-Caveat Lector-
The Kid Question
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A privacy expert familiar with fame on what to tell the children
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By Caroline Kennedy
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In my family, we were taught and shown by example that politics can be a
noble profession, that each of us should serve the country that has given
us so much. Over the past year, however, I worry that my own children have
developed a profound fear of government. What is happening in Washington
makes them confused, uncertain and afraid�not unlike many adults.
Though I don't think President Clinton should be removed from office, I
don't condone his conduct. It was wrong. Children must be taught to tell
the truth, and that they will be punished if they don't. My 5-year-old son
Jack recently saw a picture of Clinton and said, "He lied." I couldn't
disagree, but I explained to him that people make mistakes and should be
judged by their whole life and work, not by the worst of what they've done.
Certainly, we have a right to know about the character of the people we
elect. But that right must be balanced against the right to privacy, which
often conflicts with other values. For example, the right to keep your
personal life private, particularly if you're a public figure, conflicts
with a free press.
But while anyone who enters public life must be willing to sacrifice much
of their privacy, they should not have to sacrifice all of it. When asked
whether my father would go into politics today, with all its prying
questions, I'd still like to think yes. He was committed to public service,
as my family has been since the days of my kids' great-great-grandfather
Honey Fitz. But I fear that today's vicious partisanship and intrusions
will discourage people from both parties from thinking they can make a
difference.
The nation pays a price every time a president, for whatever reason, does
not finish his term: I've seen that firsthand. But if Clinton is censured
and prosecuted later, it is he who will suffer the consequences�not the
rest of us.
More importantly, such an outcome would teach kids that right and wrong
matter and that the world they're growing up in is fair. Hopefully, they
will then come through this believing that when they are ready to create a
new and better world, public service will still be an honorable calling.
Kennedy is the co-author of "In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action"
and "The Right to Privacy."
Newsweek, Dec. 28, 1998/Jan. 4, 1999
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From Int'l Herald Tribune
Paris, Monday, December 28, 1998
Legacy of '60s Plays Out in Divisions Over Clinton
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By David S. Broder and Richard Morin Washington Post Service
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WASHINGTON - The sharply divided public reaction to the impeachment of
President Bill Clinton has provided a dramatic showcase of a struggle for
American values that goes back to the 1960s and remains unresolved today.
As an emblematic figure from that troubled decade, polls and analysts said,
Mr. Clinton confronts his fellow citizens with choices between deeply held
moral standards and an abhorrence of judging others' behavior, a conflict
the baby boomers have stirred all their adult lives.
A series of surveys about values by The Washington Post, the Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University underlines the growing
tolerance Americans now display for groups like homosexuals that have
suffered discrimination and toward practices from interracial marriage to
premarital sex that once might have been condemned. That tolerance also
extends to free expression of controversial views.
But few issues are more revealing than Mr. Clinton's impeachment when it
comes to highlighting how
values have changed over the last 30 years. Almost without exception,
experts interviewed said that the public verdict in his case was far
different than it would have been in the late 1960s because the values
environment has changed.
Conflict over the social order is notably less violent than it was in 1968,
when the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy,
anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, urban riots and violent clashes between
police and protesters at the Democratic National Convention scarred the
nation's consciousness. But 1998, with a bitter, year-long battle in the
courts and Congress climaxing in the first presidential impeachment in 130
years, has left deep divisions across social, political and generational
lines.
They begin, according to the Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey, with a near-even
split between those (50 percent) who think a president ''has a greater
responsibility than leaders of other organizations to set the moral tone
for the country'' and those (48 percent) who say, ''As long as he does a
good job running the country, a president's personal life is not
important.''
Reflecting the partisanship engendered by the long investigation of Mr.
Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, most Republicans demand a
moral example and most Democrats reject it.
But sociologists and other students of American life interviewed last week
said that the divisions went much deeper and had their roots in
long-standing controversy generated not just by Mr. Clinton but by his
baby-boom generation.
While most Americans want Mr. Clinton to finish his term and prefer censure
as an alternative to removal from office, few say he is a good role model.
Seven in 10 Americans - including a majority of baby boomers - said in the
survey that Mr. Clinton did not have high personal moral or ethical
standards. Six in 10 - again including a majority of baby boomers - also
said his standards were no better or worse than ''most people of his
generation.''
The public sees a nation that lacks agreed-upon ethical guidelines for
itself. More than six out of 10 said the country was ''greatly divided when
it comes to the most important values.'' Ironically, on this one question
there was unity. Republicans and Democrats, men and women, young and old
all said they see a society split on moral and ethical issues.
With some exceptions, the experts tend to agree. Some describe it as a
battle of extremes - the puritanism of the religious right versus the
permissiveness of the aging children of the 1960s. Others see the
acceptance of Mr. Clinton's actions as proof that Americans are utterly
cynical about their political leaders, mute spectators at a television
drama that they despise but cannot escape.
Some say it is a symptom of national ambivalence, of individuals longing
for moral values but resistant to imposing their standards on others. And
the more hopeful say the preference for censuring the president - rather
than absolving him or removing him - is a healthy effort at synthesizing
those opposing tendencies.
But few of the scholars are comfortable with the status quo.
''No analysis can absolve the people themselves of responsibility for the
quandary we appear to be in,'' said Don Eberly, director of the Civil
Society Project in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. ''Nonjudgmentalism, the trump
card of moral debate, seems to have gained strength among the people,
especially in the sexual realm, and this clearly does not bode well for
America.''
Over the last 30 years, polling shows, the proportion of people saying they
think their fellow citizens generally are as honest and moral as they used
to be has fallen significantly. In a 1952 survey, as many answered yes as
said no. In 1965, there were three yeses for every four noes. But this year
there were almost three noes (71 percent) for every yes (26 percent).
In the same period, trust in government also has declined radically. In
1968, 61 percent said they trusted the government in Washington to do the
right thing most or all the time; in 1998, only 33 percent felt that way.
A pollster, Dan Yankelovich, writes that ''the transformation in values
from the mid-'60s to the late-'70s confronts us with one of the sharpest
discontinuities in our cultural history.'' In that period, he notes, the
concepts of duty, social conformity, respectability and sexual morality
were devalued, in favor of expressiveness and pleasure seeking.
This was a time when Bill Clinton, moving through his 20s at Georgetown,
Oxford and Yale, rejected military service and experimented with marijuana.
But in general, according to a biographer, the Washington Post reporter
David Maraniss, Mr. Clinton followed ''a moderate course during an
increasingly immoderate period.'' The stamp of that period remained on Mr.
Clinton, in at least two areas: the evasiveness that characterized his
dealings with the ''threat'' of military service and the permissiveness he
allowed in his sexual life.
In judging Mr. Clinton's morals to be typical of his generation - only 7
percent thought them better; 27 percent, worse - most of those surveyed
made it clear they disapproved.
>From the perspective of individual responsibility, the divided public
verdict on the Clinton case represents an unresolved debate about
fundamental values. At the extremes, the conflict amounts almost to the
''culture war'' some trace directly back to the 1960s.
Randy Tate of the Christian Coalition and William Bennett, a former
education secretary, have accused Mr. Clinton of subverting standards of
honesty and decency so blatantly that he cannot be allowed to remain in
office. The Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz and many Democrats in the
House have accused Mr. Clinton's opponents - notably the independent
counsel Kenneth Starr - of practicing ''sexual McCarthyism,'' trampling
civil liberties and invading people's privacy.
Christopher Gates, president of the Denver-based National Civic League,
said that the pollster George Gallup Jr. had described the 1960s and '70s
as ''the time when our country fell apart and the bonds began to dissolve.
You had a war between the generations, a war between the genders, you had
Vietnam, break-ins, resignations, pardons. You had a huge dissolution of
trust.''
Michael Sandel, director of the Harvard Institute for Policy Studies, said
the consequences went further. ''We've witnessed a politics of scandal,
sensation and spectacle that has turned the president into another figure
in the celebrity culture,'' he said. ''It reflects a cynicism beyond
mistrust. It reflects a view that government really doesn't matter, except
as it provides occasional spectacular entertainment. It is not good news
for democracy.''
>From Int'l Herald Tribune
Paris, Monday, December 28, 1998
Bonn Parties Divided Over East German Ex-Stalinists
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By John Schmid International Herald Tribune
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRANKFURT - Nine years after East Germans ousted the Communists, the heirs
of the Stalinist party have taken a giant stride toward the political
mainstream in their new political system.
Ever since Eastern Germany's reformed Communists made unexpectedly strong
gains in the September elections, the political establishment in both
Eastern and Western Germany has agonized over how to treat a
once-untouchable party newly legitimized by the ballot box but still
stigmatized by its totalitarian roots.
The reformed Communists, since renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism,
now revel in their status as the self-declared party of Eastern pride and
lobby for unification's losers. Riding its momentum, the PDS already plans
to expand its newfound influence in an unusually heavy slate of four East
German statehouse races and myriad municipal elections next year.
''We are normal,'' said Hanno Harnisch, a party spokesman. ''We have an
enduring place in the political landscape.''
But just as it appeared on its way to respectability and acceptance, the
party inflamed the debate over its oppressive past this month.
Tearing open old wounds, its leaders called for an amnesty for crimes
committed in the name of the old Communist government, including
shoot-to-kill orders for border guards.
They then added to the ensuing uproar with proposals to pay compensation to
former East German officials imprisoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
To the party's critics, the idea of amnesty only hardens suspicions that
the former Communists have yet to accept fully the principles of democracy
and the German Constitution. The party, critics say, does not seem to care
about the Cold War victims of the old regime.
''The PDS is and remains a wolf in sheep's clothing,'' said Cornelia
Pieper, a leader in the opposition Free Democratic Party.
Nowhere is the debate more wrenching than within the ranks of the
left-leaning Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Unable to reconcile its own stance toward the former Communists, Mr.
Schroeder's party is struggling with a widening split between members who
ostracize the PDS and those who embrace it by encouraging power-sharing
alliances at the state and local level.
The former Communists are ''one of the biggest irritations in the process
of German unification,'' according to an angry manifesto written last month
by four leading Social Democrats, who reject any moves that enhance the
respectability of the Party of Democratic Socialism.
By getting in bed with the PDS at the local level, the Social Democrats
only legitimize the former Communists, some Social Democrats fear. That is
sure to backfire, they warn, as the bigger party effectively fosters a
rival to its left that invariably will drain votes.
Some assert that the former Communists still harbor anti-Western,
anti-American and anti-capitalist tendencies behind the face it presents to
the public. ''The PDS has significant difficulties in accepting Western
values of democracy, private property and the NATO ties that were acquired
by the West Germans after 1945,'' said Klaus-Dietmar Henke, director of the
Hannah Arendt Institute for Research of Totalitarianism in Dresden.
Such reservations appeared to matter little in the Sept. 27 national
elections, when the party outstripped nearly everyone's expectations. In
its power base in the East, it gathered slightly more than a fifth of the
votes compared with a scant 1.2 percent in the West. The Free Democrats and
Greens, both influential in the West, polled far behind the former
Communists in the East.
For the first time, the party appears in the Bundestag with full
parliamentary status after winning more than 5 percent of the total
national vote, clearing a threshold meant to bar extremists. That allows it
to nominate a deputy speaker, sit on committees and receive funds for a
research institute. In the previous Parliament, the party, with 4.4
percent, got into the Bundestag on a technicality, by winning three
districts.
The former Communists scored another first in a separate statehouse race on
the same day in the struggling Eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The
party became the junior partner in a state government coalition led by the
local Social Democrats, who had the backing of the party leadership in Bonn
when they cemented the alliance last month.
By joining the government in Mecklenburg's capital city of Schwerin, the
Party of Democratic Socialism automatically installed a representative in
the Bundesrat, the upper house of the national Parliament. The party
already props up a minority Social Democratic government in the Eastern
state of Saxony-Anhalt.
''The PDS is a protest party,'' said Richard Schroeder, a professor in
Berlin and one of the authors of the Social Democratic tract against the
former Communists. ''They are not a risk to democracy, but they slow the
acceptance of democracy in the East. They confuse the learning process.''
More than half of the party's 95,000 members are retired, making it only a
shadow of its 2.2 million-member precursor. Its ranks shrink by the
thousands each year as the elderly die off, but it still includes the
former elite, including academics, Mr. Schroeder said.
Helmut Holter, the party leader who is deputy premier of Schwerin, studied
politics in Moscow in the 1980s and now rides in a chauffeured Audi
limousine as an elected state official. ''This will create a new social
climate of reconciliation and integration,'' Mr. Holter said of the
alliance with the Social Democrats.
Not everyone agrees. The increasingly assertive anti-PDS faction of the
Social Democrats argues that the former Communists remain a purely Eastern
phenomenon and thus unable to heal Germany's inner divide. Indeed, they
say, it is unfit to represent even Eastern Germany because 80 percent of
the Easterners consistently vote against it. ''The vast majority of the
East Germans distance themselves from the PDS,'' the four Social Democratic
critics wrote in their treatise.
Similar controversy has split other parties. Heiner Geissler accused his
center-right Christian Democratic Party of ''schizophrenic behavior'' in
its cooperating with the former Communists at the municipal level in the
East while denouncing them bitterly in Bonn. Mr. Geissler, a leader in his
party's labor wing who also said some cooperation with the Party of
Democratic Socialism is conceivable, reaped nothing but bitter criticism.
''Geissler is talking sheer rubbish,'' the Christian Democratic Party
chairman, Wolfgang Schaeuble, said last week. But only two months before,
Mr. Schaeuble made overtures to individual former Communists to switch
parties.
PDS leaders justify the calls for amnesty for crimes during the Cold War,
arguing that amnesty would help foster ''reconciliation'' between the
halves of Germany, in the words of the party's parliamentary leader, Gregor
Gysi. The party chairman, Lothar Bisky, said he would like to see the
amnestry granted May 23, the 50th anniversary of the German Constitution,
which now applies to the whole of the reunited Germany.
The rush by Western politicians to ''normalize'' the party stems mainly
from the growing importance of Eastern voters.
Mr. Schroeder owes much of his victory to the East, where former Chancellor
Helmut Kohl's share of the vote fell more than 11 percentage points, to
27.3 percent, from four years earlier, leaving Mr. Schroeder and the former
Communists to share the defectors.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A<>E<>R
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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