April 1998

Anthony Burgess Byrne

Of all the rotten things that have been said about Ken Starr, none has been molowdown than that he concealed perjury while representing General Motors in truck-fire cases. The ever-reliable James Carville said on Larry King Live that Starr was guilty of "encouraging perjury . . . when a tank blew…

David S. Landes

Several attentive readers have written to point out that our Clinton fashion pin the April 13 issue could have used a bit of fine-tuning. A spelling gaffe was noticed primarily by our Texas subscribers: It's Neiman-Marcus, not Nieman-Marcus. If this were a Clintonian magazine, we would launch into…

THE WEST MAY FINALLY have found part of its exit strategy in Bosnia. He is six feet, three inches tall, plainspoken, and the new prime minister of the Republika Srpska, one of two Bosnian entities recognized by the Dayton Accords. His name is Milorad Dodik, and he was elected to his post in January…

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright travels to Beijing next week, and China's leaders undoubtedly will greet her with open arms. Together, they'll be laying the groundwork for the June Sino-American summit, and Albright may intimate what new goodies the president has in store for China. Here at…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A VAGUE, sweeping civilrights law is put at the disposal of antisocial citizens famous for the variety, multiplicity, and shamelessness of their lawsuits? We may be about to find out. On April 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on whether the Americans with Disabilities…

A few weeks ago, the House Republican leadership ought they had safely bottledup campaign-finance reform with a bit of procedural sleight-of-hand. But here it comes again. Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan and Connecticut Republican Chris Shays have been collecting signatures on a discharge…

Jayson Williams, the center for the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Association, noticed Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in the stands during a home game last fall that the Nets lost. "Maybe if we'd have won, she'd have fixed I-287 South," he told reporters, referring to the crumbling…

This month, former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen is gracing the pages of Playboy for the second time. Back in 1992, when her nude shoot first appeared, Gracen was asked whether she'd had an affair with then-governor Clinton. She denied it -- a denial she recanted last month, when she admitted…

Every so often the conservative movement casts up another hero. Sometimes the darling of the moment turns out to be a true hero, like Ward Connerly, the spokesman for the California Civil Rights Initiative. And sometimes the object of our admiration turns out to be Flake-o Supreme -- mention the…

The era of congressional junkets to tropical paradises is largely over, but nothere's a new criticism: Congressmen don't travel abroad enough.

A friend once told me that the surest way to avoid a speeding ticket is to have your license and registration ready for the cop by the time he shows up at your car window. Police officers appreciate the courtesy, he explained. And rooting through the glove box ahead of time might prevent the…

OLD HABITS DIE HARD AT THE University of California. A law passed by the state's voters in 1996 prohibits UC schools from using race or gender in admissions, but that hasn't stopped them from trying to determine the racial breakdown of the students they admit. This year, a formidable obstacle…

Edward Lazarus

At long last, the empire is striking back. The tobacco companies, which for months had acted like docile children in hopes that Congress would play nice with them and approve their June 20 settlement with states and plaintiffs' lawyers, came to their senses last week.

There is at least one small proof that literary criticism will never be a science, and it's that there is no theory of art capable of explaining exactly why Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is great fiction -- like George Borrow's The Bible in Spain or Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, one of the…

Dramatic as it has been, the failure of the West to find an adequate response to militant nationalism in Bosnia in the 1990s is nothing new. As Ernest Gellner reminds us in Nationalism, it was the Versailles peace conference in 1918 that first gave real-world sanction to theories that had been…

REPUBLICANS HAVE ALMOST AS MANY facile explanations for President Clinton's success as he does for the allegations against him. They credit -- i.e., blame -- his personal emotive skills, shameless dissembling, and sheer good luck. They complain about a biased press, that hoary excuse for…

If the 1980s were the decade of greed, then the 1990s must be the decade of the 401K plan. How else to explain the fact that, in the orgy of celebration last week over the Dow Jones Industrial average's breaking 9000, not a peep was heard from America's liberals about their old bugaboo, Wall Street…

The "English for the Children" ballot initiative that Californians will vote on in June is looking like a juggernaut. The latest poll numbers show overwhelming support for the initiative, which promises to end the disastrous two-decade experiment in bilingual education in the state's public…

Jude Wanniski -- the supply-side propagandist, Jack Kemp ventriloquist, and flack extraordinaire for Louis Farrakhan -- has been noticeably mum of late about his Nation of Islam friends. Perhaps they balked at accepting the central role of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in the history of 20th-century…

I'D JUST LIKE TO APOLOGIZE TOmea culpa his way around Africa, read Newt Gingrich's new humble pie of a book, and listened to the pope say "oops" about the Holocaust. My fault if I ever doubted the wisdom or intelligence of any of you guys.

In the late 1960s, the fiddle-playing bandleader Bob Wills became one of the first performers elected to the country music hall of fame. Ailing and near the close of his long career, Wills was by all appearances delighted to accept the honor that gave him a place beside such legendary figures as…

One of the least edifying spectacles in Washington these days (always excepting the White House is watching Republican contortions over what to say about the presidential zipper problems. Newt Gingrich counsels his colleagues to stay mum; Arlen Specter gives aid and comfort to the Clintonistas;…

In Santa Barbara, California, in the English department of an evangelical Christian school called Westmont College, there stands a large piece of furniture that is, visitors are quickly informed, the real wardrobe -- the wardrobe the Pevensie children passed through into Narnia in the first of C.…

WHEN EUTHANASIA ENTHUSIASTS urged Oregon voters to legalize assisted suicide, they promised an open, rational, and carefully regulated system in which physician-hastened death would be a "last resort." Voters were also assured that life termination would be conducted under the watchful and…

Jeff Koltys is 13 years old and in the seventh grade at the Mary E. Volz Middle School in Runnemede, N.J., a blue-collar suburb outside Philadelphia. On a recent Wednesday morning he describes as typical, Jeff arrives at his 9: 30 class, a "gifted and talented" program reserved for the school's…

Three weeks ago on this page, THE SCRAPBOOK published a frame from an ABC News video capturing candidate Bill Clinton in what looked like an overly affectionate posture with a flight attendant on his campaign plane. "Longhorn One." Many, many readers of this page called THE SCRAPBOOK for a copy of…

Few propositions about today's world can be stated with greater certainty: Never in its nearly 450 years has the modern Russian state been less imperialist, less militarized, less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more receptive to Western ideals and practices than it is in 1998. This…

We all mark the arrival of spring in our own ways. For me, the season has officially sprung when the cherry blossoms bloom, George Will writes his first-of-the-year baseball column (like the cherry blossoms, he burst forth early this year), and I decide, on some happy, unexpected afternoon, to lift…

Washington's resistance to the poisons of Clintonism has dramatically deteriorated since the Paula Jones lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Susan Webber Wright on April 1.

On a blistering cold Boston afternoon twenty-five years ago this week, I was a witness to history for the first time in my 10-year-old life. I sat in a first-base box at Fenway Park and watched Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees come to bat as the first designated hitter in major-league history.…

One among my several immodest ambitions is to leave behind a word or two of my own invention before departing the planet. I want to leave a precise word, a useful word, a good word, a word that absorbs a sweet bit of truth. Neologism, not socialism, is the name of my desire.

THE ONCE-MIGHTY Progressive Conservative party of Canada took another step toward extinction late last month. There are not many left to go.

New Gingrich

IN THE BABBLE ABOUT who's up and who's down among House Republican leaders, Tom DeLay of Texas doesn't get much play. He's majority whip, the third- ranking Republican, but he's usually described as a sharp-edged conservative, a hard-sell fund-raiser, and not much more. Meanwhile, the speculation…

Bob Dole reared his well-tanned head recently, giving his first serious interview since Monica Lewinsky's name became a household word. Dole being Dole, it should come as little surprise that his utterances were packed with reminders of why he didn't pass muster as a presidential candidate.

Let's see if we've got this straight. It is legally actionable -- a tort -- when blue-collar workers paste girlie posters inside their lockers. It is a tort when white-collar workers display beach-scene photographs of their wives on office desks. But when the governor of Arkansas dispatches an…

The Senate provided a modest improvement in the tax-cut climate last week. During debate on the budget, a number of Senate Republicans protested that the tax cuts included in the budget resolution -- just $ 30 billion -- were too small. John Ashcroft, Jim Inhofe, Bob Smith, Sam Brownback, and Rod…

In the complex relationship between sex and politics that has preoccupied Americans for the past three months, many of those seeking to condemn the president have relied on some version of the feminist principle that "the personal is political," while those seeking to excuse or exonerate him have…

In the latest issue of the liberal journal American Prospect, John Judis weighs in on the Lewinsky affair. Judis is deeply disturbed by the behavior of the media; specifically, by the failure of newspaper and TV owners to step in and squash their uppity, anti-Clinton reporters. THE SCRAPBOOK kids…

OIL IS NOT LIKE OTHER COMMODITIES, as Winston Churchill found out early in his career. In 1911, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, decided to rest Britain's naval supremacy on oil. Welsh coal might have been near at hand and secure, but oil offered the advantage of speed and efficiency.…

April 9 is the 100th anniversary of the Stalinist entertainer Paul Robeson's birth. Although he died more than two decades ago -- and despite the fact that he made relatively few movies while he was alive -- Robeson's life will be remembered over the coming year in no fewer than six documentary…

Curt Sampson

For reasons known only to themselves, executives of CBS television have decided to cede portions of their Saturday-night schedule to radio weirdo Howard Stern, whose approach to sexual matters falls somewhere between that of a 13-year-old boy and a tumescent St. Bernard. But guardians of the public…

At the age of nine, the twentieth-century American sculptor Alexander Calder drew a self-portrait -- a picture of a boy working on a block of wood with a hacksaw, a broad smile of contentment on his face. Every artist produces art that expresses in one way or another his personality. What…

Tom Boswell, sportswriter and baseball fan extraordinaire, once wrote a book called Why Time Begins on Opening Day. And so it does. Life begins anew not with the first robin or the vernal equinox, but with the first pitch -- this year thrown out charmingly at Camden Yards by a former pigtail league…

DOES ANY COUNTRY have more reasons to be proud of itself than Great Britain? Twenty-five years ago the United Kingdom was a basketcase. Its economy was a shambles, the IMF had to take over its fiscal policy, and its people lived in cold flats with bad plumbing. Today, Britain has one of the most…

Patrick J. Buchanan

On Friday, March 20, 1998, Bill Clinton's public and private attorneys made a novel claim in a Washington, D.C., federal courtroom. They claimed that nothing less than the United States Constitution gives the president authority to have sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and to receive…

LAST WEEK I TOOK A TRIP BACK IN TIME -- way, way back, to the distant days when James Carville seemed a refreshing, colorful rustic instead of a sputtering psychotic. I rented The War Room, a documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, which made stars of Carville and his diminutive sidekick,…

For the first five years of Bill Clinton's presidency, his opponents grumbled that the press was too soft on him, refusing to probe one scandal after another. When the Monica Lewinsky story broke on January 21, however, the press came alive, and it has been hot on the case ever since. Steve Roberts…

Last week's cover photograph of Bill Clinton doing his chin thing should have been jointly credited to Kenneth Lambert and the Washington Times.

The Clinton administration is about to unveil a proposal for divvying up disputed territory on the West Bank. It will do so knowing that the Israeli government will reject the plan, that U.S.-Israeli relations will then go into a deep freeze, and that the whole diplomatic fiasco will absolutely…

Edward O. Wilson

President Clinton managed a trifecta of shamelessness last week in the first half of his Africa trip. He apologized for America's having coddled anti-Communist dictators in Africa during the Cold War. Yet the goal of preserving freedom against the depredations of Moscow and its Cuban mercenaries…

The Best Interview of the Week Award goes to James Barnes of the National Journal, for the revealing quotes he managed to wrestle out of Leon Panetta. Panetta of course was White House chief of staff while the president was busy developing his "complicated human relationship" (Mike McCurry's…

Andrew Motion

THE STAGE IS SET TO BEGIN reforming, modernizing, and partially privatizing Social Security this year. President Clinton desperately needs an issue that's bigger than the sum of his scandals -- a point speaker Newt Gingrich made to the House Republican caucus last week -- and overhauling Social…

As if more evidence were needed that the ACLU is less civil-liberties organization than a particularly obnoxious arm of the Democratic party, consider the group's latest advertising campaign. Less than two weeks after the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the ACLU placed a costly, quarter-page ad in the…

In 1896, Charles Monroe Sheldon published a wildly popular book on Jesus entitled In His Steps. In the buoyant optimism of the Gilded Age, Sheldon's Jesus had the look and feel of a confident and aspiring businessman -- a man of eminent practicality and common sense, a trustworthy guide to the…

There never were any group meetings among us targets of the so-called Unabomber, but we nearly had one in Sacramento on the day the trial began. The FBI had set up a "witness room" where we could gather and get briefed, away from the press. Most of the survivors were on hand, together with other…

A few months ago a parent at my kids' school asked me if I wanted to contribute to a piece of Communist propaganda. Well, sort of. Ari directs the theater program at the Jewish Community Center in downtown Washington, and he said he was reviving Waiting for Lefty, the famous agitprop play Clifford…

ON MONDAY, MARCH 23, 1998, the irrepressible Boris Yeltsin sacked his entire government, including his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. The Russian president's move came as a bolt from the blue. In most countries, the unexpected demise of a government would generate uncertainty and prompt the…