Grading John Kerry
The junior senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry (remember him?), was in the news again last week, finally releasing his military records--a mere 128 days after he told Meet the Press host Tim Russert he would do so--in a June 7 document dump to Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish.
According to Kranish, Kerry had kept those records hidden from the public for "at least" two years. Which is sort of a puzzle, Kranish says, since the information supports the senator's account of his Vietnam war service, called into question last August by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (remember them?). Had Kerry released his records last year, Kranish writes, the Swifties' accusations would have been laid to rest, and Kerry's presidential campaign, faltering in the summer heat, "might have [been] helped." Needless to say, Kerry didn't, and his campaign wasn't. Go figure.
The best guess for why he didn't stems from a secondary piece by Kranish in that same day's Globe: "Yale Grades Portray Kerry as a Lackluster Student." Which isn't the worst of it. Kerry's "4-Year Average," Kranish further reports, was "on par with [President] Bush's." Ouch.
You see, in his application to Officer Candidate School, Kerry was asked to include his grades from Yale, and, to summarize, they stank. Kerry's freshman year average was 71, a low C; that year, too, Kerry received four Ds--one in geology, two in history, and one in political science. He received another D his sophomore year. In contrast, President Bush, who never pretended he was a top student--but whose intellect has been subjected to a years-long-and-still-running, take-no-prisoners strategic ridicule campaign--received only one D in four years at Yale. Bush's four-year grade point average was 77, a high C. Kerry's four-year average? 76.
"Would the revelation of Kerry's mediocre grades have been enough by itself to cause him to withhold his records for such an embarrassingly long time? Is he that vain and insecure?" asked Slate's Mickey Kaus. "I think so!"
Intrigued by--and more than a little pleased at--this news, The Scrapbook spent a few hours last week trolling the Internet for old quotes from Kerry's professors on the former candidate's more-often-claimed-than-demonstrated depth, seriousness, and intellectual gravitas. We couldn't find any. There were a few from former Yale diplomatic history professor Gaddis Smith, who told the Hartford Courant during the campaign that Kerry "was the one who stood out" while in school. Smith also told Newsweek that Kerry was "the definition of a Big Man on Campus." When Kranish read Kerry's grades to him last week, Smith said, "Uh, oh. I thought he was a good student. Those aren't very good grades."
Not all of Kerry's grades were bad, though. In one class he got a 77. It was his second-best grade in four years at Yale. The class was French.
The Churchill Files
While the nation strives to forget about the misadventures of Ward Churchill, the professor who compared 9/11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, the University of Colorado's standing committee on research misconduct appears to be slow-rolling the investigation into Churchill's purported academic fraud and fake Indian ancestry, perhaps in an effort to make the nation forget about the misadventures of Ward Churchill. Nice to see we're all on the same page.
But if the committee has any interest in taking Churchill's scalp before old age does, they might want to subcontract with the staff of the Rocky Mountain News. While history's first draft can often be misleading, the second draft isn't shaking out much better for Churchill. In a blowout series of articles resulting from a two-month investigation, the News's industrious reporters have thoroughly demonstrated that those who initially accused Churchill of being an academic fraud, a rip-off artist, a Tonto-talking faux Indian, and an all-purpose charlatan, were, well, probably right.
In just a sampler from the highly detailed News series, Churchill was found to have: wrongly claimed that Israel employs a eugenics code against the Palestinians; wrongly accused the U.S. Army of deliberately spreading smallpox among the Mandan Indians (several works and authors he cited directly contradicted his claims); wrongly claimed for decades that the General Allotment Act of 1887 established a "blood quantum" that allowed Indian tribes to count as members only those who had at least "half" native blood as a way of wiping out tribes; published the works of others without their permission in at least three instances; and claimed Indian ancestry when an extensive examination of genealogical records turned up not a single Indian ancestor (the News discovered that a recent DNA test proved that the father of Joshua Tyner, the ancestor Churchill most often cites as being the source of his Indian blood, wasn't Indian).
Everyone makes mistakes, of course. But it's hard to think of anyone who makes as many as Churchill. Perhaps his ex-wife, whose name has been mixed up in one of the plagiarism allegations, puts it most succinctly, saying of Churchill, "He's despicable." While Churchill has said he can make "slam dunk" cases on some of the charges, we hope he doesn't do so anytime soon. His original slam dunk cases turned out to be anything but. And after they cranked out 20,000 words on the subject, having to slog through over 100 of Churchill's books, essays, chapters, and articles, News staffers are due a vacation.
Cause and Effect?
"The statutory mandates for 'balance and objectivity' [in public broadcasting], not to mention for 'excellence' and 'quality,' may be beyond enforcing in an era when the country's loudmouths, on the left and the right, refuse to agree on anything. . . . But that's an argument for privatization--cutting public broadcasting loose from its government lifeline altogether. Public broadcasters should be careful what they wish for" (last week's Weekly Standard editorial, "Clearing the Airwaves").
"A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as 'Sesame Street,' 'Reading Rainbow,' 'Arthur' and 'Postcards From Buster.' . . . The subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting . . . starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million" ( Washington Post, June 10).
Janice Rogers Brown for Chief Justice!
"Her friends describe Justice Brown as a voracious reader, amateur poet and serious intellectual, and her speeches are filled with allusions to writers including Cicero, the apostle Paul, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Beckett, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Friedrich von Hayek and the comedian Chris Rock" (New York Times, June 9).