Word: leiken
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After Robert Leiken returned last week from a five-day trip to Nicaragua with Les Aspin, a Democratic Congressman from Wisconsin, he spoke with TIME White House Correspondent Barrett Seaman. Excerpts from his remarks...
...knows that better than Robert Leiken, 47, a Central American analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. For years he toiled anonymously on the intellectual left, pursuing liberal causes and scholarly studies. While working at a succession of jobs, including posts at some prestigious think tanks in Mexico City and Washington, Leiken produced papers on Soviet strategies in Latin America. His work, however, rarely received much public notice. In early 1984 he edited a collection of essays called Central America: Anatomy of a Conflict, which took the Reagan Administration to task for promoting confrontation rather than negotiation...
Then came the deluge. In October 1984 Leiken (rhymes with bacon) published an article in the New Republic titled "Nicaragua's Untold Stories." It was a searing indictment of the Managua regime that accused the Sandinistas of repression, corruption, political manipulation and fealty to Moscow...
...idea that a well-respected liberal analyst would launch such a strong attack on the Sandinistas caused considerable stir in Washington. Leiken's apparent conversion was seen by the entrenched left as a betrayal and by Reaganites as a vindication of their long-held views. Most important, many Democrats who had relied on Leiken's analyses began to reconsider their Sandinista sympathies. Senator Edward Kennedy had the article read into the Congressional Record. Suddenly, Leiken became as controversial as Nicaragua itself...
...Sandinistas when the revolution was "betrayed"; many of the top military field commanders, on the other hand, served in Somoza's National Guard. Still, the contra forces are "too large and have too much support inside the country to be dismissed simply as a tool of the CIA," writes Leiken...