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REEDINGS
. . .
Notes
on Books by Gerard Reed
BARBARA
OLSON’S TESTAMENTS
Perhaps the best-known victim of the terrorists’ atrocities on
September 11, 2001, was Barbara Olson, the wife of the nation’s
Solicitor-General, Ted Olson.
Like her husband, she was a lawyer, a staunch Republican, closely
connected to the Bush administration.
She had served as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and as
counsel to a congressional committee that investigated some of the Clintons’
scandals. She
frequently appeared as a guest on television and radio commentaries, for she was
renowned within Washington’s beltway for blending gracious manners with
resolute convictions.
She died aboard the hijacked airplane that smashed into the Pentagon, two
days before her long-awaited book--ironically titled “Final Days”--was
scheduled for publication.
In a hauntingly prophetic sentence, she noted:
“Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by
a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin
Laden” (p. 20).
Her book, The Final Days:
The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
(Washington: Regnery
Publishing, Inc., c. 2001), makes a microscopic examination of the pardons
granted, the deals made, by the Clintons as their reign ended.
But her focused account provides readers with a wide-angle lens whereby
one sees a broader picture, a troubling vision of a nation at risk.
On January 17, 2001, President William Jefferson Clinton took his last
flight on Air Force One, relishing all the perks of his office, making a
round-trip from Washington to Little Rock, Arkansas.
Joking with the press corps accompanying him, Clinton asked, “You got
anybody you want to pardon?” (p. 4).
Lots of folks certainly did, it seems, and during his last few days as
president Clinton considered hundreds of cases.
Amidst parties and farewell ceremonies, he furiously
flexed his executive powers.
Openly anxious about his “legacy,” he sought ways to preserve his
presidential achievements by doing things only the nation’s chief executive
can do. Consequently,
in the final hours of his final day in the White House, President Clinton
granted 140 pardons and 36 commutations.
Though Clinton’s last-minute pardons captured headlines, Olson shows
that they were by no means atypical of him.
In August of 1999 he pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists--called
“separatists” by the media to soften their image.
Members of the FALN--a Marxist group credited for 130 bombing attacks in
the U.S.-- they killed six people, injuring scores more.
Apprehended, tried and imprisoned, the FALN terrorists remained defiant,
not requesting pardon.
Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department favored releasing them, but
President Clinton proclaimed pardons at an opportune moment in his wife’s
senatorial campaign in New York.
“Former U.S. attorney [Joseph] DiGenova remarked, ‘Let me just say,
categorically, the Puerto Rican terrorists were pardoned because they were a
political benefit to the president’s wife.
Make no mistake about it.
There is no justification for those pardons’” (p. 19).
Public outrage prodded Hillary to publicly disavow her husband’s
actions, though what the two of them discussed in private will never be known.
Without doubt, however, the pardons burnished Hillary’s image among New
York’s many Hispanics.
To Olson, however, these pardons portended travesties to come.
“The FALN incident was the first time the president used his pardon
power to grant clemency to terrorists.
He would return to this theme again at the end of his presidency” (p.
21).
The folks who should have denounced such actions--particularly the
allegedly “watch-dog” journalists--followed their script and granted the
Clintons latitude to follow their own ends.
Following her election as a Senator from New York in November, 2000--and
before taking her oath of office--Hillary negotiated a book contract with Simon
and Schuster, taking an advance of $8 million, “by far the largest such
advance offered to any government official” (p. 40).
Since she was not yet, technically, in office, she avoided the Senate’s
“conflict of interest” provisos that forbade such deals.
Yet her media friends, her fellow Democrats who had howled with outrage
at a book deal negotiated by Newt Gingrich a few years earlier, blessed her
windfall.
Nor did many object to President Bill Clinton’s use of his “executive
power” to issue wide-ranging “executive orders” in his final days.
The nation’s first five presidents, collectively, issued only 15
executive orders.
Following a very different political philosophy, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt issued an astronomical 3,522 edicts in 12 years.
Subsequent presidents followed suit, though with less abandon.
And Clinton found he could circumvent Congress and implement his agenda
through executive orders.
Two days after he became president, for example, Clinton appeased his
feminist fans by authorizing abortions on U.S. military bases.
“’Stoke of the pen, law of the land.
Kind of cool,’” said Clinton strategist Paul Begala” (p. 79).
Clinton’s final weeks in office witnessed “a gusher of executive
orders and presidential decrees” (p. 79).
Carrying through on his commitments to environmentalists, educators,
affirmative action activists, anti-tobacco crusaders, and trial lawyers, the
president pursued his agenda.
He set aside lands in the West as national monuments, creating nine of
them on January 17, 2001.
He tried to subject America to the International Criminal Court.
He established by fiat an
abortion rights position, defining “a child as a ‘fetus, after
delivery, that has been determined to be viable.’
Thus, instead of regarding an unborn child as a human being, the Clinton
rule adopted the feminist language that characterizes a child as a fetus” (p.
91).
On his last full day in office, he also extricated himself from his own
legal dilemma: perjury.
“On January 19, 2001 President Clinton finally conceded that he had
broken the law” (p. 97), lying to a judge.
Intricate legal maneuvers, involving the president and his team of
lawyers, spared him from disbarment in Arkansas.
He signed a carefully-crafted statement, accepting a five-year suspension
and $25,000 fine.
Though subtly stated, the document is simply a plea bargain.
He broke the law, but he sustained only a slight spanking.
Then there are the pardons during Clinton’s final days!
He pardoned a strange variety of folks.
“The list of beneficiaries of Clinton’s last-minute clemency orgy was
as eclectic as one could imagine:
small- and big-time crooks, con men, bank robbers, terrorists, relatives,
ex-girlfriends, a cross section of the
Clinton cabinet, a former director of the CIA, perjurers (appropriately
enough), tax evaders, fugitive money lenders, Clinton campaign contributors,
former members of Congress, and friends of Jesse Jackson.
The sheer number of pardons and clemency grants, coupled with their
timing--the last day of the Clinton presidency and the first day of Bush
Two--staggered the press and smothered the story” (p. 123).
Most egregious was the pardon of Marc Rich.
One of the world’s richest men, apparently without moral compass, he
was ultimately indicted, on 51 counts,
for illegal trading practices and tax evasion.
A federal prosecutor, Morris Weinberg, said:
“The evidence was absolutely overwhelming that Marc Rich, in fact,
committed the largest tax fraud in the history of the United States” (p. 131).
Rather than risk standing trial, Rich fled the country and had lived in
exile since 1991.
A lavish supporter of Israel, he had influential supporters such as Elie
Wiesel, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak.
And he had a charming former wife, Denise Rich, who ingratiated herself
with the Clintons with lavish contributions.
“Denise Rich gave at least $1.5 million to causes related to the
Clintons. The
majority of it, nearly $1 million, came near the end of Clinton’s second term,
when Rich’s lawyer and former White House counsel Jack Quinn” urged the
president to do so (p. 137).
Rich’s attorneys also wooed Hillary Clinton, ever anxious for campaign
funds. Consequently,
ignoring virtually all his advisors, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich.
Informed of the pardon, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. attorney who
spearheaded the Rich prosecutions, refused to believe it.
“He said it was ‘impossible, the president would never pardon a
fugitive, especially Marc Rich.
It cannot have happened.’
But it did” (p. 141).
Ever mindful of the letter of the law, the president evaded clear quid
pro quo connections.
But, as Olson insists, “Another Latin legal phrase seems to cover it:
res ipsa loquitur--the thing speaks for itself” (p. 146).
That also applies to the various pardons Bill Clinton granted in his
final days. He
helped out his brother’s friends, his wife’s brothers, and a drug dealers
who was the son of a prominent Democratic donor.
Incensed by Clinton’s final days, Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy
Carter’s chief of staff, declared that Carter would have fired him if he had
dared suggest granting a pardon to the likes of Marc Rich.
The Clintons, he concluded, “’are not a couple but a business
partnership, not based on love or even greed but on shared ambitions. . . .
The Clinton’s only loyalty is to their own ambitions.’”
Nothing matters but attaining their ambitions.
“Jordan saw the Clintons as tawdry, unprincipled, opportunistic, taking
advantage of anyone weak enough to fall for their stories.
He called them ‘grifters . . . a term used in the Great Depression to
describe fast-talking con artists who roamed the countryside, profiting at the
expense of the poor and uneducated, always one step ahead of the law, moving on
before they were held accountable for their schemes and half-truths’” (p.
194)
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Olson concluded The Final Days with a reminder and a warning
regarding the deeply radical views of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
To understand them, one needs to read her earlier treatise, Hell to
Pay: The
Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Washington:
Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 1999).
Olson’s eyes opened while serving as the chief investigative counsel
for a House committee which investigated scandals involving missing FBI files
and the firing of White House Travel Office employees.
Thoroughly familiar with the documentary evidence, Olson came “to know
Hillary as she is--a woman who can sway millions, yet deceive herself; a woman
who has persuaded herself and many others that she is ‘spiritual,’ but who
has gone to the brink of criminality to amass wealth and power” (p. 2).
Olson has “never experienced a cooler or more hardened operator,” a
more singularly calculating public figure.
Her “ambition is to make the world accept the ideas she embraced in the
sanctuaries of liberation theology, radical feminism, and the hard left” (p.
3). Machiavellian
to the core, she proved herself “a master manipulator of the press, the
public, her staff, and--likely--even the president” (p. 3).
Reared in a prosperous, Republican home, Hillary “the Goldwater girl”
slowly turned to the left, politically, as a result of her exposure to the
“social gospel” in the Methodist church her family attended.
She was 14 years old when the Reverend Donald G. Jones came to the church
as youth minister.
Social change, not personal salvation, concerned him.
Rooted in the theology Paul Tillich, Jones thought the Christian faith
needed to be re-articulated as “a critique of society that took its
inspiration from Marxist lines of thought” (p. 31).
So the youth pastor Jones had his adolescent protegees reading e.e.
cummings and J.D. Salinger, discussing Picasso’s Guernica, and visiting
inner-city Chicago to empathize with impoverished folks blighted by capitalism.
After two years, Jones moved to Drew University to espouse radical causes
from a professor’s podium.
But his understanding of Christianity apparently shaped young Hillary.
Later,
as a college student, she devoutly read a Methodist publication for
collegians, Motive.
“’I still have every issue they sent me,” Mrs. Clinton would later
say as first lady” (p. 58).
The denominational magazine was edited by Carl Oglesby, a SDS leader and
theologian who defended Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and was often described as
a Marxist. Naturally
she was urged to oppose America’s involvement in Vietnam, to embrace the
revolutionary ideology of “liberation theology.”
Intellectually gifted, Hillary attended Wellesley College in the late
‘60’s. Awash
in the currents of the counterculture, she gradually embraced its radical
agenda, participating in antiwar marches, enlisting fellow students to change
the world. She
was selected to speak at her commencement, featuring an address by
Massachusetts’ Republican Senator Edward Brooke.
Rather than give her prepared speech, however, Hillary “’gave an
extemporaneous critique of Brooke’s remarks’” (p. 41), rudely reproving
him. The
senator’s liberalism failed to please her.
“We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she shouted;
“it’s human construction” (p. 42).
Nothing less than the Marxist “new man” would satisfy her!
Students stood and applauded for seven minutes!
Hillary then gained a place in Life magazine’s “Class of
‘69.” She’d
found her voice!
That youthful obsession, Olson argues, still persists.
Hillary finds Western Civilization bankrupt, needing more than reform.
Only “remolding,” only radical new structures, can bring about the
kind of social justice she desires.
Such can come only “from the top--by planners, reformers, experts, and
the intelligentsia.
Reconstruction of society by those smart enough and altruistic enough to
make our decisions for us.
People like Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Hillary, throughout her intellectual life, has been taken by this idea,
which is the totalitarian temptation that throughout history has led to the
guillotine, the gulag, and the terror and reeducation camps of the Red Guard”
(p. 311).
While at Wellesley she also found her intellectual guide:
Saul Alinsky.
Her senior thesis was devoted to him.
(Interestingly, when the Clintons entered the White House, her alma
mater imposed a new policy--”the thesis of any graduates who became first
lady” was to be placed in a locked vault.)
Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals were
playbooks for student radicals.
Dick Morris, famously influential in the Clinton administrations,
followed Alinsky’s
prescriptions while helping students dodge the draft and stage protest
marches in Washington.
So persuaded is Olsen of Alinsky’s influence that she places one of his
statements before each of the chapters in this book!
And certainly there seems to be a remarkably symmetry between Alinsky’s
words and Hillary’s career.
From Wellesley College Hillary Rodham went to Yale Law School.
Here she linked up with folks Robert Reich, Mickey Kantor, Strobe Talbott,
and Lani Guinier.
More importantly, she hooked up with William Jefferson Clinton.
They studied with professors such as Duncan Kennedy, an advocate of “Crits,”
Critical Legal Studies, shredding the law with the “deconstructionist”
ideology and methodology of Jacques Derrida.
Overtly Marxist, Crits took the law as a tool with which to engineer
social transformation.
Another professor also influenced Hillary--Thomas Emerson, “Tommy the
Commie.” He
encouraged her to involve herself in helping defend Bobby Seale and his Black
Panthers, accused of murdering a fellow Black Panther.
Seale and his thugs were clearly guilty of a brutal murder.
But Hillary and her comrades cared little about guilt or innocence.
The saw the trial as an opportunity to advance the Black Panther cause,
to enlist the public in supporting “racial justice.”
Agitation shook the streets, intimidation and threats seared the air.
“If Bobby dies,” they chanted, “Yale fries.”
Victory was obtained.
Seale survived.
While still studying at Yale Hillary spent a summer in Berkeley, CA.,
working as an intern for a noted lawyer, Robert Treuhaft, the husband of
Jessica Mitford.
She was a zealous muckraker, and he had been a lawyer for the Communist
Party. “They
were both committed Communists.
Stalinists, in fact” (p. 56).
Hillary has never criticized or repudiated Treuhaft and Mitford, so
it’s not clear to what extent she accepted their views.
In 1972 both Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton worked for the McGovern
presidential campaign.
They made contacts within the newly-radicalized Democratic Party which
would serve them so well later on.
Bill then got a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas.
Hillary, after working for a Democratic committee intent on impeaching
Richard Nixon, joined Bill in Arkansas and also taught law.
They married in 1975.
He began his famously successful political career, and sustained his
equally famous sexual adventures.
Hillary saw in him her door to power.
So the “marriage” was secure.
Bill told some “friends that he recognized that Hillary was putting her
own political future into escrow by coming to Arkansas” (p. 315).
Escrow maintains a deposit, and her day, she hoped, would come.
Meanwhile, they had a deal.
And that deal brought them both enormous wealth and power.
In the 1970s Hillary teamed up with Marian Wright Edelman, a well-heeled
feminist and influential social activist.
She understand that the issues of the ‘60s were fading, so radicals
like herself needed some fresh “fronts” for their social crusade.
Edelman decided to use “children” to mask her radicalism.
Her “Children’s Defense Fund” came into being and served as a
primary vehicle for Hillary’s political aspirations.
Her writings for CDF in the ‘70s “reveal a leftist ideologue,
dedicated to centrally directed social engineering, dismissive of the
traditional role of the family, and interested in children primarily as levers
with which to extract political power” (p. 105).
Taking seriously her writings, Christopher Lasch warned, in 1992:
“’Though Clinton does not press the point, the movement for
children’s rights, as she describes it, amounts to another stage in the long
struggle against patriarchy’” (p. 108).
Olson probes into a whole variety of Hillary Clinton’s involvements.
When Bill served as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary joined a prestigious
law firm in Little Rock, the Rose Law Firm, though she seemed rarely to have
actually practiced law.
She launched the Arkansas Advocates for Children, promoted Head Start,
and publicly claimed to be concerned about the educational system.
She headed the Legal Services Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit
organization. In
this position, under President Jimmy Carter, she had access to millions of
dollars and distributed in strategic ways.
They printed materials for “community organizations” and helped fund
political campaigns.
They taught operatives how to harass opponents and unearth scandals so as
to determine elections.
They doled out money in California to defeat a proposition that would
have reduced the state income taxes.
Little done by the LSC fell under its intended assignment.
But it helped Hillary and friends.
Edelman’s lingering influence became clear when the Clintons assumed
power in 1992. For
the transition team Hillary chose Dr. Johnetta Cole to oversee education
appointments. She was clearly Hillary’s choice for Secretary of
Education. She
had strong ties to Fidel Castro, publicly supporting his military adventures,
and “had founded a CPUSA front organization, the U.S. Peace Council” (p.
246). Hillary
also directed appointments in the Justice Department.
She brought aboard Peter Edelman, Marian’s husband, and tried
unsuccessfully to get an old Yale friend, Lani Guinier, appointed as head of the
civil rights division.
Janet Reno was finally named Attorney General, and she was a perfect
choice for Hillary.
“She was liberal and warmly regarded by Marian Wright Edelman.
And she was a woman” (p. 249).
She also followed orders.
She first fired “all ninety-three U.S. attorneys.
This was a break with the tradition of disinterested jurisprudence” (p.
250). But
93 new attorneys could be named, and Hillary saw to it that many of her cronies
got the jobs. The
new appointees, of course, would prove less than concerned with certain scandals
beginning to emerge from the Clintons’ past in Arkansas!
Hillary’s established modus operandi characterized her White
House years. Olson
documents her involvements in the FBI files, the firing of the Travel Office
employees, the HealthCare disaster.
The portrait given us is of a ruthless, sinister, masterful woman,
capable of most anything in her quest for that fabled heavenly kingdom on earth.
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