Ian Williams, whom I criticised for an article on Comment is Free yesterday about the conservative columnist Bill Kristol, has written to me in response. I'm grateful to him for being such a good sport; here (published with his permission) is his email:
Dear OliverFulbright was certainly not an active segregationist of the Wallace kind - indeed he was the mentor for the younger, lefter Clinton. When I interviewed him a few years before he died, he apologetically explained his lack of vociferous opposition to segregation as the cost of doing business in the Senate --- he would have been given the bum's rush if he had spoken out. Not brave, but certainly politically astute.
Incidentally, he is sometimes depicted as one of the victims of the Israel Lobby, for his inquiries into their funding and status as a foreign agent, but he ruefully confessed that all they needed to do was to let his voters know that he was wasting his time on foreign affairs instead of porkbarrelling.
On the other points you raised, please excuse the contractions necessary for fitting the CiF space limits. I have often pointed out, for example, that conservatives such as Bolton differ in many respects from NeoConservatists, of whom Kristol is not in fact a good example. However, Kristol is such a slavish adherent of the Bush line that he is a disgrace to any serious conservative. NeoCons per se, whether self-described as such, did not generally adopt reactionary domestic policies, on the contrary, as befits former Trotskyists, they could combine support for the great society with the crusade against Stalinism in the past and perceived enemies of Israel now.
You also seem to miss my point that Kristol's politics are certainly not an aberration for the New York Times, as years of Rosenthal and Safire et al. indicates. Nor am I in favour of limiting political horizons. I date the decline of the Staggers to when they ousted Waugh and Arthur Marshall etc, and indeed was effectively banned from the Nation for the duration of the Kosovo war for political incorrectness.
I did not ascribe any particular conspiracy to Murdoch, but was remarking on the obtuseness of the NYT. I know that outstanding stupidity often looks like a plot, but there is a lot of it about. And as for the Flat Earth Society, I remember when it was a British homegrown effort, before websites, and we had to explain the reference to the predominately American readership of CiF. So score one for accuracy, and lose two for atypical lack of humour!
Happy New Year
Ian
I have to say that I don't accept Fulbright's rationalisations and don't consider he was telling Ian the full story. Certainly Fulbright was not a segregationist in the George Wallace league; but neither were his sins those of omission alone. In describing him as a segregationist I was alluding to the "Southern Manifesto" issued in March 1956 by 19 Senators and 77 Congressmen, all from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. This document attacked the Supreme Court and pledged to resist integration. Senator Albert Gore (father of Vice-President Al Gore) of Tennessee did not sign. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, as Majority Leader in the Senate, was not asked to sign. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas did sign. Two otherwise sympathetic biographers, Haynes Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, noted in their 1969 volume Fulbright the Dissenter, p. 143: "Although [the authors of the manifesto] added [to their pledge to resist integration] the qualifying phrase 'by any lawful means', their statement was taken as a call to arms. Their action lent official endorsement to the words of the demagogues then being heard across the South."
I was, incidentally, Delphic to the point of ungraciousness when describing Ian, with reference to his CIF article, as "not always this obtuse". He has written excellently on, among other issues, the aggression of Slobodan Milosevic and its apologists. Here is a particularly incisive piece, from 1999, on the risible but sinister Ramsey Clark, "the war criminal's best friend".
UPDATE: See this article from Slate on the critics of Kristol's appointment. It's disturbing how many people are arguing against the appointment on the grounds that they disagree with what he writes. As the author of the piece, Jack Shafer, remarks ironically:
Oh, you say, Kristol's journalistic crime is not just that he was wrong about launching the [Iraq] war but that he has been absolutely wrong about every chapter in the war since the shock-and-awe bombs lit up Baghdad. Well, not wrong at every turn. From where I write this afternoon, he looks pretty goddamn prescient about the wisdom of mounting the "surge" and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. Pundits are wrong sometimes and right others. Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy.
Yes, he does. As Shafer notes, William Safire's appointment a generation ago from the Nixon White House was much criticised too. A conservative with a cussedly independent and libertarian streak (and without the neanderthal views of a professed libertarian such as Ron Paul), Safire was a fine columnist on politics and on language, and he fulfilled a much needed role in public debate.