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| After agonizing and dithering for a month, Bob Dole spent the week assailing Bill Clinton's "integrity" on Filegate, Whitewater, Travelgate, etc. The press, having egged Dole on for two weeks, turned on him when he complied. Headlines before Dole's assault: "Refusal to Play Character Card Angers Some in GOP" (the Los Angeles Times), "A Plea for Incivility" (Maureen Dowd, the New York Times). Headlines afterward: "Dole Still Tries to Live Down Reputation as 'Hatchet Man' "; "As Dole Weighs Strategy, Poll Finds Him Combative" ; "When Candidate Turns Negative, Voters May Too." Dole demanded that Clinton forswear pardons of convicted Whitewater culprits, but newspapers pointed out that Dole had favored pardons for Nixon in Watergate and Caspar Weinberger in Iran-contra. See Jacob Weisberg's "Strange Bedfellow". |
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Clinton and Dole staged their second and final presidential debate. Dole aides had promised reporters a sharp attack on Clinton's character. Did he deliver? The Los Angeles Times called Dole's performance "a broad attack on President Clinton's ethics and integrity," while the New York Times' R. W. Apple called the attack "halfhearted." Reviewers seemed surprised that Clinton ignored the attacks, more surprised still that he got away with it. Dole's delivery was graded an improvement from his showing in the first debate, but still pitiable. Network insta-polls declared Clinton the winner. The consensus was that the second debate, like the first, failed to interrupt Dole's slide toward defeat. Commentators winced at Dole's plea for a third debate. "You could almost hear a nation moaning," wrote the Washington Post's Tom Shales. See S | LATE's " Dispatch."| The Lippo scandal, in which Indonesians and Koreans are alleged to have illegally funded the Democratic National Committee, achieved Whitewateresque complexity. Dole, Newt Gingrich, William Safire, and the Wall Street Journal called for investigations and linked the scandal to everything from a) Whitewater itself to b) the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to activists in East Timor. Meanwhile, newspapers connected the scandal to c) the DNC's abuse of a Buddhist temple as a fund-raising site, including possible money-laundering, and d) the mysterious disappearance of a Korean businessman whose illegal $250,000 check started the whole mess. Gingrich called it "the largest scandal in American history," but Vice President Gore said that "there have been absolutely no violations of any law," and therefore, that "there is nothing that has been done that's wrong." The Los Angeles Times implied that Clinton had traded favors for the money; the New York Times and Washington Post said there was no such evidence. Clinton aides dismissed the criticism as desperate and unseemly mudslinging, but eventually released documents intended to show that Clinton hadn't gone soft on Indonesia. The press deemed Clinton's answers unsatisfactory, but took the heat off him by spreading blame to the entire campaign-finance system. Reporters compared the Clinton-Lippo relationship to Dole's friendships with U.S. corporate contributors. |
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| The Dow Jones industrial average soared past 6,000. Among the factors cited: better technology, downsizing, mutual-fund mania, low inflation, and the unattractiveness of bonds. Optimists rejoiced that the Dow's current six-year climb was its longest and highest without a plunge. Pessimists inferred that the next plunge was due. Reformed pessimists, grumbling that the market had defied them yet again, announced that they wouldn't sit out the bonanza any longer. A Harris poll found wildly unrealistic expectations among mutual-fund investors; analysts debated whether this irrepressible confidence was self-fulfilling or a setup for collapse. The Wall Street Journal explained the theory of optimist-pessimist co-dependence: "When pessimists turn optimistic, markets can start to fall, because little money is left outside the market to come in." |
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| The Atlanta Braves won the National League pennant, becoming the first team ever to do so after trailing 3-1. The Braves outscored the St. Louis Cardinals 32-1 in the final three games, setting two consecutive records for postseason blowouts. Sports writers said the lopsided comeback confirmed the Braves as a "dynasty." |
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Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired National Security Chief Alexander Lebed, accusing him of fomenting discord in the Kremlin and jockeying for the presidency. Lebed said he would get some sleep, take a vacation, and start campaigning officially for Yeltsin's job. The consensus was that Lebed would profit from the ouster--just as Yeltsin had profited from being ousted by Gorbachev in 1987--and might well have provoked it deliberately. Russians "are always attracted to leaders who have been sacrificed by their bosses," observed the New York Times. Critics labeled Lebed erratic, anti-Semitic, ruthlessly ambitious, and authoritarian. Defenders called him courageous, demanding, brutally honest, intolerant of corruption, and a threat to political, financial, and media elites. Optimists concluded that Lebed's departure would help stabilize the government during Yeltsin's incapacitation. Pessimists worried that it would jeopardize the peace deal in Chechnya. | | Agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland pleaded guilty to price fixing and agreed to pay $100 million, the biggest antitrust fine ever. Chairman Dwayne Andreas' son and heir apparent was one of two ADM executives forced to step aside. Financial analysts scoffed that the $100 million penalty is paltry compared to the company's $13 billion in annual sales. But the coverage focused less on the befuddling details of ADM's crime than on its better-known, better-understood political influence. ADM and Chairman Andreas have given $2.5 million to the Democratic and Republican parties during the past five years, plus hundreds of thousands to Bob Dole's campaigns and foundations. |
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Louis Farrakhan torched his way back into the news. Celebrating his "Day of Atonement" rally on the anniversary of the Million Man March, he urged the United Nations to punish America's "genocide" of blacks, declared that "terrorism is like beauty, it is in the eye of beholder," and said he might file a suit against the CIA for smuggling crack cocaine into black neighborhoods. Winnie Mandela and the Rev. Al Sharpton were among the featured guests; Lyndon LaRouche was singled out as Farrakhan's latest ally. Comparisons to the Million Man March were unfavorable: Far fewer people attended (less than 40,000), mainstream black leaders like Jesse Jackson skipped it, and Farrakhan's speech was even longer (nearly three hours). Vice President Gore called Farrakhan's behavior "un-American." | | New movies got surprisingly favorable reviews. Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, timed for the anniversary of the Million Man March, was deemed a success despite its cable-movie feel. The People vs. Larry Flynt, a biopic about the Hustler publisher starring Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, and Donna Hanover, wife of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was called "a blazing, unlikely triumph" (Janet Maslin, the New York Times). A restored version of the Hitchcock classic Vertigo also earned critical acclaim. Time's Roger Rosenblatt saw in its tale of idealized romantic obsession (the Jimmy Stewart character's for the Kim Novak character) a moral for an era of shrunken expectations: "In Vertigo, a man makes too much of a woman, and he loses. In Seinfeld, a man makes too much of himself, and he loses. This is the progress of romance in the past 40 years." Also praised were Neil Jordan's MichaelCollins, starring Liam Neeson as the Irish revolutionary hero, and Looking for Richard, directed, starring, and written by Al Pacino, about a performance of Richard III. |
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Chinese dissident Wang Xizhe slipped through the border to Hong Kong and escaped to America as the Chinese government rounded up human-rights activists. "Wang's escape marks Beijing's effective elimination of the pro-democracy movement inside the country," concluded the Los Angeles Times. Analysts worried that the crackdown might jeopardize upcoming U.S.-China talks and an eventual summit between Clinton and China's president. The latest repression was deemed an embarrassment for Clinton, since he had redoubled Bush's constructive-engagement China policy after having denounced it in 1992. The Times noted that the repression "intensified after Clinton de-linked China's most-favored-nation trade status with its performance on human rights" last year. | | Miscellany: The government reported that for the first time, most Americans are overweight. McDonald's opened its first restaurant in India, featuring mutton and veggie burgers instead of beef. Madonna gave birth to a daughter, prompting the inevitable religious puns and a $350,000 National Enquirer bounty for a photo of the child. George Stephanopoulos was the subject of magazine articles revealing his intention to leave the White House and speculating about what he'll do next. World chess champion Garry Kasparov lost a match to Soviet-dissident-turned-Israeli-Cabinet-Minister Natan Sharansky. French journalists shut down their newspapers to protest the elimination of special tax breaks for journalists. |
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| --Compiled by William Saletan and the editors of S LATE. Photograph of Bob Dole and Bill Clinton by Win McNamee/Reuters; photograph of Alexander Lebed by Michael Evstafiev/Reuters; photograph of Louis Farrakhan by Jeff Christensen/Reuters; photograph of Wang Xizhe by South China Morning Post/Reuters |
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