Editorials/Operation Hamill-Lewis/Kitty Times

...I started out in journalism in New Orleans, working for a weekly called the Vieux Carre Courier...

...It is also a difficult story, if only because of the sheer difficulty, not to say danger, of interviewing people in housing projects...

...The great reporting is still much in evidence...

...Reagan practicing the scortatory arts in the White House when Ron was away and of Ron as a rake in his early days and of Nancy ruling the White House with a "Gucci-clad fist...

...In the middle of the book there is an immense chapter on the evolution of a specific program known as the War on Poverty...

...Meanwhile the situation is deteriorating in Chicago, and by the end of the book some of those who went north have moved back to Mississippi...

...Of him it can be said, as Canning said of Pitt, that he was the 'pilot that weathered the storm.' The world owes him an enormous debtand it saddens me that there are some who refuse to acknowledge his achievements...

...Nick told me once that, when in high school, he would go to the Tulane library on Saturdays to read back issues of Esquire, where this style of journalism was to be found...

...So I was raised getting two different views of the world and having to square them...

...Pass it on...

...He reminds us on every page of the unjust treatment received by black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta...

...Thinking about the history of race relations can easily give rise to bitterness by Tom Bethell and fatalism," he writes, and there are traces of this in the book...

...Within a column inch the reporter speaks of the Reagans' conducting a "desperate' campaign to improve their image and of the Reagan White House "desperately" soft-pedaling Nancy's vanities...

...After all, he was a stalwart member of our little band of saber-rattlers...

...The best solution is for the Iraqis to police their own government by overthrowing Saddam...

...The obsession with Ronald Reagan and his wife, continuing as it does three years after his retirement, is bizarre...

...Apparently, the Times editors who put Miss Kelley's gossip on their front page believe that 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 she is a greater reporter than any of the dozens who covered Washington for the Times during the Reagan era...

...The Times's reporters have been covering the Reagans for over a decade...

...But a gossipist is by nature a mountebank...

...Columnists and cartoonists follow Hamill's lead in composing dithyrambs that blame the administration for being insufficiently harsh towards Sad-dam...

...Think of it...

...She lists scores of public figures who she says took "time to answer questions and share their stories...

...Without relishing war we recognized Saddam as a threat to American national interests and advised military action...

...CAPITOL IDEAS ORIGINAL SIN IN THE PROMISED LAND Bill Russell lives on the edge of the French Quarter, so when I left his apartment one night recently, you can be sure that I kept my eyes peeled...

...She has triumphed where its Washington editors have failed...

...But there has also been a change since I first knew him—the old detachment has gone...

...And how did he do that...

...For a commentator like William Safire to favor continued American military intervention on behalf of Saddam's latest victims is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical...

...I guess I'm more of the liberal bent," he says...

...Liberals are learning about such matters as the "free rider problem," referring to residents who won't pay for the added protection but benefit from it anyway...

...We were outnumbered among commentators and by the Democrats on the left, but experience counseled us that military intervention against Saddam was necessary and likely to be short and sweet...

...Some of his earlier pieces were published by Norton in a book entitled The Fast Track...

...The only place these worthies would send in the troops would be Wall Street to wipe out the sanctuaries of "white collar crime" or some hellish all-male soAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...

...I refused to see her...

...Eastern Europe regained its freedom . . . ; the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunified within NATO...

...All that, of course, is as nothing if agossipist can be found to utter unsubstantiated luridities about the President's wife...

...The amazing thing was that Nick was Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...I do not recall Senator Edward Kennedy being with us, and you can bet the farm that neither columnists Anthony Lewis in the New York Times nor Pete Hamill in the New York Post favored force of arms in the Middle East...

...Journal the other day, Fred...

...When wars end there are refugees and there ispartisan warfare...

...Lemann must be one of very few reporters who has done this...

...Not one has been able to show Nancy running national security policy...

...Further resolutions call for Iraq to pay reparations to the war's victims and to desist from harming refugees lest the allies renew their attack...

...Then he went on to Harvard, where he became editor of the Crimson...

...By the age of 18 he knew about the reporting techniques described by Tom Wolfe in his "new journalism" anthology...

...It's not true, as Harry McPherson wrote in reviewing Nicholas Lemann's book The Promised Land, that with the black underclass "mired in poverty," the rest of the population "averts its eyes...

...The book is snake oil...

...After working for the Washington Monthly he joined the Atlantic, where parts of his book on the great black migration were published...

...There is indeed desperation here, but the desperation issues not from the Reagans but from those who remain so overwrought by Ronald Reagan's presidency that they will debauch the front page of one of the world's most respected newspapers...

...As for Senator Kennedy, he will bewail the fate of Saddam's victims even as he dismantles our Air Force...

...He knits his stories together with seamless perfection, and his narrative is as smooth as silk...

...And so a Times reporter was called in to speed-read the 600-page book and report on its fanciful revelations of Mrs...

...Well, so reflexive are some of these detractors in opposing George Bush that they do not notice the impudence of their hypocrisy...

...He laughs...

...They refused her too...

...I vote with my mother...

...Writing in the Wall Street KITTY TIMES O n Sunday, April 7, the New York Times did something quite curious...

...No other recent President, successful or unsuccessful, has caused such a mania except Franklin Roosevelt, and then only among hardened right-wingers on the peripheries of politics...

...still in high school himself...

...He wanted to find out what was happening and describe it in this cool, neutral style...

...He did more pieces for the Courier, and he turned out to have phenomenal reportorial skills—above all, an eerie detachment from the events that he was describing...

...Miss Kelley's other essays into biography have contemplated the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...

...The uptown area near Tulane, where Nick Lemann himself grew up, is by no means safe...

...This is wishful thinking on the part of liberals and conservatives alike, but not thereby true...

...I can do no better than quote a New York Times interview with him: "My father is a conservative," he says, "and my mother is a liberal...

...Commitment" was not his thing...

...The morally superior Anthony Lewis, who has been unfailingly wrong about all the major themes of recent decades, declares that the President lacks "an empathy gene" and cannot feel "the pain of other human beings...

...Here, despite much change, "King's dream has not yet quite come true for poor black peoplein Clarksdale," and "the social ills of the Chicago ghettos are beginning to appear in the Delta...

...Not one of its reporters has been able to uncover the Reagans acting like Palm Beach Kennedys...

...It ran a front-page news story reporting the scabrous contents of an anti-Nancy Reagan biography written by an exceptionally trashy writer, Miss Kitty Kelley...

...Certainly the administration should have grounded all Iraq's air support for its units fighting Kurds and Shi'ites...

...Most of what he tells us is no doubt representative enough...

...Hamill throws in some idiotic non sequiturs attempting to connect our successful military campaign in Iraq with the urban problems of New York City, a city whose laws and rituals conform more closely to the Liberal bugaboos of a Hamill or a Lewis than almost any other city in America...

...There are timetables for implementation and there are mechanisms for monitoring compliance...

...So much of the credit goes to President Reagan...

...See "The True Death of Bessie Smith," published in Esquire in June 1969, for a more reliable account...

...No, Harry, we keep our eyes peeled—unless of course we live in a nice safe neighborhood where we don't have to worry about such mundane matters as personal safety...

...At the beginning of the 1960s, Lemann writes, the United States "was still in a kind of moral slumber about segregation in the South," and was not yet of a mind to embark on a moral crusade against anything...

...Doubtless the Times will soon be offering Miss Kelley a position, and why not an editorship...

...The administration is right to recognize the interests of its friends in the region, particularly the Turks, who have faced Kurdish uprisings for decades...

...Large areas of New Orleans are now less safe than they were in the 1970s, when I lived there, including the French Quarter at night...

...That is the Edward Albee version of her death...

...If memory serves, however, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was also the wife of a President...

...One name on the list is mine...

...Some will answer that it is because Miss Kelley exposes hot stuff about the wife of a President or, as Miss Kitty would put it, a "petticoat president...

...But the United States is right to avoid involvement in an Iraqi civil war that might leave us in the undesirable role of administering another Lebanon...

...Sometimes he seems to overdo it, however, as when he writes that "every black in Clarksdale knew" that the blues singer Bessie Smith, who died in a car crash outside Clarksdale in 1937, "had been refused admission to the county hospital on grounds of her race, at a time when she could still have been saved...

...One day Nick Lemann came into the office with a feature that he had written on his own initiative, comparing the local prep schools...

...Thatcher elucidated some of those achievements: "The Cold War was won without a shot being fired...

...Actually, the aftermath of the Gulf War is not unusual...

...But then whatother President aside from Roosevelt achieved so much in this century...

...President Bush must stand resolutely behind these resolutions and maintain our Air Force nearby...

...And so now Senator Kennedy chides the Bush Administration for the plight of Iraq's refugees and apparently wants our military involved in Iraq's civil war...

...EDITORIALS OPERATION HAMILL-LEWIS H ow is it that those commentators and politicians who so recently opposed the use of American force against Saddam Hussein now insist on its use to protect Saddam's Kurdish and Shi'ite victims...

...To write the hypocritical solemnities of these columnists it helps to be a historical illiterate...

...He said she died an hour after being taken by ambulance to the G. T. Thomas Hospital and "didn't have a chance...

...And none of us accepted an offer to have sex with her...

...The major remaining business for the United States in Iraq is Saddam's removal from government and prosecution for war crimes...

...This is a good subject for a book, because it eludes the radar of daily journalism...

...Then Mrs...

...Speaking in Washington in early March, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reminded us once again of precisely what the Reagan achievement was...

...Perhaps the administration ended hostilities a few hours too early...

...The prosecution of Saddam as a war criminal is fraught with problems...

...T he Promised Land deals with the 1 migration of several million blacks from the rural south (Clarksdale, Mississippi, in particular) to the urban north (Chicago in particular...

...cial club so that the sexes might be integrated and cigar smoke banished...

...and, as for the hot stuff, most of it appeared in former White House chief of staff Donald Regan's For the Record...

...Other names on the list are those of the journalist Fred Barnes and the historian Kenneth Lynn...

...a weakened Soviet Union was compelled by the West's economic and military competition to reform . . . and the United States once again became the preeminent power in the world...

...by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Ialso wonder on what evidence Le- mann discerns "the Reagan Administration's deep budget cuts in social programs...

...The driver who came upon the scene of the accident while Bessie Smith was still lying in the road happened to be an orthopedic surgeon...

...In the long, central chapter on Washington we come to a real difficulty...

...Now 36, Lemann is among the best reporters in the country today, and I will be surprised if he doesn't end up with Pulitzer Prizes on his shelf...

...Even in her acknowledgments the gossipist misleads...

...C. Ikle, the worldly-wise former under secretary of defense, explained how Saddam's fall might be brought about, namely through the enforcement of those United Nations resolutions that very specifically require the destruction of all Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, nuclear materials and components, and longer-range ballistic missiles...

...One of the peculiarities of the Liberal mind is that, though it has no qualms about bringing down the full force of the state on generally law-abiding citizens who run athwart some esoteric government regulation, it is extremely reluctant to call in the cops when brutal crimes are being committed or the military when tyrants threaten world peace...

...The lady is a gossipist, though you might object that she is no lady...

...It involves panoramic and slow-moving changes that are unlikely to seem newsworthy from one day to the next...

...It's not THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 9...

...One evening I had dinner with a couple who live there, and they mentioned the private security patrols now routinely hired to supplement police protection in the area...

...Why did the Times not give these masterpieces the front-page treatment...

...In the decade of the 1980s," she declared, "Western values were placed in the crucible and they emerged with greater purity and strength...

...He told me he was advised by a tenant of the Robert Taylor Homes, a large project in Chicago, that the safe time to come was before noon, when the gangs were still sleeping it off...

...No, I am afraid that the only reason this ponderous compendium of ordure received notice on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record is that the Old Order cannot get Ronald Reagan out of its mind...