Correspondence: First Things, Gary Aldrich &c.
CORRESPONDENCE Pass Key Byron York never mentions it ("Fast Times at White House High," TAS, November 1996), but the conclusion seems obvious: Bill Clinton would never have qualified for a...
...Indeed, Ms...
...Paxon's committee made a conscious decision a week before the election not to give money to conservative freshmen threeto-five points behind their Democratic challengers...
...Bunting, accept my apologies, and know you have dedicated supporters even among the ranks of the girls next door at W&L...
...Borders wrote, she, or Mr...
...Veith neglects to confront specific points made in the item he questions—namely that Mr...
...Veith...
...Generic advertising" to the tune of $520,000 didn't quite cut it in that state, did it, Mr...
...Incidentally, is this the same David Watkins who used taxpayer money?37,500 worth of federal matching funds—to pay off a young woman accusing him of sexual harassment during the '92 Clinton campaign...
...That's like expressing boredom for Louis Pasteur's constant references to toxic wine and milk before he arrived at the formula we know as pasteurization...
...Borders didn't even attempt to contact me before gratuitously libeling me in a footnote to her much heralded article about poor David Watkins ("Hell to Pay," TAS, January 1997...
...Watkins's FBI file, or the fact that Mr...
...Incidentally, I first discovered the writings of Judge Bork in the old Spectator in its newsprint form in an article titled, "A Dose of Their Own Medicines," in which he notes the discomfiture of the professors when the regulations that they long prescribed for others were applied to them...
...Of course, Ms...
...He pretends to decry the absence of a prescription for the ailments so graphically and extensively chronicled at the very same time he is snidely referring to Bork's disgust for gangsta rap and the various toxic holdovers from the sixties...
...Why didn't Ms...
...We came back...
...Still, why let the facts encumber an otherwise perfectly good footnote, right...
...Recently, your own magazine had an excellent article about drugs and the Clinton White House staff...
...Borders to turn her information over to Mr...
...I first heard of Josiah Bunting when he became headmaster at the Lawrenceville School shortly after it began accepting female students...
...or where "perhaps even a majority" of Americans feel that they have to choose between "God or country...
...The effect of the symposium (and of commentaries such as Bethell's) will not be to illegitimize the American regime...
...ROBERT C. LEA, JR...
...Watkins is now the subject of a criminal investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, the purpose of which is to determine whether Mr...
...Watkins's divorce was widely reported in the media...
...on the contrary, they have always advocated the restoration of federalism and the remoralization of civil society...
...I have friends who are rats and friends who are firstclassmen...
...That despite the cheap, small-minded, mostly mentally challenged and sleazy fulminations of the two afore-named men, there are a fair number of reasonable people writing for the magazine, and that, worst case, it's also not a bad idea to think about the things that the two resident dolts say: even the brain-dead occasionally hit upon a reasonable thought...
...Scholars and pundits agree we have solidified a Republican majority in Congress well into the next century...
...CORRESPONDENCE Pass Key Byron York never mentions it ("Fast Times at White House High," TAS, November 1996), but the conclusion seems obvious: Bill Clinton would never have qualified for a permanent White House pass if he hadn't been elected president...
...Borders did not reveal the name of the reporter, whether the information the reporter supposedly received was indeed "raw and unvetted information from [an] FBI file," how she knows the information was from Mr...
...JOHN E. DECHER III Newport News, Virginia Geoffrey Norman's report on VMI, while heartbreaking, gave me new insight on a man I had misjudged...
...Borders, an investigative reporter, report the details...
...Eventually he lost in a runoff, among other Republican disappointments in Texas...
...DON SCHENK Allentown, Pennsylvania Bork's America Donald Lyons's review of Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah in the December American Spectator might easily have made the pages of Nation or even Mother Jones...
...But I have Francis Russell's biography of Harding, published in the United States as The Shadow of Blooming Grove (1968) and published in England as President Harding: His Life and Times (1969...
...I have full confidence that whatever intellectual quality the magazine has attained has been over their strident objections...
...Though I've only lived in Lexington a few months, I can say that VMI's system works...
...Surely Ms...
...The Clinton staff's prior, serious drug use was a story which broke first in my book...
...We survived...
...How heartening it was to read that he has been "the most forceful of advocates" in preserving VMI...
...Documents which have surfaced since the release of my book, and events like "Dick Morris," "John Huang," "Jorge Cabrera," and others have more than backstopped my claims...
...Rebecca Borders...
...The place was not real popular then...
...He was highly solicited by many universities in his senior year because of his wrestling talent...
...The article begins by slamming my number one bestseller, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen weeks: "...the now infamous book," followed by, "scandalous, (if unverified) goings on...
...Clinton, and others in the Clinton administration who actually abused their public trust...
...187 and waving, not a "few Mexican flags," as he states, but thousands of them, denying as they did the very existence of Los Estados Unidos...
...It was topical, seasonal, and fun for us heterosexual males to look at...
...Nor is it a moderate or academic issue that the editors raise when they ask, "in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences," whether "we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime...
...The Aldrich Footnote I don't know The American Spectator's frequent contributor, Rebecca Borders, and she doesn't know me...
...The Prowler replies: In his triumphalism Mr...
...We remember him as a man of independent judgment and quiet generosity...
...CRAIG G. VEITH Communications Director National Republican Congressional Committee Washington, D.C...
...To do so would be to fall into the liberal frame of mind that a remedy can be found for the failure of all liberal programs by simply enacting one more program...
...Clinton's, in the Travel Office scandal...
...Any indication to the contrary is inaccurate, bordering on the irresponsible...
...Lyons ultimately sums up Judge Bork's solidly based pessimism and misgivings as excessive and unusable...
...GARY WARREN ALDRICH Chantilly, Virginia Good Neighbor Policy Geoffrey Norman's "Crashing VMI's Line" (TAS, December 1996) was superb...
...Queen Anne, Maryland Francis Russell's Harding Florence King's December review of Robert H. Ferrell's The Strange Deaths of President Harding was a good one, and I am certainly going to read the book...
...It was made possible only because of a total team effort by every member of our Conference...
...MONICA BURKE via the Internet I'm writing to say one thing about your publication's touching article on the Virginia Military Institute: AMEN...
...Imagine the difficulty ath-acting young men to VMI during the 7o's, when Clintonesque "loathing" of the military was "all the thing...
...To the latter, he writes that Bork refers "predictably...
...And in Lexington itself, I have yet to find a "townie" with a low opinion of the Institute...
...What is in dispute is nothing less than the "legitimacy" of the American "regime" —"regime," as First Things puts it, not merely the oligarchic judiciary...
...a question, we are assured, that is "in no way hyperbolic...
...Things got worse as that war appeared to have no end...
...Norman, VMI is ideal for the man who knows that "if he goes to the state university, he'll find the fraternities and the parties and he'll be pulled under...
...Miss King writes that Harding's "obloquy has been total and seemingly beyond the reach of revisionist rescue...
...They found them to be irksome and irrational...
...At no point did the NRCC ever hold back resources...
...We shall sorely miss these companions in arms...
...STEPHENS via the Internet...
...Well, can we count on Ms...
...What did Watkins have to say about this information, if it was in fact leaked to the media, and why hasn't the media ever reported whatever it was that worried Watkins so much...
...Borders bothered contacting me, a courtesy one would expect from an investigative reporter, she would have had to report my unequivocal denial...
...As the item noted, Steve Stockman, who faced more than $z million in negative advertising by the AFL-CIO, received only $15o,000 from the NRCC, and that was early on...
...A simple review of the findings released by any one of the congressional committees would have turned up volumes of evidence which support and verify what I wrote in my book...
...And you had to pay for it...
...I noted that Bunting left Lawrenceville to become VMI's superintendent, and concluded from that fact alone that he must be a "facilitator," a specialist in paving the coed bridge to the twenty-first century...
...Despite the fact that Ms...
...The Judge understands, as do all conservatives, that the remedy must come from within...
...Never has any cadet failed to treat me as a gentleman should treat a lady...
...He comes from the precincts of the wildly schizophrenic Wall Street Journal, where the lust for unlimited immigration is almost uncontrollable...
...I know to outsiders the system seems cruel, and it is...
...G.D...
...Nor is it in a moderate or academic spir' it that the editors remind us of the "venerable precedent" of the American Revolution...
...We came back...
...I will watch next year as they admit females to the rat line...
...And since the PC thing to have done was to have given us a cover that only a lesbian masochist could love, thanks...
...ELLIOT WEST Post Mills, Vermont ...Donald Lyons shows his liberal convictions in several ways, among them his criticism of Judge Bork for not proposing concrete remedies...
...Bill Bowen was a brilliant lawyer, investor, and entrepreneur...
...Borders wrote, "One reporter was informed of the details of Watkins's divorce from his first wife by none other than Gary Aldrich, who had recently retired from the Bureau...
...Had Ms...
...Nor is it true that neoconservatives "want to preserve a strong central government...
...Borders's sympathy would be better directed at the seven citizens whose lives were nearly destroyed by Mr...
...They all profess to loathe it, but they know that survival will mean a ring, a diploma, and a firm foundation for life after college...
...JENNIFER QUAIL via the Internet Congratulations on the cover that Robert Grossman did for your December issue, of a VMI coed-cadet looking like a dancer in the Nutcracker...
...In the foreword, Russell indicates, as King does, that Harding did not deserve the bad place he has in books and in the media: "Yet, whatever the tone of the Harding administration, one cannot say that it was shot through with scandal when it contained such men as Herbert Hoover, Charles Evans Hughes, and theelder Henry Wallace in the Cabinet and the Harding-appointed Chief Justice William Howard Taft...
...All members in need were provided maximum coordinated funding and, as our FEC reports show, the NRCC spent all available resources—and then some—to ensure that we retained our Republican majority...
...Lyons hasn't written a lit(Continued on page 78) The American Spectator ?February 1997 13 Correspondence (Continuedfrompagei3) erary or even a respectable philosophical analysis but has made a purely socio-political statement, an attack that belongs somewhere else, not in this print...
...Borders claims these violations occurred...
...Of course, Mr...
...Lyons clearly is not appalled or even quietly offended by the things that Bork and many of the rest of us are, to the point of a prosecutorial tone...
...Tom Bethell does justice neither to First Things, by reducing a serious issue to mild murmurings, nor to its critics, by misrepresenting both their response and their record...
...Since I am in a position to compare the cadets to students at a "normal" school, I can say that the VMI system takes teenage boys and turns them into gentlemen...
...and that this decision may have been motivated by the lack of support these freshmen had shown for Mr...
...Paxon Your House Because The American Spectator never sought comment from National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Bill Paxon or myself, the December issue's On the Prowl item, "Paxon Both Your Houses," was filled with erroneous and false reports surrounding the NRCC's funding of Republican candidates...
...But don't play taps for the Virginia Military Institute quite yet...
...Borders is an apologist for Mr...
...Washington and Lee's campus adjoins the VMI grounds...
...Lyons goes so far as to falsify the reality of what took place in Los Angeles a year and a half ago, when a reliably estimated 70,000 people of Mexican origin all but stormed City Hall screaming with rage about Prop...
...By the way, what was the supposedly unvetted, raw detail of Watkins's divorce...
...Long before First Things was founded, neoconservatives had been strongly critical of the court and staunch supporters of Judge Bork in his heroic cam-paign against the "judicial oligarchy...
...Starr to ensure that any lawbreakers are brought to justice...
...Unverified by whom...
...The upperclassmen have a fierce loyalty to the school, a loyalty matched and exceeded only by the alumni...
...I am 18, female, and a freshman at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...Is this a man who deserves sympathy or understanding...
...When the Justice Department began tormenting the Institute, I paid attention...
...I graduated in 1967 during the Vietnam escalation...
...Nor have neoconservatives been sanguine about our victory in the culture wars...
...Specifically, in the more than thirty states where the NRCC ran generic advertising, we spent $1.3 million in California, $1.2 million in Ohio, and $52o,000 in Texas...
...My brother had graduated in the Class of '83, and I, having gone to a girls school nearby, had fond memories of the all-male school...
...And here is the interesting thing about Mr...
...Watkins who, by virtually every public account, was a willing participant in the brutal May 19, 1993 firing of the career White House Travel Office staff, including the wrongly indicted and prosecuted Billy Dale...
...or where "many millions of children" come to believe that their government is "morally illegitimate...
...While I did not know many cadets or faculty, I respected and admired the values and tradition of the Institute as I did Lawrenceville's...
...After the war he practiced law in Chicago, but was lured to Dallas where he participated in the city's lusty growth...
...Rather, she tied together disparate "information" hoping to create the false and outrageous impression that "none other then Gary Aldrich" leaked confidential FBI information...
...As General Bunting, VMI's Superintendent, explained to Mr...
...GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB Washington, D.C...
...Good editorial judgment, need I say, is not censorship...
...As Mr...
...I, like Mr...
...or, more ominously, invoke the example of Nazi Germany and warn us that "it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here...
...If abortion, as the journal suggests, is the litmus test of legitimacy, then every Western country (where it is not the courts but the legislature that legalized abortion) must be deemed illegitimate...
...It is not, however, in a "dependent clause" but in the title of the symposium that the not so "moderate" or "academic" issue is posed: -The End of Democracy...
...FREDERIC A. WEED San Jose, California What Sort of Person...
...For the first time in nearly seventy years, we re-elected a Republican Congress despite an unprecedented $35-plus million negative advertising assault launched by the big labor bosses and ultraliberal special interests...
...In conversation cadets are polite and helpful...
...Bethell speaks of the disparity between the "moderate and academic" tone of the contributors to the symposium, "murmuring mildly in their dependent clauses," and the "vehement response" of the critics...
...I tell people that there are astonishingly even-handed writers employed by TAS, the foul-mouthed fumings of RET and WP notwithstanding...
...He's ticked off, Mr...
...The issue is not the usurpation of judicial power...
...Unfortunately, Ms...
...Watkins, Mrs...
...Was I wrong...
...Watkins for that matter, should have informed the FBI or Congress of that fact back in July 1996, when Ms...
...RET 10 February 1997 • The American Spectator of House Republican members who, it should be noted, also gave up precious time to make more than 525 campaign visits to fellow incumbents and candidates...
...I was sorry to see it go co-ed, although at the time I was a member of the first class of women admitted to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...Other Presidents since have suffered or tolerated scandals in their family and administrations without being branded by them...
...This phenomenal fundraising effort was made possible through the hard work of the NRCC and with the full participation In Memoriam The editors and staff mourn the deaths of two remarkable members of the Spectator family, William H. Bowen, a generous and far-sighted supporter of conservative institutions, and Michael Scully, editor and writer...
...Many of my friends are rats, and I have heard what hazing goes on...
...Instead, Ms...
...I can get this kind of sneering distaste and putdown in Time, Newsweek, or the New York Times...
...I attend church services weekly with cadets...
...For those of you on the staff that have brains, keep up the good work, and should you have the chance to ice-pick the tires (or, better the eardrums) of Messrs...
...I am the sort of person who read the New Republic throughout the 1960's period when I was a Goldwater Republican (and, roughly concurrently) a member of the John Birch Society...
...Attending Washington and Lee was an honor, and I am lucky to have been invited to attend...
...It was Watkins who had the idea to ruin the reputations of these honest civil servants by announcing the FBI's involvement...
...Nor is it accurate for Bethell to say that neoconservatives "do not much mind" the court's activism...
...That evidence, matching much of what was in my book, was taken under oath from many credible witnesses...
...Buckley's literacy exceeds that of any writer I know, and he also seems to think a great deal better...
...Born in the Midwest, he served with distinction in World War II...
...From my dormitory to the VMI barracks is a brisk ten-minute walk...
...It would be most unfortunate, however, if it had the effect of discrediting conservatism in the eyes of those Americans who properly reject such extreme ideas, or if it distracted conservatives from the urgent tasksof reforming the judiciary and preserving our democratic government...
...that is not in dispute between us...
...that readers of rational mind should be prepared to be revulsed by the racist, sexist, pig-headed rantings of the two aforementioned people ("gentlemen" evades me...
...Borders's article is primarily based on the self-serving statements of David Watkins, much of what she writes about the behavior and attitude of officials in the Clinton administration (including the president and first lady) essentially supports the facts and observations detailed in my book, Unlimited Access...
...My point is that Mr...
...In short, were it up to me, although flushing the two dummies I've mentioned would be choice number one, the magazine itself is worth saving, despite them...
...While decidedly more leftish nowadays, I continue to read, as always, "opposition" literature (my favorite, I regret to say—to you, at least—is National Review: Mr...
...General Bunting will allow only a modicum of change...
...If he were to do otherwise, people like my son would not be there...
...I only hope they have read articles like yours and realize what they are helping to destroy...
...For the record, the NRCC made more than $32 million available to assist House Republican members and candidates — $9 million of which went directly into their campaign accounts...
...Mike Scully is to be forgiven early service to U.S...
...My son is a Rat at VMI on a wrestling scholarship...
...If there is evidence "that 'raw' and unvetted information from [David Watkins's] FBI file was being given toreporters and others interested in the Clintons, in clear violation of the agency's secrecy oath," as Ms...
...To me, a single-sex high school education was incomparable...
...After attending several, all-expense-paid overnights at different universities and sampling the "good life" Bacchus had to offer, my son became nervous...
...I have had doors held for me, chairs pulled out, seats surrendered in cars and at tables, bags carried for me...
...Borders also writes, in part: 'Word even reached the office of Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, whose investigators are now interested in the notes, drafts, and tape recording of my interviews with David and Ileene Watkins...
...Watkins lied to federal authorities about his role, and Mrs...
...Pergantis (Correspondence, TAS, January 1997), "spread the word of TAS," though in a somewhat different way...
...So don't play taps for VMI yet...
...Lyons is, and most particularly on the subject of immigration, whose depredations are an overriding part of Bork's thesis...
...Lyons hates the book before he even reads it...
...Tyrrell or Pleszczynski, please don't discount the idea entirely...
...The issue is not criticism, but rather a priori detestation and loathing of what is immanently and substantially a part of the conservative Weltanschauung...
...Norman 12 February 1997 ?The American Spectator mentioned, the Yankees burned the place down in 1863...
...The entire Watkins piece is simply more verification of what I wrote in my book...
...Americans, including most conservative Americans, are too sensible and prudent to entertain such extreme ideas...
...Irving Kristol's statement, "We have lost the culture wars," is often quoted —without the addendum that the religious wars are yet to be fought and may yet be won...
...I have one minor complaint...
...Paxon's own leadership ambitions...
...Senator Lowell Weicker, for during the rest of his life he exhibited all the virtues Weicker so manifestly lacks: fine manners, humility, a deep wisdom, and an articulateness in writing about politics and policy that is quite rare...
...And I hope they realize one other thing: the Old Corps really is the only Corps...
...Admittedly, I am personally biased...
...Unverified...
...Lyons...
...ANDREW B. BURNS Stamford, Connecticut First Things Follies Tom Bethell's account of the controversy provoked by the First Things symposium is so distorted that the reader can have no idea of the nature or import of that controversy ("First Things First," TAS, January 1997...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
