Riled In the Streets

Presidents hate demonstrations. The notoriously touchy Lyndon Johnson was outraged by them. Richard Nixon was unhinged by them. The irony is that if either of them had ever listened to the Vietnam War protesters who filled the streets of Washington, they might have saved their presidencies. People carrying posters often put the "real" in the realpolitik that tends to seize the White House.

Last week's demonstration against Chinese president Jiang Zemin was puny when compared with the hosts of Vietnam: More than 1 million people joined a march on the Pentagon in 1967, and hundreds of thousands followed them over the years. The size of the turnouts was always a source of bitter dispute, subject to shrinkage from loyalist counters. On Wednesday, some 2,000 people showed up in Lafayette Park to protest China's human rights record. But this turnout was enough to cloud the day of the old protest organizer now residing in the White House. It was a spirited affair that featured many of Clinton's people -- labor, Hollywood, Kennedys. About 98 percent of the speakers were Democrats.

The administration's spinners, beginning with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, tried to put the China question into a rigid either/or equation. It would be "irresponsible," they said, not to engage with a country of the size and importance of China.

The protesters weren't saying they wanted to go back to the pre-Nixon era of pretending that China did not exist. Said Sandra Cuneo of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, as she picked up litter: "It's the terms of engagement that worry us."

Clinton, at age 50, is still subject to fads and crushes. He discovered Asia and swallowed it whole. He is hellbent for trade and sees unlimited opportunities in Beijing. He found campaign gold in the Chinese American business community. As in the case of NAFTA, he was so insistent on extending trade to Mexico that he made compromises on labor, civil rights and the environment that bedevil his latest attempts at "fast track" trade negotiations. On China, said one of his former advance men who was helping out in Lafayette Park, "he inherited a mess from Bush -- and he bought into it."

Americans who remember the interventionist years when we expressed our displeasure with recalcitrant countries are puzzled by our passive response to China's in-your-face disregard of human rights. In the old days, we bombed, invaded and subverted countries who refused to get with our program. Just cast your mind back to Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua. But we're selling nuclear reactors to Beijing and inventing a history of "cooperation" on non-proliferation.

Why? The short, crass answer is money. U.S. firms drool over prospects of trade with more than a billion buyers. They are putting factories in China that will compete with their own back home -- just in the hopes of more Chinese deals. The most baffling aspect may be the exertions and contortions that are occurring against the reality of a $40 billion trade deficit. It will go higher with Christmas toys. Slave labor is cheap.

Johnson and Nixon dismissed street smarts as mob rule. Johnson had many chances before the ultimate Vietnam protest -- Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign -- to make for the exits in Southeast Asia. Michael Beschloss's new book "Taking Charge," a compilation of LBJ's White House tapes, tells us that Johnson feared condemnation from his arch enemy, Bobby Kennedy. Nixon promised he would end the war, but 20,000 more Americans died while he weighed how withdrawal would affect his reelection chances. His accomplice, Henry Kissinger, defended Nixon's Vietnam policy by telling gullible senators and journalists, "If you could see the cables. . . ."

Well, eventually, we did see them and they had the same fatuous jargon we heard in the speeches from the throne.

The current example of the efficacy of taking to the streets comes from Italy, where President Romano Prodi was unseated -- and restored by the timely intervention of common people. Prodi's coalition partner, Fausto Bertinotti, a reconstituted communist, withdrew his support for a proposal to bring the country into compliance with European Union fiscal standards by cutting Italy's extravagant pension system. Bertinotti had heard Italians moaning and groaning about austerity and taxes, but failed to understand the underlying commitment to EU. He went to a peace rally near Perugia, where he was booed and hissed off the scene. He scurried back to Rome to make his peace with Prodi. Demonstrators had spared their country from the opprobrium of the fall of another government (56 in 56 years) when Prodi took up the reins again.

Large groups are no more infallible than small groups, or even one person. But they often have something to say. Bianca Jagger, a veteran activist, even thinks the president was listening -- or at least someone at the White House was listening for him. "At his press conference with Jiang, he talked about a `universal human rights standard,' which is what we were talking about," she said.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.