VALEDICTION

The death yesterday of Robert L. Bartley might soften the edges of his portrait for some. But it's not likely to bring much private sympathy from the Journal's reporting staff, which tended to regard him as crazily biased.

Bartley was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week (see Imperial Accessories) for being a far-right ideologue who imbued the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal with a take-no-prisoners faith in supply-side economics as well as brutal treatment of the Clinton administration.

When Clinton White House lawyer Vince Foster committed suicide in 1993, the note found in his briefcase did not mention Bartley by name, but it might as well have. It said "the WSJ editors lie without consequence."

Bartley, who could be "aloof and downright disdainful of his intellectual nemeses," had hounded Foster without mercy on the Journal's editorial page for supposed Whitewater transgressions. His response to Foster's death was to dig his heels in deeper.

"For my part," Bartley wrote (see this portrait), "I can testify that getting tagged with blame for the Foster suicide powerfully focused my own attention on Whitewater." Which turned out to be a mistake. (It also spawned a cottage industry of Whitewater conspiracy theories.)

"Bartley's rants now litter the dustbin of history," former Clinton aide and political consultant Paul Begala recently pointed out (scroll down). "He was wrong about the Clinton economic program, wrong about the Clinton foreign policy, wrong about Whitewater, and pretty much every issue he ever addressed.

"But Mr. Bush says Bartley 'helped shape the times in which we live.' Well, that he did. He replaced Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism with paranoia, cruelty, and bitterness. And for our president to honor this thug disgraces the Medal of Freedom. Shame on George Bush."

Shame on him? Don't waste your breath, Paul.

December 11, 2003 10:33 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on December 11, 2003 10:33 AM.

A SHOT IN THE FOOT was the previous entry in this blog.

DUE PROCESS is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.