Editor’s note: It has been reported that Gregory Craig will serve as Barack Obama’s White House counsel. This profile of Craig appeared in the May 22, 2000, issue of
National Review.
‘Elian is in an atmosphere that is psychologically abusive. . . . He is in imminent danger to his physical as well as emotional and mental health,” declared Gregory Craig, the lawyer for Elian Gonzalez’s father, during a Nightline appearance on April 19. A little more than two days later, Elian really was in imminent danger: Federal agents smashed in the door of his house and stuck a gun in his six-year-old face.
Within hours of the event, a credulous Craig was telling reporters that Elian wasn’t “in any way terrorized, frightened, traumatized, or otherwise troubled” by the experience. What a remarkable transformation — from horrific abuse to utter serenity. In fact, said Craig, the wee lad was “a strong boy.” It seems that he could withstand a nighttime raid of his home, but not the affections of his cousin, Marisleysis. (Craig is apparently laying the legal groundwork for lawsuits against the Miami family.)
Elian even took part in a tender scene with federal agents, said Craig. In a post-seizure CNN interview, the lawyer described a “very warm moment” between the boy and Janet Reno’s big lugs: “I must say, there was a very touching moment in the room when the INS agents — the six- foot-two guys came in, 250 pounds came in. . . . And they were saying goodbye, and they [were] saying how proud they had been to be able to reunite this family. And that’s something. I mean, these are non-emotional, non-sentimental people.” (Unlike, of course, those hysterical Cuban Americans.)
Greg Craig is many things — a high-powered D.C. lawyer, a Clinton intimate who led the president’s impeachment defense, a silver-haired golden boy. But there’s one thing he wants people to know above all: He’s an innocent. In 1998, Craig slipped to the
Washington Post a copy of a recommendation written for him as a part of his Harvard application. “This young man is Adam before the Fall,” remarked his Exeter history teacher. Craig, reported the
Post, acknowledged the description “with a chuckle.” He commented about himself: “Still wide-eyed, still idealistic, still innocent.”
Wide-eyed, idealistic, and innocent. That’s roughly what GOP Senate staffers thought of Craig in the 1980s, when he was an aide to Ted Kennedy. And they didn’t mean it as a compliment. In fact, they thought he was a dupe.
Craig orchestrated a 1984 hearing for Kennedy on alleged human-rights abuses committed by Nicaragua’s rebels, the Contras. He worked with groups closely tied to the Sandinista regime to find witnesses for the forum, which led to a round of anti-contra news coverage in the U.S. Soon afterward, however, Joshua Muravchik, currently of the American Enterprise Institute, exposed a fraud: The most compelling witnesses — three Miskito Indians — had been served up by the Sandinistas.
And a fourth participant, Father Alfredo Gundrum, an American priest living in Nicaragua, had been asked to play the role of honest broker — to place the testimony “into some kind of perspective,” as Kennedy put it. Gundrum, described as “totally apolitical” in background material distributed by Kennedy’s staff, told of how the Contras launched vicious raids on Indian villages “almost every day.” Yet Gundrum had been the subject of a San Francisco newspaper article just one month before the hearing. He was photographed standing before his church with a Soviet-made rifle in his hands and quoted as saying, “To me it was a day of grace the day the Sandinistas took over, and I really mean it.”
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