96 articles
I understood why Christopher Darden lost the O. J. trial when I saw him on the cover of Pen World magazine. There he was caressing an Omas Bibliotheque Nationale fountain pen. As one of the editors of Pen World noted inside, the person who owns an OBN pen tends to be passionate and classy, but is…
Bruce S. Thornton
David Remnick
Every month, it seems, another Cold War controversy is closed -- in the anti-Communists' favor -- and not everyone is happy about it. On March 16, both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried stories about Julius Rosenberg's Soviet handler, the octogenarian Alexander Feklisov, who had…
Contributing editor Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant. Send resume to: Justin Higgins, 1225 19th St., NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036.
Fernanda Eberstadt
The Fourth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections was held the last week of January in Washington. An annual event, it is the probably the world's most important scientific meeting of AIDS specialists. At one of this year's sessions, Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, a Canadian…
Saul Friedlander,
Last Tuesday's Senate action on campaign-finance legisation has been widely reported as a stinging defeat for bipartisan "reform." Not so fast. The bill in question, which failed by 29 votes, was Senate Joint Resolution 18, a constitutional amendment to repeal the nation's 200-year-old guarantee of…
Alice Thomas Ellis
Kim Chernin (with Renate Stendhal)
The pro-choice movement hasn't exactly been honest and forthcoming during the partial-birth-abortion debate. Now we come upon a planning document behind the distortion campaign. On September 17, 1996, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake distributed a memo to her "clients and friends" on how to talk…
Ross H. Munro is co-author with Richard Bernstein of The Coming Conflict with China, a widely and respectfully reviewed book on America's inadequate response to the Beijing regime's expansionist plans in Asia. And he has just lost his day job. Munro was director of the Asia program at…
Meet the new, new Gore, same as the old, new Gore. With the exception of the Incredible Hulk's Dr. Bruce Banner, no one undergoes more startling metamorphoses than the vice president. And every one is the same as every other! His transformation from bloodless bore to barrel of monkeys -- heralded…
PRESIDENT CLINTON HAS FLUMMOXED the Republicans again. Believing Clinton was ready to deal in good faith this year on spending and taxes, GOP congressional leaders made a magnanimous display of bipartisanship: They agreed to use Clinton's budget as the working document from which a compromise would…
IT WAS ENOUGH TO LEAVE A Washington Post reader baffled. On March 16, the paper ran a front-page story featuring an interview with Wang Jun, the notorious Chinese arms dealer who sipped coffee at the White House during the Clinton reelection campaign. In a conversation with Post reporter Steven…
Remember "reinventing government"? This was the task Bill Clinton assigned to Al Gore when they took the White House in 1993 -- and which Gore deemed so vital that he publicized his findings by appearing on the David Letterman show. Among the hidebound government bureaucracies Gore was supposed to…
At the behest of Newt Gingrich, John Boehner asked a startling question at his regular Thursday Group meeting with key Republican constituency groups on March 13. How, the House Republican Conference chairman wanted to know, would the members of the group react if the House delayed consideration of…
THE FUTURE OF THE NATION'S chief experiment in private-school vouchers is about to be decided in a sleepy spring election where the great mass of voters will simply tune out and stay home. Welcome to the saga of school choice in Milwaukee -- and the funkier side of federalism in the '90s.
Alec Baldwin gets paid millions of dollars to be photographed having sex with his wife, Kim Basinger; he is, after all, a movie star, an artist who works in film. (See, for example, their movie The Getaway.) But he is also a man of substance, of strongly held political convictions, as the ever-…
WHEN TRENT LOTT became Senate majority leader last year, he at once began striking deals with Democrats in Congress and the White House. He had an inner circle of one: himself. That's changed. Now Lott meets with a small group of Senate Republicans -- he calls it the Council of Trent -- with whom…
Who is the most powerful liberal in American politics? He has prevented the Republican majority in Congress from addressing affirmative actioon and race- based quotas. He has forced congressional Republicans to shelve their drive to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. He has stood firm…
In a heartening display of civic-mindedness, dozens of SCRAPBOOK readers responded to our invitation for tips on which charitable and tax-exempt organizations they think should be audit bait for the IRS. The idea comes from the IRS itself, which last month said that its audits of tax-exempt groups…
THE BOOK THAT'S THE TALK OF MOVIE-GOERS EVERYWHERE
Clinton scandal stories have been breaking so fast -- and so often, sometimes two and three of them on each day's front pages -- that we're frankly having trouble keeping track of them all. And we get paid to do it. So we figure our readers could certainly use a helpful crib sheet. Here, then, is a…
House speaker Newt Gingrich doesn't want to pay the $ 300,000 fine levied on him by the ethics committee out of his own pocket. His wife, Marianne, feels even more strongly that the fine shouldn't be paid out of their wallets. House GOP whip Tom DeLay adds, "I think it would be awful if he paid it…
SOMEWHERE, RICHARD NIXON'S SHADE is watching with admiration the performance of the Clinton White House. If only he'd run Watergate like this! Then he could have claimed that the break-in proved the need for tougher federal anti-burglary laws.
I once asked Dennis Hills, a British writer who had been imprisoned by Idi Amin, how he had felt when he discovered bodies floating in rivers in the interior of Uganda. Hills said he had not been shocked: He knew such cruelties were common in human history. But in Africa they are shockingly common,…
In 1969, the United States decided it was going to "comprehensively solve" the Middle East. Ever since, American officials have dreamed that they might be able to find the solution of all solutions, the key to amity in and around the world's holy sites, and a ticket to Norway for the Nobel…
For years, the debate over openly gay clergy has rolled Catholics and fractured mainline Protestant denominations, pitting liberal theologians against rock-ribbed literalists. Those in the ever-receding majority who believe the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God are astonished to find…
Emerge, a glossy monthly that calls itself "Black America's Newsmagazine," is nothing if not provocative. The image on the magazine's January 1997 cover is of a young black woman passed out in a fetal position inside a glass crack pipe that forms the letter "I" in "CIA." The February cover featured…
THE REV. CARLTON VEAZEY is an abortion fanatic. The middle-aged Baptist preacher looks like someone you might see at an Operation Rescue protest. And indeed, Veazey has spent some time at rallies outside abortion clinics, though hardly on behalf of Operation Rescue. Veazey is part of a new strain…
The very existence of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, given the isolation of his country from the world, has been treated as a kind of miracle. He has been praised by John Updike and championed by the Boston Globe, and was recently the subject of an "At Lunch With" profile in the New York…
The United States Senate must decide by April 28 whether to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. The press, the pundits, and the Clinton administration have treated the debate over the treaty as another in a series of battles between "internationalists" and "isolationists" in the new, post- Cold…
The Clinton administration is asking Congress to appropriate $ 200,000 for a new laundry facility. Normally, that wouldn't be news. But since it's come to light that the White House was being operated as a full-service bed-and- breakfast, is it possible the new facility is needed to keep the sheets…
At different times, the European right, the Latin American left and even groups at the margins of American politics have fallen under the sway of conspiracy theories. But today it is the Middle East that provides the world's most fertile ground for fears of covert plots. Scholarly works on the…
NEWT GINGRICH BRISTLED last week when a visitor to his office told him how to handle the touchy issue of renewing most-favored-nation status for China. The visitor was Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, who was there with 12 other people to brief Gingrich before his trip to China later this…
How did you while away the first half of your twenties? Did you study? Did you work? Did you hang around with your boyfriend or girlfriend? Did you meet up with your long-lost father and embark on a four-year sexual relationship that began in an airport, continued in motel rooms, apartments, and…
The other day I came across the outline of a book I once tried to write. It was going to be titled New Columbia: A Book on D.C. Statehood. My co- author and I were excited about the idea, and our earnest enthusiasm showed in the pitch we sent to publishers. "The creation of a 51st state," we wrote,…
You have to give the New Yorker credit for not assigning its review of the new biography of Whittaker Chambers to the last person it had writing about the Hiss-Chambers case: Tony Hiss, son of Alger. But it did the next best thing and got Sidney Blumenthal, a writer who embarrassed the magazine…
In 1964, America's most eminent sociologist, Talcott Parsons, and its most eminent black academic, Kenneth Clark, collaborated on a magisterial tome called The Negro American. What is most striking about the book today, which is as dated as its title, is that it has no index entries for either "…
Michael Maren
In 1994, John Miller, chief spokesman for the New York City police department, tried to explain to a reporter just how effective the force had become thanks to a new policy called "community policing." The overall drop in serious crime that year would surely be the greatest ever recorded, Miller…
DURING THE GULF WAR, Rep. Dan Burton proposed launching nuclear weapons against the Iraqis. A noisy Clinton critic, he's lambasted the White House for using taxpayer dollars to respond to letters written to Socks. He's also questioned whether Vince Foster's death was a suicide. A few years ago he…
President Clinton is publicly backing his veep in the phone-solicitation flap. But that's not all the president thinks about the Gore situation. He's sure the press is cutting Gore a lot more slack than they'd ever cut him. And the relatively gentle treatment of Gore happened though the vice…
John Phillips, who died last August at age 81, led a frenetic, world- crossing career as a Life photo-reporter from 1936 to 1959. It was Phillips who, just shy of 30, took the well-known shot of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Tehran on November 29, 1943 -- and attended and photographed…
MUSIC
Alan Dershowitz
David Horowitz
HOW ARE THINGS GOING at the scandal-plagued White House? Swimmingly, says Dick Morris, the former political adviser to President Clinton. Morris is gone from Clinton's side, but his strategy is not forgotten. Every day, the president produces a fresh nugget of good news. One day it's a ban on human…
Of all the indignities man must suffer (call-waiting being foremost), few can lay one as low as trash-talk on a basketball court. Well-rehearsed lines flow across the boards: "Are you blind? 'Cause I just shot your eyes out!"
In case you were wondering what he's been up to, Newt Gingrich has been thinking hard lately, and thinking large. In fact, he has been thinking about nothing less than how to "create a new vision for the Republican party," as he recently told several fellow Republicans. One fruit of all this…
THERE WAS ONCE A TIME WHEN leading a congressional inquiry into a sitting president was an opportunity for political stardom. The most conspicuous case was the 1973 Senate Watergate investigation led by 76-year-old Sam Ervin, who had long been regarded in Washington as a colorful old racist with a…
Two weeks ago, a man named Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of a major trade association for abortion clinics, briefly fessed up about partial- birth abortion. For almost two years, he and other pro-choice activists had insisted that the grisly procedure was extremely rare. It was, they…
Sam Tanenhaus
Ah, the perils of associating with Jude Wanniski. The star attraction of Wanniski's annual client conference in Boca Raton the first weekend in March was Minister Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam and recipient of the 1996 Moammar Gadhafi Award (an honorarium of $ 250,000 plus a $ 1…
AT FIRST GLANCE, the concept of victims' rights seems to offer the closest thing yet to a consensus on the problem of crime. Here at last is ideological common ground, which explains why a proposed constitutional amendment writing victims' rights into our nation's charter has attracted wide…
Should President Clinton be forced to lead? This isn't a question for political scientists but for congressional Republicans. They must decide whether to give the president political cover to back a real balanced budget, spending cuts, a revised consumer price index, a capital-gains-tax cut, even…
Where, WHERE is the outrage at the latest act of Washington sexual harassment? Where are the pickets? What about a congressional hearing? Let us put it another way: Who put the pubic hair in Bill Clinton's Coke?
Majority leader Dick Armey's Feb. 26 memo to his fellow House Republicans starts with the words, "Many of you appear disappointed," and reading what follows it's easy to understand why. Has there ever been a more dispiriting call to arms?
Jervis Anderson
THE DEFINING POLITICAL EVENT of 1997 was supposed to be a budget deal between President Clinton and congressional Republicans. It won't be. In the last two weeks of February, the Clinton scandals finally achieved critical mass and became the dominant story in Washington. The media frenzy over…
It'll take weeks for reporters fully to plumb the depths of Harold Ickes's newly released -- but still heavily "redacted" (i.e., censored) -- fund- raising correspondence. But a couple of items already stand out. First there's the R. Warren Meddoff controversy. Meddoff, you'll recall, is the man…
Leonard Garment
THEATER
Retired Democratic senator Paul Simon writes in Pete du Pont's webzine Intellectual Capital that Lien Chan, the vice president of Taiwan, "is being denied the right to enter the United States to attend meetings of the governing board of the University of Chicago," from which the vice president…
IN EARLY 1996, PRESIDENT CLINTON'S top political advisers had a problem. Under Dick Morris's guidance, Clinton had made an extraordinary comeback from the mid-term debacle of 1994. While the Republican presidential candidates were beating (and spending) each other senseless in the primaries,…
The only Republican not grinning about the White House fund-raising scandal is Fred Thompson. Only a couple of weeks ago it looked like the Tennessee senator's hearings investigating the Clinton administration's fund-raising practices would provide him a priceless platform from which to launch a…
Which party prevailed in the 1996 congressional elections? It's not as silly a question as it sounds. The facts tell us one thing; the actions of people in and around politics tell us another. The numbers make it plain that the Republicans won. In the House of Representatives, Republicans took 227…
When the Senate voted 99-1 two years ago to condemn the national history standards drawn up at the behest of the federal government, people concerned about the brainwashing of school children with politically correct history figured the battle had been won. Wrong. Sure, the standards-writers pieced…
During his first term in office, Bill Clinton raised an astonishing amount of campaign cash -- nearly $ 40 million -- with a program of Map Room coffees and Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers for major Democratic donors. Perhaps it bothers you that the president routinely and systematically used the…
Last year, when the skies cleared following a three-day blizzard that had dumped 22 inches of snow and had trapped me inside my suburban home, I quickly donned my boots, pushed open the front door, and squeezed outside. And all at once it hit me: There was nowhere to go. I was standing on a street…
In Washington today, we are witness to two depressing spectacles. We see a morally bankrupt Clinton White House, brazenly renting the Lincoln Bedroom. And we see a brain-dead Republican party, cowering in the halls of Congress.
CALIFORNIANS LIKE TO BE in the forefront of things, and they have lately been particularly daring about affirmative action: In July 1995, the University of California regents voted to end race-based admissions and hiring on their campuses; last November, the state's electorate approved the historic…
Jasper Becker
Editor's Note: Robert L. Bartley, the distinguished former editor of the Wall Street Journal, died today at 66. Here are two articles about him published previously in The Weekly Standard.
Robert Bartley has edited the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 25 years, and I bet that in all that time he has never held a single traditional editorial meeting. Instead, at various points during the day the editorial writers will hear Bartley's gleeful cackle coming from the office of…
This is not a joke. At Harvard University an organization called the Bureau of Study Counsel has formed a support group for students who procrastinate. " Through discussion and practical exercises," the bureau declares, "we will work on understanding the experience of procrastination and on being…
The original Library of Congress building celebrates its centennial this year. When I mention the Jefferson Building, as it is now called, to people who have done research there, they smile at the memory of it. There's something about the place that seems to inspire affection.
Early last week, independent counsel Kenneth Starr announced that, come August 1, he would no longer be able to represent the United States of America in the Whitewater matter and associated investigations. He insisted his decision did not signal what such decisions usually signal: that the lawyer…
President Clinton sat for an extended interview with editors and reporters from the Boston Globe last week. The paper described the president as " uncharacteristically on edge, his face occasionally growing red." He was being quizzed about the fund-raising scandals now engulfing his party. And he…
Conservatives have a tendency to delude themselves. First they decided that the Republican victories in 1994 proved that Bill Clinton had become irrelevant. Irrelevant he wasn't; he suckered the Republicans into shutting down the government and then whipped them soundly in 1996. No matter, say the…
An item in our Feb. 24 SCRABOOK, "Good News for CCRI," unwittingly made the good news sound better than it was. We suggested that one of Judge Thelton Henderson's two edicts blocking California's new anti-preferences law had been overturned. Not quite. An appeals panel declined to take that step…
Janet Hadley is not "pro-choice," she is pro-abortion. In Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity, her survey of abortion law and practice around the world, she scorns talk of necessary evils and last resorts. Abortion is an essential means of freeing women from "male-supremacist society." Ending a…
Nobel scientist Carleton Gajdusek, whose travel diaries were the subject of a special report by Claudia Winkler in our Oct. 7, 1996, issue, negotiated a settlement with the prosecutor last week. Gajdusek pleaded guilty to two counts involving sexual contact with one of his adopted sons from…
Imagine Mike Murphy's excitement when he received a personal letter, on recycled paper, from Jane Fonda. "Dear Michael, I have a humongous favor to ask you," the former Barbarella wrote to Murphy, the Republican media whiz who worked on the Alexander and Dole campaigns. It seems that Fonda chairs a…
THINK THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE and congressional Republicans never agree? Well, when it comes to federal judges, think again. In his first term, the president nominated 202 judges, and not one of them was rejected. What's more, Republicans demanded an actual roll-call vote on only four nominees --…
Leo Rosten and Deng Xiaoping died last Wednesday. Rosten as four years younger than Deng, and a lot funnier.
Never have so many been so wrong about so much for so long with so little consequence Starting in the mid-1960s, alarmed by Vietnam abroad and racial rebellion at home, American journalists and academics prophesied that Western liberalism -- or "late capitalism," as many chose to call it -- was…
On Feb. 19, China's 92-year-old "paramount leader," Deng Xiaoping, died. Many news organizations quoted his most famous aphorism spoken during an argument with Mao over farm policies: "Whether a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." Pat Sajak…
One of the minor irritations of being conservative is listening to liberals, and sometimes even fellow conservatives, lecture on what it means to be a " true" conservative. The true conservative, it sometimes appears, may oppose fresh liberal depredations but must docilely preserve liberal…
Few things have been more thoroughly abused by critics than the American landscape. Surveying our endless interstates, our sprawling subdivisions, our chaotic commercial strips, and our haggard cities, architects and urban planners have seen the embodiment of all that is wrong with crass,…
If only there were jobs -- that's been the liberal lament for decades on why so many of the poor linger on welfare. Sociologist William Julius Williams created a cottage industry with books and articles blaming the bulging welfare rolls on the absence of jobs. But President Clinton, visiting New…
After tanks, subversion, and vodka, perhaps the greatest export of the Soviet Union was the "socialist realism" novel. These candy-coated political tracts, which enjoyed a vogue on college campuses for half a century, were concerned less with plot elaboration than with hitting the reader repeatedly…
FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS NOW, the investigation of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr has occupied a huge place in the Washington imagination. The investigation itself has been largely impenetrable, conducted in secrecy before grand juries in Little Rock and Washington by prosecutors who…