Editorials: The Fantasist Presidency / Steve Tesich, RIP
EmmettTyrrell, R . Jr.
"Editorials: The Fantasist Presidency / Steve Tesich, RIP" by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Fantasist Presidency Washington lie sudden prominence of one Mr. Craig Livingstone has not surprised those of us who have been giving this...
...Back in Arkansas such ambushes of the Clintons' opponents were known to happen...
...The climactic scene is a team bicycle race pitting the groups against each other, and the victory by the townies is sentimental and uplifting...
...pronounced the \Vhite House's possession of confidential files a matter of negligible importance...
...He lived in the hearty burly-burly of the Chicago area, and went to Indiana University on a wrestling scholarship...
...One minute he was stumbling around post-war Europe with the remnants of his family-the rest had either been casualties of the Nazis and the Communists, or were locked away behind the Iron Curtain in Yugoslavia where he had been born in 1992 as Stoyan Tesich...
...According to the unsuspecting press...
...the news is too distressing...
...Yet in the end even Stoyan suffered the same affliction that creeps up on many fine American writers...
...Yet no president since the late Warrcii Gamal iel I larding has been so beset with "snafus...
...But this is a quibble...
...f low do these snafus occur...
...Though the bicycle race did take place, Stoyan's townies were actually members of our circle of friends, an eccentric bicycle rider of immense talent named Dave Blase and several national champion swimmers, one quite rich...
...Then there have been the news reports about Mrs...
...Craig Livingstone has not surprised those of us who have been giving this 1'l'hite House our undivided attention since its Fantasy President arrived promising such marvels as the "most ethical" presidency in the history of the world- Even while delighting in tile comic high-j inks of such Clinton zanies as Dr...
...Another rude book has come out...
...That makes five books on the Clintons in recent months, not one of which has been favorable or even neutral...
...Former Clinton bodyguard Larry Patterson reported in David Brock's Troop ergate story in 1993 that Clinton often broke the law by asking his troopers to dig up dirt on opponents...
...very much the product of a grateful writer who felt himself to be a welcomed outsider...
...Always the eternal boy he arrived in America in joyous awe, thrilled by literary and athletic heroes, wowed by all the wild phenomena America heaves up-much of which left him pensive...
...Now Stoyan, I hope, is experiencing the real thing in the real place...
...A candidate for a White House security clearance fills out an FBI background form...
...The poor sap had no idea that they were improperly Adapted from RET's weekly Washingtomi '1'iiuc,, column syndicated by Creutror•s Ss uidicoic...
...Everything that turns up on the candidate appears in the file...
...Stoyan's work was about gratitude and the marvels of America...
...And why, we might ask, do they occur so frequently in the administration of a clever fellow whose whole life has been devoted to better government...
...The Fantasist Presidency Washington 'l'lie sudden prominence of one Mr...
...Clinton's ethereal conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi, both undertaken under the trained eye of la Houston, a spiritual masseuse...
...Jovcelvn Elders (retired), Bernard "Frizzy" Niissbaui n (retired), and Zoe "Nanny" Baird (never installed), we knew the presence of former restaurant bouncer and casino PR hack Livingstone in the director's chair at the White House office of personnel security promised incomparable burlesque...
...Breaking Away is remembered by most Americans as the Times described it: a movie "about a group of teen-agers, posthigh school `townies' in Bloomington, Ind., and their rivalry with the more privileged college students at nearby Indiana University...
...Livingstone's hour has come round at last...
...Then at fourteen Stoyan arrived in America...
...Livingstoate's fellow political hacks...
...They pick up the newspapers and discover that their staff is composed of creeps, ex-bouncers in critical security positions, and dumb whites who call the black congressman Floyd Flake a "dumb-assed nigger...
...In the movie the putative townies from hillbilly families listened to opera and wore Italian paraphernalia such as ascots...
...Perhaps that was because his own youth must have been so brilliantly transforming...
...It was a charming and amusing portrayal of youth...
...Clinton is responsible for hiring the aforementioned galoots...
...Of course Hollywood had to tart up Breaking Away's story to conform with its legends and bugaboos...
...The Times goes on to say that Break- \ ing Away conveys the "sense of a dream being achieved...
...1 9 6...
...During the 198o's, his friend and agent Sam Cohn tells us, Stoyan's "ideas became more abstract...
...It is used throughout the federal government...
...The Clintons wanted political intelligence on their opponents...
...Well, I join them in wincing...
...When America does not fully conform to its stated ideals their disappointment goes a bit over the top...
...The FBI then does a background investigation on the candidate...
...He had a sound eye for buncombe...
...Ilow did this one occur...
...Those of us who have given their White House our undivided attention have been trying to point that out...
...playing make-believe Walter Lippmann on the weekly McLaughlin shouting match...
...He was a notable figure in my circle of college friends, composed, rather remarkably, of equal parts literary types, worldclass swimmers, and bohemians...
...Steve Tesich, RIP 17 The American Spectator . August 1996...
...Actually he simply became overwhelmed by the pessimism of modern writers who seem to expect heaven on earth...
...The other day the New York Times reported that Steve Tesich, the playwright, novelist, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, died suddenly of a heart attack...
...That was the style, of course, of off-beat college students, not poor country boys...
...Along with his emotions rode a sensible skepticism...
...E D I T O R I A L S by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Stoyan mixed Slavic melancholy with a vast gratitude for such big things as American freedom and such little things as a good cup of coffee with his morning cigarette...
...He was ton opponent, Steve Clark, had his expense records leaked to the press by Webb Hubbell, killing his chances to challenge Clinton...
...Actually...
...anyone familiar with federal standards for processing federal security files kno s this "completely honest snahi" is an impossibility...
...The file is then sent to the White House's director of personnel security...
...The struggle of the down-trodden townies against the lordly college students never took place...
...The resulting file must he handled with the utmost con fidentiality, for it will contain what is called "raw" intelligence...
...Keep an eye on the fate of White House operative Livingstone-and now Bruce Lindsey...
...Now the criminal justice process will...
...one of Mr...
...The White I-louse called it the ..Update Project...
...In college we were for a while roommates and remained friends for over three decades...
...If some unsavory claim about, say, former' All "s 16 August 1996 ' The American Spectator secretary of state James Baker or former White House speechwriter Andrew Ferguson (now a Washington journalist) turned up, it might be leaked at the appropriate time-say Ferguson writes a blockbuster about Hillary's latest tantrum, or Baker challenges a Clinton crony for office...
...Me a„ bets of the press who share the fantasies of our Fantasy President have swallowed this latest alibi whole...
...It is another of the Fantasy President:s implausible lies and a grave breach of government procedure The federal government's standard for security clearance determinations has been established b, the CIA for years...
...Boy Clinton refers to the White House's requisitioning of Republican personnel files as "a completely honest bureaucratic snafu...
...Tesich always had a fine sense, in fact a sympathy, for youth...
...It is in this office that an "adjudication" is performed on the Ale.'l'hat means the raw intelligence is reviewed and either a "favorable" or an "unfavorable" judgment is made on the candidate's security clearance...
...The grade of the subject's security clearance is kept on a Secret Service roster which also records the subject's employment in the White I louse with an "A" for active or "I" for inactive...
...I agree with Bill and Hillary...
...laboring at a heretofore sensitive post in the Pentagon, pushed a button and, egad, an avalanche of confidential personnel files crashed into his office...
...a refugee from Europe, from the carnage of World War II...
...FBI files have been requisitioned by such hansdoodles...
...He had an eye for the country's many characters and the whirl of movements that have whipped through the country during the past three decades...
...And there are reports that Mrs...
...Well, let's hear it for anything here in the Clintonian Era that is "uplifting," even if C skeptics such as myself have to C endure the "sentimental...
...Eleanor Clift...
...Much of that is true...
...What the Senate's Whitewater report and the pilfering of White House personnel files demonstrate is that the Clintons' Arkansas morals followed them into the White House...
...His most popular creation was the movie Breaking Away, for which he earned an Oscar...
...It could include outlandish charges from neighbors and disloyal friends, along with other unsubstantiated charges...
...A promising Clin I am swearing off the morning newspapers...
...No wonder the Clintons wince when the morning newspapers arrive...
...The "Update Project" is non sense...
...After that the file is returned to an FBI vault, front which it is to be removed only even, five years for reviews that take into...
...The White House hack who called the FBI for personnel files clearly broke the law-as did the source at the FBI who responded to this clearly illegal call...
...Only Hollywood would believe in hillbillies singing arias and insist that rich and privileged (actually quite middle-class) students lose races to wretches of Dickensian pathos...
...Even as a student his waking hours were absorbed with student government...
...obtained, and so lie left them around for months...
...account the file subject's changed conditions...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
