Part 3 (1/2)

Hell To Pay Barbara Olson 142450K 2022-07-22

Treuhaft is not like the Black Panthers. Treuhaft is a man who dedicated his entire legal career to advancing the agenda of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB.*35 Treuhaft had formally left the Communist party in 1958, but only because it had lost so many members that it was no longer a viable organization. Mitford, an unreconstructed acolyte of Joseph Stalin, would later condemn the Hungarian Freedom Fighters who threw Molotov c.o.c.ktails at Soviet tanks as ”grasping neo-Fascist types.”*36 In 1972 Treuhaft offered Hillary a summer interns.h.i.+p working on behalf of indigent criminal defendants in Berkeley. Hillary accepted and worked for Treuhaft for a summer. She later paved the way for Mitford to lobby Governor Bill Clinton on the death penalty.*37 Hillary has never repudiated her connection with the Communist movement in America or explained her relations.h.i.+p with two of its leading adherents. Of course, no one has pursued these questions with Hillary. She has shown that she will not answer hard questions about her past, and she has learned that she does not need to--remarkable in an age when political figures are allowed such little privacy.

THE RADICAL WRITE.

At Wellesley, Hillary began to follow radical publications. At Yale, she served the movement as an editor. She also became a writer herself, defining and extending the terms of a Crit idea, the burgeoning field of ”children's rights.”

At first, radical politics had started as an outgrowth of her Methodism. Now it became increasingly driven by a realization that her goals could be achieved only by the application of power.

”My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good,” the Reverend Jones told reporter Michael Kelly in his courageous 1993 ”Saint Hillary” piece in the New York Times Magazine.

”You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.”*38 For Hillary, the convergence of power and Christian ends had come together in Motive, a magazine for college-age Methodists.

”I still have every issue they sent me,” Mrs. Clinton would later say as first lady.*39 She told a writer for Newsweek that she still treasured a 1966 Motive article by theologian and SDS leader Carl Oglesby called ”Change or Containment.”

Oglesby is variously described as a Marxist or Maoist theoretician, in the piece so admired by Hillary, Oglesby defended Ho Chi Minh and Castro, and Maoist tactics of violence. ”I do not find it hard to understand that certain cultural settings create violence as surely as the master's whip creates outcries of pain and rage. I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who a.s.sa.s.sinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victims' cultural innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations.”*40 ”It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War,” Hillary said, adding that Motive had given her the impetus to move from being a Goldwater Republican to a McGovern Democrat.

At Yale, she found the chance to partic.i.p.ate in radical scholars.h.i.+p more directly. A good, though not brilliant, law student, she could have played the angles and tried to make the Yale Law School Journal, the obvious route to prestige and a solid job offer to a partner-track position with a big law firm. Perhaps she doubted her ability to make the Journal on merit. Or perhaps for other reasons, she chose instead to serve as one of the editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, where she worked side-by-side with future Clinton insiders Mickey Kantor and Robert Reich.

Founded during Hillary's first year at Yale Law School by a group of third-year students, the Review was more than just a radical version of the traditional law journal. It was to be a purveyor of radical scholars.h.i.+p and ideas. Hillary served as one of the Review's initial nine editors, critiquing articles and offering her advice.

The maiden issue of the Review in 1970 declared, ”For too long, legal issues have been defined and discussed in terms of academic doctrine rather than strategies for social change.”

There were articles by or about William Kunstler, Charles Garry, and Charles Reich of Greening fame. Although not a legal scholar, radical gadfly Jerry Rubin appeared in the Review to exhort parents ”to get high with our seven-year-olds” and students to ”kill our parents.”

”Only gradually,” two Review editors note on a profile of Rubin's appearance at Penn State, ”does the dialectic of the new myth appear.

Youth's language is its strength. For a moment, Rubin plays McLuhan. The youth culture, particularly their language, is continually being commercialized by the Establishment. 'We have revolutions in toilet paper, s.e.x through Ultrabrite, trips to the Bahamas, Dodge rebellions. But the key word is f.u.c.k; they (Rubin smiles) can't co-opt f.u.c.k.'” By the 1990s, it became apparent that Rubin was as wrong about that as he was about everything else.

Rubin was told by a student in the audience that his father was a judge. ”To this, Mr. Rubin queried, 'Why don't you kill him?' Of course, we all thought he was joking but then, he explained how it really would be dramatic and dwelled on the subject of a.s.sa.s.sination to the point where none of us in the room doubted his seriousness.”

A more typical Review article discussed rent strikes, under the heading ”The Law as a Tactic,” the Crit concept of law as a means ”both to protect the strikers and educate them.”

The combined second and third law issues of the Review in the fall/winter of 1970, on which Hillary served as a.s.sociate editor, centered on Bobby Seale and the Black Panther trials. It included many cartoons depicting the police as hominid pigs, their snouts wet while they mutter, ”n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs.” Another cartoon, under the caption ”What Is a Pig?” shows a wounded pig-man, bruised, bandaged, and on crutches from a severe beating. The answer to the question in the cartoon is ”A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.”

Another cartoon, under the caption ”Seize the Time!” shows a pig-man surrounded by flies, decapitated and cut in half.

Other articles were less gruesome in presentation, if not intent.

James F. Blumstein, fourth-year law student, and James Phelan, second-year law student, for instance, wrote ”Jamestown 70,” a radical manifesto that proposed ”migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and then establis.h.i.+ng a living laboratory for experimentation.” They write: Revolution is impossible when armed revolt by the citizenry-at-large would inevitably be put down by the nilitary might at the disposal of those in control. We see the best way out in reeducating this nation to its heritage; reopening the frontier, where alienated or deviant members of society can go to live by their new ideas; providing a living laboratory for social experimentation through Radical Federalism; and restoring effective political communication in a multimedia society.

What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process. The goal of this takeover would be to establish a truly experimental society in which new solutions to today's problems could be tried, an experimental state which would serve as a new frontier and encourage imaginative local innovation.

The goal was to forge a society based on ”a New Consciousness.”

”Experimentation with drugs, s.e.x, individual lifestyles or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society is an insufficient alternative. Total experimentation is necessary.”

The marches on Was.h.i.+ngton, Woodstock--they had all been lost, were nothing but drops in the great, oblivious sea of apple pie consumerisn. It was time for those with a heightened consciousness to migrate to a safer place, much as African Americans migrated from the sharecropper farms of the South to create their own new realities in Chicago and New York.

”An American-style Kampuchea,” is the memorable description Daniel Wattenberg used to describe ”Jamestown 70” for the American Spectator magazine.*41 For all its utopianism and fantasy-like qualities, radical federalism was a kind of a Frederick Jackson Turner thesis for the psychedelic frontier. It may even have led to the settlement of so many hippies in Vermont and Northern Idaho--or San Francisco.

Hillary complained that early drafts of ”Jamestown 70” were ”mental masturbation.” She worked with its authors to make it more specific, more ”down to earth.”

Wattenberg reported that ”Hillary provided a detailed sympathetic critique of the article, according to a source at the journal. Her main problem with the piece was that it was long on rhetoric, short on action.*42 For Hillary, the mental exercise of imagining a ”New Consciousness” was fatuous unless there were forceful steps that could be taken to enact it.

While some 1960s radicals on the wilder fringes might have been merely self-indulgent fantasists, or spoiled college kids seeking to avoid the responsibilities of their parents, Hillary was a budding Leninist. Menshevik, Bolshevik, Trotskyite--they were all debating societies. What really mattered to Lenin--and what Saul Alinsky taught Hillary to value--was power.

DEFENDER OF VIOLENCE.

At the end of the Johnson administration, Eugene Rostow, one of the main policy architects of the Vietnam War, returned from the State Department to the Yale Law School faculty.

After Rostow's office was ransacked by antiwar vandals, ”a number of us identified with the antiwar movement, including Hillary, were considering going to Rostow and saying even though we disagree with you on the war, this is unforgivable. Hillary took a different approach, one of our few disagreements,” a Hillary colleague told David Brock. ”She said, 'You know, I wouldn't put down those people so easily. You've got to understand the rage they feel. You know, because they are disenfranchised; they are not empowered.' She was sort of taking the position that well, our real enemies are society and the establishment.”*43 Throughout her life, Hillary has been marked by a desire to dedicate her life to achieve a transcendent ideal. That ideal has changed over the years. It was represented first by Barry Goldwater, then by liberal Republicans like John Lindsay. Then it became George McGovern, the Black Panthers, the Crits, and even Stalinists like Jessica Mitford and Robert Treuhaft.

Like others of her time, she had begun her journey on Eisenhower's interstate highway system only to find herself deep in the Ho Chi Minh trail; from the comforts of prosperous 1950s American suburbia to a Marxist critique of everything that had shaped her, Hillary had liberated herself from Hugh Rodham and his grim empire. While her family had struggled to get ahead, their money, the expensive education they provided Hillary, allowed her to be a free agent, exploring, a.s.sessing, finding her own path in a way her parents could not have dreamed for themselves. Now Hillary believed she had the answers she sought. Now was the time for action.

She found a partner, a fellow power seeker who would take her to the unlikely destination of Arkansas.

FOUR.

OF ONE MIND.

”What was my alternative? To draw myself up into righteous moral indignation, saying, I would rather lose than corrupt my principles, and then go home with my ethical hymen intact?”

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

When told that he had become president, Harry Truman said that he felt as if all the stars and the moon had fallen on him. Ronald Reagan, in his memoirs, recalled walking into the White House with Nancy, seeing the furniture from their home moved into the grand rooms of the mansion, and suddenly being overwhelmed by the realization that the presidency was truly his to command.

In their respective memoirs, the Clintons will one day each tell of similar emotions on their first day as president and first lady.

Untold, likely, will be the real tone and tenor of that day, or the reason for their very public fight that day as reported by Time magazine. Standing on the steps of Blair House on Inauguration Day, 1993, Bill Clinton yelled at his wife through the cold morning air.

”f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!” he screamed, causing Secret Service agents and well-wishers to cower. ”Stupid motherf.u.c.ker,” was the reply from our first lady.*1 This was a rare lapse in a carefully contrived image. For the most part, the public sees the marriage the Clintons wish us to see.

There is the loving couple on the beach, studiously unaware of nearby photographers, gently dancing in each other's arms to a lovers' waltz only they can hear. There was the tender moment during the State of the Union address when the president looked up from the podium, made direct eye contact with his wife, and mouthed the words, ”I love you”

for the entire viewing audience to see. One could only marvel at the chutzpah that it took for Bill Clinton to try such a stunt in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was a moment that seemed like a scene out of a 1950s grade ”B” movie.

Given all that is known about the Clintons today, it is likely this moment was, in fact, scripted by someone with a Hollywood or television soap opera touch. Their good friends, television sit-com producers Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, were indeed called back to the White House during the impeachment crisis to manufacture the best possible pro-Clinton gloss to the spectacle. It has taken every trick in the book--from Hollywood advice to tras.h.i.+ng former presidents from Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson to Eisenhower and Reagan--to keep the myth of the Clinton's marriage alive. Hillary even went so far as to blame her family troubles on ”a vast right-wing conspiracy”

to laying it off on child abuse from an argumentative grandmother.

The president she now claims is a victim of a weakness for which he is not responsible. The victim of personal tragedy: ”There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother,” Hillary told an interviewer in the premier issue of Talk magazine in August 1999.

”A psychologist once told me that for a boy, being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one.”

So the president, according to the most recent Clinton theory, cannot help himself. Torn between a doting mother and a devoted grandmother, he must now try to please every woman he encounters.

This, we are expected to believe, justifies exposing himself to Paula Jones, groping Kathleen Willey, and forcibly raping Juanita Broaddrick. These and scores of similar incidents Hillary expects us to believe are merely sins of weakness, if they are sins at all, to be laid at the feet of his deceased mother and grandmother. The sins of malice by comparison are those of Kenneth Starr's, Henry Hyde's and every journalist who has ever tried to tell the truth about the Clintons.