National Review back issues from May 1995:
After the 100 days.(first 100 days of Republican-controlled House)(Column)
May 01, 1995 ... NEWT Gingrich just completed one of the most remarkable political sprints in American history, from the promulgation of the Contract with America last fall to the end of the 100 days. Ahead of him now is the long march on the federal budget, the success of which will determine whether the ...
Guatemala's scandal - and ours.(investigation into CIA involvement in the murder of a Guatemalan revolutionary)(Column)
May 01, 1995 ... IN 1990, Guatemalan soldiers killed Michael DeVine, an American running a hotel in Guatemala. In 1992, a Communist guerrilla named Efrain Bamaca was captured by the Guatemalan army. Bamaca's common-law wife, an American leftist, named Jennifer Harbury, for a long time believed he was ...
Hot air in Berlin.(conference on regulation of carbon dioxide emissions)(Column)
May 01, 1995 ... THE just-ended United Nations Climate Conference in Berlin saw governments of 130 countries discussing how to share the pain of internationally agreed and legally enforced reductions in carbon- dioxide emissions. In case you're feeling hazy, CO2 is the poisonous stuff we all breathe out ...
Pure politics.(Republican tax cuts are for economic not political reasons)
May 01, 1995; ... NEWT Gingrich's tax cut ``is not about alleviating onerous tax burdens, sparking investment or any other lofty purpose. It is a political maneuver.'' Hard evidence for this, continues the New York Times, lies in an ``inconvenient fact'' long ignored by Republicans: the U.S. already has ...
Quo vadis?(Papal encyclical 'Evangelium Vitae')(Column)
May 01, 1995 ... IN HIS encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Pope pits that ``Gospel of Life'' against a ``culture of death'' that he sees overshadowing the developed world. Even those who disagree with him on specific questions will find the moral thrust of what he has to say on such matters as euthanasia ...
John Chamberlain, R I P.(National Review writer)(Obituary)
May 01, 1995; ... LATE ONE afternoon in the fall of 1955, on the eve of the appearance of the first issue of NATIONAL REVIEW, something people more loftily situated would have called a ``summit conference'' was set in New York City, for which purpose a tiny suite in the Commodore Hotel was engaged ....
Whole lotta shakin' goin' on.(Congressional politics)
May 01, 1995; ... THE mainstream press has grudgingly conceded that the House GOP kept its promise by voting on all ten items in the Contract with America, including congressonal accountability, the Balanced Budget Amendment, the line-item veto, unfunded mandates, crime control, tax cuts, welfare reform, ...
The lights go out in Georgia.(human rights abuses in the country of Georgia)
May 01, 1995; ... Dr. Rooke, a Birmingham psychiatrist, visited Georgia on behalf of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.ON March 6 Gedevan Gelbakhiani, a professor of medicine, and Irakli Dokvadse, an engineer, were sentenced to death by a Georgian court. Although they had retracted their ...
Word of mouth.(Republican presidential hopeful Alan Keyes)
May 01, 1995; ... ALAN KEYES is on the campaign trail. Today he's hitting Denver, then Indianapolis -- both from the back seat of his hired Lincoln Town Car parked outside the Washington studios of National Empowerment Television. Keyes does the two talk shows from a portable phone; strewn beside him on ...
Little red book for sale.(social change in China)
May 01, 1995; ... ``ALL reactionaries are paper tigers,'' I read in the small brochure an elderly woman surreptitiously handed to me at a bazaar behind Peking's International Club, about a mile from Tiananmen Square. ``We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the ...
Points of order.(President Bill Clinton's foreign policy; includes a related article on the importance of NATO)
May 01, 1995; ... Mr. Rodman, an NR senior editor, is director of National Security Programs at the new Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and the author of More Precious than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (Scribner's).FOREIGN-POLICY experts take it for granted that, with the ...
Fat heads. (low-fat diet obsession) (Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... A FEW years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a cardiologist wrote touchingly about seeing his 4- year-old daughter, Ariel, sneaking to the fridge to have some of the ice cream her granny had bought. ``From conversation around the house,'' he said, ``she knew what ...
Gentlemen of the leaf. (cigar-smoking)(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... THERE is a quiet revolution afoot. To be more exact, it's a counter-revolution. And while it is unlikely ever to become shrill or vulgar, it may soon be rather less quiet. Unostentatiously, a large number of ``non-smokers'' are taking up smoking good-quality cigars. The New Gentlemen of ...
Hotel highs (and lows). (staying at fine hotels)(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... IT ALL began so nicely. I had just arrived at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport, gone through Immigration, and reclaimed my luggage, and was looking for one of Hong Kong's tacky little taxis to take me to the newly opened and very posh Regent Hotel on Kowloon's magnificent esplanade, ...
Pretended pleasures. (faking pleasure)(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... CONSIDER the following scenarios: a) At a party, a fellow sidles up beside people richer, better-looking, and better socially connected than he is. When any of them cracks even the lamest joke, the sidler lets out a huge, barking laugh like a sea lion, attracting looks of pity and ...
Let it pour. (enjoying alcohol; includes related article on drinking paraphernalia)(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... SOURS, slings, cups, coolers, toddies, daisies, highballs, shrubs, daiquiris, nightcaps, cobblers, cubas, rickeys, fixes, fizzes, flips, vodkas, vermouths, kirschwassers, pale ales, absinthe, aquavit, porter, and gin. Creme Yvette? Lillet? An aurium, sir? Or perhaps a redeeming julep?...
A matter of taste. (health food fanaticism)(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... MICHAEL Jacobson wants us to know that he is not a fanatic. Over the years, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has repeatedly confessed that he occasionally butters his bread. In a January interview with the Dallas Morning News, he revealed a ...
Better shop around?(shopping as a hobby; Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... YOU PAY your money, you take your chances. Will the gown create a sensation? Will the caviar be delectable? Will the limousine purr gently? Will the Pekinese have a good disposition? Even the most mundane purchase bears the element of risk.But let us concern ourselves not with ...
Social autopsies.(after dinner party conversations; Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... THERE is a whole host of sayings to the effect that traveling in hope is better than arriving and that the anticipation of pleasure is more enjoyable than the event itself. But what about the pleasure after the event -- the regrets, the raking over of the coals, the recriminations. ...
Gliding over Maui.(hang-gliding; Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... HALEAKALA last erupted in 1790. At 9,800 feet it provides a wonderful view of Kahoo-Lawe, Molokini, Molokai, Hawaii, and Lanai, as well as its own island, Maui. You can't see the Four Seasons Hotel from where we are, but you know roughly how to get there as the crow flies.That ...
Raspberry vinegar with everything.(restaurant dining; Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... MESQUITE-GRILLED chicken with ginger and balsamic vinegar . . . Stir-fried pork on a bed of pureed spring vegetables, with peanut oil and cumin . . . Cajun blackened swordfish with a coulis of raspberries . . . Mesclun salad with Dijon honey vinaigrette . . . From sea to shining sea you ...
Why I gamble.(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... Mr. Seligman is a columnist for Fortune and the author of A Question of Intelligence (Citadel Press).THIS article is driving me crazy. First, it is sinking in, after several days of staring at the headline above, that the issues it raises are more complex than posited when I ...
Sexual athleticism.(Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... WHEN the editors of national review asked me to write an article on the subject of ``sexual athleticism,'' my first reaction, spoken sotto voce, was: ``Of course. It had to be me. But how on earth did they know?''Had they spoken to my wife? Canvassed the sisters from Sigma Chi at ...
Trains I have known and loved.(train travel; Pleasure & Its Perils)
May 01, 1995; ... TWENTY years ago, if you lived in Europe you might have taken the view that the railway train would be extinct by the end of this century. Now, five years from the millennium, the train is going from strength to strength. What on earth has happened to bring about this change of attitude ...
Good-bye to la gloire.(France)
May 01, 1995; ... WHY should anyone, least of all in the United States, be interested in France? It is understandable that American policy toward Europe now vacillates between a vague sense of dutiful attachment to Britain and a rather unattractive gamble on the inevitability of German domination. By ...
Lead hype.(over-estimated lead poisoning statistics)
May 01, 1995; ... IN THE March 21 New York Times, veteran health reporter Jane Brody wrote that ``new studies'' suggest 3 million American pre- schoolers have dangerous levels of lead in their blood. This alarming factoid is just the latest example of how lead poisoning has been hyped by activists and the ...
Hunting rhinos.(over-reaction of the media to 'Black Rhino' ammunition)
May 01, 1995; ... IF A small-time manufacturer from the far east side of lower nowhere called a press conference tomorrow and announced that he had perfected a new ``wonder fluid,'' derived from common seawater, that could grow hair, run your sports car, cure bad breath, and get your dog elected Queen of ...
Pay hazard.(raising the minimum wage)
May 01, 1995; ... ``MANY well-meaning people favor legal minimum wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor,'' Nobel laureate Milton Friedman has observed. ``It has always been a mystery to me why a youngster is better off unemployed at $4.75 an hour than employed at $4.25.'' ...
The unfair sex?(efforts to stop violence against women portray men unfairly)
May 01, 1995; ... Miss McElroy, a contributing editor to Liberty, is the author of Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Holmes and Meier) and XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography, forthcoming from St. Martin's.THE April 9 march on Washington to protest violence against women was yet another attempt ...
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.
May 01, 1995; ... AFTER a decade and a half of confinement to fairly obscure pamphlets and technical monographs, the case against massive immigration has at last found a champion whose book, in the wake of the landslide passage of California's Proposition 187 last year, is likely to inform and shape the ...
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.
May 01, 1995; ... Mr. Fukuyama, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C., has just completed a book on social capital and the global economy, which will be published this summer by Free Press. The views expressed here are his own.PETER Brimelow deserves praise for going to ...
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.
May 01, 1995; ... THE ENGLISH, it is well known, are often direct and even rude in their disagreements, where Americans are circumlocuitous and fearful of giving offense. I hope that the English national characteristic will be ignored in discussions of Peter Brimelow's important book, without any ...
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.
May 01, 1995; ... ON A RECENT trip to Australia I spent some time with a group of economists and sociologists at the local Bureau of Immigration and Multicultural Research. They were eager to explain to a visiting American how well their country was managing its immigration policy. They stressed two main ...
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America.
May 01, 1995; ... ALL RIGHT, the baboon. It was stuffed and bespectacled and stood in Madame's parlor, wearing a wing collar, morning coat, and tie, with tucked beneath its hairy arm the manuscript of a lecture on The Origin of Species, the book alleged to document its kinship with humans. Its name, shared ...
The Tunnel.
May 01, 1995; ... BACK IN the 1960s, when William Gass started working on this book, there were a lot of people writing what was called at the time ``experimental'' fiction. The experiment, it turned out, was always the same and involved doing away with the constraints of ``conventional narrative'' in ...
Jefferson in Paris.
May 01, 1995; ... THE QUESTION with the Merchant - Ivory team is not why they make so many ``worthy'' but shallow and inept films -- that is what they do -- but how sometimes, as in The Remains of the Day, they manage to do better. With Jefferson in Paris they're once again true to form. For all the ...
Art! - Art! - at the Whitney.(Whitney Biennial exhibit of modern artists)
May 01, 1995; ... IF THE latest Whitney Biennial does nothing else, it signals the revival of certain artistic ambitions that were dormant if not dead through most of the Eighties and early Nineties. It has restored to us the obligation of looking at the art of our contemporaries as if there were at least ...
Politics as a Noble Calling.(Brief Article)
May 01, 1995; ... THOUGH he spent his entire adult life deeply involved in politics, F. Clifton White ran for office only once: unsuccessfully, in a congressional primary at age 28. After that he turned to the nuts-and-bolts work of party organization, and before he died at 74 in 1993 he was recognized as ...
Newt and the popularity polls.(Newt Gingrich)(Column)
May 01, 1995; ... It was a professional pollster, no less, who recommended to Newt Gingrich shortly after the election in November that he do two things. The first: pledge not to read the opinion polls until after all the work was done attempting to legislate his Contract with America. The second: if ...
Phil Gramm in Fun City.(campaigning in New York, New York)
May 01, 1995; ... Phil Gramm came to New York on Monday to raise a little money for his presidential campaign. He descended into a thicket of reporters there to record his comments on the inhospitable remarks of William Powers, who is state chairman of the GOP. What Mr. Powers had said was that no ...
Five hundred dollars for Bill Gates?(tax credit for families with children)(Column)
May 01, 1995; ... It is a pity that over one hundred Republican congressmen have petitioned the leadership to modify their universal pledge to reduce taxation. The defecting congressmen were restive in the high atmosphere of principle, and so they dived off, and are now left to wrestle with expedience ....
Scriptophobia.(the death of letter-writing)(Column)
May 01, 1995; ... St. Martin's has just published The Florence King Reader, an anthology.I am AT war, fighting to save the dying practice of letter writing from the iniquities of ``communications resources.'' Mind you, I'm not a Luddite. I love computers for making letters easier to write, and I love ...
With morbid ideals.(Oklahoma City bombing)
May 15, 1995 ... THOUGH there have been many serious novels about criminals, there have been almost none about bombers. The vileness of the act resists even artistic understanding. A police inspector in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, which is one of the exceptions, explains the difficulty: "The first term ...
Take your daughter to Congress day. (criticism of Gender Equity Act)
May 15, 1995 ... THE American Association of University Women and other feminist lobbying groups have succeeded in getting girls categorized as an "historically under-served population." This means that, under the Gender Equity Act incorporated in last year's Elementary and Secondary Education Act, millions ...
Vietnam and memory.(lessons of Vietnam War)
May 15, 1995 ... IN THE conventional view, the Vietnam War is an unalloyed American defeat. Witness Robert McNamara, just out with a memoir of Vietnam, riddled by a deep sense of personal guilt about the political and military misjudgments that characterized his conduct of the war. Yet over the years, he has ...
Milovan Djilas, RIP.(Yugoslav author)(Obituary)
May 15, 1995 ... THE OLD axiom that the great moral struggle of the Cold War pitted Communists against ex-Communists may have been coined with Milovan Djilas in mind. There is no more damning account of the corruption of the Communist system than The New Class, published by Djilas in 1957, not long after he ...
The inequality industry.(income distribution statistics)
May 15, 1995; ... ALTHOUGH the election is 18 months away, newspapers are already filled with stories about the widening gap between rich and poor. Income inequality poses a threat to the "social fabric," not to mention the economy. Or so we're told. There is, however, one inconvenient fact: Americans are ...
Robert Strother, RIP.(journalist)(Obituary)
May 15, 1995; ... BOB STROTHER was an old-time newspaper man. He had been everywhere, seen and done everything, worked for everyone -- UP, Luce, Hearst, Reader's Digest -- in a journalistic career of more than sixty years. He was reputed to be the first American newspaperman to enter Rome when it was ...
Ties that blind.(militia movement and the Oklahoma City bombing)
May 15, 1995; ... Mr. Bock is a senior columnist at the Orange County Register and author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge, forthcoming from Dickens Press. His full report on the militia movement will appear in the next issue of NR.Noxon, MontanaTHE high-school gymnasium in this tiny town in the ...
Dealing with Dole.(Bob Dole's presidential campaign)
May 15, 1995; ... IN THE early 1980s Bob Heckman, ousted as executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, challenged his dismissal in a drawn- out, bitter lawsuit. He eventually moved on to a rocky career in the conservative movement that one activist describes as leaving "body bags coast to coast." ...
Relief pitch.(tax relief)
May 15, 1995; ... IF THE new Republican Party intends to consolidate its hold on the hearts and minds of the electorate, nothing is more important than Senate approval of the tax-cut bill that passed the House just before the Easter recess. The GOP must keep its promise to provide across-the-board tax relief ...
Random walk.(radical tax reform)
May 15, 1995; ... THE Republican takeover of Congress has shifted the debate on almost every issue, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of tax reform. Fears of class warfare kept Republicans from including in the Contract the most important key to economic growth -- reduction in tax rates on ...
War on the poor.(criticism of the Legal Services Corporation)
May 15, 1995; ... WHEN Marvin Gempler, manager of the Washington Growers League in Washington State, wrote to the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, D.C., to complain about the onslaught of cases against farmers by Evergreen Legal Services, he received with his reply a copy of an article: "The Quest ...
Blowing in the wind.(presidential candidate Pete Wilson)(Cover Story)
May 15, 1995; ... THEY nearly gush, the early reviews from Time, Newsweek, and other establishment oracles. The presidential ambitions of California governor Pete Wilson are clearly tapping a soft spot in mainstream media hearts.But don't let that fool you. It doesn't necessarily mean that Wilson ...
Good morning, Vietnam: on the long road to freedom and prosperity, Vietnam is taking the first halting steps.
May 15, 1995; ... ON THE leafy corner joining Mac Dinh Chi Street and Le Duan Boulevard, the former American Embassy squats against the morning sun. Twenty years ago, with Communist forces rapidly advancing on Saigon, young Marines on the other side of these bars did their best to hold back the crush of ...
Trial by firestorm: the case of Christina Jeffrey teaches a lesson in journalistic ethics - and political loyalty.(former Historian of House of Representatives)
May 15, 1995; ... RECRUITED by Newt Gingrich last December as the new House Historian -- who is charged with documenting and informing the public on the workings of the House -- Christina Jeffrey rose swiftly from relative obscurity as a college professor from Georgia, only to fall twice as fast, branded an ...
Congress and the exclusionary rule: would killing the exclusionary rule repeal the Fourth Amendment - or restore it?
May 15, 1995; ... 'THE greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." It's almost as if, way back in 1927, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis foresaw the advent of the 104th Congress and the so-called anti-crime provisions of the ...
Why stop halfway?(need to repeal the exclusionary rule)
May 15, 1995; ... Mr. Reynolds is director of the Criminal Justice Center of the National Center for Policy Analysis and professor of economics at Texas A&M University.A MOTORCYCLE cop stops a speeding car. Without a search warrant but suspicious, the policeman demands that the driver open his trunk ...
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.
May 15, 1995; ... Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett (Simon & Schuster, 586 pp., $30)Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne is the president of Queens' College, Cambridge. His Gifford Lectures are published by Princeton as The Faith of a Physicist.IT IS ...
Tom Paine.
May 15, 1995; ... Tom Paine, by John Keane (Little, Brown, 644 pp., $27.95)Collected Writings, by Thomas Paine (Library of America, 906 pp., $35)A WRITER'S "concerns are with all mankind," wrote Thomas Paine in 1777, "and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their ...
Collected Writings.
May 15, 1995; ... A WRITER'S "concerns are with all mankind," wrote Thomas Paine in 1777, "and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty." "Poor Paine [is] not the most prudent man in the world," wrote an American a few years later. These books support both judgments. ...
The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa's Gold Coast.
May 15, 1995; ... The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa's Gold Coast, by Robert B. Edgerton (Free Press, 293 pp., $23)ASANTE, more usually Ashanti, is little more than a footnote in British imperial history, remembered by a few as the country where Sir Garnet Wolseley made ...
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights.
May 15, 1995; ... Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribner's, 320 pp., $22)SEXUAL liberals live in a special universe all their own. Take Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and self-proclaimed defender of ...
Wings of Courage.
May 15, 1995; ... SOMETHING epochal may have happened in the history of cinema: Jean- Jacques Annaud's Wings of Courage is the first dramatic film shot in IMAX 3D, and, to a considerable degree, it works. The plot of this 40-minute feature isn't much, but it is based on a true story and it is gripping. The ...
Rob Roy.
May 15, 1995; ... From a leap into the future, to a dive into the past: the 134- minute Rob Roy is very much an updated (and not all that much updated) Errol Flynn picture. Well, yes, there is a graphic rape scene and some frolicsome conjugal groping under the kilt. Otherwise, you keep expecting Olivia de ...