Before I get to the story of how I sipped tea with Richard Perle in the South of France, I'd like to offer my condolences to Queen Anne resident Mark Sidran.
Like another ex-Seattle city attorney, Doug Jewett, Sidran has learned that being smarter, more articulate and an innovative thinker doesn't usually translate into election victories.
In 1976, Jewett lost to Henry Jackson by more than 600,000 votes. And this was after one of Jackson's offspring - WPPSS, a $25-billion necklace of nuclear power plants around Washington state - drowned in red ink.
Still, Jewett did deny Jackson the 80-percent cut of the vote he'd received in 1970, just as it was beginning to dawn on America that another of Scoop's offspring - the Vietnam War - had no light at the end of the tunnel.
Jackson was Vietnam's chief cheerleader from 1954, when he first urged the commitment of U.S. ground troops, until 1974, when he decided his presidential aspirations required losing the albatross.
To this state's newspapers Jackson was near divine. Few questioned his great ideas, like a nuke plant at the UW or nuclear missiles at Fort Lawton.
But WPPSS and Vietnam may not have been Henry's biggest follies.
In 1969 he brought two grad students to Washington, D.C., to champion the anti-missile missile: Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
In 1980 Washington state voters resoundingly ousted Sen. Warren Magnuson, the most powerful man in Congress, because he didn't look fit. When Jackson died in 1983, Magnuson was a pallbearer.
Perle, Jackson's chief advisor on foreign affairs, became Reagan's assistant Secretary of Defense and Star Warrior.
In 1996 Perle was chairman of a study group that told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu "we Israelis" see Saddam Hussein's removal as "an important Israeli strategic objective."
In 2000 Perle organized neo-conservatives into what would become the Project for a New American Century, whose members believed America should remodel the world, beginning with the Middle East. Governments in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt were targeted for make-overs.
The neocons had once backed Dan Quayle. Now they had a better version of a leader: W.
Before the 2000 election Perle and the neocons advised and promoted Bush. Afterwards they filled out his lineup card.
Neocon Lewis "Scooter" Libby became Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. Neocon Douglas Feith became Rumsfeld's right-hand man. And Richard Perle became head of the Department of Defense's Policy Board, the highest-ranking civilian in DOD.
Why did Perle chose a less than full-time position? Perhaps because he didn't want to fully disclose his business dealings with defense contractors (e.g., Boeing with its $20-million investment).
After 9/11, Perle beat the war drums in person, in print and on the air. He had no problem getting whatever he wanted published because he sat on the board of Hollinger International, a massive newspaper chain that controlled the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, London Telegraph and Jerusalem Post.
The Iraqis, he said, will greet us as the French did their American liberators. It will be "a cakewalk."
He declared France "anti-American" and said it had lost its "moral fiber." Germany was headed by "a discredited chancellor." And "Thank God for the death of the UN."
To other countries opposing America in the region, he all but snarled: "You're next."
Perle delivered these bon mots with disdainful arrogance, part Roy Cohn, part Sydney Greenstreet - complete with the puffy cheeks and comb-over.
Seeing him, Calvin Trillin thought: "This is a guy who got beat up a lot as a kid."
And Trillin wrote a poem for The New Yorker that went: "Who's responsible for Richard Perle? Who pushed him down on the playground? Who called him a girl?"
I'm less civilized than Trillin. I once dreamed I was shooting skeet and he came flapping out of the high house in a turkey suit.
Somebody told me Perle hung out in a particular town in Southern France where French movie stars vacationed.
My brother and I spent a day trying to find him. Finally, almost at sundown, a vision stopped our car. Across the gorge was a knoll lit by sunset. Centuries-old houses ran up its sides, and the castle on top glowed white gold.
When we reached the town square, there was a postcard-worthy restaurant across from the castle. From under the awning on the patio came the sound of some guy with a fat cigar pontificating on the Los Angeles Lakers.
But it wasn't Perle.
The next morning I asked the postman where Richard Perle lived. They knew nothing.
After buying some lavender soap at the street fair, I climbed the worn stairs to city hall in the top of the castle.
"Je recherché Richard Perle?" I told the receptionist.
She raised her eyebrows: "Oui." And buzzed the mayor.
He came out like a cuckoo bird. "Mr. Perle does not like our government," he announced, "but he appreciates French culture." Then he disappeared back into his office.
"So," I said to the receptionist, "there is still Vichy. Is there still Resistance?"
"You do not need to speak more," she replied. "I see every Michael Moore movie."
She went into a back room and returned with a piece of paper on which was a phone number.
"But he won't talk to me," I protested. "I need address."
"Use what you have," she said.
The only pay phone in town was tied up by a gabbing tourist. When I finally got into the booth, the sun had made the metal too hot to touch. Opening the door let in the din of the market.
Somebody answered.
"Do you speak English?" I shouted.
"Yes," said Richard Perle.
I made my request.
"You've shown such ingenuity in finding me," he replied nicely, "the least I can do is invite you over."
He gave me directions past many gates. His would have a small American flag on top.
It opened hydraulically.
I saw him walking up the drive. His hand was outstretched.
Perle's French retreat in Provence sits on a hillside that slopes south to the Riviera. The house is made of white, horizontal stones - like everything else in the vicinity - and has periwinkle-blue shutters. There's a satellite dish tucked discreetly below the second-story roof ridge.
A yellow warning sign catches the eye: wheaton terrier crossing.
Perle calls to his dog: "Come, Reagan!"
Our feet crunch on the white crushed rock of the driveway as we pass the big BMW. He leads your correspondent into a patio between the kitchen and the pool that is shaded from the near-90-degree sun.
"I was out to Seattle a few times," he says, about those years when he was Sen. Scoop Jackson's chief aide on foreign affairs. "We went up to some islands - the San Juans?"
A pair of glasses hangs from his blue yaching shirt. Perle's about 5-foot-10, could lose 30 pounds.
He says he and his wife came here 22 year before - after Socialist François Mitterand was elected prime minister. There was a lot of hysteria over Mitterand soaking the rich - "franc flight" - and, as Perle puts it, "I recognized the investment opportunity."
He pours me a tall glass of iced tea. Ice in France? "The first thing I did was buy an ice maker," he explains.
The pool sparkles aquamarine below us.
"Richard," says Mrs. Leslie Perle, excusing herself, "if Thom wants to swim later, show him where the guest suits are."
Your correspondent: "I read where Albert Wohlstetter's [who some say was the model for Dr. Strangelove] daughter invited you to her pool in the Hollywood Hills after school, and that you spent hours talking to her father, then married her."
Perle: "Actually, I didn't marry her, despite what The New York Times once wrote."
Perle graduated from Hollywood High School in 1959. His favorite high-school memory was debate; he lost at state finals but did well in extemporaneous speaking at nationals. (Debate was also a gateway experience for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.)
TG: "Calvin Trillin speculated that you had a rough time on the playgrounds." [Trilllin's poem is at http: //www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020916&s=trillin]
Perle looks toward the kitchen: "You know, I can't ever remember that [getting beat up] happening... Funny, but I do admire his other kind of writing - about food."
TG: "You called Seymour Hersh a terrorist after he wrote that you were trying to profit on the Iraqi war."
Perle: "I hope no one thought I meant that literally."
TG: "And you said you would sue him for libel in Britain."
Perle: "Well, I looked into it and, realistically, Condé Naste [owner of The New Yorker] has unlimited resources. I did not want to bankrupt my family. Hersh was taken in and used by Prince Bandar. I have denials from all the principals at that meeting.
"Hersh's reporting has gone downhill since My Lai. The JFK-Marilyn Monroe material..."
TG: "You were Scoop Jackson's advisor on foreign affairs. He was the Senate's leading hawk on Vietnam."
Perle: "I never wrote any of that. I thought the domino theory was severely flawed. I once even marched in an antiwar demonstration."
TG: "There was no conflict with Jackson?"
Perle: "He was a tolerant man."
TG: "Some people still believe that if the military had been allowed to do what they wanted, that war could have been won."
Perle: "They're wrong."
TG: "Jackson believed the communists would invade Europe if given the chance."
Perle: "They found streets signs in East Germany in Cyrillic for Brussels and other European capitals."
TG: "Did you know Nancy whispered 'Peace' in Reagan's ear every night?"
Perle: "He always had those inclinations. He didn't need Nancy [to tell him]."
TG: "None of the neocons like yourself served in the military. Do you regret that?"
Perle: "Do I regret missing boot camp and the rest? No."
TG: "Didn't the neocons support Dan Quayle?"
Perle: "Yes, Bill Kristol was his chief of staff."
TG: "Many see you as the architect of the Iraqi war, especially as you prepared a plan for [Benjamin] Netanyahu [then prime minister-elect of Israel] in 1996 recommending withdrawal from the Oslo Accords and the elimination of Saddam Hussein, just for starters."
Perle: "It was just a study for a think tank. And they put my name on it before sending it in. I've grown accustomed to being miscast. I would like to have all the power ascribed to me since Bush became president. I have not spoken to him once."
(Plan at www.israeleconomy.org/strat lists Perle as "study leader.")
Mrs. Perle comes out of the house: "Richard, Sharon says we have to leave France because of Chirac - he says all the Jews here should come to Israel." She goes back into the house.
Perle (looks around, mutters)" "I'm not leaving."
TG: "Do you feel anti-Semitism in France?"
Perle: "No."
TG: "Would you do the Iraqi war over again?"
Perle: "YES! That's like saying at the end of the year that since I wasn't sick I shouldn't really have bought that insurance."
TG: "And what should we have done differently?"
Perle: "Given Chalabi the keys and left."
TG: "But Chalabi was not popular."
Perle: "No one was popular."
TG: "Hadn't Chalabi been convicted of embezzling $15 million in Jordan?"
Perle: "He had two trials. The first was a hung jury. The second was a one-week affair presided over by a military officer. [Chalabi] has been the victim of a massive smear campaign. Even The New York Times has admitted its errors."
TG: "Have you seen the McNamara movie, "Fog of War," where he talks about the mistakes in Vietnam that seem to be repeated in Iraq?"
Perle: "No."
TG: "Have you seen Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'?"
Perle: "No. I won't give that S.O.B. my money. (Smiling.) I waited until 'Bowling for Columbine' came on television."
TG: "I'll pay for the ticket. You can review it."
Perle: "No, I don't think so."
TG: "Gen. [George C.] Marshall told Truman we shouldn't recognize Israel because there were no defined borders and domestic politics shouldn't determine foreign policy. Gov. [Howard] Dean said America must become an honest broker in the Middle East. Are they wrong?"
Perle: "Domestic politics have always influenced foreign policy, and I don't know what it means to have a policy that doesn't favor someone."
TG: "Who do you recommend as a reliable source of information on the Middle East?"
Perle: "MEMRI [the Middle East Research Institute] is very good."
TG: "Aren't they run by ex-Israeli Intelligence? Mossad?"
Perle: "Yes, but they're very reliable. Everybody uses them."
TG: "The Manchester Guardian juxtaposed MEMRI's translations of Arabic newspapers with neutral versions. The disparity was glaring." (See www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/o,7792,773258,00.html.)
Perle: "I didn't see that."
TG: "What's going on with the suit at Hollinger International and Lord Black?"
Perle (sips his tea, looks toward the Med): "It's confusing. I think we're suing him."
TG: "How did you get the nickname 'Prince of Darkness'?"
Perle: "A British journalist mistook me for Robert Novak."
Postscript
After talking for three hours, I no longer hated Richard Perle. He answered every question. Never lost his temper and was the perfect host.
But for being an authority on war and foreign relations, it was surprising how much he hasn't read. He's narrowly focused and well rewarded.
This month a committee investigating Lord Black's newspaper empire, on whose board Perle sits, concluded Lord Black had wrongly pocketed over $400 million.
And that Perle had taken more than $4 million he didn't deserve. The committee recommended prosecution for recovery.
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