Speaking ill of the dead? That’s what Literature R Us is all about! At least some of the time. Both former Senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) and Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt are recently deceased and are the recipients, appropriately enough, of numerous well-deserved encomia, here for Bob and here for Fred. But I’m afraid there’s more to be said than has been said, and I would like to set the record straight.
Dole, who retired from public life following his loss to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential campaign, was of course long gone by the time I started this blog, back in 2007, but I remember him well, and not too fondly. Jeff Greenfield, whose article on Bob in Politico I linked to above, praises Bob’s “bipartisanship”, which is “reasonable”, sort of, except for the fact that it was Bob who first acquiesced in what came to be the Republican Party’s permanent conversion to a “Burn it Down! Burn it All Down!” mind-set, which has recently metamorphized/metastasized into Trump worship pure and simple. It was Bob Dole, in 1994, newly minted Senate Majority Leader following the massive Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections, who gave newly minted House Speaker Newt Gingrich the keys to the family car, agreeing to participate in Gingrich’s “plan” to achieve an end run around the power of the presidential veto by threatening not to fund the federal government unless President Clinton agreed to a whole raft of dramatic revisions to existing federal social programs like Medicaid and Medicare. In the end, President Clinton successfully faced the Republicans down, but Republicans, once having tasted blood—the visceral thrill of abandoning one’s self to complete irresponsibility—never looked back. And it was Bob Dole who utterly lacked the nerve to say “no”—a confession of the fact that, with the Cold War over, the Republican Party no longer had a single positive thought to offer the American people.
If Bob Dole knew anything, he knew that Newt Gingrich was nothing but talk—his endless flow of “new ideas” really nothing more than an endless series of substance-free intellectual postures—but Dole had, really, no ideas at all, except, shockingly enough, detuned versions of Democratic reforms, which, when he thought about it, made sense to him, which is why he ultimately gave them his support. In his later years, Dole even descended to the depths of endorsing Donald Trump, twice! Bipartisanship? More like “terminal cowardice”. The “shocking” fact is, when the chips were down, Bob Dole failed America, and did so repeatedly.
Fred Hiatt, on the other hand, was the unwilling recipient of any number of intemperate beatdowns from this blog (well, six, to be precise). Fred took over as editorial page director for the Post in 2000, and the trend towards a hawkish, neo-Likudist foreign policy began almost immediately. The formerly liberal Post became more and more conservative, openly on foreign policy and, increasingly, on cultural issues as well—anything to weaken the hated liberals.1
The Post became so strident by the early oughties that I let my subscription lapse, though the Post, desperate to maintain its circulation, sent me freebies for several years thereafter. The combination of Hiatt’s obsession with Israel, which robbed the Post of even the appearance of objectivity, and the Internet, which was destroying both the Post’s circulation and its advertising base, was reducing the Post to a joke by the mid-oughties,2 and it was only saved, first from financial bankruptcy by its purchase in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, and then from moral bankruptcy by, most unfortunately, the advent of Donald Trump, who brought Hiatt half-way—though only half-way—to his senses.
So, Fred Hiatt, great newspaperman? Well, not so much.
1. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Post was relentless in its efforts to portray homosexuals as “just like us”. By the 2000s, this had changed. The Post stopped publicizing gay celebrities like Tony Kushner for their failure to support U.S. interventionism. I remember in particular (but can’t find) a long, tongue in cheek article the Post ran back in the 1990s describing legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant director/best boy Clyde Tolson as a pair of impossible old queens who drove their staff crazy with endless requests for special pampering. In the virtuous oughties, however, when a Hoover biography gained notoriety for its explicit treatment of the pair’s relationship, the Post ran a long, “straight” article filled with earnest assertions by retired agents that “the Director” was, you know, “all man”.
2. I chronicled the Post’s agonies during this time period quite extensively, most of the beatdowns not directed at Fred but rather publisher Katy Weymouth, who managed to make a monumental hash out of almost everything she touched.
