An Imaginary White House Attack
Time magazine columnist Joe Klein last week went after the Bush White House for what he alleged was its reflexive technique for dealing with unpleasant news: "destroy the messenger." Klein's evidence?
A prominent Republican . . . told me that the White House had sent out talking points about how to attack Brent Scowcroft after Bush the Elder's National Security Adviser went public with his opposition to the war in the New Yorker magazine. "I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn e-mail before I read it," the Republican said. "But that's all this White House has now: the politics of personal destruction."
Take it from The Scrapbook, Joe: You need to find yourself a better class of prominent Republican, starting with one who reads his email and doesn't lie to you about its contents. We're assuming, of course, that your source even received the email, although he may simply have read a rumor of its existence on an especially hysterical anti-Bush blog, which claimed that "the White House revenge-team is out to get Brent Scowcroft."
Why does The Scrapboook speak with such confidence about your source's unreliability? Because, notwithstanding our own lack of prominence, we received the email in question. Not only were we not disgusted, we actually read it, and it was about as ad hominem as a seminar paper.
The "attack" was headlined "Responding to Brent Scowcroft," and contained no talking points. Rather, it accurately summarized the New Yorker profile and "offered some thoughts in response" to
Scowcroft's critique of Bush's foreign policy. The most pungent of which read as follows: "The charge that the way we have sought to bring democracy to Iraq is 'you invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize' is itself deeply misleading. Mr. Scowcroft's 'invasion' was in fact a liberation--and overthrowing one of the worst tyrannies in modern times and replacing it with free elections is a good start on the pathway to liberty."
If this is the "politics of personal destruction," Washington could use more of it. Not so Joe Klein's reporting. How to put this? Let's just say, We're so disgusted we're going to start deleting his damn stories before we read them.
Congratulations
We note with satisfaction that Robert Conquest's name is among the winners of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award, has lost a certain amount of its luster over time, and this year's class is fairly typical: Recipients now routinely include retiring senior administration officials (Alan Greenspan, Gen. Richard Myers), popular professional athletes (Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Frank Robinson), and aging-but-not-quite dormant figures from show business (Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett, Aretha Franklin). We're not entirely certain where Robert Conquest fits in this company, but his award surely restores the medal's distinction for this season.
Conquest, a British subject long resident in America, is not just a great historian, but a scholar whose original labors on the Soviet Union became part of the history of the 20th century. His seminal work The Great Terror (1968) was in its day the most searching, most fearless, most comprehensive, and most devastating account of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that had ever been published. It still is.
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