2/12/1995 The New York Times By James Atlas
IT WAS COCKTAIL HOUR ON THE OPENING DAY of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill. Brock is a 32-year-old journalist who has taken the 60’s counterculture credo that the personal is political and given it a whole new meaning — describing Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and interviewing Arkansas state troopers about Bill Clinton’s sex life. He’d invited to his place perhaps two dozen men and women in their 20’s and 30’s and early 40’s who, like him, made their living trying to tear down the liberal establishment, or what remains of it.
There were editors from The American Spectator — the country’s most raucous journal of conservative opinion. It was in The Spectator that Brock published his savaging of Hill (later expanded into a best-selling book) and his “troopergate” allegations about the President. To judge by his elegant French-cuffed shirt, let alone the town house, his association with The Spectator hadn’t hurt him.
In the center of the parlor, radiating the charged aura of the face-famous, stood P. J. O’Rourke, the Hunter Thompson of the right, drawing on a lethal-looking cigarillo; his withering dispatches in Rolling Stone, the biweekly that helped define the 60’s counterculture, have made him something of a 90’s frat-house hero. (I’d seen him on “Charlie Rose” the week before, making fun of starving Africans.) O’Rourke was deep in conversation with Andrew Ferguson, another conservative funny man. Ferguson had published a “memo” on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page a week after the election briefing reporters — which to his mind means members of the liberal, Beltway-bunkered opinion elite — on the curious new species known as “Republicans,” who attend church not for chamber music concerts but for “services” and who drive “old cars, pickup trucks and vans,” not Volvos. The article was called “Those Who Don’t Get It.”
Brock pointed out for me some of the others who, to the strains of Smashing Pumpkins and 10,000 Maniacs, were drinking and laughing and comparing Newt sightings. It may have been a more sedate affair than the Election Night bash Brock threw — “I thought the windows were going to blow out when Rostenkowski conceded,” he said — but it was anything but staid. I had been prepared to encounter the kind of conservatives Norman Mailer memorably described as “people who went to their piano lessons when they were kids,” but it wasn’t that kind of crowd. They were bright. They’d had radical and unpopular ideas and had stuck to them. And now they were carrying on like winners. America!
I was struck by the number of women on hand. There was Cathy Young, a 32-year-old columnist for The Detroit News who had come armed with brochures advertising the Women’s Freedom Network, a conservative lobbying group formed in 1993 to seek “alternatives to both extremist ideological feminism and anti-feminist traditionalism.” Later on I would meet Danielle Crittenden, the editor of The Women’s Quarterly, a new Washington-based periodical edited for and by conservative-minded women; she was with her husband, David Frum — a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and the author of “Dead Right,” which accuses the Reagan and Bush Administrations of not delivering on their promises to reduce the size of the Federal Government. Eager to get the word out about her new journal, Crittenden had sent me the first two issues, featuring articles like “Violence Against Taxpayers: Why the new $ 1.5 billion Violence Against Women Act won’t protect women from violent crime, but will subject them to an assault of ‘abuse experts,'” by Betsy Hart, a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service who was also at the party.
Another of Brock’s guests that night was David Brooks, features editor of The Journal’s editorial page — the bulletin board of the New Right. A week after last November’s election, Brooks had published on the page a short essay of his own titled “Meet the New Establishment,” in which he heralded the ascent of a “new generation” of 30- and 40-something conservative opinion-makers: journalists, columnists, policy intellectuals and assorted other media and political types. The cultural revolution Brooks described had flickered alongside the electoral one that put Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s chair.
And who were the members of this New Establishment? Prominent among its ranks is William Kristol, the Republican strategist whose memo, faxed out to Republicans on Capitol Hill, launched the assault on President Clinton’s health care plan. Then there is Lisa Schiffren, the former speech writer for Dan Quayle, who turned a sitcom character, Murphy Brown, into a weapon in the right’s attack on single motherhood. Myron Magnet of New York’s influential conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, is a member, too; his 1993 book, “The Dream and the Nightmare,” a detailed critique of the welfare system, earned him a fan letter from Gingrich and helped make welfare reform a Republican priority. The notion of political correctness, now a staple of radio talk shows and the news weeklies, was first defined and ridiculed by the cultural critics Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza, both of whom are key players of the New Establishment. D’Souza’s next book, on the politics of race, will — like so many conservative books these days, including “The Bell Curve” — be published by Adam Bellow, editorial director of the Free Press, this establishment’s most important house. Then there are the people who publicize these books and the ideas they promote — people like Brooks and Brock and James Golden, a producer of “Rush Limbaugh” who also has his own nationally syndicated radio show. These young men and women are, in effect, a new conservative opinion elite, a counter-counterculture.
“There’s a parallel universe and it’s to every outward appearance exactly the same as yours,” Lisa Schiffren told me recently. (By “yours” she meant “liberal.”) “We went to the same schools, live in the same places, wear the same clothes. But to the left, it’s as if we’re from the twilight zone. People don’t see the difference between me and Phyllis Schlafly. They believe that anyone who’s pro-life must be rigid, repressed and neurotic about the sex they’re probably not getting.”
John Podhoretz, the son of Norman and the TV critic for The New York Post, made somewhat the same point. Podhoretz, who wrote for the arch-conservative Washington Times before a stint at the Bush White House, said: “We speak liberal as well as our own tongue. Why don’t you speak conservative?” It’s a common counter-countercultural theme: You liberals know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.
What’s new about these New Conservatives? What distinguishes them from the liberal, New York Review of Books-reading intelligentsia they resent with such a passion? After all, they do look just like the liberal elite. They live mostly along the Eastern Seaboard, in Washington and New York and Boston. They attended the right schools. (Dartmouth and Yale predominate on their C.V.’s.) They are hip to a pop culture many liberals think of as something wholly their own. Yet they embrace a set of values common among America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations — lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government — and a lot of them have made it financially, at least compared with their left-liberal brethren. Corporate money flows into their think tanks, and Wall Street welcomes their speeches with applause and handsome fees. They do not drive old cars and pickup trucks.
An elite, then — but one, unlike its liberal counterpart, that claims to be in accord with the country, the world out there, the Heartland. It’s not what Lionel Trilling called the Adversary Culture; it’s the culture that belongs. “My views of Clinton are the majority view,” maintains David Brock, who keeps a bumper sticker on a table in his front hall: “President Gore — Don’t Pardon Hillary.” The American Spectator, he reminded me, has a circulation of 340,000, three times that of the usually liberal New Republic. “We’re saying what the American people are thinking.”
But there is another youngish conservative faction that wasn’t represented at Brock’s place that night — one that also claims to speak for the majority of Americans, but not from Manhattan or Georgetown. These other young conservatives did not attend Ivy League schools, but do worry about school texts that consider Darwin’s theory of evolution scientific. These conservatives are not up on popular culture; they think it’s evil. They wouldn’t feel comfortable at a party like Brock’s — wouldn’t like the smoking and drinking, the soundtrack from “Pulp Fiction.” And it is probably fair to say that they would not feel comfortable in a room with so many professional women, with so many Jews, or with Brock himself, who is openly gay.
It is surely one of the accomplishments of the younger conservative elite to have brought together the older, mostly Catholic, William F. Buckley strand of intellectual conservatism and the relatively newer, mostly Jewish neo-conservative strand. However, the counter-counterculture doesn’t count in its crowd people like Ralph Reed, the 33-year-old executive director of the 1.5-million-member Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson. Michael Lind, a onetime member in good standing of the counter-counterculture — he was a research assistant for Buckley and later went on to become executive editor of the neo-con journal The National Interest — has recently defected, largely because, he has written, his compatriots have chosen to remain complacently silent about what he calls “the uncouth fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelicals” — a constituency, he maintains, that has big problems with Jews, women, homosexuals and most anyone who isn’t one of them. The new opinion elite, Lind argues, is more comfortable continuing to bash liberals and continuing to enjoy its access to Republican power than it is challenging and criticizing its evangelical brethren.
Reed, for his part, is not so circumspect. He has declared, “What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time.” Reed presumably means Georgetown too.
AT LUNCH ONE AFTERNOON LAST FALL IN THE top-floor dining room of the American Enterprise Institute, Washington’s largest conservative think tank, William Kristol was in a convivial mood. He excels at what used to be called table talk. ” ‘What do you think of the health care bill, Sir?'” he says in a jocund voice, imitating Dr. Johnson. ” ‘An abomination, I say.'”
His father, Irving Kristol, a fellow of the institute, was also having lunch in the dining room that day. The Kristols, the Podhoretzes: conservatism can seem like a family affair — or a nepotistic one, depending on your outlook. (I’ve heard the younger ones referred to as mini-cons.) Kristol the elder has elegant wood-paneled offices at A.E.I., five floors above the more Spartan surroundings of his son’s boutique think tank, the Project for the Republican Future. At one point during our meal, Kristol the elder came over to our table, dragging on a cigarette. “What’s the name of our Jew from the West Coast?” he asked his son. (Answer: Dennis Prager, described to me as “a not-so-right-wing Rush Limbaugh” who has a popular call-in show in Los Angeles.)
Irving Kristol, the founding father of neo-conservatism, is often identified in the press today simply as the father of William. At 42, Kristol the younger has become perhaps the most powerful member of the counter-counterculture — the fellow who tells the Republicans “what to think up in Washington,” to quote President Clinton. Kristol’s square-jawed visage is ubiquitous these days — you see it on CNN, “Nightline,” “Meet the Press.” His blunt, often brutal faxes are invoked daily by pundits across the land. Terry Eastland, a former top official in Reagan’s Justice Department and now the editor of Forbes Media Critic, claims he’s “the most-quoted non-Congressman there is.”
“All serious revolutions are revolutions of ideas,” Kristol wrote some years back, beginning a review of Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” in The Wall Street Journal. Certainly Kristol’s own ideas have been taken seriously. “He’s had a great impact on the Republican Party, and he’s one of the people who can shape it,” says William Bennett.
As if it weren’t enough to have Irving Kristol for a father, William also has a distinguished mother, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. (“Great DNA there,” says Bennett, a family friend.) In the 50’s and 60’s, the Kristols’ Upper West Side home was a salon for New York intellectuals — liberal intellectuals, because liberals, as Lionel Trilling noted at the time, were the only intellectuals there were. In those days, Trilling himself was welcome at the Kristols’. At 15, Bill, as he is known, came in to greet the guests at one of his parents’ dinner parties and got into an argument with Trilling himself. (He can’t remember what it was about.)
Kristol arrived at Harvard in 1970, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War. His father had turned right by then, and so had he. Kristol wore a Spiro T. Agnew sweatshirt to classes and declared himself for Nixon on a campus where Dick Gregory got more votes in a straw poll. “Already he was giving it to the left,” recalls Harvey Mansfield, Kristol’s government professor
“It was always just more fun to be in a minority than in a majority,” Kristol recalls of those years. “I was able to rebel against my generation instead of against my parents.” He wasn’t completely an intellectual loner in Cambridge, but pretty close. “There was a sort of circle of neo-conservative slash Straussian slash just nonleft, you might say, intellectual types,” he told me. (“Straussian,” a key term in the New Conservative vocabulary, refers to Leo Strauss, the legendary celebrator of the ancient Greeks who reigned over the University of Chicago’s department of political science and found a keen adherent in Allan Bloom.) When I asked Kristol who belonged to this circle (I, too, was a Harvard undergrad around that time, and never laid eyes on a conservative), he mentioned Mansfield, Samuel Huntington and James Q. Wilson, professors all. Later on, when he was doing graduate work at Harvard, he became friends with Francis Fukuyama, a fellow grad student and anti-leftist who would go on to write the best-selling eulogy to the cold war, “The End of History.”
Kristol got his Ph.D. in political philosophy and wrote scholarly articles with titles like “The Heavenly City of Post-Constitutional Theory” for the University of Chicago Law Review and The Public Interest (edited by his father). But there was something dutiful about Kristol’s pursuit of the academic life, as he sees it now. “It was pretty clear that, for me, a less ethereal life would be more satisfying,” he told me.
After two years at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard — a frequent stepping-stone to Washington — Kristol teamed up with William Bennett, then Secretary of Education. How he got there is instructive. In the summer of 1984, he traveled down to Washington to research an article on how Reaganites were grappling with the Government bureaucracy that candidate Reagan had vowed to dismantle. The result was an article in Policy Review, still another conservative journal, called “Can-Do Government: Three Reagan Appointees Who Made a Difference.” One of the three was Bennett, whose aggressive budget-trimming as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the first Reagan Administration Kristol lauded as a model of how to limit government. (That Irving Kristol had recommended Bennett for the N.E.H. post could have been lost on no one in this network.) Three months later, Bennett called and offered him a job.
Kristol quickly made a name for himself as a political operative at the Education Department. “We were proud to be called Fort Reagan,” recalls Bennett. “We were the only place that was keeping the Tablet” — which for Bennett meant delivering impassioned campus speeches (with a lot of input from Kristol) in defense of the core curriculum. “Bill was good at the cultural stuff.”
Kristol left the Department of Education in 1988 to manage the campaign of his Harvard roommate Alan Keyes, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Senate seat in Maryland. A few months later, he got a call “out of the blue” from a friend of Dan Quayle’s: Would he be interested in a job as the Vice President’s domestic adviser? Kristol turned it down. “I couldn’t see sitting quietly and taking notes without having a hand in shaping opinion,” he says. It was only when Quayle himself called and made it clear that he intended to have “an activist Vice Presidency,” and that he wanted Kristol to be part of it, that he changed his mind. “I thought it would be interesting and a challenge.” He defends Quayle as “a bright man and really a fine person” with “good political judgment.”
Going to work for Quayle wasn’t a popular decision among Kristol’s friends or his family. “I must say, I was rather dubious about that,” his mother admitted to me, hastening to add that “it was a clear case of ideas — Bill thought he could get his ideas across.”
Strategically, it wasn’t a bad move; it got Kristol noticed. To the media he became known as “Dan Quayle’s brain” (not in itself a remarkable achievement, notes George Will, who likens being called the smartest person in the Bush White House to being called “the tallest building in Topeka”). It was clearly Kristol who was behind Quayle’s assault on the “cultural elite.” For Kristol, it was a war on his own kind. To attack it was to attack what Kristol once described as “the typical New York-Jewish view of the world, that people who weren’t from New York and Jewish were unfortunate: they ate Wonder Bread and mayonnaise and had boring existences.”
It wasn’t just ideas that Kristol purveyed. He’d also become an adept political practitioner — a pro at what he likes to call “the baseball side of politics, the wins and losses, the vote counts.” In “All’s Fair,” Mary Matalin, the Bush strategist, recounts “a stroke of Kristol Machiavellian genius”: after rumors arose in ’92 that Quayle might be dumped from the ticket, Kristol leaked word that Bush was sticking with the Vice President; when a reporter put the question directly to Bush, he felt it was bad manners to do anything but affirm his support. (According to Kristol, who denies Matalin’s account, Quayle raised the issue at a meeting with Bush, and Bush “told him he was O.K.”)
The moment it became clear that Bush was going to lose no matter who was on the ticket, Kristol began to distance himself from the White House. Two months before the election, he came up with this masterpiece of equivocation: “I’m much less sure that we deserve to win than that the country doesn’t deserve for the Democrats to win.” Now he says, “I thought the underlying dynamics were terrible for us. I expected us to lose.”
Kristol established the Project for the Republican Future after he left the White House with money from what Kristol described as “Wall Street types, basically.” The budget for last year was $ 1.3 million — a comfortable but hardly lavish sum. The project operates with a seat-of-the-pants informality; its offices at A.E.I. feel more like an Ivy League history department than a Washington think tank. But there’s nothing academic about Kristol’s memos, which he faxes out to politicians and key opinion-makers at the rate of several a week. Kristol’s memos have a distinct edge — brassy is the word George Will applies. A little more than a year ago, at a time when Senator Bob Dole was affirming the notion of a “health care crisis,” Kristol was drafting a memo entitled “Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal.” Clinton’s plan was just another step in the direction of big government, Kristol argued; most Americans were happy with the coverage they had. There was no health care crisis. In little more than a month, Dole, a careful reader of Kristol’s memos, was saying, “My view is that I think there isn’t a health care crisis.” It was the beginning of the end for Clinton’s plan.
Kristol hasn’t let up on Clinton. Shortly after he helped defeat the health care bill, he accused Clinton of “posturing” on welfare. And within hours of the President’s State of the Union Message, Kristol issued a sarcastic memo deriding it as “the most conservative major address ever delivered by a 20th-century Democratic president.” (“You half expected Mr. Clinton to denounce affirmative action, the Clean Air Act, and radical feminism too… .”) He also found time to turn up on “Charlie Rose” that night to provide instant negative spin.
Kristol, like the rest of the counter-counterculture, is by temperament a radical — someone who likes to be against. “I don’t apologize for the fact that most of our work has been in opposition,” he told me. “In politics as in life generally, a lot of what one does is oppose bad ideas.” Opposition is “worthwhile for its own sake, good for the country,” he said, sounding just like a 60’s radical.
When asked what he’s for, Kristol grows vague. “It’s a historic moment when all kinds of things need to be worked out,” he says. “The single thing one could do now is pull kids out of failing schools and put them in successful schools” — he’s an advocate of school choice.
What about the anti-feminist rhetoric I kept hearing on the right?
“Feminism is a very difficult issue,” he replied. “I’m not willing to abandon all the progress on equal rights for women, and I never said we should. But where we go from here is a big question. The fact that feminism has had certain good consequences doesn’t absolve one of the responsibility for pointing out that it’s had certain bad consequences. Politically, everyone is happy with equal treatment under the law, there’s no big dispute about that. There’s some dispute around the margins … women and the military, stuff like that.”
But what are his priorities? What’s the one big thing to be done?
“Our agenda now is to think about how to revitalize public institutions, how to strengthen the institutions of civic society — shaping the culture as opposed to reforming the politics.”
For all his talk of “ideas,” Kristol is essentially a strategist, a tactician. Most of his friends predict he’ll end up back in government. “My guess is that Bill will be the chief of staff for the next Republican President or chairman of the Republican Party,” Terry Eastland says. The real priority for Kristol, those who know him told me, is deciding whom he’ll support in ’96. “He’s in a pickle on Quayle,” says a friend. “He wants to give him sound advice, but he’s afraid Quayle’s gonna get beat up. He’s not going to do anything disloyal.”
Not disloyal, perhaps, but definitely politic. I happened to be in Kristol’s office on the day he was preparing to fax out a memo responding to the Republicans’ Contract With America, which had been unveiled that afternoon. And what did Kristol think of the contract? “We’re pretending to like it,” he’d said offhandedly as we headed to lunch.
MEMBERS OF THE Counter-Counterculture gathered for dinner one night last month at Citronelle, a chic bistro in the Latham Hotel in Georgetown. The surroundings were refined; the talk was rightish Beltway. Daniel Wattenberg, son of the conservative columnist Ben Wattenberg, revealed that he was working on a “First 100 Days” documentary for PBS, “while it’s still there” — eliciting whoops. “Get the man an N.E.H. grant,” someone shouted down the table. (Public television and the National Endowment for the Humanities have been among the first declared targets of the Republicans’ cutting frenzy.)
Over Chilean sea bass, those around the table reminisced with evangelical fervor about their conservative origins, recounting their political conversions or awakenings. It was Jay Lefkowitz, director of Cabinet affairs in the Bush White House, who introduced the notion of the “defining moment” — a moment of nearly religious intensity when one’s conservative affiliation, one’s conservative soul, suddenly stood revealed. He told of being a student at Columbia Law School in the mid-80’s and going to an interview for a summer associate job at a white shoe law firm. A black classmate of his “who had even better grades than I did” also interviewed with the firm. Upon comparing notes of their interviews, it emerged that his classmate had been asked to supply a transcript not only of his law-school grades but of his undergraduate record. The firm wanted to be sure he hadn’t got to Columbia Law simply because he was black. To Lefkowitz’s mind, here was the true and cruel legacy of affirmative action. “What made this moment so defining for me,” said Lefkowitz, “was that my friend needed to verify himself, to prove his merit and show that he had the grades, that he hadn’t got in to law school on the basis of race” — an assumption Lefkowitz considered “profoundly racist.”
David Brock also claims a defining moment: the son of a marketing executive (“a Pat Buchanan conservative”) in the New Jersey suburbs, Brock had gone to Berkeley “for all the reasons one would go there” — drugs, sex, rock-and-roll — and seen conservative speakers like Caspar Weinberger and Jeane Kirkpatrick shouted down. It wasn’t long before Brock himself got shouted down. As an editor for The Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus paper, he wrote a signed column endorsing the Granada invasion, “controversial in Berkeley but not in many other places” — apparently his father’s Buchananite tendencies had taken hold more than his son realized. The column created a furor; petitions demanding Brock’s ouster were circulated, editorials written. “I thought it was McCarthyism of the left,” said Brock. “I thought it was extremely intolerant.”
After graduation, Brock joined “the minority culture,” as young conservatives like to identify their cohort. He sent his clips to John Podhoretz, who was then editing Insight, the Sunday magazine of The Washington Times, and Podhoretz gave him a job. He did a stint at the Heritage Foundation and wrote his piece about Anita Hill for The Spectator; Erwin Glikes, then president and publisher of the Free Press, read it and signed him up to do a book. “The Real Anita Hill,” edited by Glikes’s protege, Adam Bellow, was on the best-seller list for 14 weeks.
Those at the Citronelle dinner were young conservatives. But they were old enough to be concerned about their stodgy image.
“We have to prove to the American people that we’re fair, that we believe in equality, that we’re not the elite,” Jay Lefkowitz said.
“I grew up in a liberal household and was taught that conservatives were dumber, not nice,” said Jennifer Grossman, communications director of Michael Huffington’s failed Senate campaign in California.
To the counter-counterculture, the divide between liberals and conservatives is no laughing matter. They talk about “our point of view,” “our people” — except that for them, the beleaguered and persecuted minority is on the right. “We’re still competing on their terms, sending our kids to Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” Grossman complained. She was also angry that Clinton failed to bestow any Kennedy Center Honors upon conservatives.
When it came right down to it, what really seemed to irritate Grossman and her cronies was not the state of the nation but their exclusion from what they call the loop. Over and over I heard this note of grievance against “the majority culture,” “the condottieri of liberalism,” “the compassion crowd.” Toward the end of dinner, John Podhoretz began a long peroration about his father, Norman, the editor of Commentary and one of the pioneers of neo-conservatism. “My father, one of the most eminent intellectuals of his time, is retiring,” Podhoretz, a stout, prematurely balding man, tieless and perspiring, said in a wounded tone. “Where are the honors due an old general? When the prizes are given out, when intellectual eminence is conferred, there is only silence. He has to give his own honorary dinner.”
Others around the table were obsessed with reviews. There was a conspiracy to “silence” conservative books. Look at Brock’s book, attacked in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, whose own book, “Strange Justice,” was highly critical of Clarence Thomas; look at the liberal assault on Richard Bernstein’s recent polemic on multiculturalism, “Dictatorship of Virtue” — a book by one of The Times’s own reporters! — Louis Menand in The New York Review of Books, Leon Wieseltier and Nicholas Lemann in The Times, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor, in The New Republic: could a more liberal lineup be devised?
“You think we’re nuts, don’t you?” muttered Laura Ingraham, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas and now an attorney at the Washington offices of the power firm of Skadden, Arps. Ingraham, who is also a frequent guest on CNN, had had it with a particularly long-winded argument over some review in The New Republic. It could have been worse. They could have been the dweebs and nerds that liberals imagine young conservatives to be. But no one seemed to be going home from Citronelle, even though it was after 11; a number of the guests were on their way to a Capitol Hill party at the home of Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to the new Speaker of the House. I found myself careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.
As we sat in the bar of the Tabard Inn knocking back big glasses of Sambuca (“Should we all sing ‘Kumbaya’?” suggested Ingraham), she entertained us with stories of her adventures in El Salvador during the mid-80’s. What was she doing there? I asked. “Subjugating third-world nations,” she said with a dry laugh.
NEWT GINGRICH’S headline-making book deal — $ 4
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?emc=eta1&src=pm&pagewanted=1