July 1999

Both Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Bob "The Comb-over" Smith demonstrated last week that despite their feisty independence and enervating candor, neither is in danger of being mistaken for Arthur "The Historian" Schlesinger.

IN THE MIDST OF ALL HIS OTHER ACTIVITIES, one thing continues to preoccupy Bill Clinton: his frantic attempt to remake himself and rewrite history. Consider some of his more recent statements.

It wasn't Clintonesque whopper, but when George W. Bush declared last week that spokesman David Beckwith hadn't been fired -- well, it wasn't the truth either. On July 12, Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh and press secretary Karen Hughes informed Beckwith he should clear out of Bush headquarters…

Whatever my other unseemly habits -- spitting, streaking, breaking twenties in church offering plates -- I've never been one who pretends to greatness. Sure, I have some great qualities: Kids love me, supermodels adore me, enemies cower at my cool assassin-like manner. But beneath the high-gloss…

Taiwan's President Li Teng-hui sent the American foreign policy establishment into a nervous frenzy last week when he declared that Taiwan would henceforth negotiate with China as one state to another. China experts are working overtime on their op-eds chastising Taiwan for its provocative action.…

"I'M GOING TO BE president of the United States," Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire says in a perfectly even voice. "I really believe that."

A fellow who talks non-stop is liable to get lost in the thickets of his own verbiage once in a while, and sure enough it happened to President Clinton again last week. At a fund-raising dinner in Coral Gables on Tuesday, our leader expressed his delight at the impending visit of Israeli Prime…

THE NEXT TIME Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch shake you down for a contribution to the noble cause of public television, ask them about PBS's in-house massage service that your money will subsidize.

It was a heist, and Katie Couric was one of the thieves. Two days after the U.S. women's soccer team defeated China and won the World Cup, Couric interviewed several players on the Today show. She had other things on her mind besides soccer and the stirring victory over the Chinese. Couric wanted…

Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments Act prohibited gender discrimination in school programs receiving federal financial assistance. But on the question whether its requirements applied to school-sponsored sports, which then as now generally received only indirect federal aid, the new law and…

SARA JANE OLSON is an exemplary citizen by Minnesota standards. She lives in a tony, upper-middle-class neighborhood of St. Paul. She campaigns for liberal political candidates. She has been prominent for years in African, Central American, and other "peace and justice" causes. She is an activist…

WHAT IF IT HAD HAPPENED LIKE THIS? It's July 20, 1969. Man has just landed on the moon. A teary-eyed Walter Cronkite turns to the camera and says, "This is the way it will be for American spaceflight in the next 30 years. Over the next five years America will junk the rockets that took it to the…

But sometimes, of course, the president gets it just right. Speaking to a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council in Baltimore last Wednesday, the president assayed the governing philosophy of the Republican front-runner.

In 1981, a small book appeared from a university press that looked at the modern world and saw nothing but disarray. Indeed, in the author's view, morality as such had nearly vanished, and the collapse of intelligible moral discourse marked a serious "degeneration" and "cultural loss." Arguing that…

It hardly matters where you go. In newspapers across the continent -- from the Bangor Daily News to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Seattle Times to the Miami Herald -- there appear on the inside pages ten, twenty, even thirty comic strips. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times may…

Hollywood comedies have been undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis in the past few years: They are turning into horror films. You cannot watch them without, at some point, covering your eyes in anxiety and fear that the next image you see will upset, disgust, or terrify you. Right now, there are four…

Modern political analysis tends to transform principles to ideologies and to reduce subtle acts of prudence to mere political calculations. What gets shoved aside in the process is the possibility of statesmanship -- the possibility of applying genuine principle to new times, new peoples, and new…

While Congress and the president very publicly squabble over whether to give us back some of our tax money, a sum equal to at least four times next year's non-Social Security surplus is up for grabs in a little-noticed part of the economy. Consumers stand to pocket at least $ 20 billion, unless…

Marriage, of course -- from Romeo and Juliet, Henry VIII and the Duke of Windsor to Dennis Rodman and Adam Sandler in "The Wedding Singer" -- is a frequent source of trauma, and wedding anxiety is a nondiscriminatory phenomenon that crosses religious and sexual lines. But for gay men and women, the…

EDWARD DMYTRYK HAD IT RIGHT. "When I die," he said, "I know the obits will first read, 'one of Hollywood's Unfriendly Ten,' not director of The Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, Raintree County, and other films." When Dmytryk died July 1, at 90, the New York Times quoted this remark without apparent…

As BILL CLINTON ROARS INTO ACTION, demagoguing the education issue, he proves he's still a master manipulator of the domestic agenda and that when it comes to schools, he remains more surefooted and silver-tongued than anyone on Capitol Hill.

DON'T GET TOO EXCITED YET. It's way too early to forecast a Republican tilt to the 2000 election (still more than 15 months away). Yet some not-so-subtle shifts in public sentiment have put Republicans in a better position nationally than they've been in for many months -- and thus have improved…

In their continuing struggle to prove to America how normal and regular they are, Al and Tipper Gore let it be known last week that they are now grandparents, courtesy of their daughter Karenna. And how did normal, regular Al and Tipper spread the word? Why, the same way proud grandparents have…

Contributing editor Irwin Stelzer is looking for a research assistant. Some economics courses preferred. Part-time graduate student acceptable. Fax resume to 202-777-3010.

Thirty-three million human beings across the globe already show the symptoms of AIDS or are infected with the HIV virus. Two thirds of them live in sub-Saharan Africa -- more than 25 times the number of cases accounted for by Canada, Mexico, and the United States combined. In Africa the infection…

It's time to reexamine the most durable liberal cliche of the Clinton era: that right-wingers have a unique, irrational hostility towards Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is completely false, it turns out. Lefties disdain her, too. Indeed, the only memorable abuse of the first lady these days comes…

On the night of the shower for Graciela Braslavsky, Andy Cohen was still working through some of the issues that gay men have when a woman they worship gets married. . . . Cohen, a thirty-year-old senior producer at CBS News, who was hosting the bridal shower for gay men only in a friend's East…

It took more than the usual Clintonian brass for the president to choose the Mississippi Delta during his "poor tour" last week as the venue for declaring his commitment to bringing jobs to America's neglected regions. In the last two years, the Clinton administration has waged a war against dozens…

University of Michigan researcher Brian A. Patrick has compared news coverage in the elite media from 1990 to 1998 for five interest groups: the ACLU, NAACP, AARP, Handgun Control, Inc., and the National Rifle Association. Not surprisingly, by 16 objective measures the NRA garnered much more…

Cooperstown, N.Y.

New York

I'm writing this somewhere over New Mexico, on a United flight to Los Angeles. This is the day's last plane out of Washington, the one for people who absolutely have to be in L.A. by midnight. Evidently a lot of people do. Every seat is taken. Watching the passengers file on, I realized that I…

The thing you have to understand about Nicole Kidman is, she's shy. Really shy. And private -- this is a woman who jealously guards her privacy, thank you very much. Her husband Tom Cruise is the exact same way. Sometimes, Nicole recently told an interviewer, Tom will go to party and just stand in…

When Gene Sarazen died in May at the age of ninety-seven, the obituaries dutifully noted that "The Squire" was one of only four players to win each of the four major championships of men's golf: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the British Open (which begins again this year on…

A journalist once asked Helmut Kohl if he ever spent sleepless nights thinking about history, and the German chancellor responded, "When I get up at night, I'm not thinking about history, but about plundering the refrigerator." At six feet four and over three hundred pounds, he gave an answer that…

With the 1970s back in fashion -- bellbottoms, platform shoes, even Donny and Marie! -- it's not surprising that Germaine Greer and her in-your-face, death-to-the-male-power-structure feminism is back, too. And in a big way, with the first print run for her new book, The Whole Woman, a hundred…

One more item for the "A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing" file. Fulfilling his promise to explain his proposals for a "new partnership" between government and faith-based organizations, Al Gore gave an interview on religion to seven reporters on May 29. Of course, the interview lasted only 45…

The antitrust case United States v. Microsoft was filed in May 1998 and went to trial last October in Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's federal district court in Washington, D.C. On June 24, the final witness left the stand. The parties now have thirty days to file proposed "findings of fact," on…

Los Angeles

WHO IS GEORGE W. BUSH'S IDEAL JUDGE, the model for nominees he'd pick for the Supreme Court? Antonin Scalia, that's who. In public comments, of course, Bush has declared his desire, if elected president, to choose judges who interpret the Constitution strictly, and Scalia qualifies on that count.…

My old pal Nick e-mailed me last week to say that he was trading up from his charming limestone bungalow a block from the campus where he teaches to a split-level on half-acre lot. We've stayed buddies since college, a friendship built on the incredibly durable foundation of petty rivalry and…

It's difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, America's most celebrated doctor after Spock, Seuss, and School, went from being the country's foremost healthcare authority to its foremost health-care commodity.

Slobodan Milosevic has lost the war in Kosovo, and his dictatorship of Yugoslavia may be headed (let's hope) for the dustbin of history. Now it's time for the United States to start paying serious attention to a far more dangerous dictatorship several thousand miles to the east, in Beijing. Sound…

The early report card is in on Proposition 227, which ended bilingual education in California last year. It gets an A+. In Oceanside, Calif., where implementationhas been immediate and aggressive, and where one-fifth of the students were non-English-speakers, scores on the SAT 9, a nationwide…

National Affairs Inc. (publisher of The Public Interest and The National Interest) is looking for an assistant to the editors. The job involves bookkeeping (A/P, A/R, payroll, and benefits) and general administrative duties. Previous bookkeeping experience required. Send resume to Karis Kercher,…

IN THE 1980s AND '90s, large federal deficits put a damper on new spending. But now that an era of surpluses is here, some members of Congress are acting like alcoholics on a binge.

Going behind Congress's back is becoming a habit for Bill Clinton. First, he misused a recess appointment (generally reserved for emergencies) to make gay-rights activist James Hormel the ambassador to Luxem-bourg. Now he has misapplied a waiver provision in the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy's Relocation…

AS THE WHITE HOUSE GEARS UP to promote Bill Clinton's universal prescription-drug benefit for the elderly, it seems to have learned a thing or two from its historic health-care defeat of 1994. Like that earlier plan, Clinton's promise to pay for the prescription drugs of older Americans will put…

As NATO consolidates its victory in Kosovo, unnamed senior White House aides have begun wondering aloud -- though always on background -- whether it isn't time for the world to acknowledge the existence of a "Clinton Doctrine" worthy of mention in the same breath as other famous presidential…

No single man is more responsible for the Fourth of July than John Adams. He knew full well the glory that would attach to the author of the Declaration of Independence, and there is a sense in which he spent his entire life preparing for and coveting that glory. But in the summer of 1776, Boston…

THE BURNING QUESTION libraries face today is whether to install filters on the computers they make available to the public for online research. Stumbling now and then onto lascivious material while searching online is practically inevitable and so should be a matter of concern. All sorts of tricks…

The historian Stephen Ambrose has devoted his life's work to studying men -- men like the American soldiers who won the Second World War. In the course of his long career, he's interviewed hundreds of veterans about what kept them going in battle, and in such popular and highly acclaimed volumes as…

Only a wordsmith of William F. Buckley's caliber could try, and largely succeed, in depicting Joe McCarthy as an engaging, sympathetic, and ultimately tragic figure. Buckley's McCarthy is a rogue -- but not a loathsome enemy of freedom so detestable that the very word "McCarthyism" is a name…

You might expect, from a book with the title Betrayal, a typical blast from the far, far right -- a raging, rambling indictment of William Jefferson Clinton for everything from drug-running at Mena airport to conniving in Vince Foster's murder.