McGovern Has Taken 10 Privately Paid Trips Since 2000
WASHINGTON, May 2— Since 2000, U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.) has made 10 trips abroad that were paid for by private groups. One of the trips, to a conference in Paris, was funded by a non-profit group promoting business and trade. Five trips to Cuba, three trips to Colombia and one trip to El Salvador were funded by non-profit educational, research or human rights organizations. Mr. McGovern has long had an interest in Latin America.
The total cost of the 10 trips was $26,751, according to travel disclosure forms filed by Mr. McGovern with the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The public filings, which each member of Congress must make for trips paid for by private sources, were examined by the Telegram and Gazette. In addition to privately funded trips members of Congress take official trips, often with other members, that are paid for by taxpayers.
The cost of Mr. McGovern’s privately funded trips ranged from $1,469 to $4,850, with expenses divided between travel, lodging, meals and other services, such as translator fees.
Mr. McGovern’s trip to Paris in February 2004 cost $4,524, which included the expenses for Mr. McGovern’s wife. It was paid for by the International Management and Development Institute.
Sabine Schleidt, executive vice president of the Institute, said the organization brings politicians and international business people together to discuss economic issues. Schleidt said she was on the trip that McGovern took and that it allowed members of Congress to speak with multinational businessmen “in an off the record setting.”
Twelve other members of Congress, including Reps. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Mark Souder (R-Ind.), were on the trip. According to Ms. Schleidt, the institute’s funding comes “100 percent” from corporate donors.
According to an itinerary provided by Ms. Schleidt, the trip to Paris included a guided tour of the Louvre, a cocktail reception, and several roundtable discussions with foreign dignitaries.
Michael Mershon, Mr. McGovern’s press secretary, said the congressman attended because he wanted to speak with multinational companies such as Sodexho about sponsoring food programs abroad. Mr. McGovern co-founded the Congressional Hunger Caucus and co-chairs the Congressional Hunger Center.
Privately paid travel in which highly paid lobbyists representing corporate clients have the chance to meet privately with members of Congress has become more controversial in recent weeks after lobbyist Jack Abramoff admitted paying for various members of Congress to journey abroad to exotic locales, if only to play 18 rounds of golf.
But not all privately paid travel is all play and no work, according to Mr. McGovern, who said the private trips can be more productive than those funded by taxpayers.
“The problem with U.S. government-funded trips is that I have to follow a certain protocol when I go to places,” Mr. McGovern said in a recent interview. “Usually I have to go with somebody who is assigned to me from the State Department or Department of Defense.”
On government-sponsored trips, embassies arrange meetings and set up itineraries for members of Congress, detailing whom they will speak to and which events they will attend. Members of Congress are given very little leeway to amend their schedules, Mr. McGovern said, and need to seek approval for the trip from the Speaker of the House before they may receive any tax money.
“I don’t find that particularly useful when I go to a place like Colombia, where I disagree with our policy, or Cuba,” he said. “To me, the only purpose of foreign travel is to learn, and if my trip is going to be basically embassy briefings, which are all useful, then I can do it here. I wouldn’t need to go anywhere.”
Ray Laraja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, said congressional travel of any kind can be good, even if the trip is a junket.
“We don’t want McGovern just to hang out in Worcester and in Washington,” Mr. Laraja said. “It does become questionable in terms of private travel, but you have to also remember it’s a public expense that people aren’t willing to pay for.”
Congressional members, especially of different parties, he said, don’t have much time to sit down to discuss the issues anymore.
“Even if it is a junket, if they are going with other members [of Congress] that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he added. “It allows them to get to know each other better.”
Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, agrees with Laraja that traveling with members of both parties is important, but said representatives “should travel far and wide and not just focus on one or two countries.”
“Privately paid travel is not inherently a bad thing,” Mr. Darling said. “It’s better than the taxpayers paying because they already pay for plenty. If the members want it to be done with complete transparency then there is nothing wrong with it.”
However Mary Boyle, press secretary for Common Cause, a nonprofit organization promoting open and accountable government, said due to current ethics violations, an outside commission should be created to monitor privately paid travel.
“The concern about travel is this issue of access— people who can afford a corporate jet, etc. can get the kind of access that a common person would not normally get,” she said. “There should be some sort of outside body to review these trips. Short of that there should be no privately funded travel until that happens.”
A vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, Mr. McGovern first traveled south of the border as a college student in the late ’70s to study the impact of the trade embargo on Cuba. He has returned to Cuba more than a dozen times since then, including during the late Pope John Paul II’s visit with Fidel Castro in 1999, and five times over the past seven years.
“I thought back then, as I do now, that our policy toward Cuba as an economic blockade, is just dumb,” Mr. McGovern said. “It doesn’t help the Cuba people and I think it has probably resulted in Castro hanging on for so long. If something goes wrong in Cuba, Fidel gets to blame it on the U.S. embargo.”
A trip to Cuba in April 2000 sponsored by the Washington Office on Latin America, a non-governmental organization that works to promote human rights, sought to facilitate an increase in academic exchanges with the United States. Presidents and deans of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Massachusetts-Boston met with their Cuban counterparts. The Washington Office on Latin America paid Mr. McGovern’s expenses of $2,150.
“I think there is a lot of interest and focus on Cuba after the Pope’s visit, and that generated a lot of the interest in increased academic contact,” said Geoff Thale, program director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “The Clinton administration in 1999 made academic exchange much easier.”
George Humphrey, executive director of college relations at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, said because of Mr. McGovern’s negotiations with the Cubans, the college returned to Cuba in 2003 to attend the Inter-American Conference on Pharmacy.
“The dean of the college of pharmacy in Havana came to Boston to receive an honorary degree and spoke at our commencement,” Mr. Humphrey said. “The following year we went down to the conference and invited Congressman McGovern to be our keynote speaker.” The college paid his expenses of $1,469.
Mr. McGovern has a longstanding relationship with the Washington Office on Latin America, dating back to his service as chief off staff to the late Rep. Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.). He wrote a letter over Moakley’s signature urging the U.S. government not to certify approval of military aid to Chile when Gen. Augusto Pinochet ruled the country.
“They are in my opinion a very serious organization,” Mr. McGovern said. “The trips I’ve been on with them have always been very balanced.”
Oxfam America, a global humanitarian aid organization, paid for a trip for Mr. McGovern in January 2002 to monitor progress in sustainable agriculture programs in Cuba. The cost: $1,900.
Mr. McGovern also has participated in the effort to preserve Ernest Hemingway’s home just outside of Havana. The American author’s home is falling apart because of the harsh humidity and storms of the Caribbean.
Mr. Mershon said tense political relations have made it difficult for American scholars to study what Hemingway left.
The Social Science Research Council, an organization that promotes scholarly exchange internationally, has worked with the Hemingway Preservation Foundation, an academic organization based in Winchester, Mass., and with Mr. McGovern in trying to restore the house, which they view as “both a Cuban and American icon.”
Both organizations paid for trips Mr. McGovern and his wife, Lisa, took in November 2002 and November 2005. The tab was $4,850 in 2002, paid for by the Social Science Research Council, and $3,192 in 2005, paid for by the Hemingway Preservation Foundation.
“These things are worth preserving,” Mr. McGovern said. “I would hate because of politics that we stand by and watch all this stuff disintegrate and crumble.”
Jenny Phillips, president and treasurer of the Hemingway Preservation Foundation, said the organization has been cooperating with the Cuban government to send architects and technicians to restore the author’s estate.
Mr. McGovern, a member of the Foundation’s board, said the process of saving the house has been complicated by U.S. government regulations for travel to Cuba, which limits who can and cannot travel to the country as well as who can take U.S. currency into Cuba.
“If I wanted to bring a bag of cement down there, I’d have to go through a whole other process with the Commerce Department, the State Department and probably other agencies about whether or not I’m authorized to do that,” he said.
Mr. McGovern’s role has largely been one of a cultural diplomat, working with both Cuba’s National Council of Patrimony and the U.S. Government to negotiate a way that allows researchers to work together.
The Social Science Research Council has begun to preserve some of Hemingway’s documents and plans to create digital copies for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which already houses the largest collection of the author’s materials in the United States.
“If at the end of the day we can manage our way through it all and we end up protecting Hemingway’s writings and his house, that’s a good thing,” Mr. McGovern said.
In his office in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, Mr. McGovern hangs pictures of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980. Romero, whom McGovern calls his hero, criticized the Salvadoran government for overlooking the poor and for its use of repressive tactics.
The Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, which represents institutions such as the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, invited Mr. McGovern and former Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) to travel to El Salvador last December to mark the anniversary of another tragic event from 1980—the murder of four American missionaries after their van was stopped by Salvadoran National Guard troops.
“We decided to make the trip not to recall the horrific tragedy or to decry the misguided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America back in the 1980s,” Mr. McGovern wrote in December 2005 in The Nation. “Instead, we made the visit to celebrate the lives of these remarkable women and to be inspired by their selfless example.” The $1,933 tab for Rep. McGovern was picked up by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and by the Washington Office on Latin America.
While working for Rep. Moakley, Mr. McGovern became involved with events leading up to the peace process in El Salvador, particularly with the fate of refugees, according to Mr. Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America.
“On El Salvador, he’s probably the most outspoken and best known member of Congress since he worked as an aide and first arrived here,” Mr. Thale said.
The Washington Office on Latin America, which has sponsored the most trips for Mr. McGovern, is concerned about the role of paramilitary groups in Colombia, Mr. Thale said.
Mr. Thale’s organization paid for three of Mr. McGovern’s trips to Colombia, costing it $1,931, $2,656 and $2,146.
Mr. McGovern “has been concerned that we’ve been spending hundreds of millions of dollars down there [in Colombia] for drug interdiction efforts that don’t seem to be reducing the amount of cocaine on the streets,” Mr. Mershon said.
The billions of dollars spent on drug reduction efforts in Colombia could be better spent on law enforcement programs at home, Mr. McGovern said.
“I think the people in Worcester want to make sure we’re not throwing their tax dollars down a rat hole,” he said. “Heroin is more readily available on the streets today than it was five years ago. Something is not working right.”
“Part of my job is to worry about these things,” Mr. McGovern said. “I think my constituency not only wants me to be engaged, but be engaged where I can be thoughtful and intelligent.”
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