Tilting at Windmills - News Briefs

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Charles Peters

You can imagine how much legal learning goes on amidst all these diversions. The scandal is that it's tax-deductible. You pay the bill.

OF ALL THE POLLSTERS, ONLY Zogby predicted Al Gore's popular-vote victory. Gallup and Pew came next closest to the actual result, but predicted a two-percent margin for Bush. The Washington Post and NBC/Wall Street Journal each predicted a Bush win by three percent. But the real chumps were Portrait of America and Battleground/ Voter.com, both of which predicted Bush by a nine-point landslide. Zogby you may remember is the only pollster that caught the last minute Republican surge in 1996 that deprived the Democrats of the expected recapture of Congress.

ALTHOUGH ARIEL SHARON appears to have been the guilty party in igniting the latest explosion of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, it's clear that extremists in both sides leapt to exploit the incident and pose a continuing threat to hopes for any sane solution.

The news from Northern Ireland is a bit better. David Trimble, the Protestant leader who has been willing to take risks for peace, survived a challenge from the hard-liners late last month. But his 54-46 percent victory shows the narrow margin the good guys have over the haters.

ONCE YOU HIT YOUR 50s, you begin to worry about losing whatever skill has earned you a living. The anxiety intensifies each year. But there is good news for all of us worriers. The greatest of the editorial cartoonists, Herblock, still turning them out, recently celebrated his 92nd birthday. Jacques Barzun, whose book, Teacher in America, persuaded me to go to Columbia 44 years ago, just produced a major book. He's 93. Saul Bellow in his mid-80s published Ravelstein to mostly enthusiastic reviews. And another writer in his middle 80s, Arthur Schlesinger, has come out with a marvelous memoir: A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950.

IF I'M GUILTY OF ENVY, I RARELY admit it except in the case of the driver just ahead of me who snatches the parking space I'd been eyeing for the last block. But I have to concede that I envy Arthur Schlesinger. There are episodes in his life where I would have loved to have been in his shoes. First was the year before he entered college when his parents treated him to a year-long round the world trip, by steamship and train, the only kinds of travel I really enjoy. The time was 1933-34. He experienced the beauty of pre-War Dresden, rode the Shanghai Express between Peking and Shanghai, stayed at the legendary Eastern and Oriental Hotel in Penang, and saw Fred Astaire and Noel Coward perform in London. My pre-college trip was five days in New York.

During World War II, he managed to perform his public service in FDR's Washington, Churchill's London, and DeGaulle's Paris, all of which were a tad more interesting than Fort McClellan, Alabama, where I spent the largest chunk of my Army career.

His later service as speechwriter and adviser to Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy placed him a lot closer to the great men than I was as a leaflet hander-outer and doorbell pusher for Stevenson and a county campaign director for Kennedy.