The foreign contributions story continued to grow and mutate. 1) U.S. marshals tried to serve a subpoena to the Lippo scandal's central player, Democratic National Committee fund-raiser John Huang. DNC lawyers said they didn't know where to find him. Huang's attorney said Huang wouldn't be available for interrogation until Nov. 6, the day after the election. The Washington Post decried President Clinton's "cynical" efforts to dodge and suppress the truth. 2) Vice President Gore said he thought the illegal Buddhist-temple fund-raising event he attended in April was a "community outreach" event, not a fund-raiser. The Post reported that nearly everyone else at the event knew what it was. 3) Another Huang associate, Yogesh Gandhi (a great-grand nephew of the Mahatma), was exposed as a tax deadbeat after forking over $325,000 to the DNC. 4) The DNC returned a $20,000 donation from a convicted drug trafficker who was invited to last year's White House Christmas party, where he was photographed with Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, on the Republican side: 5) A former Dole campaign financier was sentenced for laundering contributions to campaigns, including Dole's. 6) Dole tried to capitalize on the Lippo scandal by crusading for campaign-finance reform. Editorials derided him as a hypocrite and an opportunist. 7) Clinton aired a TV ad quoting a former Common Cause head Fred Wertheimer on Dole's obstruction of reform. Wertheimer asked Clinton to stop quoting him, since he considers Clinton just as guilty.
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Bob Dole dispatched his campaign manager to ask Ross Perot to quit the presidential race and endorse Dole. Perot publicly spurned the plea, calling it "trivial," "totally inconsequential," "goofy," and "weird." Republicans labeled the mission "pathetic and desperate." Even senior Dole aides professed shock and disgust. Political analysts called it stupid for numerous reasons: Perot had obviously invested too much in his candidacy to back out; he could hardly be expected to yield to the man who had excluded him from the debates; his supporters wouldn't have followed his endorsement anyway; even if they had, there weren't enough of them to make up Dole's deficit; the entreaty diverted attention and prestige from Dole to Perot; and it further discouraged Dole's supporters from bothering to vote. | | New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's fight with Time Warner (over whether the company's New York cable system would carry Fox's new 24-hour news station) degenerated into name-calling and wife-bashing. The combatants: former CNN owner Ted Turner (now a Time Warner vice president), Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, Turner's wife Jane Fonda, and Giuliani's wife Donna Hanover Giuliani (who works at the local Fox affiliate). Turner compared Murdoch's tactics to those of "the late Führer." Murdoch's New York Post suggested that Turner's behavior might be caused by his having stopped taking the lithium he once used to ward off manic depression. Fonda speculated that Giuliani's enthusiasm for the Fox news network was catering to his wife's boss, Murdoch--also a big campaign contributor. Mrs. Giuliani issued a press release pointing out that she has a master's degree from Columbia School of Journalism, and the Post called Fonda "just another scatty-brained Hollywood nudnik."Business Week pointed out that the spat was "jeopardizing a wide range of deals" between Fox and Time Warner. The New York Times' Frank Rich summarized the dilemma: "Whom do we root for? The answer: No one." |
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| The National Enquirer reported that Bob Dole had a mistress for four years during his first marriage. The New York Daily News confirmed the story, quoting a suburban Washington woman saying that she and Dole had an affair beginning in 1968, when she was a secretary at George Washington University. The Enquirer also reported a second affair, with a model, begun in 1971 when Dole was separated, but not divorced, from his first wife. The story was the talk of reporters on the campaign trail but, as of the beginning of the weekend, most other media were not picking it up. According to Washington D.C.'s City Paper, the Washington Post had a story written several days before the Enquirer and Daily News, but spiked it after much internal discussion. Prediction: The respectable media will report the story by reporting the "story of the story," accompanied by public agonizing over their ethical quandary. |
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| AT&T selected John Walter, the relatively obscure chairman of a printing company, to be its new president and eventually its chairman. AT&T's stock slid 5 percent as analysts grumbled that instead of a marquee name, it had picked "an unknown guy who prints phone books" (Washington Post). Reports circulated that more notable names had turned down the job. Defenders called Walter "charismatic" and "visionary." The New York Times argued that in his present job, Walter "has achieved the kind of transformation of a corporate culture that many analysts have been calling for at AT&T." Some said AT&T had set up Wall Street for disappointment by comparing its high-profile, three-month executive search to "looking for God." The other noteworthy aspect of the search was AT&T's simultaneous use of two headhunting firms. The Times noted that this tactic "skirted the standard that prevents firms from poaching from their other clients ... reinforcing a trend that is turning executives, like professional athletes, into free agents." |
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| Hot-button television ads sparked controversy in the election's closing weeks. Martin Luther King's widow denounced the use of footage of her late husband in an ad promoting California's ballot measure against affirmative action. Likewise, Nancy Reagan protested President Clinton's use of footage of her husband's shooting to tout the new Brady gun-control law. (See the ad itself, and Robert Shrum's analysis of it, in " Varnish Remover.") Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry replied that the ad was about Jim Brady, shot at the same time, and had nothing to do with Reagan. Clinton was also scalded by editorialists and political ethicists for an ad in which Marc Klaas, the father of well-known murder victim Polly Klaas, misleadingly implies that Clinton's crime bill applies to victims such as his daughter. Cynics pointed out that Klaas had recently denounced a Republican candidate for "exploiting my daughter Polly's death to further his own political ambitions." |
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| Overseas elections: Japan's longtime ruling Liberal Democratic (i.e., conservative) Party regained power. The New York Times said the vote "suggested that a three-year-old rebellion against politics as usual has collapsed," but the Wall Street Journal argued that "Japan's voters registered their disgust with the whole political system by simply staying home." The early line was that the new regime would be good for the U.S. on military cooperation, not so good on trade. Nicaragua elected a rightist president, "decisively rejecting a bid by the Sandinistas to return to power," according to the Times. The Sandinistas at first refused to accept the vote count as legitimate, but backed down. Observers worried that the new, bitterly anti-Sandinista president might inflame tensions by confiscating from the Sandinistas property that they had confiscated from previous landowners. In Russia, the former vice president who led the 1993 coup attempt against President Yeltsin won a regional governorship and a seat in the parliament. |
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| An attorney representing families of victims of TWA Flight 800 sued TWA and Boeing, arguing that a defective fuel pump in the plane's central fuel tank caused the explosion. The FBI's chief investigator scoffed that the plaintiffs had "never seen the wreckage or participated in the investigation," but CBS reported that investigators' theories had turned in much the same direction. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that the airline industry had blocked a regulation two decades ago that would have prevented the kind of vapor reaction suspected of triggering the explosion. Other attorneys assailed the plaintiffs' lawyer for filing suit without waiting for the government to determine the cause of the crash. They charged that the premature filing wouldn't help the plaintiffs and was strictly a public-relations stunt to attract additional clients. |
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| A researcher discovered that Swiss banks had secretly raided the accounts of Holocaust victims to compensate Swiss businessmen whose assets were confiscated by Poland and Hungary after World War II. This was the latest in what the New York Times called "a widening stream of disclosures suggesting that [the Swiss] cynically manipulated the Nazi era and the Holocaust for profit." Sen. Alfonse D'Amato was also upset. |
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The New York Yankees stunned baseball analysts with a comeback in the World Series. After losing the first two games at home--including the most lopsided defeat in series history--the Yankees won the next three games on the road, pushing the Atlanta Braves to the brink of defeat. First the Yankees clawed their way out of a 6-0 hole to win Game 4 in extra innings; then they held the Braves scoreless in Game 5 to eke out a 1-0 victory against a pitcher with a 24-8 win-loss record. The Yankees finished the postseason with an unheard-of 8-0 record on the road. Meanwhile, in an even more impressive but less-heralded comeback, D.C. United won the inaugural championship of Major League Soccer, battling back from a 2-0 deficit in the final minutes of a match soaked in driving rain and mud. | | Scientists reported once again that things that are bad for you may sometimes be good for you. A study found that nicotine might help thwart the development of Alzheimer's disease. While acknowledging that Philip Morris helped sponsor the study, USA Today pointed out that a peer-reviewed journal had published the report and that previous studies had found smokers to be less susceptible to Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's Association, also a sponsor of the study, cautioned that "there is no reason to recommend cigarette smoking as a way to treat Alzheimer's." |
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| Thomas Pynchon's publisher announced that his next novel, Mason & Dixon, will be out in April. The avant-garde author/cult figure's new tome, reportedly in the works for two decades and now comprising more than 1,000 manuscript pages, is already shrouded in hype and suspense, in part because the notoriously elusive Pynchon gives no interviews and hasn't released any recent photographs of himself. The Washington Post described the novel as "a reimagining of the lives of British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon," purportedly featuring "Native Americans, frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, erotic and political conspiracies, and major caffeine abuse." |
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| Miscellany: The pope decreed that the theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity as long as it applies only to the body and allows the soul to be understood as God's creation. The Democratic nominee for governor of Montana died of a heart attack while driving to a debate. A federal judge declared Richard Jewell a "former suspect" in the Olympic park bombing. A government study contradicted previous reports that drug and alcohol abuse are more common among welfare recipients than among the general public. Another government study found that electronic price scanners rarely err and usually do so in favor of the customer. A California poll suggested that the GOP's crackdown on legal immigrants may be backfiring: Newly naturalized Latin Americans plan to vote for Clinton over Dole by a margin of 17 to 1. Fortune magazine ranked Seattle the best American city to live in; the chief controversy was why Washington, D.C., leapt from 128th on Money magazine's list to 8th on Fortune's list. |
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| --Compiled by William Saletan and the editors of S LATE. |
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Photograph of Bob Dole by Jim Bourg/Reuters; photograph of the D.C. United vs. the Los Angeles Galaxy by Clay McLachlan/Reuters
