SCRAPBOOK
SCRAPBOOK AT HOME WITH THE HISS FAMILY Last Thursday, the New York Times ran one of its "At Home With . . ." features on Tony Hiss, son of the late Communist spy Alger Hiss and author of a new...
...But we wouldn't consider hanging onto it a sign of our special virtue...
...Nonetheless, the Gephardt volume merits a footnote in the history of the genre for its ingenious title, An Even Better Place: America in the 21st Century...
...He'd just been introduced by Newt Gingrich...
...Seconded...
...According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which broke the story, "the guidelines would establish a high burden of proof for institutions to show lage apartment overlooking a rare crabapple orchard in one of the toni-est (no pun intended) downtown Manhattan neighborhoods...
...of Claremont McKenna College has been trying valiantly for years to exterminate the most widely circulated bogus quotation in hack-pun ditdom: "America is great because America is good," and so on, inevitably attributed—mistakenly—to Alexis de Tocqueville (probably crafted by some 20th-century ghostwriter...
...And it simply will not go away...
...That "even better" is a piece of unparalleled craftsmanship...
...There's probably no book quite so deservedly forlorn as the campaign biography without a campaign...
...SCRAPBOOK AT HOME WITH THE HISS FAMILY Last Thursday, the New York Times ran one of its "At Home With . . ." features on Tony Hiss, son of the late Communist spy Alger Hiss and author of a new memoir...
...Things are going badly, it seems...
...describes the Hiss apartment as something of a time-capsule, largely unchanged since Alger and Priscilla Hiss moved into it in 1947...
...What's wrong with the SAT, a standardized test that has played a key role in college admissions for decades...
...According to the following sample of recent speechmakers, columnists, and other mistaken sorts, America remains great because America is good, and it remains the case that Tocqueville said so...
...He is also mercilessly free of the petty intellectual etiquettes common at this moment in our national letters...
...If she succeeds, the net effect will be to undo state referendums and federal court decisions that over the past few years have advanced the quaint principles of merit and race-neutral university admissions...
...Except that he didn't...
...And we find out midway through the article that this is actually a gorgeous Greenwich vil*Two days earlier, during a floor appearance in the House, Rep...
...The story, which includes the jump-headline "A Son's Debt of Honor" (what debt...
...It seems blacks and Hispanics regularly score lower on the test than whites and Asians, so ipso facto, the test must be discriminatory...
...It manages the dual and seemingly confounding tasks of suggesting an upbeat "vision" for the future without being even microscopically critical of the present—i.e., the Clinton utopia, which it is now Democratic party dogma to praise as perhaps the finest epoch in American history...
...what honor...
...Department of Education has been circulating draft guidelines that propose penalizing universities that use SAT scores as a leading criterion when making admissions decisions...
...Also in November, at a campaign rally in Roswell, Georgia, secretary of state candidate John McCallum called it a "quote...
...Wouldn't it be terrible to have nuclear war in the next week or two and mess up y'all's careers before they have gotten started...
...And what are the Hisses paying for it...
...The individual responsible for promulgating these guidelines is assistant secretary of education Norma Cantu, a leading administration proponent of quotas...
...It's been a year and a half since The Scrapbook last reported on the progress of this war...
...The implication is that Tony Hiss has kept the apartment as a shrine to his martyred dad, rather than decamp for more luxurious surroundings, out of a deep sense of filial piety...
...It is refreshing to hear so independent a voice...
...Chattanooga Free Press editor and publisher Lee Anderson, in a signed editorial last September, identified it as one of Tocqueville's "penetrating observations...
...In other words, it's an apartment that any CEo or publishing magnate or merg-ers-and-acquisitions specialist would give his right arm for...
...It just thinks America will be even greater when its columnists and speechwriters stop abusing Tocqueville...
...Probably $67.85 a month, though the Times didn't tell...
...In the new collection, readers will find his thoughts on, among many other topics, napping, Anglophilia, and heart bypass surgery—a combination that makes the book must reading not only for sleepy hospital patients with funny accents but everyone else, too...
...Nice guy...
...IT'S ALIVE...
...Sanford N. McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas Corporation, used it in a speech at a national conference on ethics last November...
...CHEERFUL Does Ted Turner, as they say nowadays, have issues with young people...
...But The Scrapbook couldn't help noticing that 1947 saw the very dawn of New York's notorious rent-control policies...
...Which brings The Scrapbook to . . . the president himself, who told Boys' Nation delegates at a Rose Garden ceremony last July that "I'm convinced" Tocqueville was right, when he said . . . Not that The Scrapbook disagrees with the sentiment...
...that [SAT-weighted admissions] policies do not violate anti-bias laws...
...Occasional Weekly Standard contributor John J. Pitney Jr...
...NO CANTU In the latest reminder that racial preferences in college admissions will not go quietly, the office for Civil Rights at the U.S...
...It's not that we wouldn't want that apartment ourselves...
...HELP WANTED Contributing editor Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant...
...About it, and him, Tom Wolfe has written: "He moves so effortlessly from the amusingly personal to the broadly philosophical that it takes a moment before you realize how far out into the intellectual cosmos you have been taken...
...James Traficant of Ohio invoked the "Tocqueville" quotation in support of the notion that "Today's debate is not just about Bill Clinton...
...We salute the nameless dozens of Gephardt staffers responsible...
...Hiss's wife Lois Metzger for comparing Alger Hiss to her own grandmother, who survived the Nazi concentration camps...
...I know the speaker knows as well...
...Arianna Huffington led her syndicated column with the quotation on May 16...
...this, after all, is not a news article but a puff piece in the paper's "House & Home" section...
...BOOKNOTES Joseph Epstein's new collection of essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin, and at $25.00, it's a steal...
...Will any committee chairman in Congress, we wonder, have the nerve to haul Cantu up and question her about this...
...It would be churlish to fault Mr...
...Not long ago CNN's aging frat-boy CEO was regretting that he had, in his words, had "five kids— boom, boom, boom—by the time I was 30," adding, "If I was doing it over again I wouldn't have done it, but I can't shoot them now that they're here...
...Contact Borden Flanagan at 1225 19th St., NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036...
...The other week, he offered this cheery observation in a graduation speech at the University of Georgia: "Here's the class of '99, and y'all are just starting out...
...Epstein is one of the country's premier men of letters and (no coincidence) a contributing editor to this magazine...
...IT TAKES A COMMITTEE Dick Gephardt's new book won't get much attention since the ranking House Democrat decided several months ago not to run for his party's presidential nomination...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 35
