Liberal organizations lobbying the Senate against John Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general fixed on an interview the nominee gave in 1998 to Southern Partisan, a magazine of unabashed Confederate irredentism. We thought it worth reading the interview in the unabridged original, just to make sure the quotations from it cited by People for the American Way -- and routinely reprinted in the mainstream media -- are fair and accurate. Ashcroft is supposed to have praised the magazine for "defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson, and Davis" against the "malicious attacks" of "revisionists" who claim that slavery was a "perverted agenda." Can this really be true?
Nope. Here's the actual passage in which the above-quoted words appear:
ASHCROFT: Revisionism is a threat to the respect that Americans have for their freedoms and the liberty that was at the core of those who founded this country, and when we see George Washington, the founder of our country, called a racist, that is just total revisionist nonsense, a diatribe against the values of America. Have you read Thomas West's book, Vindicating the Founders?
INTERVIEWER: I've met Professor West, and I read one of his earlier books, but not that one.
ASHCROFT. I wish I had another copy: I'd send it to you. I gave it away to a newspaper editor. West virtually disassembles all of these malicious attacks the revisionists have brought against our Founders. Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson, and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.
So it turns out John Ashcroft defended not the pro-slavery views of Civil War-era Confederate leaders but the anti-slavery views of the nation's Revolutionary War-era Founders. Ashcroft's "controversial" mention of Lee, Jackson, and Davis seems simply a polite aside to his interviewer. And an insincere one, to boot. For three sentences later, Ashcroft makes clear that he, too, believes slavery a "perverted agenda" from which the honor of the American founding can and must be rescued. There can't be any serious question about it: "These people" are the Founders, which is why Ashcroft explicitly refers to the Declaration's final words. And slavery, in the view of our next attorney general, is indeed a "perverted agenda."
We find a sliver of comedy in the fact that Ashcroft should have been smeared as a crypto-racist on the basis of his conversation about Thomas West's fine book Vindicating the Founders. There's nothing at all funny about the smear itself, however.