Transformational Presidents

Harvard's Professor Joseph Nye, surveying the USA's 44 presidents, divides them into "transformational" and "transactional" in terms of their foreign policy:

Leadership experts and the public alike extol the virtues of transformational leaders — those who set out bold objectives and take risks to change the world. We tend to downplay “transactional” leaders, whose goals are more modest, as mere managers. But in looking closely at the leaders who presided over key periods of expanding American primacy in the past century, I found that while transformational presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan changed how Americans viewed their nation’s role in the world, some transactional presidents, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush, were more effective in executing their policies.

He notes that transformational foreign policies are risks: they can be wildly successful, or tragic failures. Transactional policies, on the other hand, are more cautious, and make progress which is steady but perhaps less exciting:

Compare Woodrow Wilson, a failed transformational president, with the first George Bush, a successful transactional one. Wilson made a costly and mistaken bet on the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the First World War. His noble vision of an American-led League of Nations was

revealed in the course of time to be good-hearted, well-intentioned, and idealistic. It was also doomed to failure. Not only were Wilson's internationalist visions destined for ineffectiveness because of their naively utopian nature, but also because of Wilson's poor managerial skills:

He lacked the leadership skills to implement this vision in his own time, and this shortcoming contributed to America’s retreat into isolationism in the 1930s. In the case of Bush 41, the president’s lack of what he called “the vision thing” limited his ability to sway Americans’ perceptions of the nation and its role in the world. But his execution and management of policy was first-rate.

Unlike Wilson, George H.W. Bush understood working relationships with other world governments - before becoming president, he had served as ambassador to the United Nations, as a diplomat to China, and as director of the CIA. Wilson, by contrast, had been a strictly domestic figure, with little understanding, experience, or contact to any government outside the United States; inside the USA, Wilson had been a somewhat distant and academic figure, not a hands-on manager. The elder Bush had played on a successful baseball team and managed successful energy companies: he knew how to work with people.

Woodrow Wilson's quixotic plans for international relations were perhaps naive, but not simplistic. The League of Nations, Wilson's brainchild, was tasked with enforcing not only the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but also the other postwar agreements, like the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon (both of which dealt primarily with the Balkans), and the Treaty of Sevres (which dismembered the Ottoman Empire). This tangled skein - composed between 1918 and 1920 - was so complex that the U.S. Senate feared unintended and perhaps disastrous consequences, should the USA become party to it. The Senate refused to ratify the USA's entry into the League of Nations, not wanting to saddle the country with the burden of enforcing all these treaties, and not wanting to obligate the country to enter wars in the future: entry into the League would have required the USA to come to the military defense of any other League nation which might find itself under attack.

By contrast, President George H.W. Bush gained the respect of other world leaders, not by a dramatic recasting of the world, but rather by patient, cautious, gradual and organic development of international relations. When the senior Bush proposed creating a coalition which would include both European states and the Islamic states of the Middle East, and use this coalition for the purposes of defeating Iraq, many of his critiques deemed this impossible. Yet he created a coalition of more than thirty nations, ranging from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, and including both Argentina and the United Kingdom. Bush's patient diplomacy drew Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Guatemala, and Senegal into the coalition. Most delicately, he persuaded Pakistan and other Islamic nations into a coalition which could have been perceived as a coalition which would benefit Israel. The 1990/1991 Gulf War coalition remains one of the most amazing feats of international diplomacy.

Economics, Then and Now

The study of economics is contested territory - some see it as a "hard" science, like chemistry or astronomy, subject to the rules of empirical observation and mathematical modelling; others see it as a "soft" science, in which reflection and analysis are of a more nuanced type and not subject to algebraic patterns. It is also a controversial topic inasmuch as the purely descriptive nature of economic laws is continuously conscripted to work in the service of prescriptive policy. It is a rare economist indeed who can keep his work as a purely academic exercise in categorizing data under the headings of various hypotheses; if, by himself, he is not tempted to veer from the descriptive into the prescriptive, someone else will nudge him into that temptation.

Wherever economics crosses into the prescriptive - which is almost everywhere - then it will become controversial as a matter of course, as policy makers and parties seek justification for their views.

The use and abuse of economics becomes clearer over time. A student graduating from Yale University in 1950 would have been exposed to an economics curriculum shaped by the teaching faculty and its views. One such graduate, William F. Buckley, recorded his experiences. The introductory concepts can be taught by professors of various leanings - despite their biases, they are competent

to explain the price system, the laws of supply and demand, the cost curves of the business firm, and the myriad details and background knowledge that must serve as the basis for any well-conceived course in economics. The elementary textbooks at Yale do this job well enough. It is when the author begins to talk about desirable government action, appropriate social policies, just economic goals; it is when he discusses the obsolescence of individualism and the waning of free enterprise and capitalism, that he reveals his biases. And these biases are readily espoused by the average student.

The practicalities of economics are, in many cases, non-controversial. But the economist always walks the tightrope over the abyss of policy recommendations. There is a double danger here: in the examples given by Buckley, the textbook author writes about which government actions might be "desirable" - first, in choosing one set of actions over another, the author has betrayed a bias; but second, in assuming that government actions can be "desirable," the textbook author has already accepted the premise that the government should act, rather than leaving the organic economy to work on its own to find its way to an approximation of an equilibrium.

Likewise, not only is there a subjectivity in choosing one or more social policies as "appropriate," but there is a deeper belief behind the choice - the hidden and unquestioned belief that a government should have a "social policy," rather than letting society choose its own course. Societies can largely structure and guide themselves, and it is a large assumption to assert that the government can and should override society's internal guidance.

And so it is with the other examples listed by Buckley: not only is it an assumption that one can decide which economic goals are just; it is also an assumption that a government should have economic goals, or that such goals could possibly be just. It is a conjecture that individualism is "obsolete" or that capitalism and free enterprise are "waning" - a conjecture which is not strong enough to be stated as a brute fact in introductory textbooks.

These were the ideologies hidden in the curriculum of economics at Yale in the late 1940's. Although still current among some people - among some elected leaders of both parties, among some career bureaucrats and civil servants, and among the less competent academics who are all the more influential because of their incompetence - these ideas are even less credible 65 years later than they were then.

However incredible, these ideas were influential, and influential by design. The teaching of them was part of a broader social and political vision. The ideas were certainly not meant to fuel some violent overthrow of the economic system:

It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state, that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale, and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country. The documentation that follows should paint a vivid picture.

Buckley goes on to list the examples already discussed. There is certainly neither crime nor sin in teaching various ideas, but there is both when the mission of the university is thereby betrayed. Yale in particular, as a privately owned and operated university, has the mission of fulfilling the desires of its founders, of those who fund it, and of its alumni. By contrast, a publicly run university, to the extent that it is funded by tax dollars, has the mission of carrying out the desires of the voters and taxpayers, as those desires are expressed by their elected representatives.

I cannot repeat too often that I have cause to object to the current Yale policies only if there exists a disparity between the values the alumni of Yale want taught, and those currently being taught in the field of economics. If, after digesting this section or pursuing personal investigation, the alumnus finds himself in accord with the values that are being fostered at his college, I have nothing more to say to him - unless, of course, I find him, some day, lamenting the collectivist drift of our government.

It may well be inevitable, that as long as economics is taught as an academic discipline, it will be an ideological battleground in a way in which, e.g., trigonometry is not. In any case, the biases and unspoken dubious assumptions which Buckley identified in Yale's curriculum remain common, despite the fact that they are intellectually even less respectable now than they were then. To present such ideas, and deliberately withhold data which reveal such ideas as untenable, while being funded by those whose desires are not represented in such ideas, and funded by those whose well-being is measurably harmed by policies based on such ideas - be they taxpayers or alumni donors - amounts to fraud.

Soviet Spies on the Inside

1946 was a year for the world to reorganize. WWII was finally over. Europe was adjusting boundaries between nations - the borders between Poland, Germany, Belgium, and other countries were redrawn on the map. Inside the nations of Europe, a long rebuilding process was starting; it would take years before London or Berlin repaired most of the wartime damage. Asia was changing as well: China, free of the Japanese invaders, could resume its civil war between Mao's communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists. India sensed that the moment for its full independence would soon be at hand.

The United States was also reorganizing. Millions of soldiers were returning to civilian life, to pursue education at college or to find a job. Major corporations and their factories were shifting from military products and resuming the manufacturing of consumer goods. The government was also shifting. For more than half a decade, the major concern had been the defeat of Hitler and Tojo. Other functions had been subordinated to that primary objective. Hitler and Tojo were gone and the war was over. The government turned its attention to other topics, one of them being its changing relationship to the Soviet Union.

Prior to America's entry into the war, and prior to the Soviet Union's becoming an ally against Germany - both events in 1941 - most Americans held a dim view of the Communist government in Russia. President Coolidge had, after all, not even granted diplomatic recognition to the Leninist government after it solidified its power. By 1933, FDR had officially recognized the USSR. While the average citizen in the USA still did not embrace Stalin's dictatorship, many individuals in key positions in the State Department held a sort of fondness for the Soviet experiment. The New York Times had carried, after all, glowing reports about Stalin's bold new adventures in restructuring society - articles written in the 1930's by Walter Duranty, an ace reporter for the Times, who was later found to be deliberately lying in order to make Stalin look good.

Once the USA and the USSR found themselves as allies against Hitler, suspicions about Stalin's government were put on hold. After 1945, those suspicions came to light again, setting the ordinary citizen's misgivings about Stalin into sharp contrast against the State Department's embrace of him. But not everyone working at the State Department held affection for the Soviet government. Historian Medford Stanton Evans writes:

In the peacetime summer of 1946, the first such summer in half a decade, a State Department official named Samuel Klaus drafted a long confidential memo about the grave security problems that were plaguing the department.

As it turned out, a number of employees at the State Department were also on the payroll of the KGB, or of other Soviet intelligence agencies. They were used to gather secret information, to influence decision-making within the United States government, and to slow down or stymie certain undertakings. Names include Felix Bloch, Flora Wovschin, and Laurence Duggan. Some were members of the Communist Party, others were not official members but merely sympathized with the communist cause. Some spied because they truly believed that the Soviet Union should topple the U.S. government; others did it for the money.

This 106-page report, dated August 3, contained some startling revelations. It discussed, among other things, the number of Soviet agents said to be on the payroll at State, alleged Communist Party members there, and others in the department described as "suspects" or "sympathizers." In the cases of agents and CP members - some thirty-three people altogether - the names (one being Alger Hiss) had been compiled by State's security screeners. As for the suspects and sympathizers, numbering more than ninety staffers, the names weren't available yet as lists were still being assembled.

Until the end of WWII, between the necessity of working with the Soviets against Hitler and the enthusiasm of some State Department diplomats for Stalin's socialism, there was little concern about the fact that some federal employees might be communists, sympathizers, or in contact with the Soviet government. President Roosevelt, whose health prevented him from being fully alert to Stalin's deceptions, had believed the Soviet dictator's statements that he would set up free and independent democracies in eastern Europe, and had dismissed the contradictory statements in which Stalin expressed the intention of setting up communist governments around the world.

Information of this type, needless to say, was both ultrasecret and of sensational nature. During the crisis of World War II, when the Soviet Union was our ally against the Nazis, comparatively little attention had been paid to the matter of Communists in the federal workforce. But in the early postwar era, the alliance with Moscow had rapidly unraveled and was being replaced with a series of hostile confrontations that would be dubbed the Cold War. The presence of CP members or fellow travelers in official jobs, formerly viewed with indulgence or ignored, would look shockingly different in 1946 when Sam Klaus composed his memo.

During the Cold War, it was not always easy to catch the Soviet spies planted in the United States. Proving that they were part of systematic espionage was difficult. Even the most blatant offenders, like Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, who were part of the spy ring which sent the plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviets, claimed that they were innocent, and claimed that they were either mistakenly accused or being framed. While it was certain that they were guilty, their pleas were moving enough to make some in the public consider that they might be innocent.

As the Cold War ended, however, new information about spy activity was released. The information dated back to the 1930's - and in some cases even earlier - and went up to the 1980's. This new data, released from eastern European countries once the Soviet Union had collapsed, gave massive amounts of new evidence which showed not only that the spies like the Rosenbergs were guilty, but that there were even more spies than the U.S. government had suspected.

Luckily, in recent years, the state of our knowledge about such topics has changed in dramatic fashion, and greatly for the better. Things known only to a handful of people circa 1950 are now accessible to journalists and scholars, as many formerly secret records have been made public and certain long-lost documents have surfaced. Most notably, with the fall of the Soviet empire, records from some of the Communist archives have become available to outside researchers. Likewise, information from our own formerly confidential files has become in some measure open to inspection. These new sources supply a wealth of information about what was actually going on fifty or sixty years ago in the dark back alleys of the Cold War.

Some information about Soviet spy networks in the United States came from U.S. intelligence agencies decrypting intercepted messages. Some of these messages had been held at the highest level of secrecy for decades. The American intelligence community did not want to signal inadvertently to the Soviets that their codes had been broken. Only after the end of the Cold War were these decryptions revealed.

The most widely noted of these new disclosures are the so-called Venona papers, in possession of the U.S. government since World War II but made available to the public only since 1995. These are coded messages, exchanged between the intelligence bosses in the Kremlin and their agents over here, dating to the early 1940s. Having intercepted thousands of these missives, U.S. Army cryptologists succeeded in breaking the code in which they were embedded, and by a painstaking process were able to figure out the meaning of many cables and the matters they pertained to.

In the postwar era, the Soviet Union aggressively planted spy rings around the world in various countries. It no longer needed to direct its resources to the war effort. Stalin, and later Khrushchev, would use the years after World War II to organize attempted communist dictatorships in a wide variety of nations: Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Bolivia, Chile, and Guatemala.

These efforts met with varying degrees of success: in Angola, Soviet-backed guerillas and terrorists created decades of disruption, during most of which time they controlled the country, starting in 1975; in Indonesia, an attempted communist takeover was thwarted in 1965. Efforts in South America and Africa started in the late 1940s and continued into the 1980s.

In any case, the fact that the Soviet agents were simultaneously planted in multiple countries helped their cause. When a move was made in one country to establish a Soviet-backed dictatorship, neighboring countries found their governments slower to respond because they, too, were infiltrated by Soviet agents.

Vietnam - Division in Society and Politics

The Vietnam War was different from most military conflicts in which the United States has been. Two things were lacking: first, a broad understanding of why we were fighting and about what we were fighting; second, a general agreement that it was important for us to be in this war. In fact, while there was no significant disagreement in society about the war when the U.S. first entered it, there would be deep division within society about the war as it dragged on.

Divisions in society were paralleled, and possibly preceded, by divisions among policymakers and legislators. Those merely trying to inform themselves about the details of the war were frustrated by the Johnson administration’s tight control of military information. Congressman Donald Rumsfeld writes that, in 1965

on a number of occasions I joined other members of Congress in expressing concern about what appeared to be the White House’s attempts to manage the news on the war. This was an understandable inclination on the administration’s part, since no doubt they felt the media coverage of the war was unfair. But the administration made matters worse with their seeming reluctance to provide much, if any, documentation that would have given members of Congress a better sense of what was taking place.

Rumsfeld and other members of Congress worked to pry information out of President Johnson’s administration.

By this time, I had become a cosponsor and advocate for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Members in the House of Representatives who were in the Democrat Party were uncomfortable

in the awkward position of promoting a bill that went against the express wishes of the President, so I helped

draft and promote the bill as it went into Congress, a bill that

was crafted in reaction to the Johnson administration's behavior.

It would be up to Rumsfeld and others to

develop the legislation and move it through the House. For me, support of the bill came down to one long-held belief: Good judgments require accurate information.

In addition to LBJ’s refusal to pass information along to the Congress, and to the public, another painful issue in American society at this time was the draft. Should young men in the United States be forced to fight in a war which was neither well-understood nor well-supported? Rumsfeld continues:

The situation in Vietnam, and the demonstrations against the war and the draft, strengthened greatly my support for a transition to an all-volunteer military. The draft had been in place since World War II. By the mid-1960s, many young Americans were asking why they were being forced to fight in a war they did not understand and that they did not see as critical to our country’s security. Since the various draft exemptions - being a college student, a teacher, married, or a conscientious objector - seemed to favor the more affluent, the draft also exacerbated racial and social tensions in the country. In October 1967, one of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the Washington area was held on the steps of the Pentagon, with many protesting that conscription was unwarranted, discriminatory, and unfair. I agreed with them.

In our free system of government, I believed, conscription was appropriate only when there was a demonstrated need. A volunteer system offered many advantages. First and foremost, it would preserve the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions about how they wished to live their lives. Volunteers who chose to enter the military would be more likely to make it a career, instead of serving for a short period. It also would avoid the implicit discrimination and the inherent inequalities caused by the various deferments and exemptions in the draft system.

Because of my interest in a volunteer military, I was invited to be part of a conference at the University of Chicago convened to discuss the topic. There I met one of the most passionate proponents of the all-volunteer system, the economist Dr. Milton Friedman, who I would turn to many times over the years for advice and guidance. Friedman’s belief in the power of freedom was inspiring, and he felt the same way about giving people the choice to serve in the U.S. military as he did about giving them a choice about their education. Other participants on the panel included Senator Edward Kennedy and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, both of whom favored continuing the draft.

Edward “Ted” Kennedy - or “Teddy” to friends - operated out of loyalty to his Democrat Party in supporting the draft. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, however, had been influenced by the work of John Dewey. Mead’s mother, Emily (Fogg) Mead was a fan of Dewey’s at the University of Chicago, as was Mead’s fellow student Ruth Benedict at Columbia University. Dewey had no great love for war, but supported the draft on principle; he wrote that

conscription has brought home to the countries which have in the past been the home of the individualistic tradition the supremacy of public need over private

liberty. Margaret Mead thus represents an extension of Dewey’s progressivism. By contrast, Milton Friedman and Don Rumsfeld represented a version of American politics which places great value on personal freedom.

How Hillary Clinton Became Wealthy

Hillary Clinton spent decades in politics, ending with her stint as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. Over the course of these years, she and her husband, Bill Clinton, have become multi-millionaires. None of the posts held by either of them had paychecks large enough to enable such wealth. When Bill Clinton occupied the White House from 1993 to 2001, the president's annual salary was approximately $200,000. The other offices held by Hillary and Bill, elected or appointed, paid less.

While an annual salary of $200,000 is much more than most Americans will ever earn, it is not nearly enough to explain the Clinton lifestyle. Owning several houses and traveling on private jets and yachts, the Clintons spend millions, own property worth millions, and have millions in stocks, bonds, and other investments. How do they pay the many servants, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs who work for them?

The Clinton strategy, which has worked so lucratively, is to make profitable deals while ignoring the scandals they create. Many political leaders work to avoid any appearance of impropriety. The Clintons discovered an alternative tactic: ignore the appearance of impropriety. Bill and Hillary learned that even if they look bad in today's newspaper, when the public discovers the odd agreements they've made, by tomorrow or next week, the public will have forgiven or forgotten, and the Clintons will still have the money.

The Clinton approach to amassing wealth is to do whatever may be necessary to turn a profit, and simply shrug off the unsavory details of how you got the money. It has worked amazingly well for them.

When the words 'scandal' and 'Clinton' appear in the same sentence, many readers will think first of Monica Lewinsky. But that was an exception to the Clinton pattern. The Lewinsky scandal was about sex, while most of the Clinton incidents were about money. It is true that the Lewinsky affair shocked the Americans, according to historian Ann Coulter, a viewing

public that produced record-breaking Nielsen ratings for TV shows covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal for the rest of the year.

It is also true that this matter was "the scandal that led to only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history" and "the scandal that led to the only presidential impeachment of the twentieth century." But, again, it was not about money. The Clinton pattern was centered on money and power, which are interchangeable in politics. Bill Clinton's long string of sexual improprieties, both unethical and illegal, were beside the point. Although Bill Clinton's repeated sexual harassment of women over the years got more attention in the news media than the financial scandals, this circumstance may have actually helped the Clinton strategy by diverting attention from its true objective.

While the public was paying attention to the women victimized by Bill Clinton, the profiteering schemes organized by Bill and Hillary received less notice. One principle utilized by Hillary in negotiating deals was to ensure that someone else was set up to take the fall in case the deal failed, or in case the deal was exposed to law enforcement officials or to the public. For example, the Whitewater deal was set up to generate wealth for the Clintons, but was also set up in such a way that, when Hillary's crimes were exposed, somebody else paid the price. The net effect

of Whitewater, for example, produced more than a dozen felony convictions against - among others - the sitting governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker; former Arkansas municipal judge David Hale; Clinton's associate attorney general, Webster I. Hubbell; and Clinton's former business partners Susan McDougal and the late Jim McDougal.

The bottom line: the Clintons got the money, the other people got years in prison. The Whitewater deal itself was a real estate business. The Whitewater corporation sold homes, or vacant lots on which to build homes. They seemed like reasonable homes, reasonably priced. The catch was in the fine print. The Whitewater corporation deliberately targeted low-income and low-education buyers, who had little experience in buying real estate, and did not know or understand enough to ask the pertinent questions when buying a house.

The fine print in the Whitewater contracts stated that if a buyer missed a payment, or was more than one month late in making a payment, then the buyer would lose both the property and all the money paid for it. In short, the buyer walked away with nothing.

This type of real estate scam is not new. It has been around a long time. By contrast, ethical real estate deals are arranged so that, if a buyer misses a payment or is late in a payment, then the seller keeps only what the buyer still owes to the seller, and the seller must refund the surplus to the buyer.

In short, Hillary Clinton sold houses to people and took their money. Then she evicted the people from the houses and kept their money. When it was all over, she had both the house and the money.

Because this type of racket is so obviously set up to exploit the poor, the naive, and the ill-educated, most states have made it illegal. But because Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, political connections allowed Hillary to find the loopholes in the law, and to have loopholes made for her where none existed.

So it was, in fact, that

many people did lose their homes and life's savings in dirty deals. One company offered homes for "sale," the purchase price to be paid in installments. But if a purchaser defaulted on a single monthly payment, there would be no foreclosure proceeding or short sale: The purchaser would automatically lose everything he had invested in the property - the house, the equity, and all prior payments. The small print of the contract said that if a monthly payment was not made within thirty days, all prior "payments made by the purchaser shall be considered as rent for the use of the premises" - not a mortgage payment, not a down payment on a house.

Stanford University's Peter Schweizer described a typical case of Hillary Clinton's Whitewater business:

Clyde Soapes was a grain-elevator operator from Texas who heard about the lots in early 1980 and jumped at the chance to invest. He put $3,000 down and began making payments of $244.69 per month. He made thirty-five payments in all—totaling $11,564.15, just short of the $14,000 price for the lot. Then he suddenly fell ill with diabetes and missed a payment, then two. The Clintons informed him that he had lost the land and all of his money. There was no court proceeding or compensation. Months later they resold his property to a couple from Nevada for $16,500. After they too missed a payment, the Clintons resold it yet again.

According to the pattern established by Hillary Clinton, most of the victims of the Whitewater scam were naive, trusting, and ill-educated. The victims were workers earning at the lowest wage levels, or retirees who had never received anything more than a typical lower-income salary.

Soapes and the couple from Nevada were not alone. More than half of the people who bought lots in Whitewater — teachers, farmers, laborers, and retirees — made payments, missed one or two, and then lost their land without getting a dime of their equity back. According to Whitewater records, at least sixteen different buyers paid more than $50,000 and never received a property deed. The Clintons continued this approach up until the 1992 election, when they tried to quietly get out of the investment.

Hillary was able to sell the same house several times, each time keeping all the money the buyer paid, and then repossessing the house. The profit margin on such transactions is enormous, and explains how the Clintons are able to afford their lifestyle. Bill and Hillary own several homes and vacation houses - at the same time - which have a total value of more than all of Bill's paychecks as governor and as president added together. The money had to come from somewhere. A company which sells the same object again and again - without refunding the payments to any of the buyers - will generate huge returns for its owners. As Coulter writes, whether such a scheme is legal is one question; whether it is ethical is another.

The business plan described above was, of course, the Clintons' Whitewater Development Corporation. And that was the legal part. Although many states made such contracts illegal on the sensible grounds that it involves scamming the poor and gullible, Arkansas was not among them. I'm sure the technical legality of Whitewater provided great consolation to all the people who lost their homes when Hillary Clinton enforced the small print.

Hillary formally joined the Rose Law Firm in February 1977, although her informal connections with the group predate her official hiring. Her connections formally ended at approximately the time at which Bill started his 1992 bid for the presidency, but her unofficial and personal connections with the firm continued for a number of years afterward. Not only as the First Lady of Arkansas and as the First Lady of the United States, but also as Senator and as Secretary of State, Hillary had a conflict of interest between her involvement in the Rose Law Firm and her roles in the Arkansas state government and her roles in the United States government. This conflict of interest was occasionally indicated in the news media, but either it was quickly and quietly swept aside by Clinton sympathizers in the press, or public attention was diverted from the matter by one Bill's adulterous scandals. Ann Coulter notes:

Hillary Clinton created the Whitewater Development Corporation, wrote the fine print, and ran it out of the Rose Law Firm, with purchasers' checks sent to: Whitewater Development Corporation, c/o Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm. As Peter Schweizer says, "Hillary herself sold a home to Hillman Logan, who went bankrupt and then died. She took possession of the home and resold it to another buyer for $20,000. No one was compensated (and she didn't report the sale on her tax return)." The Clintons' involvement with Whitewater continued right up until the 1992 election.

The Whitewater scheme functioned well, because, when it finally ran into trouble, Hillary's careful planning meant that she had placed other people in key roles - which meant that those people, and not Hillary, would pay the consequences for illegal or unethical details of the Whitewater operation. The Whitewater Development Corporation was

a barely legal scheme to rip off the least fortunate Americans - which also happened to yield a dozen felony convictions, taking down the sitting governor of Arkansas.

Although Whitewater was one of the more profitable enterprises organized by Hillary, it was not the only one. The same basic business model would function in other cash-raising programs. A constant theme among all of the Clinton machinations was the periodic interruptions caused by Bill's womanizing. Although his romantic flings caused some difficulties in the media, they also provided a much-needed diversion to keep the public from discerning pattern underlying the Clinton stratagems. One such philandering sideshow occurred when it became known that Bill Clinton had used Arkansas State Troopers to provide both transportation and coverup for his extramarital affairs. Needless to say, the taxpayers and voters of Arkansas were not pleased.

"Troopergate" led to the Paula Jones lawsuit, which in turn led to the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Jones's attorneys subpoenaed Lewinsky. Unable to avoid answering Jones's charges in court, Clinton was eventually forced to pay her $800,000 to settle the case.

Because Bill Clinton's womanizing is habitual - perhaps even compulsive - these various scandals were linked. Investigating one led to another; inquiring into Paula Jones led to Monica Lewinsky; all of which led to Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Wiley, Dolly Kyle Browning, and Juanita Broaddrick. It is important to note that some of these women, and the others not named here, were not necessarily willing participants in affairs, and did not necessarily welcome Bill Clinton's advances. Some of them resisted, and some of them resisted successfully. The civil lawsuits and criminal charges resulting from Bill's sexually harassing these and other women

created new legal rulings, including the Supreme Court's august decision holding that a sitting president can be sued for flashing a female employee when he was a governor.

The sexual scandals, although interesting to the mass media and to the public, were sideshows. The real business of the Clintons continued to generate cash for them. Moving from Arkansas to the White House, they found new opportunities:

Travelgate consisted of the Clintons' using the full resources of the federal government in an attempt to destroy career employees of the White House, in order to turn over operation of the White House travel office to a Clinton contributor out of Hollywood. To make the travel office firings look like something other than rank cronyism, the Clinton White House publicly accused the fired employees of criminal acts and ordered the FBI and IRS to investigate. Unfortunately for the Clintons, the travel office employees were innocent of any wrongdoing.

The Clintons spent thousands of taxpayer dollars by directing the FBI and the IRS to investigate White House employees. Wanting to give the White House travel business to their friends and supporters, the Clintons needed an excuse to fire the existing staff.

Travel Office Director Billy Dale was criminally investigated by the FBI for two years, but the jury took less than two hours to acquit him of the embezzlement and conversion charges. The end result of the IRS investigation was that the IRS owed the head of the travel office's partner airline about $5,000.

In this connection, it is worth citing the full text of the Fourth Amendment from the Bill of Rights; the Orwellian nightmare of a chief executive using the full investigative and intelligence resources of a powerful hi-tech government to search for excuses to fire innocent workers is perhaps one of the most extreme abuses of state power imaginable. It is for exactly such reasons that the Founding Fathers wrote the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The fact remains that "Travelgate" was simply, in Coulter's words,

a president's misuse of the IRS and the FBI to harass American citizens whose jobs he wants for Hollywood friends.

Yet neither Bill nor Hillary paid any consequences for this manipulation of federal expenditures for personal gain. If money is power, and knowledge is power, then knowledge can be used to gain money. To that end, the next Clinton scheme amount to finding ways to access information, again in violation of the Fourth Amendment:

Filegate was the discovery that the Clinton White House had collected more than 900 secret FBI files on individual American citizens, included hundreds and hundreds of files of Republicans who had worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Hillary Clinton hired Craig Livingstone to comb through FBI files without probable cause. Livingstone was a security specialist in the hospitality industry, meaning that he was a bouncer in a bar. But he had done volunteer work for the Democratic Party, which apparently qualified him in Hillary's eyes. The paperwork recording her approval of his hiring was apparently lost at the time that the public began to ask questions about the matter, so she was able to escape any consequences.

Even the Clinton administration gave up trying to defend its possession of the files, eventually simply denying any knowledge of who hired the White House employee who was pawing through them - former bar bouncer Craig Livingstone.

Inasmuch as this controversy involved the improper use of the FBI for personal and partisan purposes, it amounted to a constitutional matter. The parallel case occurred during the Watergate scandal, when White House staffer Charles Colson was found to be in possession of one FBI file. The reaction in the news media was intense:

The New York Times article on Charles Colson's guilty plea for possessing a single FBI file in the Nixon White House was languorously reported under a headline spanning several columns on the front page: "Colson Pleads Guilty to Charge in Ellsberg Case and is Expected to Aid Jaworski and Rodino Panel - Move is Surprise: Watergate Prosecutor to Seek Dismissal of Other Counts."

Craig Livingstone's actions amounted to the same as Colson's except that Colson had one FBI file, and Livingstone had hundreds. The Clintons, however, had persuaded the news media to downplay the matter, so that, although Livingstone's offense was worse than Colson's, the reaction in the press was much weaker:

When Clinton White House employee Livingstone was caught with 900 confidential FBI files the New York Times headline was rather more low-key: "White House Announces Leave for Official Who Collected Files."

Occupying the White House, the Clintons found yet another money-making opportunity. People who donated money to the Democratic Party were given free overnight stays in Lincoln's bedroom in the White House, were invited to private gatherings at the White House, and invited to formal dinners with the President. Bill and Hillary had turned the White House into their private business, raising money for themselves and their political party. When the public began to find out about this business, Hillary invented

a sleazy excuse the Clinton administration used for its violation of the campaign finance laws - heretofore considered by the Times to be the most sacred laws of the republic. It appears to be the only scandal involving Christmas cards. When Clinton was caught doling out Lincoln bedroom sleepovers, White House coffees, and dinners to big campaign contributors based on lists of political donors on file at the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton White House denied that the database was being used for campaign purposes, explaining that it was the president's Christmas card list. It was an odd Christmas card list, inasmuch as it included notations recording the amount each donor had contributed.

The offense was compounded, inasmuch as the Clintons were both using the White House as a private business, and working off a list provided by a political party. Either was bad; the combination was damning. But between Hillary's eye for the loophole in any fine print, and Bill's ability to fast-talk, sweet-talk, and charm, they again escaped consequences.

In any event, the Christmas cards weren't part of the accusation, they were part of the Clintonian justification for a violation of the campaign finance laws more serious than anything.

Barack Obama did in his alleged violations of campaign laws. The levels of subterfuge in the Clinton administration serve to moderate the impression made by Obama's legal and ethical violations.

The final Clinton White House scandal - as opposed to the Clinton scandals after leaving the presidency - occurred as Clinton's staffers were packing up to leave. Determined to undermine the next administration, the staffers committed sundry acts of vandalism, destroying office equipment and damaging the White House offices.

Although there was never any formal complaint from the Bush White House, the story broke in the first days of the Bush administration, when anonymous Republican White House staffers were quoted in news reports accusing Clinton administration staff of doing "a lot more vandalism to the White House and other offices than just yanking 'Ws' off typewriters," mostly in the vice president's offices, including "cut cables, phone lines and electric cords, plus a mess of rubbish."

Obscenities and political slurs were written on walls, and pornographic images posted throughout, both on paper and electronically. Increasing details of the deliberate damage leaked into the new media: "White House staffers were telling reporters what they had seen with their own eyes." The public began to demand some explanation, and eventually, "the GAO eventually concluded - as described in the New York Times, June 12, 2002" - an official admission that the Clinton staffers were guilty of sabotage.

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said today that "damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex" in the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys.

In an effort to shield the Clinton administration, the Bush staffers directed the GAO not to include the worst and most offensive details in its report. The Clintons, out of office, directed the New York Times not to include those same worst details in its coverage. The New York Times article continues:

Some of the damage, it said, was clearly intentional. Glue was smeared on desk drawers. Messages disparaging President Bush were left on signs and in telephone voice mail. A few of the messages used profane or obscene language.

Apparently looking for a souvenir, the Clinton staffers stole what they had not damaged or destroyed. Again attempting to shield the Clintons, the Bush administration did not pursue legal action against the theft. In hindsight, it may have been a mistake on the part of the Bush administration not to more aggressively prosecute the Clinton staffers, and Bush made another mistake in protecting Clinton's reputation by not letting the media know what had happened. Some of the details emerged only long after the fact, leaked despite Bush's efforts to shield the Clintons.

"A Secret Service report documented the theft of a presidential seal that was 12 inches in diameter from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building," next to the White House, on Jan. 19, 2001, the accounting office said.

Some of the damage was trivial, some of the graffiti harmless. By withholding accounts of the more serious damage, the official reports of the lesser vandalism downplayed the seriousness of the matter. The readers of the article might have assumed that nothing very serious happened when they read further:

Six White House employees told investigators that they had seen graffiti derogatory to Mr. Bush on the wall of a stall in a men's room. Other White House employees saw a sticker in a filing cabinet that said, "Jail to the thief," implying that Mr. Bush had stolen the 2000 election. The report said all these employees were members of the current White House, but did not make clear whether any had also worked in the Clinton White House.

Beyond what the Times reported, the full text of the GAO report noted that

incidents such as the removal of keys from computer keyboards; the theft of various items; the leaving of certain voice mail messages, signs, and written messages; and the placing of glue on desk drawers, clearly were done intentionally. Any intentional damage at the White House complex, which is a national treasure, is both inappropriate and a serious matter. The theft of or willful damage to government property would constitute a criminal act in violation of federal law.

The Times summarized the GAO's estimate of the total cost of the vandalism committed by the Clinton staffers:

The accounting office confirmed that $9,324 had been spent to repair or replace various items and to clean offices. That included $4,850 for 62 keyboards, $2,040 for 26 cellphones and $1,150 for professional cleaning. In addition, the White House and the General Services Administration estimated that it cost $3,750 to $4,675 to replace missing doorknobs, medallions and office signs and the large presidential seal, the accounting office said.

While the dollar amounts are not significant, the fact that the Clinton administration failed to engage in a peaceful transition of leadership from one party to another, from one president to another, is telling. Dozens of presidents have vacated the White House for their successors, successors who were often of a different political party. Yet, until 2001, such transitions were carried out with civility. The Clinton administration ended that pattern.

The Clintons are the political equivalent of a suicide bomber or a kamikaze pilot: they can inflict great damage because they disregard the damage done to their honor, to the character, or to their reputations.

In sum, Bill and Hillary left behind them a long string of scandals. They learned to effectively disregard the public disgrace and simply amass the profits. Callousness can be profitable. Not caring that both parties and most voters viewed them as simple opportunists, and paying no heed to any legal or ethical standards, they accumulated wealth at the cost of their reputations. It was a simple transaction: they traded their honor for money. Their mercenary tactics were successful: individuals who have no sense of shame or guilt, and who are unshakeable in their focus on gathering power or wealth, are indeed difficult to impede.

Resuscitating Joe Biden

Barack Obama surprised millions of people when he nominated Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate. Both Biden's friends and his enemies considered Biden's political career to be long over. Inertia alone had kept Biden in the Senate for several terms after his failed 1988 bid for the presidency. He had done little of note since that time.

When Biden announced that he was seeking to be his party's presidential candidate in June 1987, he was on the young side. Had he won that election, only Teddy Roosevelt and JFK would have been younger upon assuming the office. But Biden quickly made himself an albatross around his party's neck - an embarrassment because of his pompous tendency to take himself very seriously, combined with a rhetorical ineptitude which either left him explaining and apologizing for his own remarks, or left him as the butt of political humorists who capitalized on his gaffes.

When Michael Dukakis, who was also seeking the nomination, assembled a weak case against Biden based on alleged plagiarism - Biden borrowed a phrase from a British politician - the party eagerly seized on the charge, ignoring its flimsiness, because it urgently needed to get rid of Biden to save whatever credibility the party might have had left. Dukakis, himself a weak candidate, went on to lose the presidential election in a record landslide.

From that point forward, the power-brokers within the Democratic Party saw Biden as unmarketable. He was increasingly regarded as a buffoon and little more. Thus it was that Obama's selection came as a shock to many observers.

To win the 2008 election, Obama would need to do a lot of damage repair to Biden's public image. As the media, which had paid diminishing attention to Biden during the previous decade, looked again more closely at Biden, blemishes appeared on his reputation. Historian Ann Coulter writes:

both the brother and son of Barack Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, were accused by a former business partner of defrauding him out of millions of dollars. Two lawsuits were filed against them in June 2008. That was mentioned on page A-9 of the Washington Post in August. By Election Day, the New York Times still had not reported the lawsuit.

Scandals surrounding Biden's family might be deemed irrelevant, were it not for the contributions from them into Biden's campaigns. Obama's handlers, however, skillfully repaired the damage, however, by persuading the Washington Post to downplay the scandal, and persuading the New York Times not to tell the voters about it at all. Obama's campaign skill trumped Biden's tendency to land in trouble.

It would likewise be the Obama campaign's skill at handling the press which got Biden out of a different problem. In 2006,

Democratic senator Joe Biden told a questioner of Indian descent at a town hall in New Hampshire, "You cannot go into a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking." Biden's line was treated, as it should have been, as a buffoonish comment from a harmless fool. Indeed, Biden's repeated gaffes didn't even prevent him from being chosen as Barack Obama's running mate in 2008.

Once again, the Democratic Party persuaded the press to downplay or overlook Biden's odd remarks. The party which had practically disowned him earlier now used it resources to rescue him. Being nominated by Barack Obama may have been the best thing that ever happened to Joe Biden. The party which had rejected his bid in 1988 now went to work to salvage him. The Obama campaign reigned in the press and put the news media into his service.

Thus the astounding rebirth of Joe Biden, back into the American political landscape. But why would Obama have taken such an unlikely individual and placed him again into the nation's civic life? The answer may lie in money.

Like most members of his party, Biden is significantly richer than the average American. In 2006, Biden's total income was $248,459 - but in that same year, the national median household income was $8,201. In 2007, Biden's income was $319,853 - while the median American household had to make do with $50,233.

Although Biden places comfortably into the top 1 percent of incomes in the United States, his income is small compared only to his fellow party members. Barack Obama is comfortably a multi-millionaire, as are Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. John Kerry, on the other hand, is a multi-billionaire. Similar wealth levels extend throughout the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Biden, then, while being richer than 99% of citizens in the United States, has a humbly small income relative to his party's leaders, allowing him to portray himself as "the common man" or "one of us." Yet, at the same time, Biden has not-so-visible connections to donors with deep pockets: the people who fund campaigns. Hence the interest in Biden's son and brother.

Although Biden is a liability when he's in public - the Democratic Party leadership winces whenever he speaks on camera or before a crowd - behind the scenes he have some influence and important connections.

So Obama unearthed and resuscitated Joe Biden's political career, surprising many observers, and utilizing his party's influence among the news media to hide Biden's personal and professional shortcomings. But it was calculation, not whimsy, which caused Obama drag this unlikely political fossil into the limelight: Biden brought with him a shadowy underground network of campaign supporters, and Obama's 2008 campaign would swim in more cash than any other American political candidate in history. Obama had not merely more wealth, but several times more wealth, for his campaign than candidates of either party were accustomed to having.

Hyman G. Rickover

The long naval career of Admiral Hyman Rickover spanned the peacetime decades of the 1920's and 1930's, the years of World War Two, and the Cold War. Born in Poland in 1900, he brought with him the perspective of someone who started as an impoverished immigrant and worked his way up, earning a scholarship to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His name has become associated with the development of nuclear-powered submarines, a development which he fostered. Originally, the U.S. Navy had nuclear weapons only for carrier-based bombers. Historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

In the mid-1950s the Navy changed course. For one thing, it had a launch platform that met the test of survivability - the nuclear-powered submarine. Driven by Hyman G. Rickover, an engineering officer of genius and irascibility, the Navy had built its first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, operational in 1955. An expert at bureaucratic politics, Rickover had built a nuclear power coalition that included his own Navy staff, the Atomic Energy Commission (in which he also held office), Congress, and the Westinghouse and General Electric corporations. Rickover saw "his" nuclear submarines as weapons to attack ships but a new Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh A. Burke, saw the nuclear submarine as a missile carrier for submerged strikes at land targets. The Navy, however, did not have a missile, since it had worked primarily on the "Regulus" cruise missile for both warships and surfaced submarines. In 1957 Burke redirected the Navy IRBM program toward a solid-fueled missile that could be launched from a submerged submarine. For the missile he followed the Air Force model and created a Special Projects Office, whose staff, the AEC, and the Lockheed Corporation produced the 1,500-mile "Polaris" missile by 1960. Because the missile had a limited payload and accuracy, its warhead could destroy only an area target. Nevertheless, the relative invulnerability of the launch platform made the fleet ballistic missile (FBM) an attractive addition to the deterrent force.

Babcock & Wilcox, an engineering firm, would also play a role in the construction of the Nautilus and also of later generations of nuclear-powered submarines. Continuing to develop Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM's), the Navy simultaneously refined the designs of SSBN's - nuclear-powered submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles. The classification SSBN is derived from "Ship, Submersible, Ballistic missile, Nuclear powered."

The White House and the Russians assisted Burke. To review the effectiveness of America's nuclear posture, the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization had established a special "security resources panel" in April 1957. When this group, known as the Gaither Committee, made its report the following November, the "Sputnik crisis" gave its study special importance. The Gaither Committee report emphasized the nation's vulnerability to a nuclear attack and the pitiable state of its air defense and civil defense programs. The only thing that stood between the United States and atomic Armageddon was SAC's bombers. The Gaither Committee did not think SAC should bear the burden alone. When the Navy in 1957 proposed that it develop three missile submarines, the administration authorized five submarines and moved the operational date forward from 1962 to 1960. Rickover cooperated in supporting the construction of fleet ballistic missile submarines, as long as they were nuclear-powered. In 1960 the first George Washington-class fleet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) went on patrol with sixteen "Polaris" sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).

Rickover, as noted above, was well-connected not only within the military, but in the private sector, and in the civilian government. Historian Ted Widmer writes:

Hyman Rickover had one of the most storied military careers of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1900, he emigrated with his family in 1905, at the time of anti-Jewish pogroms, and grew up in New York and Chicago, where he graduated from John Marshall High School and won admission to the United States Naval Academy. So began a remarkable naval career encompassing sixty-three years of active duty, marked by administrative ability, tireless work, and extremely independent judgment. Rickover served on submarines in particular and over the course of the 1940s and 1950s became the legendary "Father of the Nuclear Navy," known for his technical expertise, his strategic wisdom, and his personal interest in interviewing thousands of officer candidates. One of them, Jimmy Carter, later claimed that Rickover was the greatest influence on him after his parents. Rickover gave President Kennedy a plaque that he displayed on his desk in the Oval Office, featuring the words of an old Breton fisherman's prayer: "O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small."

Rickover not only instructed JFK about missiles and nuclear-powered vessels, he also, surprisingly, instructed the president about education. Both men shared a background in the U.S. Navy, Rickover as a career officer, Kennedy as a veteran of WWII in which he served for almost four years.

Rickover was fascinated by education and the role it played in bettering society. In 1960, he published Education and Freedom, which announced that "education is the most important problem facing the United States today" and called for a "massive upgrading" of academic standards. Two years later, he published a detailed comparison of American and Swiss schools, arguing that the United States was inferior in nearly every respect.

As an example, Rickover, in conversation with the president, compared their respective upbringings. These White House discussions were electronically recorded. Reading such talks, one must remember that the repetitions and sentence fragments were not intended to be read as polished prose. In a conversation, transcribed by Widmer, the admiral says to JFK:

I'll tell you, you can take two opposite extremes, you can take my case and you can take your case. In your case, you had parents who recognized that money can do you a great deal of harm. And they took care to see, dammit, that it did not. That's because you had intelligent parents. In my case, I was brought up where, a lot of times we didn't have enough to eat; you had to go out and fight, and so one recognized the importance of school. I think it's something like that. Now when you get in between, that's where you have your problems.

Gaining JFK's interest by using such personal examples, Rickover points to the role of the parents; they must teach the child to value education.

Your parents were exceptional in this respect. That vast majority of parents who have children now [unclear] are just trying to do everything they can to make everything easy. In that way they are really defeating what they are trying to do.

The admiral espouses, in a phrase, "tough love." It may not be easy, but a parent needs to allow the child to face difficult circumstances and wrestle with those difficulties. Only in this way will the child learn to be strong and learn to overcome.

Because everything is made easy for them. Some of them get to expect, your parents will take care of you. So you have youngsters going off and getting married. And fully expecting that the parents, you know, will come to their support. And they do. I can give you any number of cases like that, where the parents would have done much better for their children to throw 'em out. There comes a time in every animal life - and human being is a form of animal life - when you have to fend for yourself. This is where the trouble is. Today you can make these arguments today and society will support you. That never used to be the case before. This is the problem we have to face, and we have to try to get around it.

In 1931, Rickover decided to convert to Episcopalianism; his Jewish background had been more cultural than spiritual. He remained Episcopalian to the end of his life. He saw the question of education not only as a personal matter, but as of strategic interest to the nation. He retired in 1982 and died in 1986.