The Hiroshima hustle; yet another way to fleece campaign contributors.

• Author: Waldman, Steven
• Position: Misuse of nuclear freeze campaign contributions

THE HIROSHIMA HUSTLE

"Dear Friend, I am writing to you from Hiroshima,' begins the emotional letter from Rep. Edward Markey. "Here, 40 years ago, the nuclear arms race began. It is a brilliant summer afternoon as I look out my hotel window. But earlier this morning, as I visited Ground Zero, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of what happened here.'

Markey, the author of the nuclear freeze bill that passed the House of Representatives in 1983, goes on to say that having come "face-to-face' with the effects of nuclear war he now believes "more firmly than ever that we must either reverse this insane arms race, or likely in this generation see the end of life as we know it.' The letter, written last year on the stationery of Hiroshima's All Nippon Hotel, implored potential donors to use the political system to stop this madness by helping elect members of Congress committed to freezing the arms race.

Eighty-three-year-old Eula McNabb of Dallas, Texas agreed with Markey's pitch. She doesn't remember whether it was this lertter or one of several others Markey sent her that prompted her last year to mail a $100 check to Markey's political action committee, the U.S. Committee Against Nuclear War. She felt strongly that only by contributing money to campaigns could she help defeat well-financed candidates who, she says, "get their support from the military industrial complex.' Since there are so many good candidates out there, she turned to the PAC "so they can decide which candidate is worthy.'

But Ed Markey's PAC didn't spend Eula McNabb's $100 on helping candidates. In fact, over the course of its life, the U.S. Committee Against Nuclear War has spent only $40,000, 3 percent of the $1.3 million it has raised, on such efforts. That's better than Markey's other PAC, the National Committee for Peace in Central America, which has given only 2.8 percent of its $388,000 in receipts to political candidates. The 50,000 people who have contributed to the two PACs over the past four years were also promised that their money would be used to lobby legislators, train anti-arms race candidates, conduct polling and finance canvassing and phone banks. Those promises weren't kept either.

In fact, the strange thing about these PACs is that at first glance even Markey doesn't seem to benefit from the arrangement. What's the point of a PAC that doesn't give out money?

Mailing lists.

The $1.7 million in contributions have enabled Markey to build a bank of names of people who not only support his cause but have responded to a personal entreaty from him. He is, as one direct mail specialist put it, "sitting on a pretty valuable commodity.' He has tapped it to run for re-election to the House and to run for the U.S. Senate in 1984--a campaign in which he made a point of rejecting PAC money as corrupting and tied to special interests. Markey and the aides who ran the PACs also discussed how the lists could give him national notoriety, even how they might form the base for a long shot bid for the White House.

What Markey did was perfectly legal. Indeed, Markey's PACs are most troubling because to a large extent they merely embody the worst qualities of many other PACs. They show a disregard for the reasons people give to causes and ultimately may end up hurting the causes they claim to promote.

The name game

By mid-1982 the call for a nuclear freeze had energized a powerful, broad-based movement not seen since the Vietnam war. Starting a year earlier in several small Massachusetts towns, the effort had quickly spread from town to town, state to state, engaging thousands of volunteers. By January 1982 seven state legislatures, eight city councils, and 50 national and international organizations had joined the call for a bilateral halt of nuclear weapons production. By the middle of 1982 the effort had reached the U.S. Congress, with Ed Markey of Massachusetts leading the campaign in the House of Representatives. He had joined the fight fot he freeze early on, even though his congressional district, filled with high-tech industry, was dependent on the arms buildup for jobs. He vigorously lobbied other members of Congress to support his freeze legislation, which he called "the final option. We're either going to live together or die together. All other issues are only a footnote in history.' To help the cause, on June 9, 1982, only three days before the New York City freeze rally that drew 750,000 supporters, Markey...