WASHINGTON — The White House and its allies Friday intensified their campaign to defend John R. Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be U.N. ambassador, as a Senate committee prepared for a showdown on the candidacy next month.
Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that an abrasive manner in the workplace should not disqualify presidential nominees.
"If being occasionally tough and aggressive were a problem, there are a lot of members of the U.S. Senate who wouldn't qualify," Cheney said in a speech to Republican lawyers, echoing an increasingly common defense of Bolton.
Bolton, 56, the undersecretary of State for arms control since 2001, has been under fire for allegations he bullied subordinates and intimidated intelligence analysts who disagreed with his hard-line views of foreign military threats. Questions about Bolton's suitability forced an unexpected delay in a committee vote that had been scheduled for Tuesday.
Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after two days of private talks, agreed Friday to meet May 12 to again consider Bolton's nomination. The two sides agreed on procedures under which they would examine witnesses and compile a final written record of their findings.
Pressing a defense of Bolton, the Senate Republican leadership distributed talking points about the nominee to members. Republican senators, such as Jon Kyl of Arizona and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who are staunchly supportive of the fiery conservative will appear on the weekend news programs.
Meanwhile, a former subordinate of Bolton's offered to provide information to the committee about the way she said that Bolton treated her in the early 1980s, when they both worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Lynne D. Finney said Bolton had bullied her and tried to have her fired when they clashed over U.S. policy on the distribution of infant formula in developing countries -- an issue that was then highly visible and politically charged.
Finney said she was working as a USAID attorney and had developed relationships with foreign officials at the United Nations. She said that in late 1982 or early 1983, Bolton called her into his office and told her to use her influence to persuade the United Nations to ease a policy that restricted the marketing and promotion of infant formula in developing countries.
