Spectator's Journal
"Spectator's Journal" so unmistakable was to mark him down as an ass for life. There sat two hundred pounds of woebegone Playboy philosophy declaring: "It has been written that a man does what he must, in spite of...
...He has no elegance, no romance, no vision...
...This volume brings together his major and representative writings, including the title essay, "A Plea for Voluntaryism," "The Ethics of Dynamite," and "Salvation by Force...
...Grant recklessly heaved Union troops at his problems, Teddy heaves money and coercive laws...
...Recently we've been reading the Ethiopian Herald...
...Edited and with an introduction by Eric Mack...
...He is re-ported to be highly respected among non-Communist Cambodians...
...In brief and in sum, Teddy will give the twentieth century a Grant...
...Yet inside Yugoslavia the press is said to be so stridently anti-American that most citizens are under the impression that our countries are engaged in a "war of nerves...
...Av%wilable: The Principles of Ethics By Herbert Spencer A thorough and systematic exposition of individualist ethics...
...There has been a fatal automobile accident...
...Burns remarked on Teddy's "valiance of the highest order...
...Peter Braestrup, a typical case, is a former New York Times reporter who spent years producing a mammoth two-volume study of how the press covered the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, then spent months trying to get me to write something about it...
...There is a homiletic outburst about courage and honor, two virtues conspicuously lacking in his recent behavior...
...ressLibertvClassics We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...that is the basis of all human morality...
...What is their point...
...As the man got within a couple of paces he pulled out a gun and fired five shots at point blank range into the Croat nationalist's head...
...During his months in Yugoslavia Waugh also became convinced that Tito was a woman...
...In Germany, it is reported, Yugoslav agents have killed twenty-four Croatian exiles over the last seven years...
...the lead stories do not, however, seem to change radically from week to week...
...Was its dreamy amorality ever more apparent...
...The killer then fled into the street...
...Historians almost all now agree that the offensive was disastrous for the Communists...
...On the 15th the principal (front page, upper right) photo pictures an airport scene and carries a caption that reads: "The visiting high-level delegation from Yugoslavia being welcomed on arrival here at Bole Inter-national Airport...
...Hardcover $9.00, Softcover $3.50...
...The same day's Times reported a joyous entry of Khymer troops into the capital with thousands of Cambodians cheering and waving...
...Hardcover $9.00 per volume, $18.00 the set...
...Richard J. Walton speculated that "Perhaps Chappaquiddick was fate's final test, one that would destory him or prove him...
...Elsewhere in the two issues TASS, the Soviet press service, reports from the UN, "Committee Demands Israel to Stop Aggression Against Lebanon...
...Khieu Samphan, a French-educated economist in his early forties, was once a member of the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk....He has a reputation for integrity, incorruptibility and concern for the peasants...
...That automobile accidents are the testing ground for presidential greatness...
...Spencer himself considered this to be his finest work...
...The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays By Auberon Herbert British political theorist Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) is without equal as a defender of liberty...
...There sat two hundred pounds of woebegone Playboy philosophy declaring: "It has been written that a man does what he must, in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures...
...Teddy fled the scene and failed to report the accident...
...That this fatal botch made Teddy a better person...
...He invokes the names of fallen Kennedys and speculates on man's fate...
...An example is the recent experience of the People's Republic of Bulgaria...
...After Chappaquiddick he got to work in the Senate, but of all the liberals he has shown the least capacity to learn from the past...
...And it was after Chappaquiddick that the fabulous Dr...
...Upon his return there were two more signs: "Beware of bombs, but worse than bombs is panic...
...The American Association of University Professors, represented by current Nation-al Endowment for the Humanities chief Joseph Duffey, took an uncharacteristically budget-minded approach: "Placed in the context of current national priorities, the suggestion of appropriating additional funds for Indochina would be a direct affront to the American people who believe that more pressing current issues require resolution...
...Marshal Tito's welcome to Washington last spring was ecstatic...
...Big Story, by Peter Braestrup, the Washington Post's Saigon Bureau Chief during Tet, is a phenomenally well-researched account of the press's performance then...
...Diplomaticconsiderations have rendered Washing-ton's response inaudible...
...Timing is everything, as even the Vietcong knew...
...The whole country resounds with doubts about bureaucracy's beadledom and the state's infringements on personal liberty and Teddy wants to extend the genius of the Postal Service and the regulatory agencies into ever more areas of American life...
...The stories of past courage cannot supply courage itself...
...It discovered assassination to be an effective way of countering foreign press criticism, and has since put it to frequent use...
...Camelot's insistence on delusion was never more patent, and the whole claque joined in...
...Articles are headed "Anti-Apartheid Year Said Gives Renewed Impetus to Heroic Struggle," or "Workers Here Express Joy at Victory of Popular Forces, Brace for Struggle...
...Braestrup must have given up on me and gone straight to the top...
...That Chappaquiddick is the Camelotian equivalent of the playing fields of Eton...
...Was the corrupting influence of Camelot ever more obvious...
...The books sat on my desk mocking me for weeks, until I dipped into them, and decided the subject was too obscure, the event was too long past, and the opus itself was published too far in advance of the 10th anniversary of Tet even to use that slender excuse as a news "peg," something to hang a story on...
...On March 19th, under the heading "Religious Leaders Call President Ford's Request for Vietnam/Cambodia Aid Immoral," seventeen prominent clergymen declared, "It is morally indefensible to speculate on a possible future blood-bath...
...Now that actual events in Indochina have gone far beyond the "mythical bloodbath" originally predicted—and now that it's too late to do anything about it—an even longer book could be written along Big Story lines on the media and clergy response to the victorious Communist offensives of spring, 1975...
...Softcover $3.00 per volume, $6.00 the set...
...To order these books, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/ LibertyClnssics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept.A13 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 The American Spectator December 1978 41...
...The London Times reported: "According to one of the tenants, who happened to be at his window closing the shutters at the time, Mr...
...Teddy isthe least appropriate candidate for the Camelot purple...
...On the 22nd the principal (front page, upper right) photo pictures an airport scene and carries a caption that reads: "Comrade Isidoro Malneiro Peoli, Foreign Minister of Cuba, being seen off at.Bole International Airport...
...S P E C T A T O R ' S J O U R N A L This month's journal will pay informal tribute to a remarkable twentieth century success story—world Communism...
...For this each man must look into his own soul...
...But it was described as the opposite...
...One of our correspondents, who has stayed at Addis Ababa's leading hotel twice since the Revolution, reports noticing 40 The American Spectator December 1978 on his first visit a sign in his room reading: "Beware of fire, but worse than fire is panic...
...Teddy lectures the citizenry on morality and the need for prayer...
...Of all the Kennedys the Hon...
...For thirty years Yugoslavia has been the freak specimen of Communist non-alignment...
...A. fascinating book published earlier this year indicates that signs such as these would have been helpful in the hotel rooms of the American correspondents based in South Vietnam during the 1968 Tet offensive...
...Bruno Busic, a 39-year-old socialist journalist who left Yugoslavia in 1975 after spending a couple of years in prison for his historical writing...
...It didn't work...
...The Herald's pages are, in short, filled with idealism...
...As he returned to his temporary residence in northeastern Paris, a man ran up behind him...
...The Hon...
...On October 17th agents of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia conducted an operation along Bulgarian lines against Mr...
...A sort of postscript to journalistic history —by the editor of Time magazine's "Press" section—appears in the October issue of the University of Pennsylvania's alumni magazine...
...Arthur in-formed America that "with Chappaquiddick the iron went into Edward Kennedy's soul...
...The wartime origins of our present Yugoslav policy were portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in his novel, Unconditional Sur-render...
...Tito like Lesbian," his notes record, and for a time he referred to Tito exclusively as "she...
...As a satirist Waugh found his greatest inspiration in Ethiopia...
...In his "Confessions of a Press Critic," Don Morrison, Penn '68, mentions receiving the original two-volume version of Peter Braestrup's Big Story, which we described above: Reporters call me to push books they have writ-ten, and I try to explain that I rarely do stories about books, unless they are books about journalism, and even then...
...and, "Beware of machine gun fire, but worse than machine gun fire is panic...
...Busic spun round as he heard the footsteps...
...When the two were later introduced, Tito is reported to have said, "Ask Captain Waugh why he thinks I am a woman...
...In our last issue W. Scott Thompson profiled Colonel Haile Mengistu Meriam's new Leninist regime there...
...Grant was seedier, but then Teddy is surrounded by aides for every occasion...
...These completely fabricated and unsubstantiated horror stories are designed to manipulate the American public and convince it that Socialism could not possibly be in the interests of ordinary people like ourselves...
...And, as if for editorial balance, the op-ed page included a lengthy analysis of the war from the Weather Underground: "The need to pacify and control people at home has produced an orgy of `Communist bloodbath' rumors...
...Two months later, however, the Managing Editor Himself sent me a note asking why we hadn't written about the book...
...There are features on Marx and Lenin, their lives and thought...
...East German President Erich Honecker welcomes Ethiopia's first participation at the Leipzig Fair, calling it "an important event...
...Much has been written about this movement's idealistic allure, but a greater element in its success might be a striking "can do" approach to sensitive political problems...
...Particularly striking, in April 1975, was the contrast between press coverage of the "corrupt" Thieu and Lon Nol regimes, which "jailed dissidents," and the victorious Khymer Rouge leaders...
...An article entitled "Forces of Reaction Being Wiped Out" reports on the successful searches for reactionaries being conducted by the "red terror campaign...
...In response the fabulists roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands, and transform the sordid event into romance, an inscrutable mystery, a personal triumph, another "shining moment...
...Our latest copies are dated March 15 and March 22...
...I pray that I can have the courage to make the right decision," etc., etc., ad nauseum...
...Busic, a leader of the Croat nationalist organization Matika, had just published an article harshly critical of Marshal Tito...
...On the 16th, below the headline "Sihanouk Pledges `Democratic Rule,": the New York Times introduced its readers to one of them: "Mr...
...Braestrup's appalling chronicle of misreporting in Vietnam (panic was occasionally a factor) and misrepresentation by commentators at home, will be treated at greater length in a future issue...
...In a time of doubt about the collectivist nostrums, he hollers for the most dubious and expensive statist policy of all, nationalized health care...
...His writings are eloquent, forceful--and uncompromising...
...In two volumes, with an introduction by Tibor R. Machan...
...More-over, he has the fabulists to see to it that when memoir time comes Teddy writes claptrap...
...Waugh's biographer has summarized this account as a "picture of how in a Yugoslavia slowly but certainly coming under the domination of the Communist Party led by Tito, the British and American allies help in the extinction of surviving freedom, partly out of wishful thinking and partly out of blank stupidity...
...On the 18th, Flora Lewis reported from Paris that the Cambodian Communists were pledged to neutrality and non-alignment, and summarized Comrade Chau Seng's remarks as "sober and conciliatory...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
