FROM THE GRAVE: NIXON ON FRED THOMPSON
From the Grave: Nixon on Fred Thompson Fairly or not, Republicans from Trent Lott on down have been grousing lately about Sen. Fred Thompson and his handling of the campaign-finance hearings. It...
...From Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, published this month by the Free Press, we offer this choice tidbit, dated February 22, 1973: Haldeman: Minority counsel is aware of the way things work in Washington, and we can handle a guy like Sam Dash, majority counsel...
...What did the president know about Fred Thompson, and when did he know it...
...First the good news...
...John Mica to fly with him on Air Force One to the dedication of the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas...
...At least nine Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee appear to have held firm in opposition to Bill Lann Lee, the Clinton administration's nominee to become assistant attorney general for civil rights...
...There just aren't enough of them...
...Mica took the trip, but he's not just any Republican...
...Republican consistency isn't in much better shape...
...The true believers are not going to win it for you...
...And it turns out that Kinsey was . . . a masochist, a sadist, a voyeur, and—to resurrect an apt old term—all around deviant...
...Is this Fred Thompson the young guy from Tennessee...
...That was all the cover nervous-nellie Republicans on the committee needed the following day...
...Jody's recent contributions to these pages include "The End of the Academic Novel" and essays on Thomas Pynchon and Paul Theroux...
...But why is that anybody's business...
...The recent biography by James H. Jones gathers the record together for dispassionate consideration...
...Charles Canady's bill outlawing race and gender preferences in federal programs...
...Voting Often for Earley Confounding Washington Post predictions and conventional pundit opinion, Virginia attorney-general candidate Mark Earley, strongly backed by Christian conservatives, won his election and led the Republican ticket in that state...
...Elton Gallegly of California, one of the bill's cosponsors, bailed out...
...The Canady measure is dead in Congress for the rest of this year...
...Republican George Gekas of Pennsylvania said voting on the Canady bill would "hinder the achievement of the ideas espoused by one of our nation's greatest presidents," Abraham Lincoln...
...In his new position, he will continue to write regularly on fiction, in addition to overseeing the back of the book...
...House majority leader Dick Armey, apparently overcoming private doubts about the measure, had even given Canady a statement of endorsement...
...Rhodes attributes all such attacks to vested interests, particularly among the "Eastern Establishment" that cut off Kinsey's funding, out of sheer "homophobic McCarthyism...
...Queasy on Quotas_ Do congressional Republicans still believe in a colorblind Constitution and equality before the law...
...It turns out that grousing about Thompson has a long history among Republicans, a history stretching all the way back to the martyred President Nixon...
...asks Richard Rhodes, reviewing the Jones volume last week in the New York Times Book Review...
...When push comes to shove, Rhodes defends Kinsey not as a scientist but as a sexual liberator, one who "contributed vitally to the march toward tolerance that continues today...
...President Nixon: Yeah, I know...
...Haldeman: Do you know him...
...The orgies he organized for "senior staff, their spouses and outside volunteers" served the same purpose: to "bond them together under his paternal authority...
...Oh, Baker has appointed Fred Thompson minority counsel...
...Haldeman: Well, we're stuck with him...
...The bad news comes from the House, where the Judiciary Committee last Thursday killed Rep...
...It's too damn bad the kid (unintelligible...
...But at a Wednesday meeting of the entire Republican conference, none other than Dick Armey rose to urge that the vote on Canady's bill be canceled...
...How did this happen...
...The day before, everything seemed to be going smoothly...
...It's hard to know after their schizophrenic performance on racial preferences last week...
...President Nixon: Yes...
...President Nixon: Oh s—, that kid...
...It's those who've assailed him for the past 50 years who are the true weirdos...
...Which is what Kinsey's critics have said all along it would be...
...We'll Impeach When We Land Before putting off the fast-track trade vote, Bill Clinton showed just how accommodating he can be when he really, really wants your vote...
...We haven't heard the last of Kinsey's defenders...
...Perhaps unbeknownst to the White House, the Florida Republican is one of 17 cosponsors of a resolution seeking to begin an impeachment inquiry against the president...
...Maybe Virginians are more conservative than the Post would like to think...
...Mandy Grunwald also joined the he'll-have-to-change choir...
...We Are Proud to Announce . . . . . . that contributing editor J. Bottum, whose fiction criticism has been a regular feature in The Weekly Standard for the last two years, becomes our Books & Arts Editor with this issue...
...He invited Rep...
...Like so much about Watergate, that "(unintelligible)" is tantalizing...
...After Earley won a June primary against two "moderate" Republicans with his anti-abortion/anti-porn message, the Post predicted: "Now Earley must scramble to soften his image to fit the game plan of the GOP candidate for governor . . . who is focusing on moderate, suburban voters...
...Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch led the charge, delivering a stinging indictment of Lee's views as "exceedingly narrow and violative of the court's holdings...
...Haldeman: I guess that's the way it is...
...He is a young kid...
...Haldeman: I guess so...
...Kinsey was a pillar of the scientific method, Rhodes insists, if only we'd understand it properly...
...But Earley didn't go squishy, and he received 57 percent of the vote, outpolling Gilmore...
...Lee's constitutional understanding of civil-rights law is well outside the mainstream and runs contrary to a series of court decisions over the past few years that have consistently struck down an array of racial-preference programs...
...The Report on Kinsey_ Attacks on the methodology and ideology of pioneering sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey have come out piecemeal over the decades...
...It's true that Jim Gilmore, the candidate for governor, went for "moderate, suburban" voters and won his race handily...
...All this without the recommended slouch to the middle...
...Being a favorite of the religious Right and focusing one's campaign on abortion is supposed to be the kiss of electoral death in Washington's northern Virginia suburbs, and a severe handicap statewide...
...President Nixon: They are going to lose them all...
...But we can now see that their final defense is an ideological, not a scientific one...
...He was also a blackmailer...
...Even Rep...
...He secured a stream of foundation money for his research by "shrewdly obligating his sponsors in those organizations by collecting their sexual histories...
...But he attacks Jones, too, who "appears to cherish the quaint notion that good science is disinterested science...
...President Nixon: Yes...
...indiana Republicans Steve Buyer and Edward Pease agreed...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 10
