Enough Already
Having reached a certain age, The Scrapbook finds itself taking more interest in probate news than we used to. And while we concede that it’s not exactly the stuff of Perry Mason or a juicy episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the little dramas of probate law teach us something about human nature.
When, for example, the reclusive, 104-year-old heiress Huguette Clark died in Manhattan six weeks ago, her lifelong desire for seclusion and anonymity was treated in the media as freakish, clear evidence of some unstated abnormality. The Scrapbook will concede that Mrs. Clark’s story was intriguing in many respects: The surviving daughter of a 19th-century robber baron who left her unimaginably wealthy when he died in 1925, she lived a resolutely private life in what is the largest private apartment in New York City, and later in two private hospitals; she owned estates in California and Connecticut that were scrupulously maintained but seldom occupied. According to the New York Times obituary, her personal austerity seems to have extended to nourishment—a daily lunch of crackers and sardines—and she cherished her collection of French dolls and enjoyed watching The Flintstones on TV.
How much of this is true, of course, is open to conjecture. But it must have been distressing to a 102-year-old recluse when, in 2009, MSNBC.com learned that her Connecticut property was for sale and reporter Bill Dedman embarked on an extensive “investigation” to penetrate her privacy.
Accordingly, The Scrapbook believes it is worth mentioning that Mrs. Clark had donated her father’s giant art collection to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, gave $1.5 million for a security system to the settlement in Israel where her lawyer’s daughter lives, contributed generously to New York hospitals, and in her will, left one of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” to the Corcoran and established an arts foundation in California, complete with lavish endowment and collection of rare books and vintage musical instruments. In other words, while Mrs. Clark’s long, solitary existence may have been comparatively eccentric, it was also punctuated by common interests in life and a philanthropic spirit that, in The Scrapbook’s view, should have ensured her privacy.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the notoriety spectrum, The Scrapbook records with grim satisfaction the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (albeit on a legal technicality) to deny the heirs of the late Anna Nicole Smith further access to the estate of Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall. This has been a spectacle from start to finish: the wedding of the 89-year-old Marshall to the 26-year-old Playboy model in 1994, Marshall’s demise the following year, his widow’s claim that her late husband had informally promised his bride one-half of his estate (approximately $400 million), and Anna Nicole Smith’s own death from a drug overdose in 2007.
The fact that Marshall’s direct descendants have been bogged down in litigation since his death in 1995 reminds The Scrapbook of Dickens’s Bleak House and its interminable chancery case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. It is certainly true that Anna Nicole was married to J. Howard, who may or may not have been fully cognizant of what he was doing, and that she deserved some sort of settlement when he expired 14 months later. But there was never any evidence (and no mention in his will) that he intended to add substantially to the millions that he had already lavished on her in his lifetime, or that the various relations and hangers-on around Smith should take precedence over the Marshall family in dividing his estate. Of course, that did not prevent the case from bouncing around for years among state and federal appellate and bankruptcy courts; nor did it spare us the memorable day when Anna Nicole Smith herself appeared as petitioner when the case was argued in Washington.
Now the High Court has decreed, at long last, enough! ♦
Strike Three for Alcee Hastings?
Democrats looking for a respite from the Anthony Weiner scandal—gird your loins. Well, maybe it’s better we gird congressional Democrats’ loins, as that seems to be the source of the party’s trouble.
While Weiner made his resignation official on June 22, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 21 that Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., was being investigated by the congressional ethics committee for sexual harassment. A lawsuit has been filed against Hastings by Winsome Packer (yes, her real name) who encountered Hastings while on the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
For his part, Hastings claims Packer’s allegations are based on “numerous inaccuracies and untruths.” While the usual standard of innocent until proven guilty applies, The Scrapbook is not inclined to give Hastings the benefit of the doubt.
Those of you with long memories will recall that the most noteworthy item in Hastings’s biography is not his dismal track record in Congress these past 18 years. Rather, it’s that Hastings in 1989 became the sixth federal judge in history to be impeached by Congress.
In 1981, Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a light sentence for Frank and Thomas Romano, who were facing 21 counts of racketeering. Hastings was acquitted by a jury after his co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify against him, resulting in a prison sentence for Borders.
In 1988, the Democrats in the House of Representatives took up the case against Hastings, who was impeached in the House by a vote of 413 to 3. Borders served another prison sentence for refusing to testify before Congress. (Borders was later given a full pardon by Bill Clinton on his last day in office.)
In Hastings’s impeachment trial, the Senate considered forbidding him from ever holding another federal office, but held back. So naturally, Hastings was elected to Congress in 1992.
Today Hastings serves as a senior Democratic whip, but other than that he’s mostly relegated to such marginalia as co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Global Road Safety, which is no doubt doing its best to improve road signage in the Bahamas, or something.
When Hastings does make the news, it’s usually for something dubious. He nabbed headlines in late 2008 with this sage campaign advice: “If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 that Hastings had spent $24,000 in taxpayer money to lease himself a Lexus.
So should Hastings be found guilty of sexual harassment, we urge his congressional colleagues to consider his long track record of corruption and, in Hastings’s phrase, “just think this through.” ♦
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Honor in Beirut
James Wolfensohn was due to be awarded an honorary degree at the American University in Beirut last week but pulled out at the last moment to defuse a controversy that had been brewing over the past month. AUB faculty had circulated a petition protesting the university’s decision to honor the former World Bank head. University president Peter Dorman tried to reach an accommodation with the petitioners but proved no match for a group that included Edward Said’s nephew Karim Makdisi.
Some professors attributed their stance to their disapproval of the “policies” of the World Bank—which also happens to have funded the research of some of their faculty colleagues. Only slightly less disingenuous were those who protested Wolfensohn’s “pro-Zionist” positions and his disregard for the Palestinians. It seems that they don’t read the New York Review of Books at AUB, or they would’ve seen that Wolfensohn was among the signatories to a recent letter there demanding President Obama go harder on the Israelis. Indeed, as some of his supporters at AUB noted, Wolfensohn is the 2007 recipient of the Palestinian Authority’s Prize for Excellence and Creativity—a prize not known for its pro-Zionist track record.
A simpler explanation was advanced in Lebanon’s liberal corners: Wolfensohn was the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign. There may be some truth to that, but it seems there is yet another explanation as well. A profoundly anti-American political current wanted to take its ideological warfare into an institution that was once the citadel of American soft power in the Middle East. Hezbollah got its way.
Overlooking the Mediterranean and located on one of the choicest pieces of land in the whole country, AUB was founded in 1866 by American missionaries who had little luck converting Middle Easterners to Protestantism. The school was created to disseminate America’s other gospel—democracy, freedom, universal equal rights.
That message was reinterpreted in peculiarly Levantine fashion, as AUB became one of the Petri dishes of Arab nationalism. This political doctrine attempted to redefine the region in terms of a shared history and language rather than by its dangerous sectarian divides. In time, Arab nationalism misfired and led to more conflicts than it was meant to put to rest. As Scrapbook friend Makram Rabah documents in A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University in Beirut, 1967-1975, the university became a hotbed of student radicalism that graduated Palestinian militants and culminated in the Lebanese civil war, 1975-1990. Undoubtedly the school’s worst moment came in 1984, when its president, the well-respected American scholar of the Middle East Malcolm Kerr, was gunned down on campus by killers believed to have been sent by Hezbollah.
That brings us to the present day. It’s not clear whether the university faculty that started the anti-Wolfensohn petition was acting on its own. However, Hezbollah-associated media outlets threw their weight behind the campaign. Most notable among the press agitators was al-Akhbar, a daily newspaper that a fawning New York Times profile last year described as “dynamic and daring.”
In fact, the broadsheet is used by Hezbollah to issue threats against its opponents—threats that no one can ignore given the Party of God’s suspected involvement in a string of assassinations over the last six years. If Lebanese journalists, policemen, and even a former prime minister were murdered, why not an American college president, again?
Dorman’s reluctance to push his case for Wolfensohn is thus understandable. If Hezbollah and its allies are calling the shots at AUB, however, that can’t be the end of the story. The school’s agenda can’t be abandoned to an organization with American blood on its hands, which makes war on -Israel and kills our Lebanese allies.
The school operates “under a charter granted by the Education Department of the State of New York, which registers and certifies the University’s curricula, degrees and certificates,” and it receives millions in U.S. aid. Over the last decade, AUB has received $21 million in scholarships and educational grants alone. We certainly don’t want to see deserving Lebanese students denied a good education, but that’s a prospect incompatible with a Hezbollah-mandated curriculum. The university’s funders in this country should withhold future subventions pending a full examination of the anti-Wolfensohn campaign. ♦
The Director’s New Clothes
Terrence Malick is venerated by sophisticated moviegoers for his languid, beautiful, meditative films. His career has been as languid as his movies: He has directed just five since 1973 and the long pauses have served to heighten the anticipation of each new work. Enlightened viewers who appreciate Malick will tell you that his films are tone poems set to celluloid. More bourgeois audiences have been known to complain that his movies are incoherent.
The latest Malick opus, Tree of Life, debuted a few weeks ago and was promptly awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Starring Brad Pitt, Tree of Life tells the story of a 1950s American family whose three boys come of age as their loving, but not altogether nice, father tries to make men out of them.
Or maybe it’s about something else entirely. The Italian paper Corriere di Bologna reports that a theater in Bologna showed the movie with its reels in the wrong order. For a full week (or as many as nine days; accounts differ). Not only did no one seem to notice, but after some showings, it’s reported, the audience actually applauded. ♦