Correspondence
Correspondence WEST WING CONSPIRACY AS YOU KNOW, I AM A FAN of your magazine. God forgive me, I read it regularly. It is always lively, often provocative, and only rarely flat-out wrong. I was...
...I do confess to having miles of videotape of the three cutest little boys in the world, but none of it shot at the White House, and every inch of it celebrity-free...
...That sentence is simply false...
...Unfortunately, your coverage of this conflict is typical of American media coverage...
...The Belgian human-rights organization Droits de l'homme sans frontières reported that as of February 8, 70 Orthodox churches and monasteries had been destroyed by the Kosovar Albanians...
...The heroic portrayal of the president and my fellow Clintonistas must make right-wingers feel about as disgusted as I do every time I land at the airport formerly known as Washington National...
...DONALD C. BAGWELL Reston, VA PERHAPS JOHN MCCAIN'S suspension of his campaign has put the editors at a loss for cover material, but there are surely still items more worthy than John Podhoretz's analysis of The West Wing and what it reveals about the longings of a vague (but sinister) group of "Hollywood liberal elites...
...Of course Clinton was impeached in the House...
...The starstruck videocam operator in question was deputy chief of staff Mark Gearan...
...the media do it themselves...
...But my enjoyment was interrupted by a rather glaring factual error...
...So please, don't give the revisionists any more help...
...They don't need it...
...JACOB HEILBRUNN Washington, DC...
...Under such circumstances the nation does not need a propaganda ministry...
...PAUL BEGALA Washington, DC JOHN PODHORETZ RESPONDS: I owe Paul Begala an apology...
...but he wasn't removed by the senate...
...That is why it is all the more important for conservative publications to maintain a strictly accurate reporting of events to offset, to whatever degree possible, the pressure of the revisionist left...
...And even then I kept my office camcorder-free...
...It may sound like technical nit-picking, but it's more than that: The left would love for the belief to take root that Republicans tried to impeach Clinton, but failed...
...In fact, while I was a political adviser to the president during his first term, I did not serve on the White House staff until 1997...
...HAROLD O. J. BROWN Charlotte, NC REVISIONIST TENDENCIES IN A LETTER in last week's issue, Robert Conquest stated that my article on Stalin's academic apologists ("Stalin's New American Apologists," March 13) was "gravely marred" by my observation that Stephen F. Cohen was the first revisionist historian and that no one in Soviet studies could conceivably have committed such a mistake...
...NATHAN SEGERLIND San Diego, CA BALKAN BIAS I HAVE BEEN A FAITHFUL and enthusiastic reader of THE WEEKLY STANDARD since you began, but this one thing I have against you: Why do you give us nothing but consistently and extremely one-sided treatment when you have to deal with Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Clinton, and Milosevic...
...Apparently this story, like so many advanced by the right, was just too good to check...
...In a recent issue you emphasize Serbian-caused destruction of a mosque ("Kosovo's a Mess," March 27...
...Podhoretz would do well to avoid analyzing the mindsets of likely participants in an alleged conspiracy, and instead analyze a television show in the context of its influence on our culture and its industry...
...This is bewildering...
...Perhaps more importantly, from the perspective of television viewers, if the show is successful, we may see one-hour television dramas about someone besides doctors, lawyers, and policemen...
...I do not now nor have I ever kept a camcorder handy to record the presence of celebrities, either at the White House or anywhere else...
...I was enjoying the guilty pleasure of schadenfreude as I read John Podhoretz's whine about the hit TV series The West Wing ("The Liberal Imagination," March 27...
...Imagine my surprise when I saw John Podhoretz provide, in his otherwise excellent article on The West Wing, a closing paragraph that begins with "Republicans tried to impeach Clinton, and failed...
...Indeed, in the preface to his 1985 book Rethinking the Soviet Experience, Cohen himself embraces the term revisionist: "[T]his book is, I think, the most general effort to date in the revisionist cause...
...While it is certainly true that Cohen has not soft-pedaled Stalin's crimes—and I did not say he had—he has strenuously argued that Leninism need not have resulted in Stalinism...
...I suspect that even today, a scant few years after the actual event, most Americans probably aren't sure what really did happen...
...Podhoretz writes: "So many celebrities were traipsing through the White House that a starstruck Paul Begala kept a camcorder handy to record their presence...
...The West Wing contains relatively few shootings, car chases, or explosions, and the glamorization of politics and public service as noble callings is desirable from any side of the political spectrum...
...CONSERVATIVES LAMENT the revisionist tendencies of liberal historians and the effect that they have on the backwards view of the public...
...The courtesy of a correction would be appreciated...
Vol. 5 • April 2000 • No. 29
