63 articles
My father always insisted on an early Christmas breakfast -- a huge feast of eggs poached in milk, and bacon and hashbrowns and pancakes and marmalade and grapefruit and a sort of sweetened toast whose name I can't remember, but it tasted like corrugated cardboard with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled…
MY FATHER ALWAYS INSISTED on an early Christmas breakfast--a huge feast of eggs poached in milk, and bacon and hashbrowns and pancakes and marmalade and grapefruit and a sort of sweetened toast whose name I can't remember, but it tasted like corrugated cardboard with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on…
Over the years, I have read at least four biographies of the sixteenth-century politician, scholar, lawyer, writer, diplomat, and saint, Sir Thomas More. But Peter Ackroyd's new biography, The Life of Thomas More, is the first that I wanted to start again as soon as I finished. It may be, quite…
FINALLY, FOR THE FIRST TIME in the six years of his administration, President Clinton took vigorous military action against Iraq. Nonetheless, his December 16 speech to the nation was unclear about both the real objectives of the attack and the level and duration of force that were to be applied.…
THE RALLY ORGANIZED BY JESSE JACKSON on the Capitol steps last week was advertised as a prayer vigil against impeachment; but for demonstrator Haji Warf, a 33-year-old non-profit-foundation employee from the Virginia suburbs, the event was "part of the grieving process." Warf has been involved in…
THOSE WHO BELIEVE CLINTON is an innocent lamb also believe, with unwavering certainty, two "truths." The impeachment process is a subversion of the democratic process; and the vast right-wing conspiracy is behind it all.
There's news aplenty from the vast leftwing conspiracy. Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt described the investigators he has hired to look into congressional sex lives as "friends of people inside the White House." He says there may have been conversations between his crack team and Clinton…
REP. BOB LIVINGSTON'S SATURDAY-MORNING surprise resignation threw House Republicans into confusion and chaos. But only for about an hour. Before most Americans even learned that Livingston had withdrawn as speaker-designate, a number of his colleagues had already spread word that they intended to…
It was while he was first running for president that Bill Clinton promised that his foreign policy would have only two touchstones: the promotion of democracy and the halting of arms proliferation. But somewhere along the way, he managed to forget his promise. "Commercial diplomacy" is instead what…
What a magnificent speech the chairman of the House Judiciary committee delivered last Friday to begin the impeachment debate. A friend of ours was particularly struck by one passage. At a time when too much rhetoric reduces every issue to "the children," our friend pointed out that Hyde managed to…
Just as we were despairing that today's children, seduced by the Information Age, might never learn to read for pleasure, a new strategy to draw them back to the stacks has emerged: the translation of children's books into Latin.
I confess to having been mildly embarrassed when Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemalan political activist and author of I, Rigoberta Menchu, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The Chronicle of Higher Education called the very day her prize was announced and reminded me that in my book Illiberal Education…
No one in New York or Washington or even Boston expects to find much happening out along the United States' northern border -- and most of the people who live there seem to think that's just fine. The northlanders -- Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher explains in his North Country: A Personal…
THE CAPITOL, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18
THE DECISIVE MOMENT in the House Judiciary Committee's deliberations over impeachment occurred the morning of November 4. The previous day's disappointing election returns were still dribbling in, and there was speculation the Republicans would scale back their inquiry. The quickly emerging…
Bumper sticker sighted last week in the Pentagon parking lot: "Only two bombing days left till Ramadan."
One of the mysteries of the past year is why no member of the White House staff felt compelled to resign over Bill Clinton's dishonesty. Maybe the answer is they just stopped thinking about it very hard. The day before the impeachment vote, former spokesman Mike McCurry was asked by a BBC…
The reason why Bill Clinton was impeached turns out to be not very mysterious: So-called "moderate Republicans" looked at the evidence and decided the president had perjured himself. They made the difference.
THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S DEFENDERS are shocked, absolutely shocked, that anyone might think the timing of the raid on Iraq had something to do with the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives. Geraldo Rivera -- usually a reliable indicator of this administration's thinking -- opined on…
With the impeachment of Bill Clinton, our long national nightmare of the self-contradicting New York Times editorial board is mercifully brought to a conclusion. Originally, the Times editorialists ardently promoted censure of the president, but only if he admitted his lies. Then -- as we noted…
WHAT CHANGED? A month ago, Republican governors gathered in New Orleans and sneered at the bid to impeach President Clinton. "We're all kind of tired of it," Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania told a reporter. "You and I know there will be no impeachment." This assessment was echoed by the mainstream…
The modern American political party is a frequently disappointing beast. And the Republican party, sure enough, has all too often in recent years disappointed us with graceless or timid leadership. This magazine has never hesitated to point out these GOP weaknesses. They still exist, and we do not…
Last week's air and missile attacks on Iraq, for all the damage they inflicted, didn't accomplish much of lasting importance. Military planners seemed to be targeting Saddam Hussein's elite forces in the hopes of stirring a general uprising in the regular army. But officials admit they were just…
According to White House counsel Charles F. C. Ruff, Bill Clinton could not have perjured himself because "in his mind -- and that's the heart and soul of perjury -- he thought and he believed that what he was doing was being evasive but truthful."
The headline over the December 8 story in the New York Times business section captured perfectly Microsoft CEO Bill Gates's brilliant, even Clintonian defense against the government's anti-trust case: "Gates Criticizes government's Lawyers for Tone of His Deposition." The story continued: "Gates .…
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, first lady of the United States for two years and ten months some thirty-five years ago, has been the subject of more attention than all the other first ladies put together.
In late 1943, film mogul Jack Warner paid the extravagant sum of $ 300,000 to Cole Porter for the rights to make a movie about the composer's life. But it would be more than a year before filming would start -- in no small part because Warner Brothers' screenwriters had no idea how to make the…
Twenty years ago, my elementary-school friends teased me for dressing up on Halloween as Gene Simmons, the freakish bassist in the rock band Kiss. Last month, my Washington friends teased me for going to see Simmons -- still a freakish bassist for Kiss -- in concert. Some things never change.
Phil Lader, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, gave a talk recently in London at the annual Christmas lunch (about 600 people) of the American Chamber of Commerce. During his brief remarks, he said that we have to find a way to govern multiethnic societies such as America's, "in which…
IMAGINE YOU'RE SEAN WILENTZ. For years, you have labored in the vineyards of academia, writing footnoted books, getting tenure, rising to become director of the American Studies program at Princeton. Things are going well. Then, suddenly, you become famous -- not for your research on 19th-century…
Liberal Minnesota is the last place you'd expect to find an anti-"sex-ed" revolution. But in Osseo, a large suburban district near Minneapolis, parents fed up with "value-neutral" sexuality instruction have overthrown the old regime. Starting in 1999, Osseo schools will offer a two-track sex-ed…
In marathon sessions all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning of last week, the House Judiciary Committee allowed the White House to summon 14 uninterrupted expert witnesses in a final defense of the president. Few of these witnesses said anything even remotely notable.
President Clinton's embarrassing failure in November to punish Iraq militarily illuminates two broad and profoundly disturbing themes of his foreign policy. The first is his near-compulsive unwillingness to use decisive military force to achieve critical American objectives, even when conditions…
THE PRESIDENT IS SECOND TO NONE in recognizing what was wrong in his behavior and apologizing to those who he's affected and hurt." Those few words by presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart last Monday unintentionally revealed how President Clinton has come to stand on the brink of impeachment by the…
A recent report by the International Labor Organization -- the United Nations labor panel -- shows that not all of Asia's problems are economic. "The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia" is the ILO's 222-page survey of what it calls "sex work" in Thailand,…
For the time being, the Supreme Court has allowed the Wisconsin Educational Choice plan to go forward. As a result, low-income families in Milwaukee can use their share of state education funds to attend the public or private (including religious) school of their choice. Teachers' unions and other…
If simply to be an American is "a complex fate," as Henry James once declared, then the fate of an American who chooses to live most of his life in England must be something more than complex -- maybe compound complex, like an especially nasty fracture. In Improvised Europeans: American Literary…
THE LINE FROM PRESIDENT CLINTON'S CAMP is that the people have spoken on impeachment and they're massively against it. "The message of last month's election," said Rep. Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, was simply, forget about impeaching Clinton. Abbe Lowell, Democratic counsel on the House…
THE SCRAPBOOK might be tempted to predict the impeachment of the president, except for the wise words of the Baltimore pundit H. L. Mencken, who observed famously that -- how does it go? -- no one ever went broke underestimating the squishiness of congressional Republicans. And it's not just the…
In an amazing feat of intellectual jujitsu, the White House and influential segments of the media have managed to construe the perjury and impeachment of a Democratic president -- and the eerie lock-step support of that president by Democrats in Congress -- as an hour of peril for, yes, the…
RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 8
Some defense of the president that was! For most of the summer and fall, Bill Clinton's apologists have argued that the case against him boils down to a cultural offensive by the sex-hating Christian Right in league with a censorious hymn-humming prosecutor. THE SCRAPBOOK chalked this up to the…
In a column last week in the New York Post, Dan Seligman thoroughly embarrassed the New York Times editorial page by comparing its positions on impeachment over the last four months. From the assertion that "the rule of law is too vital to be sacrificed," the Times editorialists evolved in a brief…
That empty-sounding new Al Gore slogan, "practical idealism," rang a bell with one fan of THE SCRAPBOOK, who kindly faxed in the following book excerpt:
DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATIVE VIRGIL GOODE of Virginia -- that's rural, conservative, Southside Virginia, in his case -- scarcely knows President Clinton. "I've never talked to him except when I went over to the White House for the Christmas party and shook his hand," Goode says. That was in 1997,…
New York is revising its state history curriculum for high school students, and the first draft is beyond parody. The last major rewrite, in 1987, contained partisan howlers like a "Dismantling the Great Society" section for the Nixon years and multicultural excesses like tracing the intellectual…
IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE A SADDER GROUP of people than the children of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union. I am thinking of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the son of Alger Hiss, and now Harry Dexter White's two daughters, who in a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review…
At a December 1 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the consequences of dishonest legal testimony, Judge Leon Higginbotham Jr., appearing for the committee's Democrats, suggested that a "per se perjury" trigger for presidential impeachment would be preposterously extreme. What if President Clinton…
THE WHITE HOUSE -- supremely confident until two weeks ago that the House of Representatives would not impeach the president -- is suddenly on the defensive. Lawyers for President Clinton, reversed themselves last week and decided to appear at the House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for…
WHEN JACK KEVORKIAN APPEARED on 60 Minutes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to explain his killing of Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig's disease, Kevorkian justified his crime to Mike Wallace by claiming Youk was scared to death of choking on his own saliva. Wallace, a vocal euthanasia supporter,…
The soon-to-be-departing Newt Gingrich leaves many legacies for the next Republican Congress to build on. But one of them is a minor scandal. Sometime last year, Gingrich pulled money out of the Pentagon budget to set up yet another interminable, congressionally mandated study of U.S. national…
We're reaching the tail end of the contented nineties and there's not a compelling legislative debate on the horizon. The do-nothing Republican Congress is still beating the dead impeachment horse. And the White House types are still harking back to the glory days of the Family and Medical Leave…
GALINA STAROVOITOVA was a brilliant and memorable member of Russia's Duma. To admirers, she was a lioness, fiercely defending Russia's ethnic minorities from the tyranny of surrounding majorities. She championed decency in the face of all forms of bigotry, and grasped the folly of attempting to…
On the night of February 23, 1997, Dallas paramedics were summoned to the apartment that Dionne Pickens shared with her son, 2-year-old Devonta, her daughter, 8-year-old Deandrea, and her boyfriend of two months, 25-year-old Abdullah Youself Blackmon. Little Devonta Pickens was unconscious.…
I like to have a few handsomely misused words going at all times that drive me a little nutty. It's good, I believe, for my blood pressure, which is normally low, but which the American language and people, in their combined genius, often help to raise. For a while, what I thought of as "the flying…
IF YOU'VE BEEN READING THE PAPERS RECENTLY, you know there is no way the House of Representatives can impeach Bill Clinton. Republicans allegedly don't have the votes. Two days after impeachment hearings began on November 19, representative Peter King of New York announced that not only was he…
In a Nov. 19 press release, the U.S. Postal Service announced that among the new commemorative stamps released next year will be one honoring Ayn Rand, the sixteenth author to appear in the "literary arts" series.
"The Dutch Health Ministry said it would extend an experiment to distribute free heroin to hard-core drug addicts after a three-month pilot scheme showed no serious, undesired side-effects. However, some heroin users complained about the quality of the heroin offered" (New York Times, November 25).
Word after word, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, John Updike writes a seductively perfect prose. He seems as well never to have suffered writer's block. We have over fifty books from the man, delivered over forty years: a cornucopia of stories, novels, novellas, poems, essays, and book…
It's October 30, 1974 and the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali is about to start. Set in Kinshasa, Zaire, the bout has been hyped for months, dubbed "The Rumble in the Jungle" by its promoter, Don King. Foreman is the reigning heavyweight champion and heavy favorite; he's a massive,…
The notion that new means of expression -- the printing press, the novel, the cinema, radio, television, the Internet -- have in themselves the power to derange human behavior and undo morals is an old one.