He's back

Reagan-era arms official David Emery emerges as Republican gubernatorial contender in Maine


Emery

An old nemesis is fixing to run for governor of Maine in 2006. David Emery was the opponent of Democrat Tom Andrews in the 1990 race for Maine's 1st District Congressional seat. It was a political race in which I became deeply involved on Tom's behalf. Tom won. He became one of the most progressive members ever to represent Maine in the US Congress.

Later, Tom lost to Olympia Snowe in the 1994 race to replace George Mitchell, who retired from the US Senate in 1995. He has had many distinguished positions since, including with the Win Without War coalition in 2003.


Image of button from the 1990 Andrews campaign.

Seeing Emery in public again, slithering out of his hole as a Republican opinion analyst, brings back a flood of memories of the Reagan years. Some of those memories appear in this letter I wrote, that was published in the now-defunct Maine Times (October 19, 1990):

A naysayer to peace

I feel the need to remind voters about the record of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) during the tenure of Republican 1st District Congressional candidate David Emery as its deputy director.

Emery worked for ACDA from 1983 to 1988, under director Kenneth Adelman. Both were appointed by Ronald Reagan.

When Kenneth Adelman appeared, many of the agency’s diminished resources were used to wage a public relations campaign against arms control, particularly the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty with the Soviet Union.

With much fanfare and media attention, they accused the Soviets of cheating.

The irony was hard to miss. The United States trotted out arms control chief Adelman to raise public anti-Soviet feelings by calling them liars and cheats while busily preparing to test a series of Star Wars missile defense schemes in violation of the treaty.

None of the allegations ever amounted to much, including the ballyhooed Krasnoyarsk radar. The Congress, with the support of senators George Mitchell and William Cohen and Rep. Joseph Brennan, stopped the Reagan administration from abrogating the ABM treaty.

So Emery now speaks of how he is “proud of the role that the Reagan and Bush administration have played” in the “greatest contribution to peace and stability on this planet that has happened this century.”

It is an odd kind of pride in arms control that allowed Emery to help with one of the most vicious attacks against it of the last decade. Emery unfairly takes way too much credit for the easing of tensions Which accompanied the INF treaty and subsequent collapse of key cold war battle lines.

Emery was always one of the nay-sayers to peace, a weapons advocate. Meanwhile, his opponent in the 1st District Congressional race, state Senator Tom Andrews of Portland, sponsored the Nuclear Weapons Freeze resolution in the state legislature, exposed the absurdity of ``crisis relocation planning'' for nuclear war and was an early supporter of the successful citizen-initiated referendum calling on the Navy to halt cruise missile testing in Maine.

Eric T. Olson
October 1990

Note the appearance Kenneth Adelman, Emery's old boss. Adelman, of course, became the Pentagon's most truculent pre-war promoter of the cakewalk theory of the Iraq occupation.