Coronavirus Relief: How the National Endowment for the Arts Should Disburse $75 Million

Arthur T. Barbieri was the Democratic boss in New Haven from the early 1950s into the late 1970s. Sounds like a minor martinet but New Haven, the first Model City, was the urban-renewal movement’s incubator. Barbieri moved tens of millions of dollars and got the votes for this spectacular, hubristic failure, an adventure as reckless as the one we’re on now, though not as hasty. At least that mess’s masters didn’t decide over a weekend to crash an entire economy.

Yale’s there, so every politically ambitious undergraduate in the 1960s tended to wade into the swamp in which Barbieri wasn’t the kingfish — he was too discreet — but more like the Hydra of Lerna. Bill Clinton had his first political job in Art’s office. What better place to learn the art of money laundering? Google Art today, and his ties to the Mafia pop up mostly. That’s too bad. He was more than a mobster.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Arthur T. Barbieri was the Democratic boss in New Haven from the early 1950s into the late 1970s. Sounds like a minor martinet but New Haven, the first Model City, was the urban-renewal movement’s incubator. Barbieri moved tens of millions of dollars and got the votes for this spectacular, hubristic failure, an adventure as reckless as the one we’re on now, though not as hasty. At least that mess’s masters didn’t decide over a weekend to crash an entire economy.

Yale’s there, so every politically ambitious undergraduate in the 1960s tended to wade into the swamp in which Barbieri wasn’t the kingfish — he was too discreet — but more like the Hydra of Lerna. Bill Clinton had his first political job in Art’s office. What better place to learn the art of money laundering? Google Art today, and his ties to the Mafia pop up mostly. That’s too bad. He was more than a mobster.