Dear Tim,
Today is the first day I’m e-mailing you from somewhere farther than a flight of stairs away. I’m in Princeton, NJ, visiting my sister. (Well, you know this; I’m telling the reader, of course. Not to be too grim, but my mother died this spring–about two months before my father did–and so I’m at her old house performing various rites of business and nostalgia.) I hope Actual Breakfast wasn’t too brutal this morning for the single father.
Three items of interest today:
I love the Washington Post story about Republican members of Congress using the corporate jets of tobacco companies. A new study says that in the 17 months after the start of 1997, Republican committees in Congress made 236 payments to reimburse corporations for the use of private jets, 84 of them to tobacco interests. (The scam is that the Congressional rules say the company has to be reimbursed at the rate of first-class air travel. But if you have, say, a sweet little Philip Morris jet squiring you to three or four campaign stops in a day, that’s obviously worth far more than the cost of first-class travel to each of the airports in question. Hence members are pocketing a nice, legal little perk. The Post story doesn’t explore this, but it’s also a great little leadership tool, since the flights are requested and paid for by leadership-controlled committees. The member who gets the flight doesn’t even have to report it personally.) How naïve am I? It had never actually occurred to me that this sort of thing went on as a part of campaigning (as opposed to, say, as part of a junket to the Superbowl). Of course, it was the Democrats who went to the trouble of compiling this information, since their track record for the same period includes only 23 payments of this kind to companies–none of them tobacco interests
The Post offers a fifth-anniversary story on the long fallout from Vince Foster’s suicide. In it, various sources enact a more high-minded version of the Blame it on Vince phenomenon that followed his suicide. (There was a time when any minor White House scandal was laid at least partly at Foster’s door; he was hardly in a position to object.) Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel who directed (or at least colluded in) the Clintons’ paranoid reaction to the investigations of Foster’s suicide, claims that Foster’s death was responsible for igniting the legal brushfires that have burned through the administration: Why, if Vince had been here all along, Nussbaum just knows he would have supported him, Nussbaum, in resisting the appointment of an independent counsel. Another source–an anonymous investigator somehow embroiled in some aspect of Whitewater–agrees that Foster’s death was key, but for the opposite reason: If it hadn’t been for the Clintons’ paranoia in the wake of Foster’s death, the Permanent Investigation would never have started.
Finally, the New York Times serves up a publicist’s dream with its serious treatment of Random House’s “100 Best Novels” stunt. Random House convened a distinguished panel of the usual suspects (among them Gore Vidal, Daniel Boorstin, A.S. Byatt, Arthur M. Schlesinger, William Styron–perhaps the crucial vote that put Sophie’s Choice on the list at number 96) in the name of its Modern Library imprint to choose the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century. I can’t quarrel with Ulysses in first place, nor with The Great Gatsby in second (thought I’m surprised by the unconventionality of the choice). But because I am in my mother’s house, I must register my shock that Howard’s End is all the way down at number 38 (after A Passage to India, which is always erroneously treated as Forster’s Important Classic). This book was her amulet, her North Star, her refuge from what heroine Margaret Schlegel is wont to call “the world of telegrams and anger.” I always think of it here, in the house whose every corner holds some expression of my mother’s passion for small beauties.
Nostalgically,
Marjorie
