The Week

■ Bill Clinton’s pick at HUD, Roberta Achtenberg, is a lesbian activist from San Francisco. We knew he’d find a way around the nanny problem.

■ We read in the Washington Post that President Clinton took his entire Cabinet and senior staff to Camp David over the weekend of January 30-31 for an encounter-group exercise in team bonding. Two professional “facilitators” were on hand to lead a Saturday-night session in which all were asked to share some intimate personal experience. Mr. Clinton told how he was a “fat kid” at five or six and how the other kids taunted him. Education Secretary Riley, who has a spinal disease, told of the competitive instinct that led him to become co-captain of his high-school football team. The mind boggles. Imagine what Lincoln could have gotten off his chest in a session like this. (“I was tall and gangly, and the kids made fun of me.”) Visualize George Washington inviting his colleagues (Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, et al.) to let their hair down for a weekend at Mount Vernon, sharing childhood traumas about cutting down cherry trees, being short, being a political-philosophy nerd, whatever. Who knows what tragedies in our Nation’s early history might have been averted if these men had had professional “facilitators”? The White House physician was fired around the time of this Camp David retreat. Rumors that Werner Erhard and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were being interviewed as possible replacements were denied by George Stephanopoulos.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The Washington Post

■ Bill Clinton’s pick at HUD, Roberta Achtenberg, is a lesbian activist from San Francisco. We knew he’d find a way around the nanny problem.

■ We read in the Washington Post that President Clinton took his entire Cabinet and senior staff to Camp David over the weekend of January 30-31 for an encounter-group exercise in team bonding. Two professional “facilitators” were on hand to lead a Saturday-night session in which all were asked to share some intimate personal experience. Mr. Clinton told how he was a “fat kid” at five or six and how the other kids taunted him. Education Secretary Riley, who has a spinal disease, told of the competitive instinct that led him to become co-captain of his high-school football team. The mind boggles. Imagine what Lincoln could have gotten off his chest in a session like this. (“I was tall and gangly, and the kids made fun of me.”) Visualize George Washington inviting his colleagues (Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, et al.) to let their hair down for a weekend at Mount Vernon, sharing childhood traumas about cutting down cherry trees, being short, being a political-philosophy nerd, whatever. Who knows what tragedies in our Nation’s early history might have been averted if these men had had professional “facilitators”? The White House physician was fired around the time of this Camp David retreat. Rumors that Werner Erhard and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were being interviewed as possible replacements were denied by George Stephanopoulos.