The Eternal Challenger
Henry B. Gonzalez has made a career out of jabbing at political heavy-weights. Now he’s finally landed a punch—on George Bush.
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Over the years Gonzalez and I have had many talks, usually over breakfast at Earl Abel’s in San Antonio or in the House dining room in Washington. What I learned from those meetings is that Gonzalez possesses an astonishing intellect and is motivated by the noblest intentions of politics. At his core he believes great ideas matter, and the main ideas of democracy—liberty, freedom, equality—must be fostered and protected on behalf of the many, not the few. At the same time, however, Gonzalez has never achieved as large a place in history as he believes he deserves because he has never made the kind of compromises necessary to maintain valuable political relationships. All his public life he has put ideas ahead of individuals. The image he carries inside is that of the lonely fighter, the boxer-intellectual who fought the battles no one else would fight.
This self-imposed isolation began as soon as Gonzalez was elected to Congress in 1961. The late Bob Poage, then a congressman from Waco, decided to give him a small welcoming party. Most of the Texas delegation came, but Gonzalez never showed up for his own party. “We toasted him in absentia,” said one who was there. Gonzalez is a teetotaler whose idea of fun is working out regularly in the House gym, studying mathematics and reading history and Latin primers. (He punctuated a speech last April with “Non redolent pecunia”—Latin for “Money has no nationality.”)
Memory is the indispensable sustenance of politics, and no politician has a longer memory than Henry B. He was the first Mexican American elected to the San Antonio City Council in 1953. He can remember when he was thrown out of a public swimming pool in New Braunfels because he was Mexican. He can remember entire passages from his 36-hour filibuster against segregationist laws in 1957. He remembers when Lyndon Johnson thanked him for helping in the 1964 campaign and told Gonzalez, “I want to help my Mexican friends in Texas. If you know of any who would make good appointments to federal jobs, you just let me know.” His response to the president was polite but chilly: “If I know of a good person, I’ll be glad to give you his name,” he told Johnson, “and if that person happens to be Mexican American, so much the better.” He was one of the few minority members who objected to the Voting Rights Act, predicting it would lead to ethnic separation and the balkanization of American politics.
But there is another side to Gonzalez besides the lonely fighter. He is as prone to battle over turf as over ideas. He quit the chairmanship of the assassinations committee because he failed to win a squabble with the committee’s chief counsel. When his aide, Albert Bustamante, went into politics on his own, Gonzalez blasted him. “There’s only one politician in Henry B’s office, and I violated the rule,” Bustamante, now a congressman himself, told me a few weeks ago. “I don’t blame him. He is an unquestioned hero.”
Not long after former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros was elected to the city council in 1975, he wrote a letter to Gonzalez, vowing never to run against him for any office. Later Cisneros supported naming the convention center after Gonzalez. He was hoping to avoid Gonzalez’s mistrust. The strategy failed. Gonzalez saw him as a rival nonetheless, not for office but for the judgment of history: Whose approach to politics and whose accomplishments in office were greater? His turf-consciousness helps explain why Iraqgate is not a campaign issue: Gonzalez is miffed at Bill Clinton because Clinton asked Cisneros to play such a prominent role in the presidential campaign.
These imagined slights plague most of Gonzalez’s relationships, including ours. When I attempted to interview him for this story, Gonzalez refused in writing and referred in his letter to a breakfast appointment that he thought I had missed a few years back. I replied that the two of us must have miscommunicated because I didn’t remember missing any such appointment, but he didn’t answer. “Hell,” said Maury Maverick, Jr., who ran against Gonzalez in a 1961 special election for the U.S. Senate, “Henry B’s one of the finest fellows in Texas, but I’ve been falling in and out with him for years. Ain’t nothing new about that.”
THE FAILURE OF A SMALL STATE BANK in the South Texas town of Carrizo Springs back in 1976 first aroused Gonzalez’s concern about the lack of regulation of foreign-owned banks operating in the U.S. It was to become one of his legislative obsessions. Thirteen years later, after Gonzalez spotted a one-paragraph story in the Wall Street Journal about how an Atlanta branch of an Italian-owned bank had issued a $2 billion line of credit to Iraq, he ordered banking committee staff to find out if the bank was continuing to make similar loans. Gonzalez’s hunch paid off, big time. Here are some of the fruits of that investigation:
• In 1989, Bush signed a secret directive calling for more aid and closer ties to Iraq. Iraq soon became a large participant in the Commodity Credit Corporation, through which the Department of Agriculture guaranteed bank loans for Iraq to buy American farm products.
• Iraq diverted food purchased with federally backed loans to buy weapons and military equipment from other countries. Investigators suspect the food was traded for weapons in the former Soviet Union. For instance, rice left Houston for Baghdad, but there is no documentation it ever arrived.
• Iraq used agricultural credits to obtain illegal loans from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, the Atlanta branch of a bank owned by the Italian government, at below-market interest rates. Bank officials, indicted in 1991 on a variety of federal charges, have pleaded guilty to bank fraud. Iraq defaulted on the government-backed loans, costing U.S. taxpayers at least $400 million.
• The scandal goes beyond banking transactions. With the approval of the Department of Commerce, Iraq was able to acquire from U.S. companies sophisticated equipment and technology that could be used for military purposes.
Gonzalez’s revelations have forced the Bush administration to renounce its pre-war policy of helping Iraq. Last May, then Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told another congressional committee, “When you’ve got a policy that didn’t work, it isn’t easy to defend.” What Bush and Gonzalez are fighting over is whether the Bush administration was involved in a criminal cover-up. Gonzalez and others have charged that officials in the White House interfered with prosecutors investigating the Atlanta bank and knowingly lied to Congress about the extent of Iraqi purchases of military equipment.
A Commerce Department official has testified that a list of export items approved for sale to Iraq prior to the Gulf War was subsequently altered 68 times to omit references to military applications. According to the official, the altered list was prepared by White House officials and top aides to Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher.
In the three years since Gonzalez first read about the bank loans to Iraq, he has encountered bizarre twists and turns. In one instance, Iraq turned out to own at least 30 percent of a North Carolina company that sells base plates for artillery shells to the U.S. military. Gonzalez’s investigators discovered that the company also sold its base plates to Iraq’s army, which may have purchased them with money from illegal bank loans.
Another strange moment occurred at a hearing when a government inspector testified he had no evidence that any agricultural goods bound for Iraq had been diverted. Later the inspector general of the Agriculture Department said he had no evidence the goods had actually arrived. All the documents concerning the transaction were in Arabic. “Does anyone in your office read Arabic?” asked a committee member. “No,” replied the inspector general. Nor, it turned out, had anyone bothered to have the documents translated.
The duel between Gonzalez and the administration escalated in early August when Central Intelligence Agency director Robert Gates criticized Gonzalez for releasing “top secret, compartmented, and particularly sensitive” intelligence material on Iraq. (This is the way Washington works: Gonzalez, who was investigating the CIA’s role in the scandal, is now under investigation by the CIA. He has also been warned to hire a bodyguard. The hunter becomes the hunted.) The floor speech that rankled Gates was one in which Gonzalez—relying on CIA reports—described how the Iraqis, operating through the Atlanta bank, bought military technology that could be used to build a nuclear bomb.
The White House insists that there is no cover-up. Attorney General William Barr defended the alteration of the Commerce Department documents as an attempt to correct “inaccurate perception.” Barr declined to appoint a special prosecutor. But Gonzalez has one more hearing set on Iraqgate. Christopher Drogoul, the former vice president of the Atlanta bank who made the Iraqi loans, is scheduled to testify on September 17, after this article goes to press.
Even if these hearings do uncover more damaging evidence, the impact may be lost because Gonzalez insists on making his case in his own eccentric way. His last floor speech was a good illustration. It was an impeccably documented account of the way Iraq used a vast array of front companies in the U.S. to purchase military equipment. But for every shocking point Gonzalez made, there were tedious and hard-to-follow digressions. At one point he launched into a story about the Korean CIA and how years ago it brought “beautiful Korean girls” into the U.S. “They reached former President Eisenhower in Pennsylvania,” claimed Gonzalez, apropos of nothing about Iraqgate, “and took the girls to have a private dance with him.” Near the end of his remarks, Gonzalez expressed frustration at not being able to get the answers to the nagging questions about Iraqgate. “What is it going to take?” he asked. But there was no answer because the House chamber, as usual, was empty.
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