76 articles
From the externals, you couldn't have guessed that the gathering was in any way remarkable. The dozen or so participants came one by one, over several days, to a spacious, sparsely furnished suburban house in one of China's most populous provinces. Most of them were men, in their forties or older.…
(slightly abridged)
SEVEN MONTHS AFTER the Clinton administration backed down from its confrontation with Saddam Hussein, the disastrous consequences of that retreat are on full display. Whether or not Saddam makes good on his threat to throw out the U.N. weapons inspectors, he has now enjoyed almost two months…
AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE LAST WEEK, Bill Clinton received one question he clearly relished: Would his current troubles harm his cherished race initiative? No, Clinton answered -- especially given "the response you've seen from some sectors of the American community," which has "reinforced and…
Meeting with the top brass last week at the National Defense University in Washington, President Clinton pronounced himself satisfied that "our forward-deployed and first-to-fight units are highly ready." But ready for what? The cruise missiles the president launched against terrorist targets last…
During his January 17 deposition in the Paula Jones civil suit, President Clinton was asked this rather simple question: "At any time, were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?" Clinton answered, "I don't recall," and then launched a longish speculation about how it was…
Here's a fascinatingly contemporary-sounding dispatch from the June 21, 1963, Time, on Great Britain's Clintonesque "Profumo Affair":
Several commercial publishers have now come out with their own editions of the Starr Report, and none of the book covers contains blurbs. You can only wonder at the missed opportunity. The newspapers and magazines are chockfull of stirring possibilities. "It's raw!" -- Time. "Excruciatingly vivid!"…
A tippler I take to be someone who boozes in small quantities but regularly, stopping just short of actual drunkenness. Your tippler tends to operate on the sly, if not the sneak. He ducks into a bar for a quick one. He keeps a bottle in the office, maybe a flask in the car. The thought of being…
PRESIDENT CLINTON'S "REBUTTAL" to the Starr report denies there are grounds for impeachment because the report fails to provide unambiguous evidence of perjury. Any members of the House inclined to take the word of David Kendall and Charles Ruff, the lawyers who penned the rebuttal, will want first…
WHEN HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH and other Republicans met with a delegation of social conservatives on September 17, the first piece of advice came from Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. "Please kill censure," Weyrich said. Gingrich didn't obfuscate or waffle. "I won't schedule [a vote…
THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICA'S LIBYA POLICY -- nearly lost in the recent crush of news -- should not be allowed to pass unnoticed, for the Clinton administration's reversal of almost seven years of consistent policy on the Pan Am 103 bombing is highly damaging. Not only does the administration's…
It is with more than a touch of sarcasm that Robert H. Knight entitles his new critique of relativism The Age of Consent. This is Knight's preferred moniker for the present era, a time in which phony tolerance has become a governing principle. Knight explains that tolerance, "like any other good…
At his press conference last week alongside Vaclav Havel, Clinton offered examples of work he'd like the government to buckle down to: One of the top items on his list was the elimination of the backlog at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. People say that this president is too distracted…
Presidential aide and ex-journalist Sid Blumenthal could conceivably be in legal as well as professional peril if it can be proved that he played a role in circulating stories about the lives of Rep. Henry Hyde and others. THE SCRAPBOOK has learned that, in a deposition for his libel lawsuit…
Gordon MacDonald is one of the three pastors President Clinton now summons for weekly prayer and guidance -- what he calls his "accountability group." And he included MacDonald, senior minister at Grace Chapel outside Boston, for a special reason. The president told MacDonald he'd read his book,…
Presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal denies spreading nasty rumors to help the president (see above). Really? In a fascinating article for the Nation last March, veteran left-wing journalist Doug Ireland followed up on an MSNBC report that Clintonites had been digging into the sexual preferences of…
They called him the "Emperor," and when he died on September 6 at the age of eighty-eight, the newspaper obituaries were filled with stories of Akira Kurosawa's imperious -- and imperial -- arrogance.
It was a remark of dazzling, if unintended, self-revelation. But its perversity being subtle, it went entirely unnoticed. It does not deserve such obscurity.
I HAD ARRIVED LATE FOR A RALLY in the south Alabama town of Robertsdale on the first day of George Corley Wallace's 1970 campaign for governor. Late on that early-spring evening, some 5,000 Alabamans -- all white, predominantly male, and many wearing bib overalls -- turned out for fried fish and…
Weirdly enough, the very grossness of President Clinton's misconduct has proven to be his best defense. The details of Kenneth Starr's report to Congress are so lurid that it's hard at first to see past them (this is almost certainly the first government document in history whose readers have…
The year was 1961 -- an incredible time for a sixteen-year-old kid to be a magazine intern in Washington, D.C.
Just look at them sitting together, luxuriating in one another's gazes like fat hounds in the sun: Over there, the First Amendment lawyers, with their chalkstripes and barrel cuffs and owlish widow's peaks. There's the professoriat, suited up in seat-cleaving Dockers and itchy tweeds or…
He has known this day would eventually come. He has not cared. At last, it has come, and he still does not care. He will stay clawed to his White House desk until his fingers are bloody stumps -- and until the nation's expectations for its leader are similarly reduced and wounded. He would sooner…
Fanesville, Wisconsin
SINCE REPUBLICANS TOOK CONTROL of Congress in 1994, Democrats have pursued a simple strategy in congressional investigations of President Clinton: obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. In 1995, they denounced the Senate Banking Committee probe of the Whitewater scandal as partisan, then impeded its…
"GET ON WITH IT." Sound advice about impeaching the president from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York.
Good thing the British novelist Kingsley Amis is dead, because I want to write about his sensibility -- just the kind of lit-crit buzzword that would have caused him to hurl this article across the room and denounce its writer as a F -- ING FOOL (his favorite epithet, always capitalized but without…
Pour a couple drinks into a Republican above a certain age, turn the conversation to politics, and the odds are that sooner or later he will start to grumble about the bad rap Richard Nixon got. The wiretapping didn't start with Nixon, after all -- and what were people supposed to do in 1968…
THERE IS A POINT AT WHICH EVEN James Carville runs out of spin. Until recently, that point existed only in theory. Then, last week, Ken Starr submitted his report on the Lewinsky investigation to Capitol Hill and the normally talkative consultant seemed to run out of things to say. So, Carville was…
Before you skip to the dirty parts of the Starr report (THE SCRAPBOOK assumes that, thanks to Al Gore's "information superhighway," you have a personal copy by now), there is a fascinating bit in the introduction called "current status of the investigation." It makes clear that last week's report…
When people from my state are asked where we're from, we always answer, "Jersey." A cab driver once tried to pin me down on this. Bostonians, Chicagoans, and New Yorkers all name their city proudly, he said, even if they're really from Brookline or Libertyville or Westchester Country. What's wrong…
An audience of 200 mostly liberal professors got a bit of a shock at the recent convention of the American Political Science Association in Boston. Duke University's Stanley Fish, the well-known left-wing social and literary critic, expressly disavowed support for "abortion rights" and chastised…
Suspicious White House reporters who have long parsed every jot and tittle of presidential speech have been utterly vindicated by the Starr report. The man whose name gave us the adjective "Clintonian," it turns out, is an expert parser of his own sentences. The report's footnote 1128, THE…
Let us recall now George Will's maxim that staffs, over time, take on the characteristics of their bosses. Back in February, Republican prosecutor Joe diGenova charged that he and his wife, Victoria Toensing (another Republican prosecutor), were being investigated by private eyes tied to the…
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
The Starr report is so devastatingly thorough in corroborating every damning detail of Monica Lewinsky's testimony that the possible defenses of the president's behavior have shrunk almost to the vanishing point. In fact, rather than deny Clinton's immorality and illegality, David Kendall was…
There is a new "Big Idea" abroad in the land -- no, in the world. "The United States and President Clinton's administration are at the forefront of an important transformation taking hold in the wealthy democracies of Europe and North America," writes E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post. Why, this…
In Great Souls, David Aikman has assembled brief biographies of six modern figures, all but one of whom are still living: Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Elie Wiesel. Each of these six has indeed "changed the century," and for the better.
Officially, at least, the White House line remains that President Clinton's August 17 mea-sorta-culpa speech achieved a thorough-going catharsis on the Monica Lewinsky matter -- both for him personally and for all America. He has been "quite heartened by the reaction," Clinton surreally suggested…
"People expect you to look them in the eye, tell em the truth, and they evaluate it."
It is no surprise that the world's most prominent wronged wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is feeling underappreciated at home these days. But isn't this taking things a bit far? In a discussion with Russian women in Moscow last week, the first lady said that nothing ails the world's women that a good…
Merrimack, N. H.
When I was 11, my family got lost in rural Tennessee and stopped at a fireworks store to get directions. Mom pulled our Honda station-wagon with its Garden State plates into the dirt parking lot, and I went into ask the way to the Hungry Mother Campground. The woman behind the counter was…
Dean Acheson may be the most respected secretary of state of the last fifty years, but he is also the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented. The Cold War policies he helped put in place -- the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, containment, the global ideological and…
Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter, the "inside news of public relations," had a fascinating item in its August 26 edition on the president's televised Lewinsky speech. Big-league PR executives commented on Clinton's body language and tone of voice and whatnot. One of them, however, disdained all such talk…
In June 1985, two former Marines turned would-be survivalists -- Leonard Lake and Charles Ng -- were caught shoplifting a $ 75 vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco. Ng managed to flee. His friend Lake, while in custody, wrote a note to his exwife, then killed himself, swallowing a…
THE U.S. ECONOMY AND FINANCIAL MARKETS are now beginning to reel from the crisis in Asia that has spread throughout the developing world. As the crisis lingers and deepens, many of Asia's leaders are questioning the value of globalization and open markets.
Joe Biden of Delaware turned in a shameful performance at last week's Senate hearing with Scott Ritter -- the United Nations official who recently resigned because the Clinton administration was blocking his weapons inspections in Iraq (see Matthew Rees's "Smearing Scott Ritter," page 9). Biden…
A HALLMARK OF THE Clinton administration is the personal smear. Billy Dale, Linda Tripp, Paul McHale -- all tarred because they interfered with President Clinton and his objectives.
The printer garbled the final paragraph of Christopher Matthews's review last week ("Clinton v. America? Bill Bennett's Book of Outrage"). It should have read: "We have an uninterrupted democracy stretching back to the eighteenth century. Unlike the French, we haven't had a Second Republic or…
IF YOU BELIEVE REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS and others in the conservative movement, the issue of tax reform is a sure winner. The debate, it is said, is not about whether tax reform will cross the finish line in the next few years, but about which horse -- the flat tax or the national sales tax -- is…
Geoffrey Fieger, the out-of-control Democratic nominee for governor in Michigan, continues to be an embarrassment to the Democratic party. His failure to retract any of his venomous statements -- he's compared Orthodox rabbis to Nazis -- prompted Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League to send…
WE CAN'T READ THEIR MINDS, of course, but the hoary defenders of the Social Security status quo would have had to be superhuman not to cheer as the stock market slid through the last week of August and then crashed on the 31st. For years they have endured the complaints of young taxpayers that…
Austin, Texas
AS PRESIDENT CLINTON'S DATE with the grand jury approached, Lawrence Walsh was feeling queasy. "My instinct is to shut my eyes," he told a television audience. The Iran-contra prosecutor was hardly known for delicacy when he was pursuing Presidents Reagan and Bush. What had so perturbed him now? "I…
THIS FALL, 23 NEW EDISON SCHOOLS -- public schools managed by Christopher Whittle's Edison Project -- are opening around the country. This will nearly double the number of Edison schools in operation, and it will significantly increase the total number of public schools being run by for-profit…
Richard Goodwin, a liberal light little seen since the Johnson era, emerged recently to lecture us about sex and mendacity, defending President Clinton from the sex-crazed hordes bearing down on him. Sex, he told us in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, is never an issue, and lies are lies only…
THESE DAYS, RUSSIA'S ECONOMY depresses everyone. But it's worth remembering that just a few years ago, it was a glamorous and promising story. In the early nineties, when communism was freshly dead, Moscow was awash with Western experts telling the Russians how to reform their economy. These people…
William J. Bennett has beaten Kenneth Starr into print. While The Death of Outrage, Bennett's new lickety-split critique of the Clinton-Lewinsky farrago, is no Book of Virtues, it is guaranteed to make its author the hottest guest on the TV talk-show circuit. What the short, little book lacks in…
Last week's article on the Laborers' International union, "A Corrupt Union and the Mob," mistakenly attributed a quotation to Arthur E. Coia, father of the union's current president. It was not Coia but rather his pal, New England mafia boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca, who was overheard by the FBI…
As WASHINGTON GEARS UP for the arrival in the House of Representatives of Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton's impeachable offenses, a particularly virulent strain of wannabe conventional wisdom has been making the rounds. It is that Republicans would prefer (if they put party ahead of…
When it comes to American Catholics now in their twenties and thirties, the words "well grounded in the faith" do not spring immediately to mind. We are, for the most part, an astonishingly undereducated generation, calling ourselves Catholic -- or "culturally Catholic," or "raised Catholic," or…
Bill Clinton's foreign policy is in tatters. Republicans are pointing this out, and they're right to. But can they go beyond criticizing Clinton? Can they articulate a coherent alternative to his policies? It so happens that their political interests coincide with the interests of the nation.…
The last American forces left southeast Asia twenty-five years ago, but we are still being startled by "revelations" about the Vietnam War, most recently the CNN-Time magazine joint report that American troops attacked a Laotian village with illegal nerve gas during a covert operation to kill…
Most high-school textbooks claim the First World War precipitated the breakup of the British Empire, but it's hard to believe British newspapers didn't have something to do with it. Outside of San Francisco, Great Britain consistently produces the worst daily journalism in the civilized world,…
Bill Clinton isn't the only one who's apologized (or feigned an apology) for sex this summer. Anglican bishops formed their own mea culpa choir at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England in July and August. Most of their regret was sexrelated.
IN THE MOST STINGING INDICTMENT YET of the Clinton administration's Iraq policy, United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter resigned last week. He wrote that Washington's unwillingness to hold Iraq to the letter of numerous Security Council resolutions "makes a mockery of the [U.N.…
THIS TIME LAST YEAR, I arrived in London just days after the death of the princess of Wales. The city was paralyzed by the rites of mourning. Every park and monument was piled yards high with floral tributes, sometimes for blocks. Amidst the bouquets were thousands of tiny, elaborate shrines --…
Support for school vouchers and education tax credits is on the rise -- and not just among Republicans. The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools found that 51 percent of Americans now favor the government's paying part or all of a child's private-school bills.…
Thirty years ago this month, Bobby Kennedy died. What might have been? Did hope exit with him? Or was he over rated?
The Taliban, the militant rulers of Afghanistan who also play benevolent landlord to terrorist Osama Bin Laden, are in an undeniable public-relations tailspin. Their two-year reign, if you believe infidel Western foreign correspondents, has been a roundelay of compulsory dress codes, public…
"I would hope every American adult, even those who smoke, would think, as I had to when I became president and I had this occasional bad habit of having my cigar once in a while, I would hope they would think about not doing it in public, not doing it around children, not setting a bad example. I…
So what's Bill Clinton's reward for pushing the (ill-advised) Chemical Weapons Convention through the Senate last year? Being undercut by the arms controllers at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- the bureaucracy that oversees compliance with the chemical-arms treaty.
It is the mark of boys to mistake how things work for why they work, to become fascinated with the mechanisms that make the wheels go 'round and forget to watch where the train is going.
Another revealing sign of the incredible parochialism of the New York Times. On August 28, the Times ran a story on how women view Clinton, based on "dozens of interviews across the country." The story found that while "women" are disappointed in the president, many would vote for him again.