One thing that the Chas Freeman attacks have tried to erase is Freeman's professionalism. He served his country for four decades in many countries, through Democratic and Republican administrations, and lost a child and a marriage along the way. The Saudi Arabian chapter is an important one, obviously, but it was reluctant, and followed from long engagement in east Asia, famously as the interpreter on Nixon's trip to China when Freeman, an extremely verbal person (i.e., a great raconteur) who is fluent in Mandarin, was still in his 20s.
The reason I think Chas Freeman is a lock to keep his appointment at the National Intelligence Council despite the smear campaign is his connections to many big deals, including Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke, the consummate operator who now has a high position under Hillary Clinton. I have to believe that Holbrooke is now working behind the scenes in Freeman's behalf.
I say so because Freeman has never suffered fools–he recently described George W. Bush as "leading the world's first genuinely-autistic government"–and Richard Holbrooke won his respect. In an oral history of his service, Freeman describes working with Holbrooke on an important speech about U.S.-China relations in 1980, when Holbrooke was an assistant secretary of State. By the way, Holbrooke is Jewish. Any suggestion that Freeman, who is a WASP with somewhat traditional manners, is prejudiced against Jews is nonsense, and belied by this character portrait of Holbrooke, the epitome of the Jewish meritocracy, thrown off during an interview in the mid-90s, when Freeman cannot have anticipated that he might need Holbrooke:
Dick Holbrooke has the most brilliant policy mind that I have ever
encountered. He is someone with enormous quickness to see the political
realities of Washington and understand how to use those to create
results. So he's a very driving personality, with acknowledged
brilliance.
He has succeeded then and subsequently because of that brilliance,
not because of his charm. He began his tenure, before my time, in the
East Asian and Pacific region by throwing out a great number of older
people and bringing in people with whom he felt more comfortable. He
paid a great deal of attention to personnel. I think he created, in the
end, a more dynamic bureau by doing that, but he broke a lot of rice
bowls and made a lot of enemies.
And he's infuriatingly distracted always. He would often have a
meeting, with two television sets going, on different channels, and
while he was reading a newspaper, he would be discussing a policy
issue. He has a notoriously short attention span, but somehow the sheer
power of his intellect compensates for all of that.
