off track,

White House off track, out of touch

By David North

A POLITE letter from George Bush’s White House has Guam’s teeth on edge.

It was a thank-you note to the Governor, and it was signed by the Director of White House Personnel, Constance Horner, a powerful figure in

Washington.

The problems were: the Governor to whom it was addressed, Ricky Bordallo, had not been governor for four and a half years; and he is no longer alive.

The White House had lost track of Guam’s political calendar and, worse, had missed the widely reported suicide of Bordallo, who chained himself to a statue of an ancient Chamorro chieftain on a public square and shot himself, rather than spend a few months in a Mainland prison camp.

He had earlier been convicted of corruption in a federal court and was scheduled to report to prison the day after he killed himself.

The White House letter thanked the Governor for his recommendations of some persons for presidential appoint ments, and assured him that they still were under consideration. The note apparently was a routine form letter, and related to recommendations which must have been sent to the White House years earlier. Bordallo left office in early 1987,

and died on January 30, 1990.

As luck would have it, the letter came to Bordallo’s widow, Madeleine, a scrappy and successful Democratic poli tician in her own right. She was recently elected to fill a vacancy in the Territorial Senate after losing a race for the Governorship in November, 1990.

Her spokesperson said “she really thinks the White House should keep up on who they’re writing.”

The Pacific Daily News grumbled editorially about the letter indicating, yet

again, the “not always benign neglect”

that so often characterises Washington’s treatment of Guam. □

Bordallo: scrappy and successful too