My Student Senate colleague Debra Cagan: From leftist to neocon?

Now that I’m done with the first draft of See You in Chicago (formerly Things Done and Left Undone), I needed a break from the world of Chicago, 1968. I decided to dust off a mystery/romance I had started writing in 1986 or so, and rework it as more of a romance/mystery, written in the third person, though almost exclusively from the woman’s point of view. It’s set in Iowa City, in the fall of 1972.

A lot of it is based on my brief career in student government at the University of Iowa. And thinking about that time, I wondered whatever happened to Debra Cagan, who served on the Student Senate at the same time I did. I also sat next to her in a political science class during the fall of 1972. She was always fun to be around. She had a quick, sardonic wit, though she sometimes had a tendency to shoot from the hip.

And she had compassion. In that political science class, she had a friend who was not just gay, but flaming. I must have made some disparaging comment to her about his black fingernail polish. Debra replied that it was just his tribute to Liza Minelli’s character in the movie Cabaret, who also wore it. I still think black fingernail polish is ugly, no matter what sex or sexual orientation you are, but Debra was able to look beyond the outer trappings and see the person behind them.
She was bright and very ambitious. In fact, she helped organize the Better Days Party at UI and became Student Senate president in 1972 or ‘73.

I always assumed that Debra was far to the left of me on the political spectrum. I was and am a liberal Democrat. I was for George McGovern in 1972 and Barack Obama in 2008. Debra has done well for herself in the thirty-some years since I last talked with her. But politically, it seems she’s become a neoconservative.

Her Wikipedia entry begins:

Debra L. Cagan (born March, 1954) is an American stateswoman and a former U.S, policy liaison. Her most notable public role was that of an adviser to former United States president George W. Bush.

The article mentions that she was Senior Coordinator for Nuclear and Nonproliferation Policy, Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, Department of State, in 1996. In other words, she was working as a diplomat in the Clinton Administration. Most State Department employees are not political appointments. It’s common enough for a diplomat to work through changes in administration.

But her last government position, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Coalition and Multinational Operations, which she assumed in 2007, was clearly a political appointment. And it’s strange to read of someone who opposed America’s military adventure in Southeast Asia becoming an advocate of preventive war with Iraq.

I haven’t spoken with her in over thirty years, so I don’t know her side of the story. Her job involved trying to persuade other nations to join in the "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq war. That doesn’t necessarily mean she supported the war initially.

But the most damning thing I’ve read about Debra is an article in the London Daily Mail which quotes her as saying "I hate all Iranians." The article also accused her of accusing Britain of "dismantling" the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon.
The first quote sounds both right and wrong. Debra could make off-the-cuff remarks. But she’s had years of diplomatic experience. If she did say it, I’m sure she denied it. I would have. But it’s still a troubling accusation.

The remark about the British really depends on whether she said it on her own, or at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Again, if it was one of her shoot-from-the-hip statements, she surely denied it. If Gates told her to say it, he’d deny it.

I’ve seen her portrayed as the Wicked Witch of the West on one blog. She’s been accused of being an Islamophobe, wearing the Iron Cross (it’s actually the Hungarian Commander’s Cross Order of Merit), being transsexual (All right, I’ve never seen her naked, but she was definitely female when I knew her.) and even being HIV-positive. (Even if she is, does that affect her ability to be do government service?)

I’d like to hear her side of the story. I considered her a friend in the early 1970s. But no matter how much her views have changed, I’ll remember fondly her cracks about politicos and political science, which she called P.S., as in, "That’s a lot of P.S."