94 articles
Earlier this month, a Superior Court judge in Washington, D.C., named George Mitchell ruled that convicted murderer Latrena Pixley "is not a threat to her son's physical or emotional well-being" and so is fit to take custody of the boy, a 2-year-old named Cornelious who is currently living in…
Has anyone the area code for Stockholm? I need to call the Nobel Prize Committee, fast. I've got an idea. It's time they added a new prize -- one that, in my view, ought to have been instituted from the beginning of the Nobel Prizes in 1901.
The turning point for Bosnia came in August 1995 with a NATO bombing campaign. The air strikes succeeded in doing what no diplomatic effort had: persuading Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to join in ending the four-year-old war over the pieces of the former Yugoslavia. Before the bombing, the…
It was on March 13 that the Pentagon's public-affairs office released information from Linda Tripp's confidential security file, in violation of the federal Privacy Act. Only days after, the department announced an internal investigation. The events of the illegal leak took a few hours, but the…
There is a widespread popular bias against the use of anonymous sources in print and TV news. "If there's nothing evil or false about it," the thinking goes, "why must they whisper it in the dark?" And, predictably enough, a certain number of journalists are eager to win applause by pandering to…
Two weeks ago, some of the biggest guns in American journalism made a horrifying accusation: A U.S. Special Forces unit in September 1970 had cold-bloodedly dropped lethal nerve gas on civilians in Laos while on a mission to assassinate American defectors thought to be in the village. This…
IT IS NEVER PLEASANT WATCHING a grown man suffer the indignities of politicking. But we nevertheless gaze, transfixed, as Alabama governor Fob James works the buffet line at Niki's seafood restaurant on the outskirts of Birmingham. Fob is a skilled campaigner, joshing and cajoling and avuncular,…
"We are going to give a new definition to hypocrisy in the U.S. Senate today," Sen. John Kerry portentously announced during debate last week over the tobacco bill. And so the Massachusetts Democrat did. Kerry objected to the idea that raising the price of cigarettes should be called a tax. "To use…
Ever since J. Bottum's Casual "You Can't Eat Alger Hiss" appeared in our June 1 issue, with its account of his toddler daughter's destruction of his Greek lexicon, dictionaries of ancient Greek have come pouring in from concerned and generous readers -- one from a sociology professor who taught…
Of the many stories about William Shawn in his last years as editor of the New Yorker, my favorite concerns Henry Fairlie. A highly regarded journalist in London for many years (and generally credited with having coined the term "Establishment"), Fairlie was living in Washington when he came to…
Initially, Emma Peel was a man. When The Avengers debuted on British television in 1961, John Steed's crime-fighting partner was a male physician played by Ian Hendry. The actor Patrick Macnee was -- as he remained through the nine seasons of the program -- Special Agent Steed. But in most respects…
Once upon a time, there was a scandal-plagued president with an intern named Monica -- but it was a blonde Monica, Monica Crowley, the girl whose interest in international politics led her in 1990 to Richard Nixon, then the King Lear of Saddle River, New Jersey.
NO JOURNALIST IS MORE TROUBLING to the Clinton White House than Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. He has immersed himself in White-water, taken Paula Jones's claims seriously, and listened to Linda Tripp talk about an intern named Monica. Now, Isikoff is himself a target of controversy. On June 11, Julie…
In our May 18 issue, Matt Labash reported the story of Maj. Jacquelyn Parker, the Pentagon pin-up girl for combat gender integration who helped destroy the careers of several distinguished Air Force pilots from the 174th Air National Guard Fighter Wing, once known as the "Boys from Syracuse." After…
As promised on this page last week, an update on Brent Scowcroft's invitation to 28 worthies to join him, Presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford, Henry Kissinger, and Lawrence Eagleburger in signing a treacly "Open Letter to the U.S. Congress" aimed at overawing congressional critics of President…
Republican senator John Ashcroft of Missouri remembers the momentum behind the tobacco bill last spring. Nearly everyone -- that is, nearly everyone in Beltway political and media circles -- insisted there was a "tidal wave" of popular support for the measure, so much that "it could not be…
WHEN JAMES CARVILLE first announced his plans to launch an "all out" public-relations war against independent counsel Kenneth Starr, official Washington seemed almost shocked. An attack by a president's campaign manager on a sitting independent counsel was, the Washington Post pointed out tartly,…
Critics of President Clinton's upcoming China trip point to its bad symbolism -- the welcome at Tiananmen Square above all. Its defenders counter with substance: Important strategic and political gains are at stake, and China is too important to let human-rights symbolism drive the agenda. Or, as…
School reformers just had a banner week. Last Wednesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved a pioneering effort to expand educational choices for the children in Milwaukee's worst public schools. The court declared -- over the protests of the ACLU, People for the American Way, the NAACP, and…
THE FISH IS, along with the superimposed chi and rho, one of the very oldest symbols of Christianity. As handed down in Christian iconography, it looks like a football drawn with two arcs -- but sloppily, so that the two lines meet at one end and cross at the other. Most early Christians having…
THIS IS THE BEST REPUBLICANS could muster: not a principled assault on the tobacco bill, but a clever scheme to destroy the bill by ostensibly improving it. The backhanded effort, pursued by a half-dozen conservative Republican senators, worked brilliantly -- up to a point. They managed to modify…
You've known girls just like her: tiny, pretty, flirty young women -- energetic, talented, bright, and brittle. The kind who always wants to be an actress. The kind who makes old men long to pat her hand and middle-aged men buy sports cars. The kind who inevitably compels cliches -- smart as a…
What if, just for the sake of argument, nothing more can ever be established from the Monica Lewinsky investigation than that she and the president engaged in, say, a sex act -- and that both of them later, under oath in a civil proceeding, denied having had a sexual relationship? The answer to…
As preparations for the Tiananmen Square Summit proceed apace, it's increasingly clear that no Chinese infamy -- not blatant interference in American elections, not Beijing's aggressive military buildup, not the forced-abortion and organ-harvesting horrors perpetrated by the Chinese Communists --…
First-rate satiric novelists are rare, in part because their art is harrowing even to themselves. True satirists grow so used to seeing through pretense that after a while they begin to wonder whether anything besides pretense exists at all: Reveal the sham too many times, and pretty soon even…
No one likes a braggart, but here's a fact: A golf tournament is a much nicer experience with a press pass. And you feel the difference immediately.
THIS IS THE NINTH ANNIVERSARY of I. F. Stone's death. When he died of a heart attack in a Boston hospital on June 18, 1989, he rated a top-of-the-page New York Times obituary that called him "a pugnacious advocate of civil liberties, peace and truth" and asserted that his "integrity" was…
Do the ancient Greeks still matter? Does it make a difference that they are no longer taught to high-school and college students? And who's to blame for the fact that they are not?
Failed presidential candidates never die, they just run for mayor. Jerry Brown did it in Oakland earlier this month. Now, perhaps inspired by Brown's success, former senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota has announced that he may run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C.,…
Shallow people are greedy for money, but profound people are greedy for real estate. The shallow person wants fast cars and glitz, but anyone with a broader worldview longs for the kind of home they have in Winnetka, Ill. The million-dollar houses stretch for mile upon mile through the North Shore…
People who are elderly, disabled, prematurely born, or seriously ill have much to fear from the medical intelligentsia -- those bioethicists and moral philosophers who have in recent years transformed medical ethics.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle.
Golfer Tiger Woods is proving himself one of the nation's leading purveyors of clear-headedness about race, not that this is winning him many friends. Woods's mother is Thai, and his father is black -- but also part-Caucasian and part-American Indian, which leads Woods to describe himself as…
These days, a Washington journalist who evinces an interest in Social Security is likely to find himself in the same predicament as someone who buys from a mail-order catalogue: 72 hours later, the Post Office will need a forklift to deliver all the bales of printed matter to his doorstep. Proposal…
You have to excuse America's movie critics for going a little overboard when a movie like The Truman Show opens. After all, they see many more films than anyone else, and when you spend your life foraging in a garbage dump, a cubic zirconium can look a lot like a diamond.
HE COULD EASILY PASS for one of the tens of thousands of young Chinese studying at American universities. His smooth skin, boyish looks, and modest demeanor might be those, say, of an astrophysics researcher at M.I.T. But though Wang Dan, 29, earnestly stresses his desire to study in the United…
ONE THING LAST WEEK'S California primary for governor did not prove is that voters reject candidates who spend heaps of their own money on their campaigns. Political reporters, few of whom could self-finance a campaign, and other politicians naturally resent such candidates, but voters don't much…
ANY DAY NOW, OUR "EDUCATION PRESIDENT" will strangle another newborn education program in its crib.
THE SCRAPBOOK has "obtained" (thank you, Judicial Watch) a March 16 memo from Cliff Bernath of the Pentagon public-affairs office, explaining how he and his boss Ken Bacon decided to leak information from Linda Tripp's confidential security file to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, thereby violating…
Candice Bergen, the actress formerly known as Murphy Brown, has come clean in a Los Angeles Times profile about the famous 1992 contretemps in which Vice President Quayle zinged her TV character in a speech about family values for setting a bad example by blithely choosing to be a single mother.…
The battle over the 2000 Census continues. Republicans are urging the traditional head count. Democrats warn that such enumeration misses vast tranches of the American people -- particularly that subset of the American people that votes Democratic. So they urge scrapping traditional Census…
California lieutenant governor Gray Davis won the Democratic nomination for governor last week. Davis, the Washington chat shows all seem to agree, personifies the overarching "meaning" of this year's primary campaigns. "Cool," experience, competence are in. "Hot," insurgent candidacies are out.…
THE EFFORT TO TARNISH LINDA TRIPP is sometimes appalling, sometimes comical. Ever since the former White House secretary emerged as a threat to Bill Clinton's presidency, she has been the target of furious examination. Her story has always had its share of intrigue: sex, divided loyalties, an FBI…
TO HEAR BILL GATES and Microsoft partisans tell it, antitrust chief Joel Klein is a wild-eyed radical, determined to destroy the capitalist system by making success and bigness crimes. If not a radical, Klein is a reactionary, they say, in the grip of antique economic doctrines forged in the age of…
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH demanded an explanation when the story broke last month that a big Democratic donor, already under investigation for illegally giving military technology to China, got special treatment from the Clinton administration. "If the president won't share this information with…
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson called Barry Goldwater a "ranting, raving demagogue who wants to tear down society." What would Johnson say now if he could see Goldwater being saluted as a "truly fine man" by the first Democratic president to win reelection since 1964? In his cynical way, LBJ would…
China has a long political history and a long history of political philosophy, and many contemporary Chinese pretend to know more about them than they really do. The durability of Chinese tradition is, in itself, a point of pride. But a mastery of its details is usually too great a burden for one…
Barry Goldwater burst onto the scene at the tail end of one of the least polarized eras in the history of American presidential politics. The Eisenhower-Stevenson races of 1952 and 1956, and the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, were virtually free of memorable issues. Much was happening in global…
Barry Goldwater was the sort of citizen-politician the Founders originally hoped would lead the republic. No one foresaw how far he would go, when in 1952, the proprietor of his family's department store and a second-term member of the city council of Phoenix, Ariz. (1950 population: 106,818), he…
Just after the Civil War, American women believed their political emancipation was at hand. Though they were still excluded from the ballot box, women already occupied a more advanced position in the United States than in any other country. Political exclusion of women would very shortly go the way…
A couple of years ago, I watched an entire infomercial about toupees. It was late, and I was stranded alone in a motel room, but it wasn't boredom that kept me tuned in. It was the testimonials. "The girls at the health club used to laugh at me," one satisfied wig buyer explained to the camera.…
Monday through Thursday of last week marked what must be the most cynical four-day period in the history of the American presidency.
I first met Barry Goldwater in 1957, when I was a 26-year-old reporter for the Associated Press helping cover the Senate Rackets Committee's investigation of organized labor. I liked him immensely. He was a reporter's dream: friendly, funny, and oh so helpful, telling just about everything he knew,…
I was a senior in high school when Barry Goldwater ran for president. I was active in his campaign in my hometown, Newport, Ky., a blue-collar community with a strong union presence.
A book like Pierre Manent's The City of Man doesn't come along every day. Originally published in France in 1994 and now brought out in English by Princeton University Press, its is a fundamental book, and it raises a fundamental question: What is man?
Sandy Weill and John Reed are on a roll. The merger of their companies, insurance giant Travelers and banking colossus Citicorp, has now received the blessing of the House, which passed a banking deregulation bill in May that would legalize the deal. True, the bill squeaked through by only one…
I. OPENING GAMBIT
FEW PUBLIC SCHOOLS INSPIRE so much confidence as Arlington Traditional School. Parents praise this back-to-basics alternative school in Arlington, Va., for its early emphasis on reading and writing, its dress and behavior codes, and its expectation of parental involvement. Year after year,…
Good news for the transgendered egghead community! The Harvard University Gay & Lesbian Caucus has announced that it will this week bestow the Caucus Visibility Award to Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin. Eck and Austin have become famous at Harvard for being co-masters of Harvard's Lowell House --…
President Clinton failed pathetically to persuade Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test nuclear weapons, but then Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't fare any better in her foray into Pakistani politics.
How will Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, deal with John McCain's tobacco bill? Among Republicans, there's growing opposition to McCain's bill. But Lott's interest in passing something "anti-tobacco" trumps his concern over passing a bad bill. Thus it was Lott who, earlier this year,…
Surveying the body of director Michael Moore's work, one is quickly overwhelmed by its scope. There was the 1989 documentary Roger & Me -- an indictment of corporate greed, downsizing, and cavalier disregard for the working man. Then there was the mid-'90s television series TV Nation -- an…
SURVEYING THE BODY of director Michael Moore's work, one is quickly overwhelmed by its scope. There was the 1989 documentary Roger & Me--an indictment of corporate greed, downsizing, and cavalier disregard for the working man. Then there was the mid-'90s television series TV Nation--an indictment…
THE WEEK OF MAY 18 was not an especially good one for Bill Clinton. New China allegations had surfaced, and Republicans were quick to make hay. The House leadership scheduled a series of votes, each intended to rebuke Clinton for his China policy. Democrats had little choice but to go along. Many…
TO THE EYE, LITTLE CHANGES when you drive south over the border from Alberta into Montana. There are billboards advertising cigarettes, an enticement Canada's rulers have judged their subjects too gullible to view. And paved shoulders are rare. Montanans have chosen to pay for asphalt only on that…
Trolling for votes late in the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush did what all moderate Republicans in search of conservative support seem to end up doing: He attacked Harvard. Michael Dukakis, Bush explained, possesses a "Harvard boutique" mind-set steeped in "liberalism and elitism." "I…
I have seen the future of American sports, and its name is lacrosse. Football, baseball, basketball, and soccer will, sooner or later, be forced to step aside. They all have their fatal flaws anyway. Football stresses physical size, which is fine for Reggie White but not for the rest of us.…
Two weeks ago, chief judge Norma Holloway Johnson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia released a large collection of documents -- and her final ruling -- concerning the Clinton administration's refusal to allow testimony by Secret Service officials before Kenneth Starr's…
Veterans of the great Reagan-era debates over nuclear weaponry and the Star Wars missile defense are suddenly in demand again on Capitol Hill, what with all the hearings on the Chinese satellite-launch program and the India-Pakistan arms race. Sen. Thad Cochran's May 21 hearing on technology…
SCIENTISTS TELL US that a human embryo recapitulates in only nine months the entire evolution of life, from single-celled molecule to Homo sapiens. Something similar seems to be going on over at the Clinton White House: It appears bent on cramming a reenactment of every presidential scandal in…
SUNDAY, MAY 24. I'm at an old movie house in Brooklyn, the kind that people used to call a "nabe" -- a neighborhood theater, far removed from the grand palaces downtown, where moviegoers went to see a double-feature with a cartoon and a newsreel for a quarter. But there are no double-features…
As a leading cultural indicator, it doesn't rank up there with the national drop in crime. But it's close.
It was a hundred years ago that Oscar Wilde fell from the heights of literary London to a jail cell in Reading, and there is at present in America a virtual Greek festival of theater, film, and book projects making a cultural moment of the greatest wit ever to grace a buttonhole with a green…
THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased and proud to note the establishment last week of the Eric Breindel Memorial Foundation. Breindel, a distinguished columnist, editor, and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, died suddenly in March at the age of 42. News Corporation, Breindel's employer and the corporate parent of…
Bill Clinton's China policy is a scandal. Indeed, it's three scandals in one.
Some people think we are in for a long era of Republican rule, others think the Democrats will return as the majority party, but Richard Rorty, America's most famous academic philosopher, predicts we are about to become a dictatorship.
ON MAY 19, 58 SENATORS voted against an amendment that would have paid trial lawyers $ 250 an hour, plus expenses, for all the work they've done against tobacco companies. If the lawyers had been working full time, that would have meant half a million per year -- or $ 2.5 million for each lawyer,…
The Clinton administration made a fateful decision in 1996 to put the Commerce Department in charge of overseeing exports of American satellite technology. Under fire now for transferring this weighty responsibility from the more security-conscious State Department, the administration insists the…
How far is President Clinton in the pocket of organized labor these days? More than ever, and even on small matters. Take the plan in the anti-drug bill that came up in the House last week. The idea is to let the Customs Service rotate its agents, temporarily or permanently, to stop the flow of…
The American economy is currently purring along at effective full employment. That's good news, of course. But it's a problem, too, in this respect: In certain occupational categories -- relatively well-paid, high-tech positions in particular -- there are now more jobs available than there are…
For thirty years, crime and guns have been among the most hotly disputed and politically potent issues in America. Not surprisingly, slogans and anecdotes have been the principal ammunition. When empirical evidence has been allowed at all into debates about gun control, it has been notable mostly…
WHEN THE NAACP -- outraged that Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines the word "nigger" as "a black person" -- threatened last year to boycott Webster's dictionaries, it was hardly the first time the company had heard from angry readers: Merriam-Webster is always getting complaints.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Bill Archer, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, see eye to eye on most things -- but not on cutting the tax rate on capital gains to 15 percent this year. Gingrich believes the reduction from the current 20 percent would generate enough revenue to pay for…
WHEN THE NEWS BROKE THAT Johnny Chung had told Justice Department prosecutors he did indeed funnel Chinese government money to the Democrats during the 1996 elections, Sen. John McCain pounced on the story. "I think there's a number of people that owe Fred Thompson an apology," McCain said.
Presidential spokesman Mike McCurry last week justified the Clinton administration policy that allowed the transfer of satellite technology to the Chinese military with the hoary "they started it" defense. "This administration," said McCurry, "has pursued the exact same policy pursued by the Bush…
Add one more straw to the camel's back of evidence that Janet Reno's Justice Department has ceased to function as an independent law-enforcement agency -- and now operates, instead, as a coordinated arm of the president's personal criminal-defense team. The latest example comes from PBS's Frontline…
IT WAS A VERY STRANGE STRETCH of an already strange deposition. Ten times in a row, Ken Bacon, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, was asked whether he took responsibility for the release of confidential information from Linda Tripp's security file. And all ten times, he answered,…
American defense policy is at a crossroads: Will we shape the future to produce a generally peaceful, prosperous world, or will we allow the international system to become increasingly perilous and chaotic? The former course entails an arduous process of global engagement and steady expenditure on…
INDIA'S NUCLEAR-WEAPONS testing may have surprised many Americans -- especially the CIA and the Clinton administration -- but for people who remember the early history of the nuclear age there is a natural and immediate association of India with nuclear weapons. When the first mushroom cloud rose…
Cormac McCarthy is an odd duck in the literary pond. He appears on no literary panels, sits on none of the bookish juries that parcel out prestige, and is not given to signing petitions to save the sardines. More notoriously, he avoids the press. McCarthy is a novelist who sticks to his lathe --…
ON FRIDAY, A FEDERAL JUDGE in Washington rejected the Clinton administration's claims of "Secret Service privilege," a previously unknown legal theory that would have prevented members of the president's Secret Service detail from having to testify before the Lewinsky grand jury, even if they had…
Last week, my daughter Faith destroyed my lexicon of ancient Greek. Playing quietly half-hidden behind an armchair, she succeeded in tearing out a surprising number of pages before I caught her, and what she didn't tear she managed to fold, spindle, and mutilate. And it's while I was prying from…
Two years ago, on a hot August night, I was sitting in a car across from Roosevelt Park in Queens while Ron Naclerio explained, "The worst they can do is put a bullet in you. If anything breaks out and you hear shots, just get down on your stomach."