The Johnnetta Cole affair began as a fairly straightforward story, but it became important because it was the first real test of the claim Bill Clinton had made during his campaign that he was “a new kind of Democrat.”

Dr. Cole, the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, a prestigious school for black women, was appointed to head the Clinton transition “cluster” on education, labor, and the humanities, and was widely thought to be the leading candidate for Secretary of Education. But she was then derailed by stories in the Forward, a Jewish weekly in New York, and Human Events, a conservative weekly in Washington, which revealed her past association with such organizations as the pro-Castro Venceremos Brigades and the pro-Soviet U.S. Peace Council. Cole was not casually, or only briefly, associated with these groups. She served on the national committee of Venceremos and was listed on the letterhead of the Peace Council as a member of its executive board. Nor had she ever publicly broken with either organization.

As the author of the Forward story, I tried unsuccessfully to contact Cole for over a week, but after dodging my calls and faxes, she was finally forced to respond to questions posed by her hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution. She did not deny the facts that had been uncovered about her political past. But, her voice “quivering with rage,” she did deny that she had ever been a member of a Communist organization, and she said that “right-wing extremists” were targeting her because she had opposed the Vietnam war and the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Cole also accused the Forward of being “a right-wing newspaper which I understand to be of a particular form of Zionism.” (In fact, the Forward had endorsed Clinton.)

But Cole was not a liberal critic of the Vietnam war, like the young Bill Clinton, or a post-Cambodia dove, like Anthony Lake, his new National Security Adviser. She was an out-and-out supporter of the Communist side in that war. Worse yet, when the folk-singer Joan Baez, who had herself been a member of the radical wing of the peace movement, criticized the terrible repressive measures taken by the victorious North Vietnamese after the war was over, Cole signed an open letter denouncing Baez as “immoral” and “arrogant.” This document, published as an ad in the New York Times and paid for by the U.S. Peace Council, admitted that “some 400,000 servants of the former barbaric regime were sent to reeducation camps,” but asked, “Should they not have been reeducated?” The statement further declared that, under Communist rule, “Vietnam now enjoys human rights as it has never known in history.”

Nor was Cole’s opposition to the Grenada invasion akin to that of some liberal Democrats in Congress. As president of the U.S.-Grenada Friendship Society, she believed that “the U.S. invasion put an end to four years of tremendous progress” under the Marxist dictator Maurice Bishop. Moreover, in an essay distributed by the U.S. Peace Council, she wrote:

The invasion of the sovereign Black nation of Grenada cannot be divorced from a history of U.S. aggression and genocidal practices against peoples of color around the world. . . .

The hidden agenda of the U.S. government, which seeks to destroy all enemies of corporate America, must also be condemned, most vociferously by the U.S. peace forces.

Those “peace forces” included the Soviet camp and Cuba:

Regardless of how one views Cuba or the Soviet Union, we must recognize that if it were not for the constraint displayed by these nations in the face of repeated provocations and unlawful actions by the Reagan administration, the invasion of Grenada could have signaled the beginning of a much wider war, with potentially catastrophic results. . . .

As for the pro-Castro Venceremos Brigades, they were, she told the Atlanta Constitution, little more than “an educational project that began by sending American youth to cut sugar cane in Cuba and later to build houses.” Indeed, this eminent American educator, who endorsed “reeducation camps” in Communist Vietnam, had also long believed that Communist Cuba had much to teach the United States. As she put it in an article in the Black Scholar in 1977:

The major contours of the process of eliminating institutional racism in the U.S. are suggested by the Cuban example. . . .

And she asked, “If it could happen in Cuba, then why not here?”

Finally, she attacked the Forward for concluding, “by unbelievable contortions,” that she was anti-Israel. Yet those “contortions” included the record of the Peace Council, which, according to Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, was “one of the worst groups in carrying the Soviet, pro-PLO anti-Israel line.” They also included her participation in 1985 in a funeral service for Alexandra (Sandy) Pollack, a member of the American Communist party’s central committee, a Venceremos veteran, and a founding member of the U.S. Peace Council. Among her fellow participants at this service were representatives of two extremist Palestinian splinter groups, as well as one from the PLO itself. Cole may not have shared all her fellow mourners’ views, but there was no indication then—or since—that she deviated from the Peace Council line on Israel.

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The reaction of the Clinton team to the revelations about Cole was to dismiss them with a contemptuous wave of the hand. Dee Dee Myers, who was the top transition press official, told the New York Times that the charges were “silly,” a sentiment later echoed by the co-chair of the transition, Vernon Jordan. Myers also informed the Times that the charges were “something we’re just not concerned about.” Mark Gearen, a close aide to the new Vice President, told me that the story was “an unfair smear.” Days before he was named Deputy National Security Adviser, Samuel Berger said that the whole business concerned “the distant past,” while a transition press aide, Marla Romash, called the inquiry “terrible—going back 40 years to days I thought were finished.”

But Cole’s pro-Castro activities extended up to the mid-80’s, and it was not 40 but only eight years ago that she made a speech praising Herbert Aptheker, the veteran Communist-party theoretician, for “develop [ing] quality scholarship in opposition to the ideas put forward against the peoples’ movements.”

Except perhaps for her use of this kind of language (similar in style to her denunciation of the Forward), Johnnetta Cole does not conform to a Marxist-Leninist stereotype. Despite her sympathy for “all enemies of corporate America,” she sits on many corporate boards, including Coca-Cola, Citizens and Southern Georgia Corporation, the parent company of the C&S National Bank in Georgia, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the Atlanta Children’s Shelter Inc., and the Atlanta Symphony. And during her tenure as president of Spelman, the college has been awarded grants by the Dow Jones Corporation and the DeWitt Wallace Foundation. (It should also be mentioned that in Atlanta she has built a strong reputation working on intergroup problems, and that she has an excellent reputation in the Atlanta Jewish community.)

In addition to her other assets, Cole has many connections with the Clinton circle. Hillary Clinton’s close friend, Marion Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, has been a Spelman board member, and Donna Shalala, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been a Spelman trustee.

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Nevertheless, Cole’s record is her record, and the fact that, once exposed, it should have been considered “irrelevant” by the Clinton team did nothing to dispel the idea that, as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak put it in their syndicated column:

The Clinton administration is truly a big tent that extends to the farthest Left boundaries of the Democratic party.

In his column in the New York Post, Eric Breindel spelled out the implications:

If she is given a major post—or continues to enjoy influence in the transition process—the message will be inescapable: the President-elect and his advisers will be signaling that they aren’t interested in distinguishing between a Left-liberal and someone who cast her lot with the cause of Communist totalitarianism.

Such a message would have profound implications. The death of international Communism hasn’t generally been understood to mean that its sympathizers now have a place in the Democratic party. After all, the demise of European fascism didn’t confer political legitimacy on Americans who admired Hitler and Mussolini. . . .

Creating a Big Tent is one thing. Making room for disciples of Fidel Castro is something else. Opposition to all forms of totalitarianism—believing in democracy—seems a reasonable ideological prerequisite for helping pick the members of any new U.S. government.

Another columnist, Carl Rowan, vehemently disagreed. In a piece which may have set a record for political absurdity, he declared:

She is being attacked now because she saw chances of peace with the Soviet Union long before Ronald Reagan and George Bush embraced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and before Bush and Bob Strauss began to plead for U.S. economic aid to Boris Yeltsin and Russia. Is it traitorous for an educator of conscience to be smarter than politicians?

Rowan also played the race card:

In black America . . . Cole is regarded as a national treasure. I and millions of other black people are offended and outraged by this campaign to portray her as something other than the wise patriot that she is.

Others tried to link the affair with black-Jewish relations. Because a Jewish paper had broken the story, and because questions had been raised about Cole’s attitude toward Israel, her friends in the Atlanta Jewish community felt called upon to rush to her defense. Jesse Jackson also got into the act, charging that “Jewish complaints” had damaged Cole’s chances for a cabinet appointment. But all this was a diversion from the main issue, which was Cole’s association with pro-Communist groups, her unwillingness to say whether and how she had altered her views, and the failure of the Clinton team to take those views seriously.

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In the end, Bill Clinton did not go along with those of his own advisers who still supported Cole for a cabinet position. Nor did he seem to endorse the view of her as a “wise patriot.” Yet neither did he drop her from his transition team. Evidently, though a person “who cast her lot with the cause of Communist totalitarianism” was not considered fully fit by Clinton to sit in the cabinet, she was still considered qualified to be an important member of his transition team.

In an interview with Rolling Stone during the campaign, Clinton said he intended to break some of the eggs in his party’s basket. But the inconclusive finale to the Cole affair leaves open the questions of just which eggs Clinton had in mind and just what he means when he calls himself “a new kind of Democrat.”