Colin Powell's lame excuses

One potential value of blogs is to follow up a story that the mainstream media -- busy making up John Kerry quotes -- have forgotten about. Consider then the minor question of why Colin Powell did not attend the Republican convention in New York. To an outside observer, the reasonable explanation would seem to be that Powell has enough intelligence to see what he's gotten suckered into over the last four years and wants to get out with some shred of his reputation intact.

But Powell is still in the weird grip of the Cult of Dubya, so there's no way that explanation could be allowed to stand out there. So there was another one: an alleged precedent that Secretaries of State stay out of party politics. It wasn't difficult to collect past instances where this was not the case, and here's another one (with added Irishness!).

We've blogged before about the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972, when British soldiers opened fire on marchers in Derry, killing 12. In those days, the White House was actually paying attention to overseas news, and the Irish Times (subs. req'd) has gotten access to transcripts of conversations between President Nixon and then Secretary of State (i.e. the Colin Powell analog) William Rogers.

In the manner of many Nixon conversations, there are parts that are funny: the pair know that Taoiseach Jack Lynch will want a meeting with Nixon to discuss the crisis, so they concoct the excuse that Nixon is busy preparing for his trip to China. The message being, we suppose, that the Irish need to coordinate our crises around St Patrick's Day if we hope to get a US meeting out of it.

But then there's an insight into those apolitical Secretaries of State:

Mr Rogers remarks that he will use the Irish crisis as "an excuse" to hold a press conference, during which he would attack the Democratic presidential candidate, Mr Edmund Muskie, for his stand on the Vietnam war.

Nixon also developed his own approach to the Irish Question, involving the sending of an interesting team of emissaries:

As well as sending Norman Vincent Peale, a TV celebrity and bestselling author of The Power of Positive Thinking, president Nixon also considered sending fundamentalist Protestant preacher Mr Billy Graham and the Catholic Cardinal of New York, Terence Cooke.

Luckily, the policy process in his administration was strong enough to shelve this idea. But does anyone think there are similar safeguards to filter out such fanciful schemes today?