On the Right - Hillsdale College, Beorge W. Bush's foreign relations quiz; Index of Leading Cultural Indicators

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

A Question Only of Guilt?

NEW YORK, November 19

THE Hillsdale story is well into its second, even third life, and is threatening nine lives, with stories being prepared or contemplated in Time, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Mad Magazine. The grisly details:

1. Hillsdale, under the management of George Roche III (1971-1999), became the most prominent conservative college in the country.

2. The president's son (George Roche IV) married a fellow graduate of Hillsdale (Lissa), and both went to work for the college, he as a history instructor and physical education teacher, she as an editor.

3. Roche III divorced his wife and, a few months later, remarried. Hospitalized for chronic diabetes, he was visited by son and daughter-in- law. Lissa accused Roche III of having had sex with her for two decades and now forsaking her for his new wife. Roche III (one reading) looked at her, undenying, saying nothing; (another reading) stared at her in dumb disbelief.

4. Lissa goes home, gets a gun, and kills herself.

5. The trustees, advised of what had gone on, suspend Roche III. Ten days later they convene, meet with Roche III and Roche IV, retire Roche III without prejudice, and appoint William Bennett and this columnist to head up a search committee for a new president.

6. A gathering of the entire college takes place to renew dedication to the high purposes of Hillsdale. No mention is made of Roche III's alleged perfidy.

7. William Bennett resigns from the search committee on the grounds that Hillsdale hasn't come clean, that there is a smell of a cover-up.

8. Buckley writes (in NATIONAL REVIEW) that in his judgment the trustees did what they thought best for Hillsdale and lacked grounds for treating Roche III as guilty without reasonable doubt.

The testimony of a woman who committed suicide, and of a distraught husband, was weighed against protestations of innocence by the man the trustees knew as president and respected as icon, as also presumptions of innocence owed to presidents and non-presidents.

The public question, egged on by Mr. Bennett's resignation from the search committee, actually homes in on one point: Did he actually do it?

The attitude of many at Hillsdale is one of disappointment and frustration that no clearer resolution was effected than what is viewed as purely clerical arrangements: Roche III is jettisoned from Hillsdale; he qualifies for his pension; and no repudiation of him is made. The campus is put through a ritual convocation at which the trustees are not heard from on the issue of guilt or innocence, and at which the incarnation of the flowering of Hillsdale College, from unknown, purposeless, and broke, to affluent, committed, and famous, is-vaporized. He is not there physically. He has left no message for the community. There is nobody to do an epithalamium marrying his ideals and his honor to the college.

"If he was innocent"-Mr. Bennett spoke over the telephone-"why didn't he assert his innocence, defend himself, cry out against an injustice?"

Good question.

The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson asks, "Do you believe he was guilty?"

To the first question one answer is that the fighting spirit is sometimes dulled, perhaps more understandably so when there is sickness, tragedy, and isolation. George Roche was enfeebled physically, struck by the human tragedy, and apparently forsaken by his community. These factors should not be decisive, but they are illuminating.

The answer to the second question has to be: You should not ask it, and I will not answer it.

Such questions excite the tabloid appetites. Giving them free expression can bring on moral hangovers.

A third commentator, reacting to an editorial in NATIONAL REVIEW, says, "My visceral reaction to your editorial was bewilderment. Your statement that Roche 'gave his word as a Christian that he is innocent of this particular wrongdoing, and fellow Christians should accept the formal implications of his pleading' struck me as a pious anachronism, like a plea for reinstituting trial by ordeal." But then the comment on that point is immediately answered by the questioner, himself a graduate of Hillsdale: "Upon further reflection, perhaps it is to be regretted that it does strike me as an anachronism, for it serves to drive home the point that I am very much a creature of this age-what your friend Whittaker Chambers referred to as a 'spiritual vagrant.' "

Is it then possible to draw one's eyes away from the lurid scene? For instance to ask: Who might be a suitable president for Hillsdale III? As a member of the search committee I proffer the names of Hadley Arkes of Amherst, or Kenneth Starr, lately of Washington. Or is it distracting to focus merely on the future of Hillsdale College?

Vajpayee Got Your Tongue?

NEW YORK, November 9

Governor Bush (George) got into trouble for breach of orthodoxy the other day. His big problem wasn't that he couldn't remember a name or two of a foreign dignitary or two. That was a bum rap. The mind travels to a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1958. President Eisenhower had submitted the name of an obliging Republican businessman as ambassador to Ceylon.