Elliott Abrams: the teflon assistant secretary

Washington Monthly, May, 1987 by Eric Alterman

After finishing law school, Abrams workedbriefly for the high-powered New York law firm of Breed, Abbott and Morgan. He was getting rich, but he was bored. "These people don't even read Commentary,' he complained to a friend. So he accepted a job with Senator Henry "Scoop' Jackson, the leader of the Democratic party's anti-McGovernism faction, and the father of political neoconservatism.

Political neoconservatism, nurtured in Washington,was a parallel development to that of the New York neoconservative intellectuals, though instead of Marxists becoming Nietzscheans, Democratic Cold War anticommunists became Republican Cold War anticommunists. In the years before he became a Republican and joined the Reagan State Department, Abrams straddled the worlds of political and intellectual neoconservatism, carefully maintaining his ties to the centrist establishment in both cities. He continued to contribute to Commentary, keeping his rhetoric civil and deferential rather than adopting the inflammatory, prosecutorial tones of Podhoretz. Abrams left Jackson's staff in 1976 to become special counsel, then chief of staff for the then- neoconservative senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There, too, Abrams impressed his associates. Chester Finn, now assistant secretary of education for research and improvement, Charles Horner, now USIA assistant director for programs, and Timothy Russert, now vice-president of NBC News, all former Moynihan aides, are unanimous in their undiluted praise for their ex-boss, Abrams.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in1976, his administration infuriated Abrams and his friends by refusing to appoint them to important foreign policy jobs. "We were completely frozen out,' he complained to Sidney Blumenthal. "We got one unbelievably minor job. It was a special negotiator position. Not for Polynesia. Not Macronesia. But Micronesia.' That Carter chose Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brezinski, and James Schlesinger for his cabinet somehow convinced Abrams that Carter's was a "new left administration.'

In 1980, Abrams married Rachel Mark Decter,Podhoretz's adopted daughter, in essence merging, in Abrams, the political and intellectual schools of neoconservatism. Podhoretz jokingly admits to trying to arrange the marriage, because Rachel "had a lot of dangerous friends.' But in marrying Decter, Abrams also enlisted in what Blumenthal has called Podhoretz's neoconservative "family-run dry cleaners,' which now includes Podhoretz, and Rachel's mother, Midge Decter, who is a writer and the executive director of the Committee for the Free World. It also includes their daughter, Naomi Munson, a frequent contributor to the committee's publication, Contentions, and her husband, Steve Munson, until recently the committee's deputy director. Their son, John Podhoretz, is executive editor of Sun Myung Moon's newsweekly, Insight.

After plotting revenge throughout the Carteradministration, Abrams, in 1980, joined Democrats for Reagan and traveled across the country giving speeches to Jewish organizations on how much tougher Reagan would be than Carter was. Shortly after the election, Abrams enlisted in the conservative Counter-Establishment and became a card-carrying Republican. It was a propitious decision.