Chambers of the Heart
The White House celebrates an American hero.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
July 10, 2001 5:00 p.m.

he 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.