In April 1998, Lawrence Lindsey, the economist and former Federal Reserve governor who is now a principal adviser to Governor George W. Bush, pulled his savings out of the stock market. He's been out ever since. At the time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had climbed above 9,000, more than tripling in the previous eight years. Wall Street had never seen a run like it, and Lindsey was far from alone in believing it could not continue. Sixteen months earlier, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greens Read more
You can say this for George Stephanopoulos: He's emerged from his brush with Bill and Hillary Clinton in much better shape than have a lot of others. He's gainfully employed, unindicted, able to pay his legal bills, with full-time work, and now has a New York Times bestseller to his credit. Not bad for a young man who served the most dangerously seductive of politicians in the most dangerously seductive of places, the White House. His book, All Too Human, is subtitled "A Political Educati Read more
BUY A COMPUTER RUNNING Microsoft's Windows 95 these days, and you get something extra. There is an icon on your screen that looks like a magnifying glass above a globe. It is labeled simply "The Internet." Activate it and it takes you through the process of setting up Microsoft's World Wide Web browser, called "Internet Explorer." Now in its fourth edition, Internet Explorer is a full-blown Internet-access program with all the bells and whistles expected of such software. There is no additional Read more
JANET RENO'S DAYLONG, ROPE-A-DOPE performance before the House Judiciary Committee October 15 was reported in the press as a clash between frustrated Republicans and an attorney general steadfast in her determination to say as little as possible about her investigation of the Clinton fund-raising scandal. She "rebuffed their assault" (New York Times), "held firm" (Washington Post), and "stood her ground" (Los Angeles Times). What such accounts missed, or were too polite to say, was that mu Read more
You don't have to be British to see that the least likely result of Princess Diana's death and the astonishing reaction to it is the undoing of the British monarchy. Britain may now have little need of the monarchy as unifying symbol in time of crisis, but the royal family still has a remarkable hold on the imagination of the British people. And from the day she burst on the scene 16 years ago, Diana was the focus of that. The queen, dignified but dowdy, and Prince Charles, eccentric and cheerle Read more
Elizabeth Drew What It Takes: The Real SStruggle for Political Power in America Viking, 384 pp., $ 25.95 Whatever It Takes is Elizabeth Drew's third book chronicling the political saga of the Clinton years, and it promises a "rich and dramatic story" of "the real struggle for political power in America" in the 1996 election. The author's publicists say she looked past the uninteresting story of the Clinton-Dole race to provide the "secret history of a titanic battle" for c Read more
THERE WAS ONCE A TIME WHEN leading a congressional inquiry into a sitting president was an opportunity for political stardom. The most conspicuous case was the 1973 Senate Watergate investigation led by 76-year-old Sam Ervin, who had long been regarded in Washington as a colorful old racist with a quaint interest in constitutional law. After Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon, Ervin achieved something close to beatification in the Washington media. Back then, the Democrats controlled Read more
IN EARLY 1996, PRESIDENT CLINTON'S top political advisers had a problem. Under Dick Morris's guidance, Clinton had made an extraordinary comeback from the mid-term debacle of 1994. While the Republican presidential candidates were beating (and spending) each other senseless in the primaries, Clinton was coasting to renomination without challenge, and his poll ratings had recovered and were still rising. He was well on his way to raising all the money he could legally spend in the pre-convention Read more