Daily Archives: October 29, 2005

Orville Babcock

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You may have heard that Scooter is the first White House official to have been indicted since the Grant Administration. Just for fun, let’s take a look at that last indictee, Orville Babcock.

Background: Babcock was a native of Vermont who graduated West Point in 1861, just in time for the Civil War. By 1863 he was a Lieutenant Colonel under the command of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg. In 1864, Babcock became Grant’s aide-de-camp. It was Babcock who delivered Grant’s surrender terms to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. When Grant became President in 1869 he chose Babcock to be his private secretary.

The Whiskey Ring was a group of liquor distillers who were defrauding the government of tax revenues, in part by bribing revenue agents to ignore untaxed liquor or to supply more tax stamps than were paid for. Grant’s secretary of the treasury, Benjamin Bristow, investigated and obtained indictments against 238 people, including Orville Babcock. Of those, 110 were convicted.

From Grant by Jean Edward Smith (Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 590-591:

Grant was initially alerted to Babcock’s possible complicity in July 1875 when he received a letter from St. Louis banker W.D.W. Barnard, a distant relative of Julia’s [Mrs. Grant]. Barnard warned Grant that federal prosecutors in St. Louis were hoping to embarrass the administration and that Babcock had become a target. Grant was shocked that his aide might be involved. He immediately passed the letter to Bristow with the following endorsement: “I forward this for information and to the end that if it throws any light upon new parties to summon as witnesses they may be brought out. Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided. Be especially vigilant—or instruct those engaged in the prosecution of fraud to be—against all who insinuate that they have high influence to protect—or to protect them. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.” Shortly thereafter Grant told Attorney General Pierrepont that “if Babcock is guilty, there is no man who wants him so proven guilty as I do, for it is the greatest piece of traitorism to me that a man could possibly practice.”

As it turned out, the evidence against Babcock was circumstantial. The prosecution’s case rested on Babcock’s friendship with McDonald[*], his occasional visits to St. Louis, and two cryptic telegrams the president’s secretary sent to the general. Bristow believed the messages were code to inform the St. Louis ring of the status of the Treasury crackdown. The first, dated December 10, 1874, stated—“I have succeeded. They will not go. I will write you.” It was signed “Sylph.” The second, sent on February 3, 1875, read: “We have official information that the enemy weakens. Push things. Sylph.”

Babcock maintained the messages were for Eads[**] and described the status of the Corps of Engineers’ efforts to scuttle the bridge in St. Louis. At the time, Grant trusted General McDonald fully, and it is quite possible the president was using him to funnel information to Eads. When Grant heard Babcock’s explanation, he was satisfied the telegrams were harmless.

A second difficulty for the prosecution was Babcock’s lifestyle. Unlike former Attorney General Williams, the president’s secretary lived modestly within his income. He was not a free-spender, his bank account showed no questionable deposits, and his wife was known for her frugality. His one hobby was raising fine dahlias, which he would share with his neighbors, including the Frederick Douglasses.

In December 1875 Babcock requested a miitary board of inquiry to clear his name, but the prosecutors in St. Louis refused to release files and the board was adjourned. Shortly thereafter a grand jury in St. Louis indicted Babcock “for conspiring to defraud the revenue.” President Grant volunteered his testimony and gave a four-hour deposition to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in the presence of the Attorney General and the Treasury Secretary, Bristow.

Jean Edward Smith continues on page 592 of Grant:

Grant’s testimony silenced all but the most rancorous critics of the administration. The unprecedented spectacle of the president of the United States coming forward voluntarily to defend his secretary, combined with Grant’s unblemished reputation for personal honesty, had an enormous impact. [Secretary of State] Hamilton Fish, one of the most honest men in public life, once said, “I do not think it would have been possible for Grant to have told a lie, even if he had composed it and written it down.” The prosecution continued to present what little evidence it had against Babcock, but it was unconvincing and the general[***] was speedily acquitted.

Orville Babcock died in a boat accident in 1884 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetary.

*General John McDonald was collector of taxes in St. Louis and was one of the 110 convicted.

**James Buchanan Eads was an engineer-industrialist and an old friend of Grant’s who was determined to build a bridge across the Mississippi. The Corps of Engineers had halted construction. The Eads Bridge eventually was built and is still in use.

***Babcock held the brevet rank of Brigadier General.

The Damage Done

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A story by Dafna Linzer in today’s Washington Post explains why exposing Valerie Plame Wilson as an agent was a serious matter.

More than Valerie Plame’s identity was exposed when her name appeared in a syndicated column in the summer of 2003.

A small Boston company listed as her employer suddenly was shown to be a bogus CIA front, and her alma mater in Belgium discovered it was a favored haunt of an American spy. At Langley, officials in the clandestine service quickly began drawing up a list of contacts and friends, cultivated over more than a decade, to triage any immediate damage. …

…after Plame’s name appeared in Robert D. Novak’s column, the CIA informed the Justice Department in a simple questionnaire that the damage was serious enough to warrant an investigation, officials said.

The article says the CIA has not done a formal damage assessment, possibly because it is waiting until after legal proceedings are finished. There is “no indication” agents still engaged in covert operations lost their lives because of Plame Wilson’s exposure.

The article quotes Mark Lowenthal, who retired from a senior management position at the CIA in March: “You can only speculate that if she had foreign contacts, those contacts might be nervous and their relationships with her put them at risk. It also makes it harder for other CIA officers to recruit sources.”

Righties everywhere are belittling this episode as no big deal and saying it has nothing to do with national security. As usual, they lie. Possibly they are lying to themselves as much as to the rest of the world, but they lie, nonetheless. As usual, partisan loyalty means more to them than the security of their country.

One other point–nearly all rightie bloggers are saying that “no crime was committed” regarding the exposure of an agent. What Patrick Fitzgerald said repeatedly in the press conference is that, because of Libby’s obstruction, he could not determine if such a crime had been committed.

Update: Today’s Mo Dowd:

Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a C.I.A. officer. “Valerie Wilson’s friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life,” he said.

He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under “light” cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the C.I.A.

“I can say that for the people who work at the C.I.A. and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected,” he said, adding: “They run a risk when they work for the C.I.A. that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don’t run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees.”

To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign. …

…what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn’t, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.

Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson’s name from the C.I.A. and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the C.I.A. to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.

Vice spent so much time lurking over at the C.I.A., trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.

This administration’s grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they’re promoting national security when they’re hurting it; they say they’re squelching terrorists when they’re breeding them; they say they’re bringing stability to Iraq when the country’s imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)