Teddy Kennedy, the famed moral exemplar, read his former senatorial colleague John Ashcroft the riot act during confirmation hearings. Ashcroft was extreme; his constitutional understanding of gun control was “radical.” The senatorial face grew flush—presumably with anger, since it was a bit early in the day for more potent stuff. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware...
Author: William Murchison (William Murchison)
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Childish Ideologues
The NAACP vows to campaign against every senator who voted to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general. Oh, how we ought to hope so! Get out there, guys! Show us what dopes you’re capable of being when you try hard! Ideologues—e.g., the folk who run the NAACP these days—don’t normally receive the attention they deserve....
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Squeaking Through
George W. Bush, as President of die United States, can be counted on in the first six months to . . . well, I should be honest here (with hand on heart). I don’t think any of us can say with much precision what my governor will accomplish in the new office whose door he...
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Offering Religion on a Silver Platter
The Episcopal Church used to offer salvation—on the inevitable silver filigreed platter from Tiffany’s, served up with a spot of sherry and proffered with immaculate taste and manners. A rougher-hewn brand of salvation—for the church itself, or failing that, a viable form of traditional Anglicanism—is now on offer in the United States. No silver platters,...
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Color Me Kweisi
For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...
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Abortion and the Murder of Meaning
“Say what you mean,” the March Hare advised Alice—a piece of counsel imparted by writing teachers of the old school. But, as we know nowadays, say-what-you-mean is a lot of old-fashioned baloney. If we were to take it seriously, which of course we can’t (don’t forget “mad as a March Hare”), we’d never get anything...
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Up in Smoke?
The Texas Aggies—well, let’s just say few other student bodies resemble them in unified outlook or devotion to tradition. That may well change. The hammer of conformity, of homogenization, has been heard banging on the Aggies’ door since the bonfire debacle. The debacle was bad enough: a dozen Aggies killed in the collapse of the...
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Woolly Conservatism
“A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself.” —J. Hookham Frère Plans to shuck the Tory Party’s sacred name rattled the young Disraeli, who remarked that the replacement name, Conservative, sounded to him like “the invention of some pastry chef.” Similarly, paleoconservatism conjures up the image—in my mind,...
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Reno Justice Department
Janet Reno fears that her credibility has been damaged. Imagine that! Just because the federal government used “pyrotechnic devices” against the Branch Davidian compound? That might do it, given the Reno Justice Department’s insistence over so many years that no such devices were used: Except, well, it now seems that maybe that wasn’t quite 100-percent...
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
So the anti-Confederate backlash comes to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June, voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman. Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large,...
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Prudence Asserting Itself in Washington?
Edmund Burke observed, two centuries ago, that “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which lends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.” In other words, all you grabby socialists, you confiscators of inherited property, keep your cotton-picking...
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Print the Legend
At the Alamo, Davy Crockett either: A. Died while swinging old Betsy; B. Came radically disconnected when he torched the powder magazine; C. Surrendered to the Mexicans, who tortured, then killed him, along with six other Anglo survivors of the siege. Does it matter immensely which of these versions of Crockett’s death commends itself to...
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Don’t Mess With the Texas Constitution
The constitution of the state of Texas, my friends, is not what you carry to the beach for light summer reading. Light? Not at 90,000 words and 377 amendments. As Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “No man ever wished it longer.” Yet longer it gets, election year by election year, as the sovereign voters...
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Two Vastly Different Men
John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis: November 1998 mingled recollections of two vastly different men who died the same day of the same year. Pomp and poignance, on the day of the Kennedy funeral, left indelible memories of muffled drums, a young boy’s salute to his father’s casket, a riderless horse clopping through the streets. Funeral...
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The Dark, Dark Wood of Suicide
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
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From Greeks to Gringos: Why Mexico Lost Texas
Among the terms of endearment applied to Americans who worry about present immigration policy is “xenophobe.” This high-toned word normally precedes lower-toned ones—”racist,” “bigot,” “neo-Nazi,” etc.—which take over as the exasperation level rises. A “xenophobe” is someone who fears foreigners. Fears them why? No dictionary is competent to say. Every xenophobe doubtless has his own...
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Sadly for Adlai
“Madly for Adlai,” proclaimed the campaign buttons in 1952. But Adlai Ewing Stevenson II wasn’t the kind of politician who aroused mad affections, or, for that matter, hostilities. He was a Stevenson. Passion isn’t the Stevenson thing; service is—service conducted with objectivity and a certain fidelity to the public weal. Jean Baker, professor of history...
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A Calvinist in Gotham
In the early 50’s, Philip Graham of the Washington Post tried to hire James Reston away from the New York Times at twice the coins the Sulzbergers were dispensing. Thanks, but no thanks, Reston said-and kept saying whenever his friend Graham sought to renew the discussion. The Times family was James Reston’s family, professionally speaking....
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The Insatiable Presidency
Suddenly everybody is writing about Lyndon Johnson—Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Joseph Califano: holding the late President’s lanky carcass up to the light, prodding and poking to see what the man was made of. The political pathologists differ among themselves. Caro, in two volumes, with two more due, has virtually nothing good to say about his...
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The Doctor and the State
While cooling my preadolescent heels in the family doctor’s office forty-odd years ago, I was given to studying a Victorian Era print that hung on the waiting room wall. The Doctor was its title. A young woman, bare arm flung helplessly toward the viewer, lay stretched on chairs in, apparently, the family parlor. The tailcoated...
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Speaking of JFK
That Presidents—chief magistrates of the nation—ought to possess solid character was taken for granted in the early Republic and for a long time thereafter. No longer is this the case. Character comes up for discussion mainly when someone like Gary Hart, caught with his pants down, throws the political odds-makers into a sudden tizzy. Even...
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Feminism Fatigued
The feminist century—ours—is markedly different from any period known . . . I was going to say “to man” but perhaps we don’t talk that way anymore. Events have transformed the relationship of the sexes from one in which men occupied most leadership roles to one in which women make laws, minister the sacraments, and...
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Lone Star Populism
Out of thin air—or of mythic consciousness—a Texas governor once plucked unhesitatingly the mot juste. The governor, Allan Shivers, who served back in the 1950’s, was indignant over some piece or other of legislative tomfoolery. As he saw it, the whole enterprise was downright “un-Texan.” “Un-Texan.” Right there we had the nub of the matter....