Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and editor of The New York Times. He is the author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White. (May 2003)
June 12, 2003: 'THE CLINTON WARS': A CORRECTION
May 29, 2003: In Clinton's Court
The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal
January 16, 2003: Rudy Rules!
Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani, with Ken Kurson
The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice by Bernard B. Kerik
November 7, 2002: In Guantánamo
December 20, 2001: Another Country
Political Fictions by Joan Didion
Bibliography* Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White (1985)
New York Review of Books - May 29, 2003
Review - In Clinton's Court
By Joseph Lelyveld
The Clinton WarsAnd don't miss his own corrections he wrote in to the editor! -- Correction by Joseph Lelyveld
by Sidney Blumenthal
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 822 pp., $30.00In the Reagan years Sidney Blumenthal made his mark as a bright campaign reporter and intrepid explorer of spreading conservative and neoconservative networks in think tanks and on Capitol Hill. After seeing Michael Dukakis battered into oblivion in 1988, he wrote a book decrying the viciousness and vacuousness of the American way of choosing a president. It was at odds, he felt, with the issues facing the country after the cold war. What was needed, according to Blumenthal's prescription, was an injection of the intellectual energy neocons were displaying on the "progressive" side: "the invention of a political language and program" for what he portrayed as a new age. All along, he had been scouting for a leader fluent in such a language. "I wondered when a Democrat might emerge for whom modern politics was second nature," he writes, setting the stage for his narrative of the roller-coaster ride the country and he himself experienced after his wish was fulfilled. "I was waiting for the new." Read More...