Public Nuisance:Bill and Me at Georgetown/A Modern Miracle
PublIc nuIsances R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. bill and Me at Georgetown LONDON I I am in london preparing a couple of talks on politics, and I have made a very unhappy discovery. A...
...I feared the mutineers might win...
...In 2004 he campaigned for 14 Democratic office seekers...
...The prevalence of these irritable sciolists explains why in the nation today there are so few historians of the stature of, say, Arthur M. Schlesinger or Samuel Eliot Morison...
...After all, I founded The American Spectator during my student days...
...Twelve lost...
...After a two-year ordeal orchestrated by a group of mutinous faculty members, the Ave Maria Law School has been given a clean bill of health by the American Bar Association and can continue with its work...
...The university at the middle of the 20th century was a happy place, congenial to civilized thought...
...Hamilton has a second volume out now, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency...
...They were the typical professorial grumblers, and such unhappy philistines so often have the upper hand on campuses...
...Drat, our secret is out...
...With this it is considered highly likely that the ABA will acquiesce to the planned move to Naples in 2009, over the howls of the irritable profs who filed their nuisance complaints...
...Also, he could not stop talking...
...Years later, in 1993, the Spectator published the first Troopergate story that set in motion the long and painful process leading to Bill’s impeachment, and of course the magazine published many other stories on Bill: his troubled real estate dealings, his chaotic and corrupt White House, his cheating on the golf course, and more...
...In power he has never gotten much done, and when he campaigns for others they lose...
...On page 112, he writes that “the American Spectator published a series of articles, mostly untrue, about the president’s promiscuous sex life and shady business practices...
...political philosophers of the stature of Leo Strauss, or political scientists of the stature of Hans J. Morgenthau...
...This is how the historian puts it: “Emmett Tyrell [sic], a contemporary at Georgetown and later conservative pundit, referred to Clinton as ‘a student government goody-goody.’” Well, who doubts that he was...
...He has never been able to cite those articles to me because they do not exist...
...Their hope was that the ABA would revoke the Ave Maria Law School ABA accreditation...
...He simply stumbled across this defamation of the magazine’s reportage somewhere and incuriously accepted it...
...Actually Gillon’s book is not the first time that oursharedexperienceatuniversityhasbeenreported...
...I am glad he never read Terry McAuliffe’s mendacious autobiography...
...the allegedly untrue articles is mentioned because there have been none...
...Dean Bernard Dobranski is a learned fellow who with Judge Bork has been teaching an important course, “The Moral Foundations of the Law...
...In researching the lives of the Clintons let the researcher beware...
...Half a century ago things were different...
...PublIc nuIsances R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Even the faculty Communists were relatively pleasant...
...One would think someone would take notice of the irony that back at 78 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 old Georgetown we were fellow students and friendly rivals, though I never took a class with him and never saw him in the gym...
...McAuliffe maintains that the Spectator published articles claiming Clinton ordered the murder of opponents...
...Learning was widespread on campus...
...Though it was founded to teach the law based on the moral precepts of the Catholic Church, I knew I would be free to say precisely what I thought—no thought police, though of course I might not be invited back...
...Back at Georgetown, Bill had a quick mind but rarely got assignments done on time and probably used crib sheets or Cliffs Notes to finish his course work...
...bill and Me at Georgetown LONDON I I am in london preparing a couple of talks on politics, and I have made a very unhappy discovery...
...What is more, the governing administrators were generous and serious...
...Hamilton offers no evidence to support it...
...In his footnotes he cites Hamilton’s opuscule as the source for Gillon’s claim that I attended Georgetown with Bill...
...I have not had my vaccinations...
...A livelier cultural atmosphere can be found at a Starbucks cafe or health food emporium...
...And serious historians among my friends here in London think I should sue Hamilton...
...In The Pact, a book that follows the strikingly similar careers of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, Steven M. Gillon reveals that Bill and I attended Georgetown University as undergraduates...
...It is even more error-ridden...
...Or we still hear of what a political genius he is, though all he has ever managed is re-election for himself, while his party’s power faded...
...I wish Ave Maria’s students and faculty well, and hereby offer to speak on campus again, at least after they flee chill Ann Arbor for Naples, by which I mean the cisatlantic Naples, the one without the garbage problems...
...In 2008 he campaigned for a famous frontrunner whose nomination was deemed “inevitable...
...From what I know of the course, most of the country’s lawyers would be improved by it, except for those who would find the concept inscrutable and unprofitable...
...Truth be known, I spend very little time on college campuses...
...The story originated in the historian Nigel Hamilton’s biography, Bill Clinton: An American Journey...
...Many of the lies have endured for so long unchallenged—or challenged only by an audacious few whose reputations were immediately blackened—that the lies have become commonplace facts of the Clinton saga...
...The ABA boiled the mutineers’ complaints down to one...
...Yet when I was asked to speak at the Ave Maria Law School I did so with alacrity...
...My only regret through the years is that Georgetown has never acknowledged my presence on campus and the amicable relations I had with Bill...
...A new book written by a promising young American historian reveals a secret about Bill Clinton and me that we have kept from the public for four decades...
...In a word, they have lied...
...Incidentally, it is completely untrue that Bill’s youth was impoverished, and in his autobiography he admits as much, adding that the born-in-alogcabin myth is always a sure vote getter...
...A problem that historians are having in chronicling the lives of both Clintons is that for forty years or more the Clintons have sedulously deposited thousands of discrepancies on the public record...
...He spread himself pretty thin on campus in those days...
...The law school simply would not exist were it not for the philanthropic founder of Domino’s Pizza, Tom Monaghan...
...The faculty was composed of intelligent minds, and the students were intelligent, polite, and not riven by the petty discord to be found on larger campuses...
...Amongst the professoriate of the land, diversity is supposedly a desirable value...
...Now poor Gillon is fouling up the record, spreading Clinton myths that will make the work of future historians nearly impossible...
...The incomparable Justice Antonin Scalia advised at the founding of the school...
...Well, certainly a law school that teaches the law based on Christian values adds to the diversity of the nation’s law programs...
...Now after a comprehensive investigation the ABA has found that, contrary to the surviving complaint, Ave Maria is fully capable of attracting and maintaining competent faculty...
...I spoke on the campus last autumn and departed burdened by gloom...
...I remember Bill well, tooling around campus in a late-model convertible (a Buick if I recall), always ready with a smile and a hearty ho ho—especially for the girls...
...None of R. eMMeTT TyRRell, JR...
...Even then Bill was an inveterate Casanova, which is in part the reason for our covenant of silence...
...Unfortunately Gillon does...
...In fact, I doubt Gillon has any familiarity with the magazine...
...Today it is gloomy, populated, particularly in the humanities, by narrowly opinionated adepts of identity politics and sham studies: the feminists, the Black Studies lecturers, and other special interests too esoteric to mention...
...Whenever he tried to seduce one of my girlfriends, the girls and I had a good laugh...
...Frankly, when I am asked to appear on an American campus I beg off, protesting coyly that the place might be too dangerous...
...I wonder how that is translated into Latin...
...In that book Hamilton claims that I told David Brock, the Troopergate writer, that I would pay his sources, the Arkansas state troopers, “anything they asked...
...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 79...
...When he and his Board of Governors decided to move the campus from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be closer to Monaghan’s other project, Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, a minority of faculty rebelled, sending a dozen or more charges to the ABA...
...There is no truth to that claim...
...a Modern Miracle WASHINGTON S S omething very good has just taken place on a college campus...
...They called him Tubby—even then he had weight problems...
...It was a rather good book, but marred by so many errors that very few intellectuals took it seriously...
...She lost...
...Thus we forever hear about Bill’s impoverished youth, though his family owned automobile dealerships in Arkansas, and he now admits to exaggerating his early poverty...
...The life of the mind nowadays is so rarely celebrated in academe...
...I have a date on the shooting range at the NRA...
...My friend Judge Robert Bork has been a founding member of the faculty...
...On most university campuses the bulletin boards sulk with notices about “Rape Awareness Week,” “Anger Management Counseling,” “The Readings of the Prophet Obama...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 7
