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White House held a commemoration of Whittaker Chambers yesterday,
a day after the fortieth anniversary of his death (the centenary
of his birth was earlier this year). Speakers at the event included
Chambers's friends and colleagues William F. Buckley Jr. and Ralph
de Toledano, his biographer Sam Tanenhaus, and columnist Robert
Novak, who wrote a preface to Regnery publishing's edition of Chambers's
great autobiography Witness. Buckley's moving talk will be reprinted
in a forthcoming issue of National Review. We will not try to surpass
his explanation of why Chambers is worth celebrating, but merely
note that the White House's commemoration was both inspired (it's
hard to imagine a Gore administration doing its bit to keep Chambers
from slipping down the memory hole) and inspiring.
Leave it to the Washington Post and New York Times
to spoil things. The Post's Lloyd Grove reports today that the White
House excluded Times reporter Elaine Sciolino from the event.
Grove notes that he and "a dozen other media-types made it into
the celebration." True. Buckley, who was giving the speech, was
there; friends and colleagues of Buckley (including us) were there;
Grove attended because Buckley got him an invite. But it really
wasn't an open-press event. And while one could make a case that
it should have been, the invitation-only nature of the event hardly
justifies Sciolino's remark to Grove that it reminded her of the
"totalitarian regimes" she's covered in her life.
Someone with that sort of sensibility would have been out of place
at an event paying homage to a true hero of the battle against totalitarianism.
And what's with Grove's description of Alger Hiss as an "accused
Soviet spy"? Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying that he was
exactly that.
Bond Re-Issue
The papers have carried NAACP chairman Julian Bond's remarks from
over the weekend: "He has selected nominees from the Taliban wing
of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme
right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy
is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." Today's papers carry
a rather lame response from White House spokesman Ari Fleischer:
"I think it's another reminder why it's so important for people
in this town to change the tone." The tone of this remark falls
rather short of the moral indignation with which one might have
thought the Bush administration would want to respond to Bond's
hateful remarks.
What's odd is that none of the coverage (at least that we've seen)
has mentioned that Bond's a repeat offender. Here's what he said
in February: Bush has "selected nominees from the Taliban wing of
American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme
right wing, and chose Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy
is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." (See here
for more.) The NAACP, which has had difficult relations with environmentalists
in the past, has apparently come around to the virtues of recycling.
Hateful rhetoric from "civil-rights leaders" is, sadly, not an episodic
thing.
Amending Bush
President Bush's speech at Ellis Island contained no news-making
policy proposals, certainly nothing
as dramatic as what we suggested yesterday: a constitutional
amendment explicitly permitting foreign-born citizens to serve as
president.
But he did say something relevant to the idea: "This is one of the
things that makes our country so unique. With a single oath, all
at once you become as fully American as the most direct descendant
of a founding father." Except that you can't become president —
at least not yet.
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