ungentlemanly, but very determined.
And, in the bigger picture, as our limited foreign-policy attention focuses on Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan, real American security is being determined in Pakistan, where the same forces who killed 3,000 seven years ago continue to have free rein.
AFTERWORD
This column was one of nearly a dozen that I wrote expressing disenchantment with the way the Bush administration was pursuing Osama bin Laden by placing too much responsibility on President Musharraf. I said the same thing on radio and television. It still stuns me to think about my friend Raza calling and saying, “Why not come to dinner with him?”
Two days later, after I gave a recap on radio that Raza heard, he called me and said the president had enjoyed our dialogue and had consented to a formal interview with me. One day later, I returned to Raza’s house, where, in his wine cellar, I recorded a lengthy discussion with Musharraf. On the record, I did my best to summarize how I saw the situation and expressed my concern that we’d taken our eye off the ball with respect to bin Laden.
His immediate response was “None of what you are saying is true.”
We then had a 40-minute, wide-ranging conversation that left me second-guessing some of my long-standing criticism. He seemed earnest. And honest. I left wondering whether perhaps he was the best dance partner we could find in that part of the world. For the next few years, Musharraf went into a self-imposed exile in Dubai and London, but he continued to return to the Philadelphia Main Line to stay with Raza and Sabina, who took to referring to their back patio as the “Musharraf deck.”
When a Musharraf visit in 2010 (during which he was in exile) coincided with our U.S. midterm elections, my wife suggested I take him with me when I voted. (He’s the second most important person to ride in my car; one morning I drove Phillies skipper Charlie Manuel down the Schuylkill to Citizen’s Bank Park.) At my quaint polling place in Lower Merion Township, we walked past yard signs for Pat Toomey, Joe Sestak, Tom Corbett, and Dan Onorato while I told him about American voter apathy and bragged that I had never missed an election. I will not forget his reply: “You said you’ve always voted. Let me shock you by saying that I have never voted—except in the last eight years [while president].”
The people manning my polling place could not have been more gracious. They allowed me to enter my polling booth accompanied by President Musharraf and I took delight in showing him our means of casting a ballot. When we exited, Musharraf told me that because of the number of illiterate Pakistanis, they record ballots for symbols, not parties or individuals. He also said that he wo
uld compete in Pakistan’s 2013 election. He’d already settled on his party’s symbol: a shaheen falcon. “It flies higher than all other birds,” he told me. “It doesn’t fly in a flock. It is independent. It flies alone. It doesn’t come back to a nest, . . . so I think it’s a symbol which shows independence, which shows courage, which shows confidence.” Musharraf did return to Pakistan in 2013 after four years in exile but was disqualified from taking part in the election.
JACK KEMP’S
WINNING GAME PLAN
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, May 7, 2009
I HAD MY LAST CONVERSATION with Jack Kemp in October.
No surprise, our focus was to be on tax policy. But the part of our dialogue that will always stay with me had to do with football and his family.
I asked him if he could still throw a spiral at 73. “I can throw a spiral,” he assured me.
I can’t throw it very far anymore. I used to be able to throw it—believe it or not—about 90 yards. But, you know, I’ve aged a little bit. I was in Vail, Colorado, last summer with my grandsons, and they put the ball on the ground, ran out for a pass, and said, “Grandpa, Grandpa, throw me a pass!” By the time I picked up the ball, they were 50 yards down the field, and I said, “Hey, come back to around 15!”
Kemp was the Republican quarterback who tried to rewrite the party’s playbook. Others will remember Kemp as a professional football player, nine-term congressman, secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Bush 41, and VP candidate for Bob Dole.
I’ll remember him as a onetime boss.
In 1991, HUD was divided into 10 regions, and I was a federal housing commissioner responsible for the one that included Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington.
This was at a time when HUD, under Kemp’s leadership, was trying to transfer ownership of public housing to the tenants. One of the first was to be Tyler House, a Washington development.
That’s where I met Elaine Johns. Ms. Johns, then approaching 70, was a tenant leader who had invited Kemp for a tour of Tyler House in June 1989.
Kemp was so disgusted by the conditions (“The rats are so bad here you find them in the hall; you get up in the morning, and you find them dead in your apartment,” Johns said at the time) that he described them as “scandalous.” He vowed to make it a poster child for his homeownership initiative.
Before my meeting with Ms. Johns roughly two years later, I remember being told by a colleague that I needed to be particularly attentive to her. When I asked why, I was told that whenever Ms. Johns called Kemp, he took the call.
That was classic Kemp. He wasn’t politicking for the sake of appearing populist. He was accessible because people like Elaine Johns were at the heart of the two most important causes in his political career—incentive-oriented economics and equality-oriented politics.
Kemp was a believer in giving people—especially minorities—a bigger stake in their own future. That’s why he pushed his initiative to sell public-housing tenants their apartments “with the fervor of a Southern Baptist preacher,” as a New York Times reporter wrote in 1996.
It’s also why he became a lone GOP voice urging the party to apply the principles of fiscal conservatism to address urban problems and reach out to minority constituents. Kemp, a self-described “bleeding-heart conservative” working in an administration perceived as inattentive to urban issues, received three standing ovations during a speech at the NAACP’s annual convention in 1989.
“You see, real leadership is not just seeing the realities of what we are temporarily faced with, but seeing the possibilities and potential that can be realized by lifting up people’s vision of what they can be,” he wrote in a letter to his 17 grandchildren published a few weeks after our October conversation.
Unfortunately, too many of those now playing the games that Kemp did—athletics and politics—are in it for the stats or the sound bite.
They’d be better off running the routes recommended by Kemp, the GOP quarterback so invested in his playbook that a consultant once told him: “If I could remove two-thirds of your knowledge and three-fourths of your vocabulary, I could make you into a decent candidate.”
AFTERWORD
I first met Representative Jack Kemp when I was an undergraduate at Lehigh University and dropped into his Capitol Hill office with a paperback copy of his book An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980s tucked under my arm. His gatekeeper and longtime office manager, Sharon Zelaska, let me in to see him. I was excited to meet him and eager for him to sign the book, so much so that I became flustered when he asked me where I was studying. I said “Lehigh,” and when he asked me to spell it, I got tongue-tied and said, “L-e-i . . . sorry, L-e-h-i-g-h” but it was too late. The resulting inscription reads: “Best wishes to you and Leihigh YRs—from a ‘fellow soldier’ and friend, Jack Kemp.” A decade later, he called to invite me to serve as one of his 10 regional administrators in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, clearly having forgotten that not so long before, I had trouble spelling the name of my own school.
CHECKING IN WITH SMOKIN’ JOE
TO THANK HIM FOR HIS DIGNITY
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 17, 2009
HARD TO BELIEVE. It’s already been a month since the great Harry Kalas passed away.
The Phillies—from the memorial cigarette to the black H.K. uniform patches to that famous home-run call now playing after each hometown dinger—offered him an honorable tribute. So too did the fans, thousands of whom visited Citizens Bank Park to pay their respects. Only Jack Buck and Babe Ruth got similar send-offs. Harry the K got his just due in death.
But as usual, it came a little late. Too often the accolades flow when the recipient is no longer around to hear them. We’ve all lost people close to us and regretted never having told them what they meant to us in life. It’s true for both noncelebrities and celebrities.
Take Joe Frazier. HBO’s Thrilla in Manila depicts the bitter feud behind the three epic fights between Frazier and Muhammad Ali. That era and those bouts have been well documented, but Thrilla is different. It shows us what the battle looked like from Smokin’ Joe’s corner.
Like the fact that the two rivals had once been friends. Or that Frazier gave Ali money when the latter’s boxing license was revoked in the late 1960s, and that Smokin’ Joe lobbied President Richard Nixon in support of Ali’s reinstatement.
Ali’s return to the ring, however, brought a change of attitude. He mocked Frazier in public. He called him stupid and ugly. He race-baited for the cameras, calling Frazier an Uncle Tom and a tool of his white backers. “He’s the other type of Negro,” Ali asserted. He riffed about Frazier as a gorilla and sparred with a man in a gorilla suit—all as the cameras rolled.
In other words, he took the prefight schtick way too far. And while Ali would later apologize to Frazier’s son Marvis, he’s never offered a personal apology to Frazier himself.
Too bad it’s taken more than 30 years to get a glimpse of that era through Frazier’s battered eyes. Ali has long been feted as one of the greatest sportsmen who ever lived. Smokin’ Joe, meanwhile, lives in a room above his gym in a North Philadelphia neighborhood labeled the Badlands. As Ali biographer Thomas Hauser notes in the film: “It’s an interesting look at how America treats its sporting icons. Some are accorded special status, and others are largely forgotten.”
I hope Joe Frazier, now 65, doesn’t feel forgotten. Where possible, the icons among us should be told today just how we feel about them. It shouldn’t take Tim Russert’s passing to spark a conversation about civility in today’s media world. Or Jack Kemp’s death to inspire the GOP to make an honest effort in his name at reaching out to minorities and urban communities.
And it’s not limited to the rich and famous. Each of us has family and friends to whom we owe gratitude—or perhaps people with whom we need to reconcile. It shouldn’t take a memorial service or a funeral for us to think about doing so.
A few weeks ago, I called Smokin’ Joe Frazier to tell him what he meant to my youth and how he’d helped cultivate my appreciation of the sweet science. I thought he should understand that there are millions of people who acknowledge his commitment to the sport and the dignity with which he’s always carried himself. Unfortunately, what Thrilla made clear is the reality that Frazier’s sense of dignity and sportsmanship has gone unheralded since he left the ring.
He told me he’s concerned with influencing “the young one who’s growing up to be a young man or young woman as time goes by.” He added, “We’re going to have to represent them right so that they can carry on the right way. If we’re not right, how are we going to make our kids right?”
Two guys who dig hats: with Smokin’ Joe Frazier in my radio studio, May 2009. Photo by TC Scornavacchi.
I then asked the former Olympic and heavyweight champ if he’s happy, and the response was vintage Joe Frazier. “The Lord’s been good to me,” he said, before telling a story about a car accident that caused him significant pain and resulted in multiple surgeries on his neck.
“From that day on, I’ve been walking with a little hippy-hop, but I get around the best I can, so it’s no problem,” he said.
I was glad I made the call.
AFTERWORD
Joe Frazier passed on November 7, 2011, after a battle with liver cancer. He was just 67 years old. While saddened over his death, I was pleased that I had picked up the telephone two years earlier to tell him what he meant to me. For two days—a Friday and Saturday—Frazier lay in state at the Wells Fargo Center, home of the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers. Like thousands of others, I drove to the South Philadelphia sports palace to pay my respects. Smokin’ Joe was laid out at what would be center ice, in a closed white casket. A black cowboy hat, which he fancied wearing later in life, was sitting on top of the casket and nearby was one of the fight posters from his legendary March 8, 1971, fight against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden (often referred to as “The Fight of the Century”). Ali was among the 4,000 mourners on the following Monday who attended Frazier’s funeral service at the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in Philadelphia. If you have not yet seen it, I highly recommend an HBO Sports documentary about that initial Frazier v. Ali fight called Ali-Frazier I: One Nation . . . Divisible. It tells the story of the remarkable fight between two undefeated heavyweights in largely political terms that helped me appreciate why, when I was just nine years old, our white suburban Philadelphia family was in Frazier’s corner, not Ali’s.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 22