Everybody's a Player

By Rick Horowitz

Tired of your humdrum little existence? Maybe you'd prefer some excitement in your life. Maybe you'd like to be: Diplomat for a Day!

Just think of the fun you'll have, intervening in foreign-policy crises, projecting power and influence halfway around the world. Not even the president of the United States will be able to ignore you, because you count.

Don't believe me? Just ask Charlie Trie. He'll tell you: All it takes is lots of imagination and a little bit of --

What's the Chinese word for chutzpah?

This one may have slipped by you with all the attention being paid to the Deng demise. Of course, just a couple of days pre-Deng, there was this other China story, about how the Chinese government might have been trying to project a little power and influence of its own by funneling contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Diplomatically speaking, this is a no-no. Politically speaking, it's an uh-oh -- if it's true.

But buried inside that story was the latest little nugget about Charlie Trie, Friend of Bill from their Little Rock days. You know about Charlie Trie, yes? Charlie owned a restaurant, Bill had an appetite. (Say no more.)

Then Bill moved up in the world, from Little Rock to Washington, and Charlie moved right along with him, trading in the apron for an attache case. An office in the Watergate and a letter from the president, and restaurateur Charlie was suddenly trade-promoter Charlie, brokering deals between China and American businesses.

Nice work if you can get it. He got it; bragging about how tight he was with the Big Guy certainly didn't hurt. It was Charlie Trie who brought a delegation of Chinese trade officials here in 1994. It was also Charlie Trie who brought a major Chinese-government arms dealer to the White House last year for one of those famous presidential coffees. (Oops!) And, of course, it was Charlie Trie who raised $639,000 for the Clintons' legal defense fund, contributions so suspicious that they had to give the money back.

But you knew all that. What you probably didn't know -- what just came to light the other day -- was that making deals, sipping coffee and stuffing consecutively-numbered money orders into manila envelopes wasn't quite enough for our Charlie. How about dabbling in war and peace?

Seems last March, the Taiwanese were holding their first direct presidential elections. The Chinese weren't happy about it. They were so unhappy, in fact, that they decided to conduct military exercises within spitting distance of Taiwan. This made Taiwan unhappy, so the White House sent American warships into the area, just to let China know we were keeping an eye on them.

Charlie Trie didn't approve.

Charlie Trie, the former restaurateur, didn't like this White House policy, so he wrote a letter to his good friend Bill asking him to reverse it. Those American aircraft carriers could provoke China, Charlie Trie said. They could start a war.

And what did Charlie's good friend Bill do? He took Charlie's concerns to Anthony Lake, his national security adviser. The president consulted with his national security adviser about this letter from a guy who ran a Chinese restaurant back in Little Rock, and only then did he write back. He told Charlie Trie that he stuck by his decision, that the carriers were not intended as a threat to China.

Now, Charlie Trie has the same right that you do to complain to the government when there's something that bothers him. But do you think your letter would have made it to the president himself? Would your letter have been discussed with the national security adviser the way Charlie Trie's letter was?

Ah, to have been a fly on that wall:

"And his particular expertise, Mr. President?"

"Probably the steamed dumplings...."

2/20/97

©1997 Rick Horowitz. All rights reserved.