Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: On the Right Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 11:57:05 EST Message-ID: On the Right Bush Congratulates Clinton NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 4 I had a friend who took so seriously the marriage vow that he disliked and even disapproved of friendly divorces. ''If they separate, it ought to be be- cause they simply cannot bear each other's company.'' The observation came to mind last night during Mr. Bush's congratulatory speech. He had spent the better part of three months denouncing Bill Clinton as a draft- dodger, as a liar, as an inexperienced yuppie and an ideological menace. Now he was congratulating him on his victory: but doing really something more. When he referred to the ''majesty'' of democracy he seemed to be saying that democracy does the right thing. But how can doing the wrong thing be the same as doing the right thing? There is no question left about what democracy wanted on Tuesday. One thing it wanted emphatically, which was to oust George Bush from the White House. There were reasons for doing this extrinsic to his reign as President, other reasons traceable to his reign. The pollsters seemed to agree that if unemployment had been two points lower, and the rate of growth of GNP two points higher, Mr. Bush would have won. But nobody can say with authority that these two objectives might have been Mr. Bush's for the asking. Ask any roomful of economists how he might single-handedly have accomplished the two economic goals, and glossolalia will overcome you (a recent discovery: no two economists agree with each other). To that extent, then, Mr. Bush was the victim of the business cycle, which respecteth not its victims irrespective of race, color, creed, or sexual inclination. On the personal point, Mr. Bush did not succeed in inspiriting his fol- lowers, let alone in increasing their number. What was his decisive mis- take? He said at the convention that he was not given to eloquence -- that, for him, eloquence consisted in action. But he did not, in the days since Houston, engage in any action other than verbal action. He did not take action against genocide in Yugoslavia, starvation in Somalia, the creeping Balkanization of Great Russia. He didn't pronounce a realistic basis for measuring capital gains, nor assert authority to exercise a line-item veto. What he did do most persistently was to attack the qualifications of Bill Clinton to be President of the United States. Now, as pointed out before in this space, to do this was an infinitely pro- vocative act. By the time Mr. Bush began to postulate the disqualifica- tions of Bill Clinton, about one-half of the American voting public had plighted its troth to Clinton. One really doesn't enjoy lectures about how the lady to whom one is betrothed is a) a misfit, b) dangerous, and c) a whore. It's okay to say that she is not going to make a good wife, given her interests in matters other than the welfare of the family: that much is expected. But not (in my judgment) the kind of thing Mr. Bush said about Bill Clinton, whom he addressed as half clown, half baby molester. In reaction, those who had declared themselves as ardent Clintonians re- iterated their vows more fervently. Others, who had been mere spectators, judged the ferocity of the attack quite simply undeserved, and their pen- chant for fair play aroused protective instincts. The vote of women for Clinton is being interpreted as a protest against Mr. Bush's pro-life posi- tion. My own guess is that much of that vote was maternal in nature: for many, Clinton emerged as a boyish victim of the Chief of State, who was engaged in bullying tactics. That, plus the perplexity of the surrounding situation: How could the husband of Barbara Bush engage in such bil- lingsgate? The image of George Bush as the patrician master of his or- derly house suffered. And so there he was, congratulating not only Mr. Clinton (how do you parse such a congratulation? ''I want to congratulate Mr. Clinton on his extraordinary skill in disguising his lack of patriotism, his inexperience, his wretched job as governor of Arkansas, and his indifference to family values, sufficiently to seduce the majority of the American people into vot- ing for him''). Mr. Bush was engaging in a formality. The whole thing was sad, grotesque, even. The KGB Exonerates Hiss NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 6 The news story all but spoke of Alger Hiss as having been definitively cleared. By the U.S. Supreme Court? Oh no. By a Russian general-histo- rian, Dmitri A. Volkogonov. A man of high reputation, who however, in ''clearing'' Alger Hiss of having served as a spy for the Soviet Union, takes rather unusual liberties. Americans may assume that the general has ac- cess to KGB or GRU files, because the general is chairman of the Supreme Council Commission on KGB and military-intelligence archives. But to as- sume that after four or five weeks he established that Alger Hiss was never a Communist agent for the Soviet Union, a) says odd things about him as a historian (you can't begin to go through KGB files thoroughly in five years, let alone five weeks); and b) makes him suddenly an expert on American judicial history. You see, said the general at his interview with Hiss emissary John Lowenthal, during the cold war people were quick to suspect other people of complicity with the enemy. ''The fact that [Alger Hiss] was convicted in the Fifties was a result of either false information or judicial error.'' The next day on CNN the reporter identified Alger Hiss as ''having gone to jail for allegedly committing perjury.'' Yes, and Ted Bundy was executed for allegedly murdering ten women. A letter from historian Gertrude Himmelfarb: ''As a former grubber in archives (better organized archives, on less secretive and sensitive sub- jects), I assure you that one month of searching and inspecting is no time at all -- certainly not enough time to produce the categorical judgment at- tributed to the general. In fact, a categorical judgment of this kind is itself suspect; historians always qualify their conclusions, cover themselves lest subsequent findings refute them. There is something very odd about this whole story . . . Remember Trevor Roper's gaffe about Hitler's secret diaries?'' Indeed. But the movement to exonerate Hiss has run into so many ob- stacles over so many decades that to declare him innocent is on the order of declaring Dreyfus guilty. Newsweek reports: ''Alger Hiss is still on trial in America. Was he a spy, a member of a secret Communist cell who passed along confidential State Department reports to the Soviets? Or was he a statesman framed by the fanatical Right, a wanton sacrifice to the careers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Rep. Richard Nixon? The legal system never resolved the question.'' Those sentences are historical trav- esties of a major order. (The legal system absolutely resolved the ques- tion.) Yet they appear in a national American newsweekly. The overwhelming case against Alger Hiss is documented by Professor Allen Weinstein in his book Perjury. That book was judged as dispositive of the Hiss case by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was not a Mc- Carthyite. Every legal maneuver, caprice, effrontery, was attempted on behalf of Alger Hiss, and always these efforts to turn history around came to naught. The incriminating papers were typed on Hiss's typewriter, they were given to Whittaker Chambers, and he sent them up the assembly line to his Soviet superiors. And it isn't as though all evidence against Hiss died with Chambers in 1961. Only two years ago, Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet Union's spy chief in London from 1982 until his defection in 1985, published a book, KGB: The Inside Story. In a footnote Gordievsky referred to Iskhak A. Akh- merov as ''Hiss's wartime [KGB] controller.'' And U.S. writer and spy- watcher Thomas Powers, writing in The New York Review of Books on August 17, 1989, advises us that the codename for Alger Hiss in the Soviet Union was ''Ales.'' There is more to be said about the Chambers story, and a gifted young historian (Sam Tanenhaus) is working on a comprehensive biography of the great witness who gave us Witness. General Volkogonov is a nice man, but it really was a little odd when he produced his certificate that Alger Hiss was a Victim of McCarthyism, and said: ''I would like to hand this document over . . . and believe that you can tell Mr. Alger Hiss that the heavy weight should be lifted from his heart.'' How nice. All we need to do, in order to lift that heavy weight from Alger Hiss's heart, is to defame the American system of justice, classify as libelous dozens of witnesses who built the case against him, and reject as a sadistic liar a great man who, unlike his old spymate Alger Hiss, tried to make it up to the country he betrayed. Thatcher Lives FLORENCE, OCTOBER 26 Lady Thatcher (as we now refer to her) is England's Henry Kissinger in the sense that she/he never quite recedes from sight, both because they are extraordinarily energetic human beings and because they have a great deal to say that people find interesting. At a dinner in London, one guest busily explained (or tried to) how Lady Thatcher could, even while seated in the House of Lords, serve as Prime Minister. Doing so from that Cham- ber, she would not need to answer questions raised in the House of Com- mons. On the other hand, she would have to answer questions raised in the House of Lords (''where they would probably be more intelligent, as it happens''). Another guest asked whether there shouldn't be an award for British Conservatives who show special courage. She gave her hus- band as an example, because, in a room with thirty people, he had said a few weeks ago to Mrs. Thatcher, ''After all, there are other points of view than your own on that question.'' Not since Oliver Twist shoved his empty plate before the Beadle and asked for ''more'' have such effrontery and courage been shown. The question of another point of view had to do with Mrs. Thatcher's recommendations for action against Serbia. She is utterly unambiguous. What she wishes, and wishes done immediately -- preferably beginning about five months ago -- is the bombing of the military encampments en- gaged in ethnically cleansing Bosnia - Herzegovina. Mrs. Thatcher doesn't arrive at this position as though she were busting to deploy an atticful of toy soldiers. She is a woman deeply haunted by the atrocities of the Nazis and the Communists. About the latter, she reasons there was simply nothing that could be done. About the former, she says there was an endemic ignorance, until it was too late. But she reminds us that immediately after the war against Hitler was won, the allies em- barked on a period of de-Nazification, in which efforts were made, on the whole successful, to educate the country at large in the horrors they had permitted in their midst, and to corral those especially guilty and send them either to the gallows or to jail. No such effort at de-Communization followed the liberation of Eastern Europe, and now we see happening in Yugoslavia the same kind of thing done under Hitler - Stalin. And if we let this happen without protests in the form of high-tech deterrence in steel and explosives, we are doing worse than nothing: we are re-institutionalizing genocide as a European pastime. The arguments against following Mrs. Thatcher's advice are plausible and -- dare one say it? -- even persuasive. But her moral point is inspiriting, and leaves the dissenter feeling just a little bit ashamed. Mrs. Thatcher's interests are in matters of quite urgent concern to her countrymen and to Europe. She holds the implications of Maastricht in great horror, because she recognizes that the overweening state continues to do the greatest harm to private initiative and to individual freedom. She challenges, moreover, all but a single institutional goal of the EC. She points out that as you get closer and closer to free trade, you need less and less government. Nothing is freer than the right of a New Yorker to order something from the L. L. Bean catalogue in Maine, and it would be desirable that someone in Birmingham could buy shoes directly from a producer in Milan. But Maastricht promises a huge bureaucracy that will engage primarily in redistribution. It would be far better to make progress in the Uruguay round of GATT than to concentrate on free trade within the EC. The only objection she has to the North American Free Trade Agreement, says she, is that the word ''American'' should read, ''Atlantic.'' The prospects for a common currency in Europe grow dimmer as the public contemplates the intangibles. On the one hand it would be wonder- fully useful to have a common currency -- trade imbalances would simply go away. Ah, but if central banks continued to exercise the authority they now do, then the whole idea of such common currency becomes illusory. If a central bank can create money, as our Federal Reserve can create money, what is to prevent a member-nation from bailing itself out with a competing currency? Nobody has come up with an adequate substitute for a gold standard, and Britain has certainly not come up with an ade- quate substitute for Margaret Thatcher. (Universal Press Syndicate) This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM