78 articles
On July 24, 1996, in the historic mahogany-paneled hearing room where grim-faced congressmen once considered the impeachment of President Nixon, chairman Bill McCollum of the House Crime Subcommittee gaveled for order. "There will be no photographs permitted of this witness," the Florida Republican…
IF PRESIDENT CLINTON could count on anyone in the press, it was Eleanor Clift, the Newsweek writer known in certain quarters as "Eleanor Rodham Clift." She never wavered.
The Russian financial crisis marks a watershed in that country's six-and-a-half-year-old attempt to build capitalism on the ruins of a giant, obsolete (mostly 1930s and 1950s vintage), urban, non-monetary, militarized, autarkic, state-owned economy, and to do so within the political framework of a…
The leering jokes of late-night comics. The armchair analyses of prime-time experts and pseudo-experts. The headlines and polls and spin and back-room calculation of everyday politics. Suddenly now, all this round-the-clock Lewinsky chatter seems so far short of the mark as to be beyond endurance.…
Like one of those in-bred attack dogs, Steven Brill simply cannot relax his jaws once he bites. In his errorridden article "Pressgate" in the inaugural issue of his magazine, Brill's Content, he took after Jackie Judd of ABC News for her reporting in January that Monica Lewinsky had a dress and…
What, exactly, is the line now for those who wish to stand four-square behind Hillary Rodham Clinton, feminist superhero? Is she extraordinarily smart, or extraordinarily naive?
Los Angeles
The column was a magazine editor's dream. Mike Barnicle told the story of the friendship of two boys, forged out of a mutual love of baseball, in the cancer section of Boston's Children's Hospital. "And on those dreamy summer nights when the Olde Towne Team was home, the two of them would sit by a…
On a brilliant August morning on a waterway west of Seattle off Puget Sound, I find myself deep inside the USS Ohio, the oldest (18 years) of the nation's Trident submarines. The Ohio is armed with two dozen long-range nuclear missiles, each capable of killing millions of people. Together the 18…
Back during the Cold War, all THE SCRAPBOOK's rightwing friends had nicknames for the notoriously leftwing news shows on National Public Radio -- Morning Sedition, for example. It was with nostalgia for those days gone by that we learned recently of the new moniker for donors to NPR-affiliate KAJX…
Last week, John F. Harris of the Washington Post reported that there were White House talking points for staff who were being asked how they felt about Clinton's confession of sex with Monica. According to the script, the approved spin was that the president should be forgiven. Indeed, someone had…
JOHN PODESTA, the deputy White House chief of staff, gathered a dozen "talkers" in his office two days after President Clinton addressed the nation about Monica Lewinsky. Talkers? You know, the Washington lawyers, consultants, and ex-administration officials who appear on TV chat shows and defend…
Black Mountain College, that utopian experiment in higher education and communal living, lasted only a little more than two decades: from 1933 to 1956. Yet even now, the college continues to fascinate, because so many of the persistent quandaries of academic life converged in that single North…
All day Monday, August 17, cable-TV junkies like THE SCRAPBOOK heard White House leaks about "The Speech." While the president was being grilled by Kenneth Starr and his prosecutors, White House officials were working the phones hyping the soon-to-be-delivered, long-awaited Clinton apology. Chief…
NO GOOD MORALITY TALE is complete these days without a wallow in the slough of victimhood, and the Monica Lewinsky affair is no exception. Those laying claim to the mantle of victim are many, ranging from President Clinton (in his blast against independent counsel Kenneth Starr when he was supposed…
"AT NO TIME DID I ASK ANYONE TO LIE," said Bill Clinton, lying, in his August 17 address to the nation. For seven months, the president asked his staffers and supporters to lie. He assured them -- some of them personally -- that he had told the truth when he denied a sexual relationship with Monica…
Why mince words? The 1502 scheme concocted by Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli -- a rare case of collaboration between geniuses of the first order -- proved an utter fiasco.
A side from the stories of Noah and Jonah, two chapters of Ezekiel, and a handful of passages in the Psalms and Job, sailors receive very little notice in the Old Testament. But in The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times, Raphael Patai contends that sea travel was no rarity for the…
Jeffrey Record is a prolific defense analyst who served with the State Department in Vietnam. In his new study, The Wrong War, he ascribes the defeat of the United States in the Vietnam war to arrogance, ethnocentrism, a disregard for history, and policies that were contradictory to the point of…
In this important and provocative new book, a respected college president looks at the crisis in American higher education, and if this sentence doesn't make you want to stop reading right now then there's something wrong with you. But wait. Josiah Bunting III is not an ordinary college president,…
Yasser Arafat showed once again this month that he is absolutely opposed to expanding Palestinian democracy. Since the Clinton administration has been silent on what happened, here is a brief account.
Does anybody, here in 1998, still believe that on-line chat is the most important use of the Internet? Sad to say, the answer is yes -- and not any old anybody, but Michael Godwin, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco think tank devoted to on-line issues.
In his much-noted recent address to the National Bar Association, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas finally got proper revenge on the critics who call him a race traitor, rebuking them to their face with courage and judiciousness: "I have come here today," he said, "to assert my right to think…
Last week, National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland told the Fox News Channel, "I think what we've seen, if these charges are true, is a man who follows a traditional model of dividing the world between women you have to respect, like Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Donna…
Every schoolboy used to know exactly when the modern world began. It was the 10th of November 1619, when a twenty-three-year-old French soldier named Rene Descartes curled up for the day in a "stove" (the heated guest room off a German inn's kitchen) and started to contemplate the rules by which…
Battambang, Cambodia
If there's anybody left in America who qualifies as genteel, surely it's New York Times columnist and PBS frontman Russell Baker. But these days Baker has been in what for him qualifies as a quaking rage. He recently wrote a column titled "A Shudder of Disgust," about the degradation of public…
THERE IS BOTH PROFIT AND PLEASURE to be derived from what may be called the poetry of mistake. Colley Cibber, perhaps the least talented of England's poet laureates, saw his play Love's Last Shift translated into French as La derniere chemise de l'amour. Scotland's Firth of Forth was translated by…
YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO Yugoslav president and ruler of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic. He has our number.
The full-figured lady has sung -- and retired to her mother's Watergate apartment -- but Washington's epic opera of presidential pathology is not quite over yet. The title character must now belt out his showstopper aria, which calls for him at last to tell the truth about his own behavior. It will…
IN AN ASTONISHING PAIR OF REPORTS at the end of last week, the Washington Post and NBC revealed that the Clinton administration has repeatedly sought to limit the work of United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq. Administration officials -- led by secretary of state Madeleine Albright -- have, in…
A production glitch in our last issue lopped off the final words of David Gelernter's "The Future of Art." Here is the final paragraph as it should have appeared:
When Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for the brouhaha over her husband's occasional use of Monica Lewinsky, she seemed to have reached the apex of silliness. But when she added last Monday, to an interviewer from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, that "a lot of this is…
ALL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT the president's predicament, whether at dinner parties or on talk radio, in neighborhood bars or on cable TV, seem to unfold with an almost ritualized predictability.
WHAT IF REPUBLICANS NOMINATED for governor a fringe figure with a history of making derogatory comments about Catholics and Jews? Klansman David Duke created roughly this scenario seven years ago in Louisiana. The national media charged that hateful extremists were taking over the GOP. And…
It's a bit of an oxymoron: Christian journalist. On the one hand, you're supposed to be meek, forgiving, and agreeable. Roughly speaking, those are the attributes of Christians as laid down by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. All the normal characteristics of human behavior -- Christ stood…
The day after terrorists blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Sandy Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, held a meeting at the White House to discuss the American response to the bombings. The secretaries of state and defense, along with the attorney general and the heads of…
If music has a mystery man, it must be Sergiu Celibidache, the late Romanian conductor who refused to record, forsook celebrity, and held legions of admirers in his spell. He belongs with the first rank of conductors -- Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, George Szell -- yet he is relatively…
Unless the United States has communication intercepts revealing who bombed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the search for the guilty will probably be an exhausting exercise involving meticulous police work, intelligence liaison, and luck. Connecting the terrorists' modus…
AMERICAN JOURNALISM REACHED a landmark of sorts last month, and the moment shouldn't be allowed to pass without suitable fanfare, however tardy. On Late Edition, CNN's Sunday-morning political talk show, three of the show's regular panelists gathered as usual to chew over the week's news. The…
It turns out, just as we always suspected, that Bill Clinton really is human, after all. He has appeared vaguely inhuman, of course, to friend and foe alike, through much of his career. For his dazzled admirers, he has been a comic-book hero made real, a public figure of para-normal steel and…
All the news about subpoenas, stains, and the Secret Service has overshadowed the ongoing investigation of how the Clinton administration's relaxation of export regulations on high-tech products may have undermined American national security. But that could change soon. Last week, the Chicago…
Anyone who doubts that the ideal of assimilation is under siege should look at the reception of The Accidental Asian, Eric Liu's new meditation on identity. What criticism Liu has received thus far has been for his defense of assimilation -- which is proof of how far we've fallen, for Liu's defense…
Can't Gennifer Flowers get any respect? Here's a woman who told us all we need to know about Bill Clinton, and America kind of shoved her aside -- shut up, lady, we've got a New Democrat to elect. The tapes she made of the then-governor showed us Clinton in all his glory, pressing the themes of his…
WHO IS THE LEADING CLINTON APOLOGIST on television? None other than Geraldo Rivera, who has spent 1998 mauling Kenneth Starr and swathing the president in sympathy. And who is television's foremost Clinton attacker? Almost certainly Chris Matthews, who rides the president relentlessly, appalled…
Wherein lies the pleasure of catching someone out in an error? It gives one, no doubt, that little touch of self-congratulatory superiority that helps one get through another day. It's finest when one catches an enemy or adversary in an error, but catching a person one is quite neutral about will…
Palatine, Ill.
Ken Starr may want to subpoena Mike McCurry's bookstore receipts to find out whether F. H. Bradley has been on the White House spokesman's reading list. McCurry's discourse with reporters last week on "ontology" puts THE SCRAPBOOK in mind of the late-Victorian philosopher, who was something of a…
YOU CAN'T AVOID THEM. The Mobil Corporation's paid "editorials" have been bombarding readers of the New York Times op-ed page for 28 years. Immediately recognizable by their bold-print headlines -- "Let's nurture human rights -- not dictate them," "Singapore: an orchid in the Pacific," "An argument…
Linda Tripp, says Margaret Carlson, when she pressed the "on" button of her little tape recorder, "lost membership in the family of man." Read herself out of the human community. Lost contact with the whole human race. And for what crime? Not murder, not larceny, not even lying; but for recording…
Where does art stand today? Where is it headed? The art world is dark and stormy, visibility is zero, and apocalyptic predictions split the air. Most thoughtful people have barred the door against contemporary art in hopes it will blow over -- which is understandable.
THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM in Washington, D.C., is perpetuating a falsehood; and, worst of all, it knows it.
In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau declared, "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."
Bluster minus resolve equals humiliation: That is the Clinton foreign-policy formula. Over the past five years, the United States has endured such humiliations in Somalia, in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, and at the hands of China and Iran. Last month, it suffered yet another -- this time at the United…
When William J. Brennan stepped down from the Supreme Court in 1990, he received a chorus of extravagant praise not heard since Earl Warren retired in 1969. And when Brennan died last year, there was bestowed upon him the rhetorical equivalent of a state funeral. The general sense of these glowing…
ON JUNE 16, the Senate considered a proposal to cap at $ 4,000 per hour the amount plaintiff's attorneys can charge in tobacco litigation. It was a revealing moment: What would anti-tobacco Democrats do? By voting for the cap, they could increase the tobacco bill's chances of passage and avoid the…
No sooner had Linda Tripp finished her final day of testimony before the grand jury last week than word leaked out that her old pal Monica Lewinsky was crediting Tripp herself, of all people, with authoring the now-famous "talking points." Lewinsky gave Tripp the talking points, interestingly…
THE DAY AFTER MONICA LEWINSKY turned state's evidence, eight Republican senators gathered for lunch at the Capitol. Most assumed the deepening White House scandals would aid Republicans in House and Senate races this fall. But there was still uneasiness. What's needed to assure GOP success, said…
Norman Mailer has quipped that the difference between Bill Clinton's womanizing and Jack Kennedy's is that Kennedy had better taste in women. Coming from the biographer of Marilyn Monroe, the barb was tipped with an extra dose of insult. But it also contained an irony unnoticed by press or public.…
Alexandria, Va.
Steven Spielberg wants you to know that War is Hell. In service of this profoundly original idea, which no one has had the courage or wisdom to express before, he has given birth to Saving Private Ryan. Using all the cinematic magic at his command -- which is almost unlimited, given that he is the…
From one point of view, the fact that the twentieth century's most important philosopher is also its most notorious is of no importance. As the famous scholar of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilson, once observed, everything in the history of philosophy that can be traced to history is irrelevant…
Had Barbara Battalino not accepted responsibility for her crime, the Clinton Justice Department would surely have brought her to trial and pressed to have her convicted, then incarcerated for at least 10 months, as federal sentencing guidelines demand. But Battalino spared the government the…
Ever since President Clinton signed the welfare-reform bill two years ago, his administration has been fiddling with technical parts of the law to blunt its impact. Now a Republican is trying to get into the act. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey has introduced legislation that proposes to penalize…
Ulysses S. Grant is universally ranked among the greatest American generals, and his Memoirs are widely considered to belong with the best military autobiographies ever written. But he is inevitably named, by conservatives as well as liberals, as one of the worst presidents in American history.
Thanks to the Clinton administration's notion of "environmental justice," black Americans in poor communities are being deprived of industry, jobs, and economic growth.
Iran launched a new North Korean-designed missile last week that will extend the deadly reach of the mullahs to Israel and beyond, as well as threatening thousands of U.S. troops in the Middle East. The North Korean version of the missile has an 800-mile range; Iran's may go slightly farther.…
I know a guy who grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Providence where he played stickball daily with kids he'd known his whole life, went out for homemade ices with them at the end of the day, knew all the shopkeepers -- the pickle man, the candy man, the hardware man -- and grew roly-poly on his…
SHRINKS LIKE TO SPEAK OF "Stockholm Syndrome," to denote that scary psychological condition in which captives begin to "bond" -- another shrink term -- with their kidnappers. It is seen, for example, among battered wives, whose love for the men who abuse them may only deepen with time. "Why, if you…
The Supreme Court's doctrine of a wall between church and state has become something more in America than merely legal opinion. It is a shibboleth, an icon, a touchstone. It seems almost an article of faith, and it surely must be what the founders themselves intended for the nation: the third in a…
IN THE ANTI-TOBACCO CRUSADE, the number 3,000 is king. The most cherished statistic of the crusade is that 3,000 kids a day begin to smoke. The next most cherished statistic is that 3,000 non-smokers a year die of "secondhand smoke." These figures fly through the air like missiles, launched by…
Was it just coincidence or did President Clinton sound a lot like Lou Gehrig the weekend before last during his Arkansas trip? In his famous valedictory speech to Yankee fans after contracting the disease that would bring him down in his prime, Gehrig, choking back tears, called himself "the…
Fatherhood and manliness have always been closely connected, not only because fathering a child is a palpable proof of manhood, but also because fathers are supposed to provide their sons with a model of what to become. And yet, as a culture, we have never been more conflicted about what we mean by…
WHEN THE AMERICANS with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, advocates for the law spoke of common-sense accommodations for the disabled, like wheelchair ramps and braille elevator buttons. Instead, the ADA has served a different social mission: highlighting the myriad of ways in which a litigious…
Last week, the Pentagon issued its report on CNN and Time's ill-fated nerve-gas "scoop." As expected, the search of Vietnam-era military archives turned up no evidence of the tall tale that CNN and Time had already retracted -- namely, that U.S. Special Forces were sent to Laos in 1970 to…
TAX CUTS ONCE PRODUCED UNITY among Republicans, but no longer. When GOP congressional leaders met in House speaker Newt Gingrich's office on the evening of July 22, talk of a large tax cut generated anger, frustration, and ill will. Bill Archer, the normally mild-mannered chairman of the House Ways…
Moscow
The notion of assembling a panel of judges and voting on the "Random House/Modern Library List of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century" was a silly one to begin with -- an effort to arrive at a 1950s-style consensus that hasn't existed since, well, the 1950s. But then, some…