CONRAD BLACK: Relentless and Entertaining
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
was over and done with as soon as she got the money, at least as far as she was concerned.” But not as far as the French were concerned. While she was in Paris buying new stuff and trysting...
...Members of the 1960s generation, those influenced, whether positively or reactively, by the intense political activism of the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement, have held the White House for four terms...
...and the intense feelings of resentment and even hostility Mary nurtured against her son Robert Todd Lincoln in the years after her release from Bellevue...
...It is impossible for a woman to like Margaretha because we know only too well what women like her think of the female sex and how they treat us, but we can admire her in her last moments...
...Some spy… Keeping track of the twists and turns of her inquisition and trial is like trying to make sense of Richard Burton’s speech “explaining” who’s spying on whom in Where Eagles Dare—a double agent is posing as a single agent when in fact the real single agent is an imposter who discovered that the fake double agent was the traitor everyone assumed to be dead...
...This was a confection of Hillary’s and has become part of the Clinton gospel, but it was made from whole cloth and was always partly a diversionary red herring, and the rest outright paranoia...
...Everyone, including Robert Tyrrell, concedes that Bill Clinton is well educated and a cunning political operator, and that he ran hard as an outsider for the nomination, and for election over a respected incumbent...
...This book is a prosecution argument, but it takes its title from the author’s contention, one of the principal premises of his book, that President Clinton is now a miserable, frenetic, often depressed, and, as is stated several times, “disgraced” man, even though his wife is a strong candidate to take them both back to the White House...
...In an attempt to identify Mary Lincoln’s B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 5 The Madness of Mary Lincoln By Jason Emerson (SOUTHERN ILLINOISUNIVERSITY PRESS, 304 PAGES, $29.95) Reviewed by Thomas J. Craughwell Thomas J. Craughwell is the author of Stealing Lincoln’s Body (Harvard University Press, 2007...
...That he really is in such a deteriorated condition is not so clear...
...Mr...
...It is hard to believe that anyone who has been elected to and completed in good health two consecutive, contested U.S...
...SOME OF THE BOOK’S other historic parallels are problematic, especially the comparisons of Bill Clinton with Warren Harding and of Sen...
...By God,” said the commander of the firing squad, “this lady knows how to die...
...He climbed Everest and became famous six years after she was born and christened...
...Hillary Clinton with Sen...
...Tyrrell’s well-argued disapproval of the Clintons, much of it published in this magazine (of which he is the founding and continuous editor), is well known...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 3 The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Treasures From the Attic AMERICAN HISTORIANS DREAM of finding a cache of Lincoln letters the way the rest of us dream of picking six winning numbers for Powerball Lotto...
...Let’s hope she heard him...
...And he did have a purposeful and bold foreign policy that he executed with consummate skill...
...If at the bottom of the trunk Emerson had also turned up a hand-drawn map with “X” marking the spot where Jefferson Davis buried the gold from the Confederate treasury, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised...
...the lessthanflattering role her friends James and Myra Bradwell played in the case...
...But many things about the Clintons are hard to believe...
...Tyrrell’s other principal thesis is that Hillary Clinton represents the last stand of the radical youths of the 1960s against the conservative youth cohort of that era...
...Whoever the Republicans nominate in 2008 will probably be from the latter group as well...
...national security interest...
...The incumbent president is from the latter group...
...This is the drama of the book...
...reviewed in this issue on page 87...
...It isn’t conclusive, but the case it makes requires a response from its subjects...
...plea bargain system works, I don’t attach much importance to the outgoing president’s payment of $25,000 and acceptance of the bearable sacrifice of not practicing law in Arkansas for five years to be rid of the independent counsel’s investigation of him...
...THOMAS NELSON, 320 PAGES, $26.99) Reviewed by Conrad Black Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (PublicAffairs) and the new book Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (Public Affairs...
...President Clinton appears to be wealthy, healthy, and cheerful...
...Apart from his reductions of tax levels, President Reagan retained or emulated almost all of what FDR had done, including his defense build-up...
...It is simply a breathtaking find, and the fact that Emerson stumbled on the letters in an old steamer trunk tucked away in the Towers family’s attic (Frederic N. Towers had been Robert Lincoln’s attorney) gives the discovery an almost fairy tale quality...
...Lyndon Johnson...
...The Clinton theory of a “right-wing conspiracy” to smear critics is nonsense, and Robert Tyrrell, who is usually represented as one of the chief conspirators (with this magazine), properly debunks this myth...
...the actions she took to win her release from the sanitarium...
...Clinton enthusiasts cannot simply ignore the allegations that the former president committed perjury, that his wife parlayed $1,000 into $100,000 in a day of commodity trading, illegally...
...After the next president, it will probably be time for younger candidates...
...Tyrrell professed to be offering a completely objective assessment of the arguments for and against his view that the Clintons are immoral, and the ex-president a degenerate and a felon...
...When Ladoux temporized, she nagged him for the promised sum in an uncoded letter addressed to his office and sent through the regular mails...
...the burning question of whether the Clintons will fade like the Kennedys have after Chappaquiddick, or will recapture the national lemonade stand for another eight-year booking...
...The vagina dentate imagery is ever present...
...The author’s views of the Clintons are well known, and he spares the readers the hypocrisy of many partisan historians and journalists who try to masquerade as even-handed evaluators of public figures...
...Tyrrell squarely raises the question of whether the Clintons are frauds, confidence tricksters, and lowlifes, or whether the admiration of their many supporters is justified and they have been shabbily treated...
...In summer 2005, independent scholar Jason Emerson hit the jackpot—twenty forgotten, neverbeforepublished letters written by Mary Lincoln...
...Refusing to be tied to a stake, she stood on her own in a desolate field in the bleak autumn dawn, and when they tried to tie a blindfold around her eyes she waved them gently away and said in a gracious tone, “That won’t be necessary...
...In addition to the Mary Lincoln letters, Emerson found five other previously unknown letters written to the president’s widow during this unhappy chapter in her life...
...Taken together, these documents offer scholars what they have never had before: fresh insights into Mary’s mental and physical condition before she was sent to Bellevue...
...presidential terms, a feat achieved by only seven of the 40 prior presidents, would be such an odious character as is described here...
...and the preceding crop, from Hoover to Eisenhower [also eight terms], were born between 1874 and 1890...
...In her heart, she is widely suspected to be a tax-and-spend, Big Government, authoritarian liberal, and Robert Tyrrell cites plenty of evidence to support that view...
...How different, and better, the world would have been if Theodore Roosevelt, as had been expected, had survived to be the candidate and to return as president...
...The Clintons and George W. Bush were born at or just after the end of World War II...
...And these are not letters from some random period in Mary’s life—these letters date from “the insanity episode,” as Emerson calls it, the months before, during, and after her 1875 confinement in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois...
...was over and done with as soon as she got the money, at least as far as she was concerned...
...While she was in Paris buying new stuff and trysting with the Marquis de Beaufort at the Grand Hotel, she was summoned by Georges Ladoux, head of French Intelligence, who asked her to spy for France to prove that she was not spying for Germany...
...Nor does he...
...Warren Harding was a pleasant yokel and a good-time Charlie who was the dupe of the Republican Party elders who selected him in the original “smoke-filled room” in Chicago in 1920 to resolve a deadlocked convention...
...Hillary Clinton, as this author points out often, is not especially popular with her Senate colleagues, and came straight into the Senate while still living in the White House, elevated by the Clinton political and fundraising machine...
...All of the men who sat in judgment on her kept coming back to her sexuality, even the understated Brits, whose consul called her “bold...
...the previous group, from Kennedy to George Bush Sr...
...that defense-sensitive technology was exported to China at a time when China was a source of large contributions to the Democratic Party...
...Given the author and the subjects, it would not be credible if Mr...
...The newspapers, who blamed her for the slaughter of Verdun, called her “a sinister Salome, who played with the heads of our soldiers in front of the German Herod...
...But there is probably merit in this author’s view that the charge of Senator Clinton toward the presidency does constitute a watershed...
...Policy differences will obviously go on, but the particular ferocity of the center-right and left of the 1960s is probably about to have its last epochal airing in a presidential election...
...Tyrrell believes that the 2008 election will be a showdown between the continuators of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the followers of Ronald Reagan...
...Said her chief inquisitor Pierre Bouchardon: “Feline, supple, and artificial, used to gambling everything and anything without scruple, without pity, always ready to devour fortunes, leaving her ruined lovers to blow their brains out, she was a born spy...
...or even that the Clintons repeat canards, such as that Hillary was named after the New Zealand conqueror of Mount Everest, Edmund Hillary...
...eight terms], were born between 1908 and 1924...
...This section of the book is strewn with phrases such as “the significance is unclear… another inexplicable gap… yet another unanswerable question...
...Far more interesting is how Mata Hari affected the men who were determined to prove her guilty...
...The Clinton party cannot simply shrug, smile, call it another “nice conservative hit job,” and pretend that the Clintons are beyond reproach...
...Once his viewpoint is understood (about halfway through the first page of the introduction), the author’s style is pleasing: amusing and brisk, and spiced with unusual or invented words (e.g., crapulent, repristinated, scortatory, rastaquouere, apolaustic, preposterosity, sempiternal...
...And given how the U.S...
...The invocation of those presidents may be questionable, as Roosevelt was dealing with an extraordinary situation, and was not such a partisan of big government as his opponents claim...
...The book is, first of all, a sympathetic portrait of Mary Lincoln, a woman who showed signs of mental illness long before the assassination of her husband, Abraham Lincoln, on April 14, 1865 (although that event is generally considered the poor woman’s breaking point...
...WHILE THIS BOOK IS NOT (and does not claim to be) rigorous history, and there are too many footnotes referring to anonymous people, or citing the New York Post or other dubious sources, it does make a strong, succinct, and interB O O K S I N R E V I E W 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 esting case for the view that Bill Clinton was the “greatest huckster ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” that the Clinton era was, in some respects, “a holiday from history,” and that there is an astounding and disturbing number of questions about the probity of the Clintons...
...Relentless and Entertaining THIS IS A LIVELY UPDATE of this author’s extensive previous comments on the ethical and legal shortcomings of President and Senator Clinton...
...Lyndon Johnson came into the Senate in 1949, after 12 years in the House of Representatives, where he became very friendly with the Democratic establishment, including Sam Rayburn, Harry Truman, and even FDR...
...Even though Senator Clinton has been a conscientious member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, there are tens of millions of Americans who remember her as a strident and threatening woman who seemed to like Palestinians better than Israelis, and never saw a tax increase she didn’t like...
...He has had a bumpy sleigh ride at times, but my impression is that his life is less perturbed and much less controversial than when he was at the height of his career...
...Pardongate” may have elicited an exaggerated response, but a large number of the 140 recipients were convicted drug dealers, some sponsored by both Clintons’ brothers...
...The discovery of these letters is thrilling, but the documents themselves are only useful if they are set within their historical context, and that is what Emerson does so well in The Madness of Mary Lincoln...
...Subconsciously they all agreed with the dictum of Tacitus: “When a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from no crime...
...This is an enjoyable and very readable political polemic...
...If she is the nominee, she will presumably be facing a Republican opponent of approximately her vintage, armed with a more robust view of the property rights of the individual citizen, and perhaps of the U.S...
...Her immediate response was to demand money for clothes and travel...
...Some were also uncontroversial, such as Patricia Hearst...
...From Hubert Humphrey on, Democratic candidates for president, including Bill Clinton, have had a rather placatory view of national security policy, and have been more enthusiastic than their Republican opponents about taking money from people who have earned it and giving it to people who haven’t (presumably in exchange for their votes...
...This is a relentless, but entertaining, excoriation of the former first couple...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
