It is often said of a graciously departing public official that “nothing so becomes him as his manner of leaving” ? but not of Paul Wolfowitz.
The spectacle of his being shoved out the door as head of the World Bank, after weeks of “negotiations” with bank officials, failed to paper over the fact that they and member countries abroad wanted no more of his arrogance and self-centered demeanor.
Ever since Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the invasion of Iraq, was “rewarded” for the catastrophe he had midwifed by making him president of the World Bank in 2005, his eventual demise in the job was predictable.
Aside from his deplorably bad judgment in engineering a fat pay raise for his girlfriend, shunted from the bank to the State Department to deal with an appearance of conflict of interest, Wolfowitz?s notorious reputation as more theorist than manager was bound to catch up with him at his new position.
Ironically, in moving from the Defense Department, where he was deputy secretary under Donald Rumsfeld, to the World Bank, Wolfowitz followed the footsteps of an earlier Pentagon chief, Robert McNamara. He similarly had been “rewarded,” by President Lyndon Johnson, for his service in the previous foreign-policy disaster of the Vietnam War.
The difference was that McNamara, an introspective man after running that war for seven years under President John F. Kennedy and then LBJ, turned his considerable managerial skills to work at thebank.
It seemed to many that McNamara was performing penance for what he had come to recognize as an exercise in military folly in Vietnam. He persevered for 13 years in the job before his retirement in 1981.
Wolfowitz, on the other hand, never gave any indication of regret or reconsideration of his role in the run-up and invasion of Iraq, and was regarded by many at the World Bank as an albatross foisted on it by Bush. Wolfowitz brought with him aides from his Pentagon years whose intrusive manner from all reports added insult to injury to bank staffers with institutional loyalties.
Wolfowitz insisted on hanging on for some transparently self-serving window-dressing designed, futilely, to put his departure in a better light. But he only succeeded in magnifying his disdain for, or insensitivity to, the imperative that the World Bank put the disruptive situation behind it and get on with its business.
Through all this, Bush maintained his support for Wolfowitz, saying only in the final hours of the negotiations to get him to leave that “I regret that it?s come to this.” Questions already have been raised about the willingness of member countries to maintain the long tradition that the new bank president be nominated by the American president.
Within the Bush administration, meanwhile, the spectacle continues of another beleaguered official, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, doing a bad imitation of Wolfowitz by resisting a roar of demands from Capitol Hill for his own resignation.
The disclosure that Gonzales, as the White House counsel in 2004, sought to get ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft on his hospital bed to reauthorize domestic surveillance of questionable legality has added more fuel to the demands. And the bizarre story came amid more charges of Gonzales? incompetence in the fiasco over fired U.S. attorneys.
With Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota joining Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska in calling for Gonzales? resignation, the total rose to six Republicans. At the same time, two Democrats ? Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California ? have called for a no-confidence vote on him in the Senate.
Such a vote would be non binding. But with a significant number of Senate Republicans joining in, President Bush?s heretofore steadfast backing of his former Texas lawyer and friend would be severely tested, at a time the president is trying to hold his party in line in both houses on the war.
Sooner or later, you have to think that Gonzales will face the fact that he, like Wolfowitz, has a higher responsibility than trying to save his own skin, and will step aside.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
