Gabbard overreaches in lofty comparisons with Mink and Eisenhower

Patsy Mink was not a friend of mine, but I knew her well enough to have breakfast with her and admire the rapidity and depth of her intelligence.

Her passion for a cause she believed in was boundless.

So when U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard compares her somewhat boneheaded trip to Syria in the same category as Mink’s meetings at the Paris Peace Talks, I’m concerned.

Despite Donald Trump’s 140-character eloquence, history is not a Tweet and it cannot be compressed.

Last week Star-Advertiser reporter Sophie Cocke quoted Gabbard as defending her visit with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“We should be ready to follow the examples of Representative Patsy Mink, President Dwight Eisenhower, and our other leaders who were always willing to meet with adversaries if there is a possibility it would bring us closer to peace,” Gabbard said by email. “Patsy Mink met with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese leaders, despite the fact that they were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. President Eisenhower met with Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union, even though Khrushchev had threatened the United States with nuclear annihilation, exclaiming, ‘We will bury you! We will bury you!’”

Somehow Gabbard was able to mischaracterize the histories of both GOP President Eisenhower and our own late congresswoman.

Mink was a Hawaii member of Congress from 1965 until 1977, and from 1990 until her death in 2002. In 1972, she and fellow Congresswoman Bella Abzug met with U.S. delegates, North Vietnamese officials and Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh, foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, during the mostly stalled Paris Peace Talks regarding the Vietnam War.

The mission was first to get information about the peace process, which Mink and Abzug thought was being blocked by the Nixon administration. The trip was part of Mink’s long-standing opposition to the Vietnam War.

As she said during an interview at the time: “It was a case of living up to my own views and my own conscience. If I was defeated for it, that’s the way it had to be.”

According to summaries of the meetings, Mink “discussed the need to resume the peace talks, treatment of American prisoners of war, and issues surrounding Vietnamese-American orphans.”

Gabbard, in contrast, said she went to investigate the conditions in Syria because of her concerns that “taxpayer dollars continue to be used in support of militant groups working hand-in-hand with al-Qaeda and ISIS in the effort to overthrow the Syrian government.”

I asked Mink’s daughter, Gwendolyn Mink, a noted political scholar and author, what she thought of Gabbard coming up with a Mink-Gabbard analogy.

“My mother traveled to Paris to meet with participants in the Paris Peace Talks, because the talks had broken down. She met with both sides to ascertain the prospects for reviving the peace process,” Mink emailed back.

“It is both simplistic and misleading to try to equate my mother’s work to end the U.S. war in Vietnam with a rogue mission to meet with a dictator and butcher. It makes even less sense to analogize such a mission with President Eisenhower’s state-to-state diplomacy with Nikita Khrushchev, even if the USSR was an enemy,” Mink said.

To paraphrase U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen in a debate with U.S. Sen. Dan Quayle: Representative, I knew Patsy Mink. Representative, you are no Patsy Mink.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.