Editorials / Thatcher Lets Us Down / Don't Shoot
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The next time the British Broadcasting Corporation calls me in search of sweet music from a Yank critical of Irish-American support of the IRA or of some IRA...
...The "public opinion" that they purport to measure closely corresponds to conventional media opinion...
...He wrote: "No wonder observers are puzzled about why recent Presidents seem to have had such a hard time staying in office and in the meantime have so little legitimacy and so little capacity to govern...
...The supply,side doctrine is economic fanaticism--it splits the economy in two, it extols only the virtues of the powerful...
...The next time the British Broadcasting Corporation calls me in search of sweet music from a Yank critical of Irish-American support of the IRA or of some IRA atrocity my transatlantic caller better hope that I took cure grano salis Prime Minister Thatcher's criticism of our liberation of Grenada...
...Walker are nevertheless extrinsic to the merits of her novel...
...Last month an American school boy, speaking with understandable innocence of the Grenadians who came to power by murdering Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, lamented that it was "mean of us to take their country...
...I never had any deep animus against our Thirty-fifth President...
...Walker's account of her fawning visitations to Cuba in order to see where, if you'll pardon the expression, she's comin' fum...
...continued on page 46) by Tom Bethell I t seems odd that the press, which prides itself on taking such an adversarial view of life, should not only be uncritical of pollsters but actually be in bed with themmhiring them and publicizing their often absurd findings on the front pages of the newspapers...
...Will the production of 250 cubic inch plus engines for automobiles count as growth, whatever their impact on oil importation...
...Yet I am not going to be critical...
...Advocates of growth never define it in a discriminating way...
...It seems to me Mr...
...It would be interesting and instructive to make a list (it would be a long one) of all the other institutions that the "adversary press" regards with equanimity, indeed encouragement, but today let's stick to the polls...
...He was amazingly irresolute about Castro's Communization of Cuba...
...Representative Kemp and his ilk inhabit a dream world in which only their own voices are heard or understood...
...Then, too, ideologues need exemplars...
...It learns nothing from the Homestead Act, the railway grants, or the super-highway system_9 It fails to consider the dead hand of corporations upon innovation...
...Still, the suspicion that behind the fairy tale may lurk a genuine ogre leaves me feeling less than satisfied with Mr...
...I readily admit that there are some marvelous moments in Alice Walker's novel and I sympathize with the main character's having found salvation in lesbian love with an older woman, since it was in fact the only form of love that was ever made real to her...
...And gradually Europe would drift into neutralism and indifference...
...Parties are "broadly based," are able to "generate policy on a very wide range of topics," and their ability to "gather and process information about human wants and demands nation-wide is impressive...
...Consider what was done with Daniel Boone, a man who rarely changed his linen or came in from the rain...
...page 75] Ms...
...New York Times essay] (3) The book dismisses campaign experts in two short, superficial pages, concluding that their use "makes no coalitions, cements no alliances, seals no deals in the world of grass roots electoral politics...
...But cautions relating to the left-wing feminism of Ms...
...Evidently, some drivers do threaten cyclists by driving close or actually forcing them off the road...
...I consider slow cyclists on fast roads a hazard but I would never menace them or drive near them...
...What a toady Cervantes was...
...As a reformed radical (i.e., crypto-totalitarian) of the 1960s, I came away from reading Mr...
...Some Europeans seem to have adopted the axiom that the farther removed one is from Marxist terrorism 1) the more fastidious one can become about international law and "world opinion," 2) the more studiously one Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...This is an attempt to produce a popular version (written primarily by Lesher) of a more scholarly tome written by Schwartz entitled Super Chief...
...It tries to delve into the secret workings of the Warren Court by emphasizing the play of personalities--always with the statesmanlike Warren in the leading role--said to dominate it...
...This helps to explain why Republicans, such as Ronald Reagan, get elected President and have legislative successes, as Reagan had in 1981...
...They are not convinced that the Communist threat in El Salvador and Nicaragua "is worth the risk of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 9 insisting on the change merely because those branches were purportedly more democratic in composition than it...
...magazine, etc...
...He was always ardently anti-Communist...
...But it is a surprise when paternity is denied...
...the SEATO alliance would collapse overnight_9 Without the United States, the CENTO alliance would collapse overnight...
...Quite to the contrary, a section of the book discusses them and their role...
...Buckley has his own reservations--but I think they would have been somewhat even more reserved if he knew more about Alice Walker's own servitude as a professional feminist for Ms...
...It is my impression that all these alleged measurements of public opinion are ultimately intended to influence public policy by reassuring elected officials that it is safe to implement the liberal agenda because it is desired by a majority of Americans...
...They are opposed to business and "conservative" political action committees, but they support (surprise) "proenvironmental" PACs...
...I call on the editor to invite the refugees of economic fanaticism in the guise of supply-side economics to join in his forum...
...The anti-industrial policy version of the supply-side fears the dead hand of government...
...At any rate, he has reported its contents inaccurately...
...Alister Hughes, Grenada's most respected journalist, said, "I don't regard the United States action as an invasion...
...As a journalist of some long standing in the church press, however, I want also to disclaim at this point that Mr...
...To the degree that Miss Walker may politicize her fiction, she will do it ill...
...I would not advise anyone to reflect on the positivism of Sam Clemens before reading Huckleberry Finn...
...I think that most people of independent mind suspect there is something vaguely fraudulent about pollingAthat there is some sleight of hand involved, some mystification of which the pollsters themselves may not be fully aware...
...In 1962 Kennedy was the first President to advocate budget deficits despite economic health, thus ushering in years of economic folly_9 Under him and his successor, wire tapping increased notably as did harassment of opponents, for instance: dawn raids on the homes of U.S...
...You must wonder when it is all going to end, and when we can come back home," Kennedy said, exhorting a cringing audience, suspected, quite possibly, of shilly-shallying in its defense of "frontiers of freedom...
...That bit of Lou Harris window-dressing exactly corresponds to the magician's patter, designed to distract you at the psychological moment...
...More careful readers will find, for example, (I) an argument about why party reforms have hurt Democrats more than Republicans...
...Hersh Read Abroad Richard Grenier's "Passion of Seymour Hersh" (TAS, September 1983) provides an excellent warning for readers of The Price of Power...
...More brutal than chemical and biological warfare, theirs was media warfare, and they waged it against us with the objective of turning us into pious adherents to the Kennedy legend...
...can indulge demented comparisons between the U.S...
...They were not asked about liberal ones...
...The book reveals little that is new or interesting...
...it ignores why we have redistribution...
...Can you stomach the dedications by Shakespeare of his sonnets to Lord Southampton...
...The theme of the work, not surprisingly, is how "the years of the Warren Court . . . spanned--and perhaps, spawned--the greatest American social and political revolutions since the War Between the States...
...He also said, "Thank God the Americans came...
...Buckley has graciously detected a certain "music of language" and all that jazz, but which is simply not on the level that Mark Twain achieved in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...
...Counter-examples of beneficial cooperation between government and corporations are buried under a barrage of statistics of a type brought forth only when the objective is to smash governmental intervention...
...2) I do not actually say that "old pols w e r e . . , fearless champions of the common good" but rather the opposite...
...They favored a cap on the third year of the income tax cut...
...Steel executives_9 The legitimacy of Kennedy's election will always remain dubious...
...Correspondence Update Some of my best friends ride bicycles...
...Is the basic idea to tell Chrysler owners just to chalk up a loss...
...His nine-year-old playmate's rejoinder could have been read on the floor of Parliament, and by Churchill: "The week before it wasn't their country...
...Nations need legends...
...Warren never wavered in his belief that an activist judiciary--particularly because it was not subject to the majoritarian political process--was the principal institution to implement the "ethical imperatives" that, if not exactly stated in the text of the Constitution, were certainly implied in its "ethical structure...
...It was a rescue mission...
...Alice Walker's The Color Purple in his review of that recent Pulitizer Prize-winning novel in the November 1983 American Spectator...
...The quality of Ms...
...Conservative tradition is what conservatives make of it...
...Grenier's assurance that he "has never confused Kissinger with Little Red Riding Hood...
...It overlooks the fact that executives and union members often receive more despite declining productivity and profitability, as Business Week's surveys of executive compensation attest...
...A year and a half ago, when Prime Minister Thatcher disturbed "world opinion" and American relations with Latin America by sending the fleet thousands of miles away to defend something as impalpable as principle, we were her loyal allies...
...If you want to become a "nationally recognized" pollster (and bear in mind that there are plenty of nationally unrecognized pollsters) then your best bet is to frame the questions in such a way as to ensure that your findings are approved of, and thus quoted, by the major newspapers...
...If the authors wish for their hero's image to remain statesmanlike, they should go easy on the gossip...
...If the NATO alliance is ever at war the bulk of our military shipments to Europe will come out of the Gulf of Mexico either between Key West and Cuba or between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula...
...It is a criticism that her own vehemence has transformed from imprudence into insolence, as American bodybags are returned home, mountains of IronCurtain weaponry are recovered, and our other NATO allies quietly reassess their earlier ill-advised pique...
...This is not even particularly surprising...
...It is purportedly an inside account of the Warren Court's activities drawn from conference notes and docket books of the justices, as well as correspondence, notes, diaries, and draft opinions...
...Had he suited his deeds to his words Fidel might have gone the way of Grenada's gangster regime...
...Walker shows plenty of empathy for the black woman, as such, but neither she nor Mr...
...Much about the Kennedy presidency was not mentioned during the recent media bombardment...
...What we can be sure of is that the entrail readers were able to make things come out the way their bosses wanted: The course of action "indicated" by the disposition of the entrails would certainly have been consistent with prevailing court wisdom...
...it bulldozes the rubble created by supplyside policy in the lives of a people...
...He wants a return to "the sort of system that chose Presidential nominees" before the reforms, because "It worked...
...For over two weeks last month my fellow Americans and I were targets of strenuous assaults from the Believers...
...Walker's deep thinking is painfully evident in her first non-fictional collection (of largely Ms...
...I urgently recommend to Mr...
...3) Nor do I " d i s m i s s . . . pollsters, election experts and media consultants" as significant actors in presidential election politics...
...Although I wrote my letter with tongue in cheek, it appears I put my foot in my mouth...
...Such clarity of mind is rare among elites on either side of the Atlantic, but Peregrine Worsthorne of London's Sunday Telegraph insisted that ordinary citizens here and in Britain understand our mission and approve...
...They tell me that I hit a nerve with my recent letter to The American Spectator (Correspondence, October 1983) regarding the dangers bicyclists pose to country motorists...
...The keepers of the Kennedy Legend may have the poetry, but I have the quotes right from the Legend's mouth...
...Yet let the Soviets menace Western Europe or let Soviet surrogates menace European interests in Africa or the Middle East and the United States had better clear the decks for action...
...I surrender...
...I would be distressed were Tolstoy's loony political and religious thinking to influence my reaction to his great fiction...
...For weeks it has been plain that the bloody disorders in Grenada had reached an Idi Amin stage about which something ought to be done, in the interest of the region as a whole...
...I like swells...
...Domestically Prime Minister~ Thatcher has never been stronger...
...Nelson W. Polsby University of California Berkeley, California 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 Richard Jensen replies: The guest who points out the baby's defects expects the father to be unhappy...
...Does Sir Geoffrey consider a putsch led by "General" Hudson Austin, a former prison guard, acceptable constitutional process...
...in Grenada and the USSR's purveyors of "yellow rain" in Afghanistan, and 3) the more exuberantly one can play the role of greasepaint moralizer before the UN General Assembly whose plumed delegates for the most part represent despotisms practicing varying degrees of inhumanity...
...The Anthony Lewises of this world last month were quoting the conciliatory passages of Kennedy's June 1963 speech at American University...
...As a literary and historical account Inside the Warren Court is only slightly superior to The Brethren, Woodward/Bernstein's mean-spirited attempt of a few years back to debunk the Burger Court...
...Nobody concerned with averting thermonuclear war can possibly fail to regard that possibility with anything else but total horror...
...Charles M. De Wolf Chiba, Japan P.S...
...Buckley takes proper notice of the bad treatment that both black and white males get in The Color Purple but he really doesn't ask why or further inquire into this or try to relate it, for example, to George Gilder's theme (see his Sexual Suicide) of the emasculation of the black male in a modern welfare society which has established the black woman herself as the main custodian...
...Her Majesty's government may view with equanimity the nature of the regimes bordering our sea routes from the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico, but Americans do not have this luxury...
...is on in Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...techniques of entrail readers, but of course we recognize today that the precise methodology is irrelevant...
...though it meant bearing far more grievous diplomatic costs for us in Latin America than she would have had to bear for supporting us in Grenada, and though a Marxist stronghold there is far more dangerous to the security of both the United States and Britain than Argentine control of the Falklands...
...That country did once invite Russian missiles in, and very well might allow Grenada to be used for the same purpose...
...Shortly after his appointment to the Court, Warren wrote that determining the Constitution's "ethical structure" was a part of "the pursuit of justice" which he described as "the capacity to generalize and make objective one's private sense of wrong, thus turning it to public account_9 It is sentiments like these that continue to inspire such standard bearers of ideological liberalism as Anthony Lewis to remark, without the slightest sense of irony or critical distance, that Warren "was the closest thing the United States has had to a Platonic Guardian, dispensing law from a throne without any sensed limits of power except what was seen to be the good of society_9 he was a decent, human, honorable, democratic Guardian_9 The most recent work on the Warren Court is Bernard Schwartz's Inside the Warren Court written with Stephan Lesher...
...They oppose indexing the tax brackets to inL flation...
...Buckley should have been curious about the Pulitizer Prize citation on its own...
...Still, in view of this, Mr...
...In the event that the BBC calls me, say, after an IRA takeover in Belfast, I hope our British friends will not consider it irresponsible of me to reiterate Sir Geoffrey's elegant principle...
...White has told us too much already...
...They support wage-and-price controls...
...They oppose his policy in Central America, even though another and intriguing poll by the New York Times--an unusual one in that it sought information rather than "opinion"--demonstrated conclusively that the American people do not know what side the U.S...
...If more people seek second medical opinions, will each opinion count toward the Gross National Product...
...Will the production be sold to the Russians, or, as with pornography, aggravate the disruption of our intimate lives...
...Alice Walker I have such high regard for Mr...
...He proceeded to rebuke Prime Minister Thatcher with refreshing lines: "It is not so much what America has done in the East C a r i b b e a n . . . which is placing a strain on the Alliance as what Britain failed to do...
...He was a very amusing swell who wanted very much to live in the White House...
...9 . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EDITORIAL (continued from page 9) This fire-and-brimstone was emitted three months after the speech widely quoted by the propagandists, and Kennedy could be even more zealous_9 Two months after the above speech he declared: "Without the United States, South Viet-Nam would collapse overnight_9 Without the United States...
...The media's line is that he was a saint and messiah...
...All this is quite untrue, as is the claim that Kennedy at some point in his presidency turned resolutely from Cold War bellicosity to conciliation...
...The same is true of today's fashionable pollsters...
...Why were these rhapsodies being composed...
...JFK the feminist, the advocate 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 of homosexual rights, no-nuke JFK champion of the nuclear freeze and holistic medicine--doubtless many of the Believers now at work have spied evidence of all these good causes in John F. Kennedy's brief presidency...
...Will TV programs and video games that stupefy children be counted along with remedial programs that try to undo the damage...
...Here, for example, are some of the things that the Harris Survey found out about the American people in 1983...
...I certainly don't mean to force this unlikely comparison...
...Without the United States, there would be no NATO...
...and Mr...
...His relations with Congress were frosty, and his popularity is exaggeratedna consequence of his tragic death and the comparative unpopularity of the Presidents that followed...
...Invasion is not the way Grenada's Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon saw our action as we released him from virtual house arrest...
...George Gilder has called polling the modern equivalent of entrail reading, which may not be too far off the mark...
...Buckley may have gone a bit too much overboard, which is like being just a bit pregnant, for Ms...
...articles), In Search of Our Mothers" Gardens (1983), that is self-described as "womanist" prose...
...The pols, furthermore, are amazingly adept at "peer review"--Polsby's term for the selection of candidates in smoke-filled rooms...
...From his bravura inaugural address to the day of his death he persisted in mixing highminded aspirations to reason and sobriety with magniloquent pep talks exhorting America to defend the "frontiers of freedom" everywhere...
...McDonnell's letter is informative and interesting, and I'm grateful for the information it contains...
...I am a new but most enthusiastic reader of The American Spectator...
...Reid Buckley and his observations, in The American Spectator and elsewhere, that I have actually said so elsewhere (Southern Partisan) and would like now to say so here in these hallowed pages...
...Foster C. Smith Akron, Ohio THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 47...
...They oppose the re-election of Ronald Reagan (or they did in August...
...Such findings will be called "scientific," they will be accorded the status of news, and in time you may even be called "respected...
...The Color Purple is a touching but eventually boring recreation of black Southern illiteracy in which Mr...
...We have always known, for example, that Frankfurter complained loudly and bitterly that Warren played fast and loose with the Constitution...
...New York Times op-ed essay, June 7, 1983] (2) Polsby's praise for old pols and machines on pages 169-70 and 182 of his book would make Tip O'Neill blush...
...At the conclusion of an encomiastic column on Kennedy last month Anthony Lewis adroitly shifted from bouquets to an invidious comparison of the illusory Kennedy with the present reality: "We have a President now who shows no sensitivity to the nuclear danger, who seeks to provoke paranoia about communismmwho in his third year of office has learned nothing...
...to the degree that she protects her works of imagination from her regrettable politics and "lifestyle," her readers will continue to be grateful...
...I surrender to this judgment, and let us forget those quotes_9 [] CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) and in the stock market--will produce new jobs or useful new products...
...DON'T SHOOT Cease fire...
...In his Sunday column he reminded readers that "the United States is not paranoid about Cuba...
...And we recognize that our vision is somehow obscured by "science," by the pollsters' claim to be saying things "with 95 percent certainty that the results are within plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would have been if the entire population had been polled...
...Why were they doing this to us...
...If she could not support our action at least she could have been reticent rather than complicitous in the dubious pronouncements of her gaseous foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, whose fatuous pronouncement was "A change of government is not in itself sufficient reason to justify invasion by one country of another...
...Buckley and others Ms...
...The point is, however, that the great critical blathering over The Color Purpie is largely a form of intellectual slumming...
...Jensen might have written a more sensible review if he had taken more careful notice of the contents of the book...
...1) I reported that Polsby feels that strong presidential leadership is impossible in the wake of the party reforms...
...Now I understand how difficult it has always been for the British upper class to recognize the nature of Hitlerism and Stalinism...
...Without the efforts of the United States in the Alliance for Progress, the Communist advance onto the mainland of South America would long ago have taken place_9 Then Kennedy added, "We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do as we have done in the past . . . . " He said all this on the morning of November 22, 1963, the day he was shot by a rat...
...Obviously last month Mrs...
...Nor, truth be known, do our British friends...
...Instead America had to endure the humbug all over again: how he beguiled those of stony heart, grew in office, took on god-like qualities as a peacemaker, good samaritan, and espouser of whatever goody-goody causes are currently in the air...
...Thatcher did not speak for all Britain...
...also, alas, he was erratic...
...Eloquent elaboration on the fun he had would have been sufficient to win my heart...
...What Inside the Warren Court does do-although less dramatically than The Brethren--is to show the extent to which many of the Court's opinions are the product almost of accident, the result of shifting coalitions having nothing to do with any notion of principled jurisprudence...
...Not that I know anything about the Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Jensen's claim that this is "quite impossible" in the political system I describe is false...
...They did not quote those later speeches wherein Kennedy slipped back into that weird oratorical style that charmed the romantics in America but set off alarm in the cocos of the Kremlin's paranoiacs...
...Buckley care to think twice, apparently, of the frighteningly bureaucratic causes of black male rage in America.--Thomas P. McDonnell Stoughton, Massachusetts Reid Buckley replies: Mr...
...Philip Groth Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Wisconsin Center Janesville, Wisconsin Peer Review Your reviewer, Richard Jensen, seems to have read my book Consequences of Party Reform carelessly (TAS, November 1983...
...Well, it isn't going to end . . . . because what happens in Europe or Latin America or Africa directly affects the security of the people who live in this city, and particularly those who are coming after...
...Hersh's book with the feeling that while the one may be a "little red," the other is still a "hood...
...Lou Harris has also found this year that Americans are opposed to the MX missile, just as they oppose a potential laser-beam defense against enemy missiles...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
